etcetera

Imag­ine this for a moment: You are Hari Kun­zru. Don’t want to? Remem­ber you get to hang out with Zadie Smith a lot. Good, so now imag­ine this for a moment: You are Hari Kun­zru. Now read on.

You pitch a plot to your pub­lish­ers — a satir­i­cal plot span­ning mul­ti­ple con­ti­nents about a com­puter virus bring­ing together three oth­er­wise uncon­nected peo­ple — and they buy into it. Then you sit down to write the book, and real­ize you have no idea about the peo­ple to pop­u­late your plot with.

Hmm… you think. Hmm. Umm. Still can’t seem to come up with any­thing. Mean­while, a cou­ple of lunches with Zadie.

After a few days, you come up with three car­ica.., I mean, char­ac­ters: a desi engi­neer, a Bol­ly­wood actress and an Amer­i­can mar­ket­ing genius. You are very pleased with your­self, but when you go back to write the book, you real­ize some­thing else: the plot has no room for the mar­ket­ing genius. Reluc­tant to waste days of thought, you swiftly decide to add the guy to the book as an irrel­e­vant sub­plot. And in a stroke of genius, you decide to pay homage to your thought process by nam­ing the guy Guy Swift.

One more lunch.

Things start falling in place now and once you know who the char­ac­ters are, it is easy to pro­vide them with traits. Thus, the engi­neer is a nerdy self-made genius, drinks a lot of cof­fee, lacks social skills, is par­a­lyzed around women and wears shirts with brand names printed on them. He also hap­pens to be Indian so he has to have a dot­ing mom, a tough-loving dad and in a nod to the new real­ity, a sis­ter who works at a call cen­ter. Oh, and he is also a vir­gin and his house smells of curry. This is satire, after all.

Guy Swift is a mar­ket­ing genius: so he has to

1. Talk mostly in mean­ing­less mar­ket­ing lingo,
2. Be glib and full of him­self.
3. Have other traits you are aware of about any­one remotely con­nected with marketing.

The Bol­ly­wood actress? C’mon, you know by now. No? Ok, she is pretty and exotic, young and sen­si­tive, has bitchy mom who forces her to hang out with seedy old producers.

This is fer­tile ter­ri­tory. You are on a roll. Thus Guy’s wife is pretty, and a lit­tle con­fused about things in gen­eral. The Bol­ly­wood actresses cur­rent co-star is also full of him­self, and in a bril­liant take on con­tem­po­rary Bol­ly­wood, he used to have a girl­friend who used to be Miss World. When she decided to break up with him, he got into trou­ble by mak­ing threat­en­ing phone calls to her. To avoid lit­i­ga­tion how­ever, you insert a line about this guy (not Guy) los­ing one of his roles to Salman Khan. So Cool.

And so on and so forth. I am sure you are tired of being Kun­zru. Plus he lives in Lon­don, where the food is rumored to suck.

Now for the real review, which you can read with­out imag­in­ing anything.

So yes, the char­ac­ters are a bit hack­neyed. And also yes, I do know it is sup­posed to be a satir­i­cal take on the con­nected world and a com­men­tary on our depen­dence on com­put­ers, but some of this stuff is so overused it is not really funny any­more. (The desi engi­neer and mar­ket­ing exec car­i­ca­tures: Heard of Dil­bert? Or the ABCD vs FOB fights at every sin­gle Indian dias­pora web­site that has com­ments enabled?)

In spite of this, the book was an enter­tain­ing read. Hon­est. Kun­zru has an eye for satir­i­cal detail and writes beau­ti­fully — even the most mun­dane of pas­sages has an inter­est­ing turn of phrase or an unex­pected insight; and if writ­ten this well, the menu from a British restau­rant will make a good read. It also helps that Trans­mis­sion is a short book, well paced and tautly narrated.

Here’s a fairly long excerpt…

As the bus trun­dled over the Yamuna Bridge, past the huge shore­line slum seep­ing its refuse into the river, he ran sev­eral vari­a­tions of this basic fan­tasy, tweak­ing details of dress and loca­tion, iden­tity of com­pan­ion and sound­track. The roar of pub­lic car­ri­ers receded into the back­ground. Lost in his inner retail space, he stared blankly out the win­dow, his eyes barely reg­is­ter­ing the low roofs of patch­worked thatch and blue poly­eth­yl­ene by the road­side, the ragged chil­dren stand­ing under the tan­gle of ille­gally strung pow­er­lines. High in the sky over­head was the vapor trail of a jet, a com­mer­cial flight cross­ing Indian air­space en route to Sin­ga­pore. In its first-class com­part­ment sat another trav­eler, rather more com­fort­ably than Arjun, who was squashed against the damp shoul­der of a man in a poly­ester shirt. Did Guy Swift sense some occult con­nec­tion with the boy on the bus thirty thou­sand feet below? Did he per­haps feel a tug, a pre­mo­ni­tion, the kind of unex­plained phe­nom­e­non that has as its cor­rel­a­tive a shiver or a rais­ing of the hairs on the neck or arms? No. Noth­ing. He was play­ing Tetris on the arm­rest games console.

