*There are days when I'd strongly agree with everything this critic says.
*On the other hand – if you're modern Indian writing in English, and you're increasingly famous and successful, and you have a global audience – what the heck are you doing moaning about the not-particularly-glittering local literary past? You oughta be churning out some 21st-century forward-looking gibberish like nobody anywhere has imagined.
*You oughta be aiming to entertain the Brazilians, Indonesians and Chinese, not the Tamils, the Urdu poets and some superannuated lit professors in Andhra Pradesh.
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2010/01/03/stories/2010010350010100.htm
(...)
"Recently, there has been another change. Young writers, whose novels have become best sellers and are toasted as the new successes of IWE, are even less linked to the past. In fact, there is a woeful lack of what has always been a part of creating tradition, which is, writers reading one another. I was appalled to hear a young and successful writer declare, not apologetically, but with arrogance, that he did not read any of the early writers. This is not a solitary phenomenon. A friend who teaches a creative writing class was shocked to find that none of her students had read the great writers whose writings were offered as models. A publisher, mentioning young writers' aversion to revising and editing, said angrily and despairingly, “they don't even read themselves!” ...
