Quite right. Shobhaa De is Penguin’s golden goose and cash cow rolled into one. She is probably our bestselling fiction writer and that makes her Queen Bee at Penguin. When the company celebrated its 20 years in India, they flew her from Mumbai to Delhi, showcased her at the event and put her up in a suite at the Taj. I also happen to be a Penguin author but they don’t give me this kind of treatment.
Now you know why Superstar India has a flattering portrait of Ms De on the cover and not a scene or design that has something to do with India.
De sells but is her fiction any good? You got me there. I have not read any of her novels. Correction. I did read her autobiography when it came out 10 years ago. I guess that qualifies as fiction. At that time, she was Shobha with one ‘a’ instead of the current Shobhaa!
De has always been a great-looking woman but you should have seen her 30 or so years ago. She was stunning. She could have pursued a film career. She has a complexion and bone structure that only certain Maharashtrian women possess, Madhuri Dixit for instance.
I have been following her career, from a distance, from the time she was Rajadhyaksha, before she became Kilachand and then De. At one time, she came perilously close to taking a French surname when she was planning to marry a foreigner who was being posted out of Bombay. She had the good sense to fly to Washington, check out his tiny flat and fly right back.
When she was still in St Xavier’s, she aspired to be a model. She hung out in Samovar restaurant at the Jehangir Art Gallery hoping to catch the eye of photographers and advertising executives. Later she turned to editing a film magazine but she found her true calling subsequently as a gossip columnist for a newspaper. The columns were snide and bitchy but she was always careful not to offend the rich and powerful, nothing that would deny her a seat on their dining tables or a berth on their yachts anchored in the Mediterranean.
A particularly nasty piece has stayed in mind. It was about Habiba Miranda, the wife of the well-known illustrator and artist, Mario. You cannot imagine a nicer, gentler person. She was fragile at that time and, for some reason, De launched a vicious, gratuitous attack on her. De is still ostracised for that in certain circles in Mumbai.
Superstar India is quite mediocre, written in a style De fine-tuned as a film journalist. For instance: "There is something ajeeb about our attitude towards sex." At places, it reads like a teenager’s diary. I cannot imagine another grown-up using phrases like "pretty confused", "pretty sinister" and "pretty spooked".
Old people, caste, Mayawati, other Dalits, cricket, NRIs, corruption and her Brahmin childhood are some of the subjects that have attracted her attention. One cannot but admire her agility. She skips from topic to topic without saying anything substantial. The 400-odd pages could not have taken more than a couple of months to put together since it could not have required research. Nothing is analysed, just a thousand words on something and we quickly move on to something else. She takes us on a tour of Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore, Xian and London. The reader can only wonder what these places have to do with Superstar India.
Every few pages there are sentences in bold type which summarise what the author is trying to say. This technique is rather useful. One has only to read these passages, get the drift of the book and finish reading it in 10 minutes flat.
Let me quote one such bold type passage. It will also give you an idea of her literary style: "It suits everybody to keep the minorities illiterate and insecure. That’s the bitter truth. Hate creates votebanks. Tolerance doesn’t. It’s that simple."
If you too think it is that simple, this is just the book for you.