He had just beaten his high score.

Guy Swift, thirty-three years old, UK cit­i­zen, paper mil­lion­aire and proud holder of plat­inum sta­tus on three dif­fer­ent frequent-flyer pro­grams. Guy Swift, twice Young British Mar­ket Vision­ary of the Year and holder of sev­eral Euro­brand achieve­ment awards. Guy Swift, char­ter mem­ber of a Soho club, a man genet­i­cally gifted with height, reg­u­lar fea­tures, sandy blond hair which tou­sled attrac­tively, rel­a­tively inac­tive sweat glands, clear skin and a cast-iron credit rat­ing. For two years he had lived with the reput­edly unat­tain­able Gabriella Caro, voted the most pop­u­lar girl in her class every year of her stud­ies at the Inter­na­tional School of Fine Art and Cui­sine in Lau­sanne. He had the num­ber of the door-picker at the Chang Bar on his speed dial. You would have thought he was untouchable.

Guy’s seat had eight dif­fer­ent para­me­ters, all of which could be adjusted for his com­fort and well-being. The air­line had pro­vided a pouch of toi­letries, a sleep­ing mask and a pair of dis­pos­able slip­pers embroi­dered with their new logo. He rif­fled through the pouch, ignor­ing every­thing but the slip­pers, which he turned over and over in his hands. A recent trend report had hinted that the air­line was about to break the taboo on yellow-accented greens in the cabin. But the slip­pers and accom­pa­ny­ing items were still pre­sented in a con­ser­v­a­tive blue col­or­way. Was this, he won­dered, a fail­ure of nerve?

“More cham­pagne, sir? A drink of water?”

He took a glass from the smil­ing female atten­dant, unself-consciously bathing in the soft-porn ambi­ence of the moment. Men­tally he noted the expe­ri­ence as a credit on the airline’s emo­tional bal­ance sheet. He enjoyed the attendant’s android charm, the way this dis­ci­plined female body reminded him it was just a tool, the uni­formed probe-head of the large cor­po­rate machine in which he was enmeshed. He (or rather his com­pany) was pay­ing this machine to admin­is­ter a cal­cu­lated series of plea­sures and sen­sa­tions. Respect­ful of its efforts, he had for the last four hours been sit­ting as immo­bile as a hos­pi­tal patient, rel­ish­ing them one by one. The heft of china and glass, the frogspawn damp­ness of a minia­ture pot of eyegel.

The flight was well into its noc­tur­nal phase. The cabin lights had been dimmed. His fel­low pas­sen­gers had put aside their com­pli­men­tary copies of The Wall Street Jour­nal and set­tled into var­i­ous states of trance. They fell within the stan­dard demo­graphic, these first-class peo­ple, bald­ing busi­ness pates anes­thetized by meet­ings and conference-center hos­pi­tal­ity, glossy retirees occu­py­ing the stew­ards with long lists of requests. He set­tled a pair of head­phones into his ears and pressed play on his cur­rent favorite per­sonal sound­track, a mix by DJ Zizi, the res­i­dent at Ibiza super­club Ataxia. Zizi, who bestrode the Uplift­ing Ambi­ent scene like a tight-T-shirted colos­sus, had cho­sen to call his mix “Darker Shade of Chill.” It was, Guy thought, a good name, because although dark, the music was still chill. Break­ing surf, fem­i­nine moan­ing and frag­mented strings were coun­tered by foghorns and echo­ing piano. DJ Zizi was com­fort­ingly com­mit­ted to the cen­ter ground.

The music trick­led into Guy’s brain, slowly clear­ing his men­tal space like an elderly jan­i­tor stack­ing up chairs. He had a sense of angelic con­tent­ment. Here he was, exis­tent, air­borne, bring­ing the mes­sage of him­self from one point on the earth’s sur­face to another. Switch­ing his lap­top on, he tried in a half­hearted way to com­pose an e-mail to Gabriella, but con­fronted by the blank white screen he could think of noth­ing to say.