Reviews and the debut author

I usually skim reviews of my book, leaping across the paragraphs that describe the plot, my eyes now trained to scan for knowledgeable comment and of course, praise. It is as much an exercise in vanity as it is in humility. "Hey! Another reviewer likes my book!" but "Oh hey, they haven't gone into its soul, perhaps it is just like every other book they've liked." Maybe it's greed, maybe it's a realisation that while reviewers of non-fiction will judge the plot, facts and writing, few can really tell me anything about the book that I don't already know. 

Why do I want this? Because writing it was a lonely process, and while I can pretend I was in control of every one of the 100,000 words in it, the truth is that on many mornings, I took a gamble. Here's the speech I gave to myself multiple times: "I have to write 1000 words today, so here, let me write about Sarva's mother cooking for him, and maybe that will get me a 1000 words closer to finishing this book, argh!" Many decisions were instinctive. Answers to plot questions - Do I reveal this horror here, or is it to soon? - or location descriptions - Do I need all this blah blah about the house? - or even facts - How can I write accurately about this hospital bombing when I have witness accounts but official denials? - were often made simply on a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was writing a book for the first time in my life. What did I know? Of course, my editor loved it, but he was on my side. So was my husband. So was my kind writing companion. Can someone who thinks nothing of me, hasn't seen my face or eaten my (very good) rasam rice, please tell me what works or doesn't and whether I should be allowed to do this at all? 
 
Thankfully, this eagerness to know if my gambles paid off is only rare. But it rears it ugly head occasionally. It makes my breath quicken every time I see a review. One of the earliest reviews in India, by Aditya Sinha in Mint overwhelmed me with how well it conveyed my unsaid intention: 

Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble... takes a micro view of the war’s end by, metaphorically speaking, selecting a couple of the corpses from under that loose tile and telling their stories, and the intimate stories-within-those-stories. It depicts the past as that which cannot be escaped, and memory as a tool for survival.

Now, this review in Art Review by Niru Ratnam is one of the few that explores the book's struggle with truth, as vague, compromised, and crucial as it is in times of conflict. It was published some months ago, but I only saw it this week. He begins by quoting me from page 368: 

About halfway through her 368-page study of the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, Rohini Mohan writes about the problems of quantifying its effects: ‘In the cacophony of different accounts, attempts to measure the cost of the conflict – the counting of the dead, lost, disappeared, raped or displaced… became fraught with motives and desired ends. Propaganda eclipsed facts, denial extinguished compassion. The war’s end produced two aggressive parallel narratives, which ran fast and strong, never meeting.’

Agreeing how difficult it was to write about Sri Lanka when facts, histories, and timelines have long been contested by all sides, Ratnam sees my focus on three personal narratives rather than the documentary approach as "brave". 

Mohan confidently restages her characters’ motives, thoughts and conversations even when they might be hazy recollections in the minds of her very real subjects. It is a brave move – one that puts an element of creative writing into the most fraught of arenas. But if the ‘facts’ are so contested by both sides as to form a block to any dialogue, perhaps this is not as unlikely a strategy as it might first seem... Mohan is able to generate a highly nuanced account. 

Other than this, it is readers' reviews via email that have really told me things I couldn't possibly have imagined: what parts of the book people loved, which characters they identified with, what made them have to stop, the reason they recommended it to certain friends, why they felt lost after they finished, and how they'd have preferred a proper resolution in the end. Someone said it was their mother's first English book. Someone else - another journalist - said it made him jealous. A writer from Sri Lanka said it didn't tell them anything new, but hey, Rohini, thank you for writing. It is not negative or positive feedback, it is considered, deeply personal reaction that I have come to cherish.

The small, sincere ambitions of Selfie with Daughter

Yesterday, I had a long phone conversation with the man who is really behind the #SelfieWithDaughter, which many have been attributing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leaving it open for heightened praise and criticism. The real architect of the campaign is Sunil Jaglan - he is 33, a panchayat head of Bibipur village in Haryana, and he does not believe it will alone solve gender imbalance. It was just a fun idea, he says, but it was never meant to be the only one. Here is the story.

