Monday, August 07, 2006

Pen is mightier than the sword

A good way for those in the public domain within the purview of Indian cinema, politics or cricket, to make some moolah so that their great grandchildren's children have their pockets full for their lifetimes - write a tell-all book.

Now, to publish a book, you either do a Jaswant or a Wright (sorry you cant do any Kaavya, coz this is a tell-tale book, and it is widely accepted in modern civilisation that tell-tales are not fictitious stuff that can be picked from J. K. Rowling).

The Jaswant method is applied when you have no content but no one is stopping you from pretending that you do have jumbo scoops. You can do a Johar, which means just like how the making of the movie is shown before its release on a news channel like NDTV, you can choose to send an extract from your book with some juicy tidbits to a national publication. Ideally the
extract should have many doggones and incriminate some specimen in any act that is drastically unexpected and wispy. The disadvantage is you might end up putting your foot in the mouth, but if you are used to it, then its negligible.

The Wright method may take longer. After you retire, you move to the mountains, maybe the Himalayas since the Andes are too far away. From there, you act as though you have been struck by some strange bolt of lightning that has opened your eyes and senses to things that you had never come across before. You publish them all in a book. Stay put in the mountains but do make sure your book gets widely circulated in the valleys below and the plains and plateaus and everywhere else. The hitch here is that old friends will become new enemies. But then, you can always write another book to make them happy.

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