Cheers For Ashok Banker

So it has happened again. Yet another Indian writer, this time a well-known one, has bagged a fabulous book contract, rumoured to be the biggest in India's literary history, with Warner Little Brown USA and UK. The book's German rights alone has been sold for a six-figure(USD) sum. Add to these Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish, Czetch and other foreign rights which are under negotiation. And lastly, it gets the film rights offer from a major Hollywood studio.

It's a fantasy come true for Ashok Banker, the Bombay-based author, who has always tried to live off his writing. He has been a full-time writer for over twenty years, and never tried to have a day job since he quit his well-paid job in an advertising company.

"If you have a job," he said some time back, "it means the best hours of your day are devoted to doing something other than writing. Your writing gets done at odd moments squeezed out of a hectic schedule, either early in the morning or late at night. I can't live with the frustation of writing."

But it was not easy for a neophyte writer - despite his talent and determination - to earn a living by writing. At one point, he had to sell one room of his flat to his neighbour so he could just keep himself going. When that money was used up, he was seriously thinking of selling one of his kidneys for a good price. What however bailed him out at this juncture was a script-writing job.

Many today know him as a script-writer of feature films. But he wears many hats. He is a novelist, poet, playwright, crime novelist, newspaper columnist, short-story and sci-fi writer, producer and writer of television shows, web-novelist, children's writer. An inexhaustible and mind-boggling list really. Possibly he has tried his hand at every conceivable genre of writing, and he has not done badly in any genre.

But is it possible for a writer, however prolific, to do justice to and continue with all such different genres all at the same time? One need not imagine it hard that it is simply to pay his bills that he had tried different genres in different times. As an avid reader of his column and book reviews, I have always thought about him that he - being a serious writer as he is - should be focused and concentrate on novels - the kind of works he began his writing life with.

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