Who wants to be a minister?

Well! Guess who wanted it first? Jeffrey Archer, the internationally acclaimed author wants to be the transport minister. His sarcastic remark about people in India driving with the road lines directed to the middle of their cars and not towards the left or right was thoughtful though. Not that I am a big fan of Jeff. Ok! This is confession time…! I have read just two books in my lifetime, ‘The Alchemist’ by Paula Coelho and ‘Painter of signs’ by RK Narayan. I don’t know anything about Jeffrey archer except for the fact that he is an internationally acclaimed author. There was never an intuition or an initiation to glorify the art of book reading, predominantly because I loved playing most of the time and not just sit with a book. However, there has always been a school of thought that reading is also an emotional enhancer that brings a balance to ones life. Sometimes I feel ashamed amidst friends who have so much to talk about books while all I can do is just nod my head.

I met him at the book launch at landmark and was quite impressed by this 20 minute speech and a 30 minute interactive session. Clad in a yellow t-shirt, the 69 year old (eh..young!) man not just tickled every person’s funny bone but our thoughts too.

The Happy me!

1) Crowd thronging across every corridor and pillar in landmark to get a glimpse of this famous man. With so much crowd in a small hall, we were all sweating like criminals in the court of law, yet I seemed to be enjoying it. The reason… I always believed that there was just one place where people wouldn’t mind the heat and sweat but still love the place, a rock concert! This book launch had most of the things similar, like young boys and girls, sweat and ofcourse they loved what they were watching.

2) Jeff’s love and respect for India is indeed very amusing. He considered every reader to be a critic and also mentioned that one needs to be very careful with an Indian reader. He pointed out that most of the hits on his blog were from India.

3) RK Narayanan was his favorite author. A wave of parallelism between my head and his, cut across the crowd in between and a ‘silly’ moment of joy. I loved his remark about RK Narayan. I’ve read just one book of his and was overwhelmed by the simplicity of the plot he handled and the language. I literally used my eye balls to flip the pages because I couldn’t just take my eyes of that 100 odd page book called ‘Painter of Signs’.

4) His love for the ‘realistic imagination’ was very much in sync with my thought of writing a book. Clubbing of imagination and facts are always interesting. Unlike the ‘realistic imagination’ in a political manifesto, which we generally forget after the elections, his new book is about George Mallary a person who had a dream, and when he'd achieved it, there was no proof that he had fulfilled his ambition.

5) The best and most intelligent question was put forth by a kid named Vajresh. He enquired about the convincing capacity of realistic imagination in the book and how Jeff proves the imagination with facts. He stressed on the amount of research that had to be done before writing a book which would convince a reader about clubbing imagination and facts.

The Sad me!

Fake laughter and ‘intended to be heard murmuring’ was prevalent among the audience. Jeff’s jokes didn’t require a higher decibel roar, but most of them were loud. A natural human being wouldn’t laugh as loud as most of them did for his sarcastic remarks. May be the crowd was trying their part of realistic imagination.

The sole intention of going there was not to see how Jeff looked like, but I wanted to listen to his speech. There was convincing evidence that most writers could speak well and also handle the questions of the fans with comforting intuition, after I heard Jeff speak. But the sad part is that I couldn’t here most of it.

The intention of 70% of the crowd was to grab a copy with Jeff’s signature and of course nobody would leave that copy to rest in their bedrooms but would circulate with a sense of pride saying, “Yea… that one is personally autographed by Jeff Himself’. I was there to see what was in him rather than to get what’s with him. Most of the fans were so excited about the fact that they would have a copy of the favorite book autographed by their favorite author and that kept their heart beat pumping and the result… It was pouring through their mouths… Next day I read the papers and it said Jeff autographed copies till 11 pm. Imagine if he was asked to talk about writing books, controversies, success factor and love for India till 11 pm? I would have started to write or atleast read his book for sure.

Now I can only pledge allegiance to the sensational accomplishments and not be obliged by the accomplished sensationalism!