Why Only Chic Lit....

Disclaimer: I am no big fan of chic Lit.

Chic lit is the new face of Indian English literature.  The whole last decade and the current times belong to it.  It has kicked open the tightly closed literary doors for the new writers and now every other person wants an entry through it to reach the fame. Most novels in this category are stereotyped stories – protagonist hails from the metro city or moved to the metro city in the beginning of the tale then falls in relationships, move back and forth, tangles in them and eventually find the way out and win every lost bit.

Every time I pick a chic-lit (which I normally avoid) I feel bore with the characters and set ups.  Urbanized characters and set ups every time as if the life beyond urban had never existed.  Most novel in this category renders a feel if they have been written with the sole purpose of getting into the Bollywood (Obviously Hollywood wouldn’t give even single shot).  Perhaps, these stories have taken birth from the very big belly of Bollywood based on the fact that every other Indian movie has got more or less the same set up. Lately, I have seen the movie Cocktail and felt it was better to have a cocktail drink than tolerate the torture. I strongly felt that the story would be a best seller if written and published as Chic-lit.

When I read the interviews of such young guns, I always notice one thing that they carry this urge to break into the bollywood, just to have a movie produced based on their very so called best seller.  I believe if that is the ultimate wish, then it’s best to go and become the scriptwriter than novelist. If you want to serve the bollywood, not the literature as a whole then better leave it at those who have faith in serving it than exploiting.

I feel most of these chic-lit authors belong to mills & boons generation. These authors have achieved fame and the time is not far from reach when we have the movies produced solely based on such novels. But, in the gust of it, we shall miss the prolific writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Premchand, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Kushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam, and many more.

Literature is the field which had always been ruled by the aged intellectual minds, but now, it is in the hands of fairly young writers, as I see the bookstores stewing with the titles from them.  However, now, the fate of this very intellectual field is in their hands.  It’s up to them in which direction they would like to drive it.  There are young writers who are still away from the lime light of fame but their work is exemplary, perhaps they couldn’t break into the list of best sellers though their regard in the literary circles is richly glinting.