He is a cyber whizkid. And an avid blogger who has been voicing out the “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” (greatbong.net) for the past six years and has won the Indibloggies’ Blog of the Year citation in 2006 and 2008.
His quirky debut May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss! has garnered him some attention. When you speak to him, the 30-something Ray holds forth on a tapestry of topics ranging from Bollywood C-grade revenge masalas, ribald songs of people, fake educational institutes, stubborn bathroom flushes, unreal reality shows, the benefits of corruption, opulent weddings, brains in toaster ovens to seedy theatres and pompous NRIs.
Ray says his work is based on his blog posts: “This is an age of online communication and the blitzkreig of media boom. Having been blogging for a while now, I could at least gauge this much that this was the ideal time to unveil a book in blogging ishtyle. This is a fairly good moment to release books of akin genres as blogging or twittering is the new-millennium trendsetters. Also, because there has been a huge publishing revolution in India, so more avenues for different voices can be heard and asserted. Genre-wise, too, the book can get a sizeable amount of target-readership.”
The B-grade Hindi potboilers are one of the themes in his book. Having grown up in the ’80s and ’90s, Ray had got glued to the golden days of Doordarshan serials. “Aren’t these trivial experiences so precious in a commoner’s humdrum life? This sliver of triteness or the triviality of life is what makes a world of difference to those humdrum lives who had never ever imagined to savour it in the first place. So, these are some snatches of encounters that I wished to tap into,” he says.
For instance, there was a Russian television channel called TV6, which would telecast all adult movies in Ray’s “formative years”. He says: “In my story, there’s a diary of a guy watching the channel, while his strictly vigilant dad threatens to throttle him if he dares to steer a glance at it.”
Ray says that the current-day commercial cinema bemoans the passing away of the larger-than-life villains pronged with a shock value. “I’ve liked the offbeat fares like Dev D and Kaminey. These films have adequately captured the spirit and flavour of today’s times via the marquee of realistic cinema, keeping in mind the collective tastes, preferences and herd instincts,” he says.
Having scrawled non-fiction in the stylised gamut of a fiction, Ray also pans his eagle-eyes towards the current political perimetre of the country. “The pragmatic affairs of the state is always the way it has been. Censure it as a gutter-game of politics or what you may, the nature of polity and character of politicos will always remain unaltered, even if there’s a drop of the old guard. Why accuse and pin down the terrorists for being mass-marauders alone? Ask for the scalps of those irresponsible ministers whose actions and decisions enervate the nation’s stability everyday at the cost of their voters’ lives,” he says.
Thriving on a clutch of dime-a-dozen character-mouthpieces, every chapter seems impregnated with an underlying tone of sarcasm. “The stories impart a moral message in conclusion. Well, it may walk along the lines of Aesop’s Fables,” he says.
Ascribing the tweets in vogue as “a lazy or a busy man’s preoccupation” as it only contains a terse cache of 140 characters, he says: “Blogging substitutes the written version of verbal diarrhoea. You can key in words as much as you can at your free will without any rein of norms to bridle your expressions. You may easily weave out a story, even if it is time-consuming. It has a broader expanse after all,” he says.
On the anvil are four more prospective titles in a row, ready to get off the ground shortly in the near future. “Every author puts a stamp of his autobiographical elements in most of his creations. From his personal experiences to character traits, every inch of a detail is like taking a leaf out of his own life story. There are sketchy outlines of an address — 34 B, Randolf Road — which suggests the working title of my immediate next. Then comes a comic fiction, followed by a horror book. Of course, I would love to explore the effects of supernaturalism in its veins. And incidentally, I’ve already spoofed the conventions of all horror Hindi movies on my blogs. But yes, don’t expect anything remotely connected to the brand of Ramsay Brothers’ spooky flicks. There’s a hint of an ‘archaeological horror meets an intense fear-factor in the book’,” he informs.
The catalogue is further tailed with a non-fictional piece of account. “But the ultimate clincher is to pen a book on graduates pursuing higher studies in the US. It will be an anti-friendship book based on a hostel life. You may call it another Inscrutable Americans,” he says.
From the Web world to the written word, Ray is leaving behind his signature impression everywhere.