>>PREVIEW
GAUTAM MALKANI
Saturday, October 14
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
Saturday, October 14
Dining room (The Banff Centre)
Gautam Malkani is one exhausted author these days, as he tries to juggle his job as a journalist at the Financial Times in London and publicity for his widely hyped first novel Londonstani (HarperCollins, 352 pp.) that explores British Asian rudeboy culture.
It’s a major challenge for him to find time to do publicity for his book. One night he calls at 3 a.m. London time to apologize for missing an earlier interview. He finally decides Friday at 1 a.m. would be the best time to conduct the interview because he’ll be able to sleep in instead of having to leave for work at the crack of dawn. Aside from all the publicity he’s trying to fit in, he’s also just had his mobile phone stolen and is moving into a new house.
"I’m going through a bit of a crazy patch at the moment," he says.
But the intensity of his life is nothing new. Malkani wrote the entire book while working full-time at his current job and says he was constantly "knackered."
"I would go home after work and sleep for an hour and then start working on the book in a kind of weird, dreamlike state," he says.
Londonstani is written entirely using text messaging, slang, some Punjabi and lots of obscenity. Malkani had to make sure that the writing style of his book wasn’t creeping into his Financial Times journalism work or correspondence.
"Soon the Financial Times (FP) language became the alien one to me and so the book language was the one that came naturally and I had to kind of watch myself at the FP," he says. "There were a couple of moments. I always caught them before I filed them."
Meanwhile his co-workers had developed a theory about why he was "always so tired and bleary-eyed."
"There was a rumour going around for awhile that I was kind of moonlighting for the Secret Service," he says with a laugh. "I was writing a lot about race relations post-9/11, so it was kind of funny."
Londonstani starts out with a vivid opening scene in which a group of British Asian rudeboys beat the shit out of a white kid for calling them Pakis.
"Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit," is the memorable opening line.
It’s a fascinating exploration of an aggressive ethnic subculture, but it also has universal relevance. Londonstani is often hilarious as it delves into the trials and tribulations of being a teenage male. The main character, Jas, is desperate to be cool, tough and to impress women, but in reality he’s a brainy kid who enjoys reading more than working out at the gym or beating people up. In his attempt to fit in with the rudeboy subculture, he becomes alienated from his true self and is badly hurt in the process. The book also has some poignant scenes where the characters struggle to meet familial cultural expectations while also trying to live their lives on their own terms.
Malkani did his undergraduate thesis on rudeboy culture because he was fascinated with the "assertive ethnic identity British Asian boys were adopting in the early ’90s." His exploration of the issue made him want to write Londonstani.
"I was just interested in why suddenly the kind of typical British Asian boy had morphed from being a kind of untroubling, conscientious, studious, stereotypical kind of Indian boy into this really aggressive kind of youth scene where it had more to do with gangster rap than any ethnic identity they were asserting," he says.
Malkani says he himself was "a geek" but he had friends who became immersed in the subculture and he was intrigued by it.
"Sociologists have written about the idea that minority communities in all societies, in order to properly integrate on their own terms, first need to cut themselves off and kind of develop their own self-esteem and develop their own identity, which kind of gives them self-esteem to re-integrate later. If it wasn’t for this process, you’d have British Indian kids acting like they were British kids in order to assimilate with mainstream Britain. But because they go through this process of looking inward, and it’s not a pretty process in some parts of the book, and in some parts of what I remember from growing up it was quite an ugly process… it basically allows them to integrate as British Indians."
Malkani is anxious to emphasize that the characters in the book aren’t primarily motivated by their racial background but by being part of a specific youth subculture that glorifies violence and bling.
"The assumption of ethnic identity was really just a proxy for a reaffirmation of masculinity. These boys weren’t trying to be Indian. They were just trying to be men and reasserting and rediscovering their Asian identity was just a useful tool in that process," he says.
One of the things that intrigued him most about the current youth movements such as rudeboy culture was the obsession with consumerism.
"Unlike previous sort of youth movements like punk or rock or whatever, it actually celebrates consumerism and materialism rather than counters it," he says. "I think that’s kind of interesting that we’re at this stage where you can’t quite have politics when no one has any qualms about the system."
Malkani has become frustrated by some of the criticism he’s received about his book. He says some critics "had their knives out for the book" because of the early hype around it.
"Before it hit the shelves people were kind of waiting to take it down and a couple of people did give it their best shot," he says. "Some people who really tried to jump on the criticism bandwagon did so primarily by saying that this guy went to Cambridge and he works at the Financial Times, so what the hell can he know about the ghetto."
He says the irony is that his characters aren’t ghetto or street. Instead, they’re "middle class mummies’ boys trying to be men."
Malkani says such negative feedback has been countered by the response he’s received from many British Asian teenagers who have embraced the book.
"The kids gave it a resounding thumbs up. I was really grateful for that," he says, explaining that both the BBC and the Times of London distributed the book at schools in London.
He resents the fact there’s a perception "that authentic Asians have to be deprived" and he says that’s why he’s being attacked for writing the book.
Malkani isn’t sure what his next novel will be about but he wants to be able to impact the same readers he connected with through Londonstani.
"I seem to have managed to get this book to appeal not just to people who read books, but also a lot of people who don’t read books, particularly the kind of people that are in this book," he says, explaining that rudeboys are enjoying it. |
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