What’s this about?
Mukul Kesavan on the blogging habits of (male) Anglophone Indians.Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog.
Update: Guru and Amardeep post on Kesavan’s strange article.
I read a couple of other articles by Mukul Kesavan and liked them. But I did not understand this article at all. Any hints?
Comment by gaddeswarup — September 6, 2007 @ 6:31 am
I’ve never read a more abrupt ending to an article. And apart from claiming that Indian writers writing in Elnglish, including on blogs, tend to write about either Hindi cinema, travel or communalism, I’m not sure what his point was. Also - I
m I’m sorry to sound so snide - he seems to have used Microsoft Word’s spell-check to give him similar sounding words tomake up the rest of the paragraph you’ve quoted.
Comment by Space Bar — September 6, 2007 @ 8:23 am
Swarup, Space Bar - I don’t get it either! Very obscure irony… anyway, blogbashing is becoming a standard column-filler topic these days. Funnily, though he rants against blogs for the samemess of their preoccupations, Kesavan has himself written a novel in English - and writes on communalism, as Amardeep points out here. Like Amardeep, I don’t understand why Kesavan doesn’t name some of the blogs he’s talking about. And I don’t get why he doesn’t attack women’s blogs. Maybe he doesn’t know that they exist?
Comment by Uma — September 7, 2007 @ 4:25 am
I thought it was quite funny. And MK is presumably part of the lot since he doesn’t specifically set himself apart. Some of the reaction surely has to be because every English speaking Indian is also apt to be disconcerted when they are dissected with amused knowingness. I think MK forgot to add that a number of male bloggers also write in a tone that seems to suggest they never outgrew the posturings of their teens (though I believe the same criticism is directed to film critics, white male bloggers et al).
Indian women presumably don’t write about the same thing and are more varied in their interests? Certainly in a random sampling Indian women write as grown women.
Comment by Shama — September 17, 2007 @ 3:32 am