For much of my book loving life I’ve been happily schizophrenic, resolutely split into two non-intersecting personas – The Manjul Who Reads and The Manjul Who Writes, hardly do the twain meet to form a Manjul who writes about what she reads. The few times in the past when I’ve been asked to review a book for a magazine or a newspaper it hasn’t even taken me a moment’s thought before declining. I always thought I had enough good reasons for not wanting to review books, ever:

The most cogent of these was that being a writer myself (even an aspiring-perspiring, modestly known one) I wouldn’t possess sufficient distance or impartiality to be a fair judge. I didn’t feel I was above being coloured or subconsciously provoked into unnecessary sharpness by another writer’s inordinate success (or even above being overly generous to the underdog). In fact I know I’m not. Should I make it to heaven you can be pretty sure I’m going to fire a volley of questions to God before he can get a word of welcome in edge ways. “Why Dan Brown? Why Paulo Platitudunous Coelho? Why E L James for chrissake? Is THAT what you think deserves to sell more copies than The Bible?”

The second reason was that I’ve never really thought too much of criticism as an activity – even something as high falutin’ as literary criticism. I kind of belong to the old school of thought that believes, “Those who can do, those who can’t review.”

But what really kept me away was the morbid fear of getting co-opted into some sort of a mutual back scratching writers’ club. Writing is a small world, now more so than ever when the internet has collapsed all distances and everyone is a neighbour in the cyber village, just one or two Facebook walls away from one’s own. In a world like that how do you keep objectivity and perspective? People who I knew ten years ago to be the main votaries of letting in new voices are now card bearing members of the back scratchers’ society. That’s life, it happens, cliques get formed, unknowns get shut out unintentionally. Sooner or later it boils down to who you know and who knows you, to rooting for friends and to reciprocal gestures. There is a certain inevitability to it which I wanted to avoid – books I thought were too important to be dragged down into this morass of social hobnobbing.

However, times change and one changes with the times. So last month I very tentatively signed up on Goodreads and began my first foray into the world of reviewing. Fledgling, byte sized opinions, rather than full-fledged reviews -small, baby steps by mankind’s standards but still a big step for reluctant, reclusive Manjulkind.

None of the reasons I discussed above have disappeared but others have begun to weigh in more heavily on the opposing side. Books are an odd creation. Not even the finest of writers can complete a book alone, for it takes a reader to complete a book. And strangely, the more a book is read the more of a book it becomes. That’s where reviewers become important, those first readers who sample and speak about a book, establishing its being-ness in a sense.

In the last 3-4 years good reviews in the traditional print media have begun to be very scarce, at least in India, where I live and write. Leading newspapers have been downsizing and often doing away altogether with their literary pages, even as more and more of us are writing. Add to that the fact that much of the available space is spoken for in a variety of ways. Some of it is paid for. Then known people have first dibs on the rest. That includes celebrities, journalists and their friends and publishing industry insiders turned authors. Whining about it isn’t going to change this any time soon, otherwise I’d whine that much louder.

The little space that is left doesn’t come easy either. All kinds of biases rule the allocation of reviewing space – that non-fiction is intrinsically worthier than fiction, that men write about more important newsworthy matters than women, that Indian authors who live abroad or come to us vetted by a foreign agent or publisher (or even quite, quite irrationally authors of mixed Indo- Western parentage) are qualitatively superior……to name just a few.

So as I see it, the future belongs to sites like Goodreads which are directly driven by reader opinions and recommendations, which are not constrained for space and are open to new genres, new imprints and new voices. It is here that one might hope to find a thriving, independent and vibrant book culture. I’m happy to pitch in and contribute my two cents worth of opinion. Of course, a part of me rues the fact that it will no longer be sunny side up – the white and yolk, the reader and writer of me distinctly and separately presented, one quiet, the other smiling freely. Once you scramble an egg there’s no unscrambling it. All I can say is if you don’t like what’s being served here reach out for that pinch of salt, will you.