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Fiction... the sordid facts
ANIRUDDHA BAHAL - news breaker and newsmaker - is used to being on both sides of the investigation table. As part of the intrepid Tehelka.com team that stirred a Hornet's nest in Government circles over sordid allegations of bribery in the ruling NDA, he recalls that when the threatened parties hit back, the journalists who had broken the story themselves became the story. So he is used to being asked "probing" questions - fair or unfair - and it is no new experience for him, he declares, to be at the centre of media attention now for his new novel, "Bunker 13" published by Faber and Faber, London - represented in India by Penguin Books - and due to be released in New Delhi this Thursday evening at a special event organised at the British Council.
What does seem to bother him though, is that people assume the novel, whose protagonist is a reporter who will go to any lengths for a good story and gets involved in the deepest layers of corruption and double crossing in the Army, is a result of his Tehelka experience or that its success - it has been favourably reviewed by the Western press - is due to his celebrity as an investigative reporter.
This is not journalism, he is at pains to clarify. It is fiction. "What is this? Can't I write fiction?" he demands. All writers bring to their writing their own life experience, and Aniruddha points out that a journalist comes into contact with a variety of personalities and places, "so if he's at all fictionally inclined," the material for a novel comes to him without extra effort - unlike writers who have to travel to exotic locations to research their works of fiction. He names Hemingway and Salinger as great fiction writers who were journalists, so "we should not forget that's where they came from". And while "Bunker 13" was started in 1996, long before Tehelka created a stir, it does not seem totally logical for Aniruddha to take offence at the allegations of wholesale use of his professional experience in his storytelling, considering real events and personalities like the Kargil war and General Pervez Musharraf are a part of it. "Bunker 13" has been lauded as "slick, fast, cynical and gripping".
That cynicism is a praiseworthy quality in a work of art says something about the times we live in. "Cynicism," says the author, "develops in journalism. You are exposed so much to the seamier side of human nature. Too much cynicism tends to blind you, but it is essential for the probing process and should be there in the relevant dose."
But what message does cynicism bring when it pervades a novel? While he spells out that "a work should never be message oriented," he agrees that it has a role to play in sensitising society. "I think it is good for a society to engage in contemporary issues. People look at writers to throw light on certain issues," says the author who wrote "A Crack in the Mirror" published by Rupa in 1991 and feels many contemporary Indian writers are too taken up with the past. So is he holding up this story riddled with expletives, with an unscrupulous protagonist, tunnelling his way to his own advantage - "You do it for the rush that comes from a job well done," says the narrator towards the end - through the rot of corruption and double dealing at the highest levels as a mirror to society and giving readers more chance to say `that's how it is boss, survive as best you can'?
"India is going through transition, and transition is never good or bad. Let's see what emerges," he says, adding that his story is not cynical throughout. It has its moments of light. But he is not here to reveal them now and spoil the suspense. This is fiction, not journalism. It is for readers to investigate, the writer to sit pretty.
ANJANA RAJAN
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