(An edited version of this appeared in Economic Times today with a more excited headline)

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Soon after he woke up on Sunday morning, Sunil Jaglan posted a status update on his Facebook account. “Today, I will listen to honourable Prime Minister’s Mann Ki Baat on the radio,” the 33-year-old Panchayat head of Bibipur village in Haryana wrote in Hindi. After breakfast, Jaglan sat at the Sunday chaupal, or community meeting, with about 10 other villagers, his ear to the transistor. His three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Nandini was playing noisily at his home nearby.

At 11am, PM Narendra Modi’s address began. In the speech, Modi spoke of tourism, Yoga, school toilets, Raksha Bandhan, rain water harvesting and fertilizers. Someone at the chaupal passed around some channa to snack on. After a few words on urban rejuvenation, Modi switched to his love for social media, which Jaglan too was keen on. “I keep communicating with you through social media, and I get to know a lot of new-new things from you too,” Modi said. “But sometimes, in a remote village, a single individual does something that touches my heart.” He said the Central government scheme of Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter, launched on 22 January, was strengthened when individuals made it their own. Then, the PM uttered Sunil Jaglan’s name.

“Hain?!” Jaglan gasped, laughing. Some villagers clapped gleefully, others who had been distracted asked what had happened.

“Some days ago, a Sarpanch in Haryana's Bibipur village, Sunil Jaglan, had come up with a fun idea,” they heard Modi say, trying to shush each other at the same time. “He started the Selfie With Daughter initiative, which created such a storm that all fathers felt like clicking selfies with their daughters and posting it on social media.” The PM then asked more people to post selfies, to boost the pride in the girl child.

Since the radio address, social media saw #SelfieWithDaughter trending. Parents, especially fathers, posted pictures with their daughters. Jaglan spent the rest of the day trying to convince many villagers that he had not known that Modi would mention his work on the radio. “I really didn’t know, but I’m glad I tuned in! I try to be cool about it, but the selfies pouring into my Whatsapp account remind me. It’s amazing what can happen a political leader backs a sincere idea,” says Jaglan.

Jaglan announced the Beti Bachao, Selfie Banao campaign, now christened Selfie With Daughter, on June 19, his birthday, by posting a selfie with his own daughter Nandini. “Everyone’s taking a selfie these days, so I thought that would click,” he says. On his public Facebook account, he invited people across the country to Whatsapp him their selfies, the best of which would win a prize of Rs. 2100. Local newspapers and channels reported it, and so did some English national newspapers. A Zee News anchor called the idea “modern, cute and emotional, like Indians!” Jaglan says such coverage spread the news of the contest, but he hasn’t selected a winner, “because the contest is not even the point anymore.” Until Sunday, he had received nearly 700 selfies, but after Modi’s speech, he has stopped keeping count.

The campaign is Jaglan’s 101st. Since he became Bibipur’s sarpanch in 2010, Jaglan says he has launched 100 programmes on women’s empowerment. Many of them have his unique creative twist and sharp understanding of what will have mass appeal. For instance, he occasionally holds an objective-type quiz for Bibipur’s women, with questions like “What IPC section will apply if a boy teases you in the bus?” and “What evidence is necessary to file an FIR if your husband beats you?” Around the 2014 general and state elections, he set up an Unmarried Men’s Collective (Avivahit Purush Sanghatan), to highlight Haryana’s abysmal sex ratio of 841 females to 1000 males at birth, and the worrying practise in Haryana of buying brides from other states. “I’m all for cultural exchange, but buying women is not the way,” says Jaglan. In 2012, he held the first women’s khap panchayat, which decided to charge with murder those found killing female feotuses. The village also has a board at its entrance: Bibipur- The Women’s World. 

When asked what inspired his focus on women’s empowerment, Jaglan says grew up in a community where girls were considered a burden, but in his family of four siblings, gender discrimination was “totally absent”. He also offers his education – a bachelors in computer science and a masters in mathematics from Kurukshetra University – as a possible reason for his “liberal views”. He says he always disagreed with people’s views against intercaste marriage, or the acceptance of domestic violence, but did so quietly.

