Waiting for the day when white-skinned writers send their manuscripts to brown-skinned (or, even black-skinned) publishers and editors, and getting rejected…Reason? The 5% quota for white authors is finished…and they need to wiat for at least a couple of years to be considered!

My take is that publishers– in all their glorious colors– are desperate for good works, but do have to balance other considerations. It's not a conspiracy. You can accuse publishers of incompetence and timidity, but racism is really a stretch.

The thing is this guy is crazy. He cant help being this way, its the only way he can survive and I salute him for being this way.

Yup. Balls of brass, for sure.

I agree with a lot of what he's said, although the vehemence with which he says it might not be justified.
I like the way the Indian publishing industry works, as opposed to the UK or the US, but if it continues to grow the way it is, there's a very real possibility that it might get all formalised and rigid like its western counterparts. He's right about letting readers decide, but the reason that there is a publishing industry is because readers don't have the patience to sift through all the crap that's available on a public domain like the internet before deciding what they like for themselves. I know I don't. I struggle to read anything that's more than a couple thousand words off a computer screen.
That said, there's a lot of crap that gets published, and editors and publishers seem to want to inflict their biases and 'marketing strategy' on books rather than just separate the quality stuff from the rubbish.

The comment on Indian publishing not having a caste system is true, to a certain extent, but sometimes it irritates me to find a whole plethora of different genres all thrown onto the "Indian Writing" shelf. When I asked an (Indian) friend of mine, who was a huge Harry Potter and LOTR fan if he'd read Samit Basu's Gameworld Trilogy, he said, "Ehhh… but it's written by an Indian."
I don't know how many other readers think that way, but I'm fairly certain he's not the only one. There's a prejudice among our own readers that needs to be battled against.

Kaushik

Yes, the best thing about Indian publishing is that it's not rigid. On the other hand, it's an industry that's happy if it sells 5,000 copies in a billion-plus world. And every time I check the Crosswords stacks, I'm always surprised by how tiny it is. Not more than 500 authors or so.

I also find it puzzling why marketing is the bad guy in Ashok-bhai's scheme of things. His style is gonzo and direct, but his readers are buying the image he projects as well as the book. Other authors have other styles. I think the future points towards author-as-entrepreneur, but there'll probably always be a place for large corporate publishing houses for authors who don't want the bother.

I agree that Mr. Banker is overdoing the race issue. Afterall, unlike actors, writers don’t even have to sell their faces, whether black, white or rainbow coloured. And while his surname sounds perfectly ‘white’, pen names can be used to a considerable advantage (even Stephen King published four novels as ‘Richard Bachman’).

As for racism regarding content, I like to believe that editors will never reject anything that readers could enjoy, however different it might be. If it can sell, they’ll pick it up. Like Anil said, they’re desperate for good work.

However, kudos to Mr. Banker for how he handled the language issue. Write in Hindi just because he happens to be Indian? I feel like shaking up the interviewer for this typical tendency to homogenise a nation that has hundreds of languages, dialects and sub-dialects. And yes, even a hundred varieties of ‘Indian’ curry.

There's also the stones and glass houses thing. Let's take a look at how we handle our own minorities. How many of them do we find in our literary establishment? How many teen Bollywood movies have scheduled caste leads? Muslims? People with dark skins? In Bollywood movies, if a major character has a scheduled-caste surname, you can be sure it's a movie *about* caste. So on and so forth. Outrage, however, is a river that mostly flows westwards.

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