This is a random post about some of the strangest (ie The Poor Man What Were His Parents Thinking?!?!?!) Indian names I encountered during my stint at the bank:

Toshit
Viral
Hardik
Shitin

I will update as I remember more.

Did anybody know that in Sanskrit "Kaavya" means 'literature'? Interesting, yes?

There's a review in the paper today by Whitney Otto, about the whole Kaavya Viswanathan issue, a slightly confusing article because it starts off talking about genre fiction, chick-lit being the latest incarnation of the romance genre, and the fact that the attraction of genre fiction is its predictability, but it has all these bits about young writers not being able to write well, and that writers have to be a certain type of person which Kaavya isn't and therefore she's only a faux-writer. She says that "a chick-lit book comes with such specific requirements to be considered chick lit that enormous similarities to previous books within the genre are almost inevitable. Or you could just write your own book."

So there you go, she's halfway exonerating Kaavya, but there's clearly quite a bit of disdain. Otto talks about other 'real' writers who have managed to transcend their genres -- Margaret Mitchell, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, among others -- and that Kaavya, by virtue of the fact that she's a serial overachiever, "might have had more success at fiction if she didn't bear the burden of the overachiever". She is not the sort of person one would expect to become a writer. Or rather, she might have wanted to be a writer for the sake of being a writer, but not because she's compelled to write. Because as a writer, failure is unavoidable and she doesn't seem like the sort of person who might want to take that chance. "If you aren't compelled to write, because you're maybe an overachieving future investment banker, then a write-by-numbers approach might be the way to go, book-wise."

So I guess the point is: given that Kaavya chose to write a book in this manner and this genre, maybe it's not so surprising that there are so many similarities to other books. But she could never have expected to be respected as a writer.

I enjoyed the book, but I have to agree with Whitney Otto that Kaavya doesn't seem like the book-writing sort, much less the sort of person who writes this kind of book. She herself admitted in interviews that she's not a very funny person and that she's into fashion but not really into pop culture, so how on earth did she manage to produce a book that's quite hilarious and loaded with pop culture references?

It's sad, really, because what I really liked about Opal Mehta was that it wrote about being an Indian in America without any angst. So many other culture-confusion writers -- Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Salman Rushdie, even Zadie Smith -- are full of a sort of angst about their displacement and alienatedness and all sorts of things. I know it's blasphemy to even begin to compare Kaavya Viswanathan to such writers as these, and even if it was ok to compare the writers, it isn't a fair comparison because culture/ethnicity never really took centrestage in the Opal Mehta plot; being Indian never got in Opal's way. The Indian parents, family, friends etc merely provided humour. But it was enjoyable, all the same, to see all the familiarly insane Indian-people behaviour chronicled in a light-hearted manner instead of "oh my god look at my crazy parents I cannot stand my life I need to run away and sleep with a lot of lilywhite boys." I identified with Opal, really, because my mother's a lot like hers. Except she knows better than to wear a Hermes scarf with a sari.

However, one thing that bothered me about the book is that a family of Mehtas would never come from Chennai. Chennai is the bastion of all things South Indian, and Mehta is a North Indian name and the food mentioned was all North Indian and calling your child 'beta' is a North Indian habit. Though technically, for a girl, it should be 'beti' -- 'beta' is Hindi for 'son', 'beti' for 'daughter'. So there was clearly some cultural confusion going on in Kaavya's head. Kaavya is South Indian and originally from Chennai, by the way. Also, I watched an interview of Kaavya by Katie Couric and the way Kaavya mispronounced 'Mehta' really got on my nerves. She said something like 'May-da'. The real pronunciation would be 'Meh-tha' where the 'meh' rhymes with 'heh'.

Incidentally, according to Whitney Otto some people have pointed out similarities between Salman Rushdie's work and Opal Mehta. Can somebody please tell me what these similarities are?