It was a personal moment that crystallized his resolve to speak up. When Jaglan’s wife gave birth to a healthy baby in January 2012, he bought his favourite sweets to distribute at the hospital. “The nurses refused to accept them,” says Jaglan. “They said I’ve had a girl and I should start saving my money now.”

Something gave that day in the hospital. “I was bursting with joy, and around me, people had the opposite reaction,” says Jaglan. “It made me wonder, is this the world my daughter is going to grow up in?”

The 2011 Census found that India’s child sex ratio had declined with “an all-time low of 918” to 1000. Women & Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said in April that about 2000 girls die every day in India – aborted, starved, poisoned or killed after birth. Women so gone missing are estimated to range from 2 to 25 million.

The task is onerous, and since Modi endorsed the daughter selfies, critics have called it shallow and inadequate to tackle real discrimination and rampant female feoticide. Reports find that the Rs. 100 crores allotted under Modi’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme had not reached the 100 gender critical districts in May.

Having occasionally faced the criticism himself, Jaglan asks, “Why do I like social media?” and replies himself. “Because when you scream there, people listen, media amplifies it, it creates awareness. But I know it only gives you a headstart for the real race.” His work on women’s rights range from cute media campaigns to a focus on harder changes like ensuring a quorum of at least 50% women in panchayat meetings and stopping prenatal sex determination. In just 3 years, he says Bibipur has recorded an even sex ratio at birth, and along with it, a gradual change in the gender attitudes of young parents. “No one wants to listen to gyan, but you can’t forget to sneak it in along with the selfie,” says Jaglan.

The uneasy decisions

A short trip to Chhattisgarh in February meant many things. A return to the kind of reporting I yearn for. The pleasure of seeing activists of the soil work - people who grew up in the small town they now work in don't think twice about barging into the collector's office to get some attention to an issue, because the latter was a school junior, or used to write love letters to his sister. But most of all, the field trip was a reminder of the churning in the country today, the tumult of decades that has gone unseen by most, the agony of plans unraveling for millions without notice or conversation, the hoarse voices of protest.

Distant, I tried to be. I had to, so that I could ask myself that question: how will things change, how will we get more electricity, better roads, better infrastructure, how will our needs be fulfilled if something doesn't give? It is not trite to ask this, of course, but often, this question is asked only so that the answer justifies the political decision of the day. If this question is really asked, it is clear there are no easy answers, as there should not be. It should not be easy to decide to evict someone, or equate their life's only asset and security to a mere piece of property. It should not be easy to mow down a forest and then build a bridge for elephants. If we truly care about our future, these decisions must be the last resort. Even then, they must be deliberated upon, agonised over, thought out rationally, predicting real long term consequences.

Women farmers say NO to the expansion of a coal mine in Kusmunda, Chhattisgarh, that will render them landless

When I speak to people (not politicians) about ethnic or caste difference, when I hear hate - mild or virulent - I feel dread, helpless dread about the nature of human relationships, and the endless cycle of mistrust, of the emotional need for brandishing difference. The trip to Korba and Raigarh filled me with dread too, but it is somehow not helpless. The ideas here are tangible - their corrosive effect on our lives is measurable, and should make us smarter. I was in Chhattisgarh only four days, but land rights, tribal rights, mining, environment protection, and their complicated interaction with politics and development has become a new frontier to learn about.

Bursting with what I heard and saw, I wrote two stories: for Al Jazeera America on how environment protection is being sidelined in India today, and for Yahoo! Originals, why exactly people are protesting the moves to acquire land from them for industry.

Second skin

Unveiling.... the India cover of my book, from HarperCollins:

Trouble over

The past year was a whirlwind of words and places. The previous four were spent in the trance of reporting. For five years, I have been working on my book - it is my first, but feels like the only, ever. I have maintained a guarded silence about it, afraid it would go away, disappear, or exhaust itself if I spoke about it. But those I interviewed, people I consulted, and a handful of friends knew how much it consumed me. 

It is now almost ready, with its powerful image on the cover, to be shared with readers I tried hard not to think about throughout the process. The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War.

From October 2014 onwards, it can be bought in stores and online. Until then, it remains a proof copy on my desk.