Ghostwriter of ‘Spare’ and a tender bar, reading Maria Ressa, talking to Deepti Kapoor Premium

A reviewer for the BBC called it the “weirdest book” written by a royal, but Prince Harry’s memoir S

A reviewer for the BBC called it the “weirdest book” written by a royal, but Prince Harry’s memoir  Spare has become the fastest selling non-fiction book till date, after 1.4 million copies flew off the shelves on the day of its release.  Spare has been ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, who also wrote Andre Agassi’s much-hailed memoir,  Open. A journalist and writer, Moehringer, who is 58 years old, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for feature writing. In 2005, he wrote a memoir,  The Tender Bar, which was adapted to the silver screen by George Clooney in 2021. In his book, he writes about his uncle’s bar and how crucial it was to his growing up years. “We went there [the bar] for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, when sad, to sulk. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.” He was an only child, abandoned by his DJ father, and his mother went back home to Manhasset in Long Island to her parents and siblings, and Uncle Steve took him under his wing early on. Manhasset, of course, is also the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s  The Great Gatsby but that’s another story. The bar, called Dickens, gave Moehringer the perfect education to send him on the way – “…one night the bar turned me away, and in that final abandonment the bar saved my life.” In reviews this week, we read Maria Ressa’s gritty memoir, an excerpt from Tho Paramasivan’s translated book, real life stories of 11 Indian queens and more. We also talk to Deepti Kapoor whose second novel has been called “India’s answer to  The Godfather.” 

Journalist and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa’s autobiography,  How To Stand up to a Dictator (WH Allen/Penguin), is a powerful analysis about how social media is spawning disinformation, seeding hate, manipulating behaviour, and compromising journalism. The reviewer, Mukund Padmanabhan, says that what marks Ressa’s account is that it is a view of a practising journalist, an account from the inside. Like many others, she started by being positive about social media, seeing it as a platform that democratised opinion-making, gave expression to long-standing grievances and ignited social movements. It was a time when her newssite Rappler enjoyed a cosy relationship with Facebook. But soon she realised that left unchecked, technology companies could destroy much more than democracy. “Ressa is right in thinking that politicians, many of them from the right, have used astroturfing – the use of fake and funded accounts to influence opinion -- to stoke irrational fears and maintain their hold on power.” Is there a way out? “If the tech companies are forced to heed her call for ending the surveillance-for-profit business model, it may be possible to greatly moderate the climate of hate, even if we cannot agree on what the word really means.”  

Some of the stories in  The Book of Indian Queens (Aleph) are taken from historical records. Others are first-person accounts, as in the case of Gayatri Devi. In her review, Geeta Doctor writes that Ruskin Bond’s is a magical tale of a rani and a mongoose, both lost to the world. Ruby Lal depicts Nur Jehan on a tiger hunt, atop an elephant, “with the brisk efficiency of a miniature painter.” She liked the “decidedly exotic” tale of Begum Hazrat Mahal with her mixed lineage. Rudrangshu Mukherjee profiles Begum Hazrat Mahal, the wife of Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh, who became the Regent after the death of the Nawab that saw her 12-year-old son put on the throne in 1857. “As Mukherjee tells us, Hazrat Mahal came from a very humble background: her father was an African slave.” Earlier, Mukherjee wrote a book on Hazrat Mahal and Lakshmibai,  A Begum & A Rani, which we had reviewed.

Tho Paramasivan’s work on the unknown, untold, uncharted aspects of Tamil country reads like notes and entries in a ledger. On Pongal, he writes that it is a festival that bestows a national identity to the Tamils and transcends religious barriers. In an excerpt from  Ariyappadaatha Tamizhagam ( The Sweet Salt of Tamil: Things We Do Not Know about Tamil Country), translated into English by V. Ramnarayan for Navayana and made possible by the Tamil Nadu Textbook & Educational Services Corporation. “The sacred day of Thai Pongal, the first day of the Tamil month Thai, in the middle of January, is the most important festival of the Tamils. It is a festival that bestows a national identity to the Tamils. It also transcends religious barriers. Importantly, this festival is not governed by the taboos regarding defilement associated with birth and death. In Tirunelveli district, for instance, the Thai Pongal rituals are performed in a house even if a death occurs on the day of the festival. The body is removed and the house is quickly cleaned. On the day of Pongal, vegetables and tubers are prominent among the foods offered to the favourite gods after lighting the ceremonial lamps. These include the tubers (yam, taro and edible palmyra root) proscribed since time immemorial by brahmins and in major temples. Clearly, Thai Pongal is a festival that is a part apart from brahminical culture.” 

Deepti Kapoor’s second novel,  Age of Vice (Juggernaut), captures Delhi’s circle of power – the maddening play of sin, envy, corruption and pride --  and in doing so, also chronicles India’s contemporary socio-economic landscape. In an interview with Saurabh Sharma, she says a turning point for her was the rape and murder of Nirbhaya in 2012 on a Delhi bus. “In the aftermath I was drawn to enquire about the specific circumstances: what led these men to operate the bus illegally, what kind of corruption was in place that enabled this.”  Age of Vice was born from the intention to enquire about the “networks and processes of corruption, power and complicity. And the small acts of rebellion you find within them.” Asked how she made the narrative cinematic, she says, “I have images in my head before anything else. I work in cinematic visuals that are then translated into prose.” She also is careful to write about ‘the other’ with empathy, trepidation and research. “One has to be extremely mindful of one’s privileges and blind spots. I think if you open yourself up to others’ pain, then you recognise that even with differences in class, caste, background, and religion, there’s a universality of emotion, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”