4th March 2015, Wednesday.
Gouri Dange’s stand-up act about the perils of being published is a witty, tongue-in-cheek view of the writer’s world. Her act at Gyaan Adab took the audience through the entire journey of getting published and the absurdities she has encountered meeting various people in the publishing world.
Agents, publishers, editors, illustrators, fellow-writers, marketing and accounting execs, the press, reviewers, bookstores, celeb-guests and readers as well as book launches, celeb launches, lit fests – Gouri had anecdotes about her time spent amid all these publishing affairs.
The author also read out actual letters she had received from marketing managers of various publishing houses as well as some of the reviews of her books. The letters and reviews were absurdities in themselves and had the audience laughing at the sheer hilarity of the words and the situation.
The audience members, many of them budding writers, had questions and shared stories about the difficulties and frustrations they faced to get published. Gouri answered all of their queries from her experiences with different publishing houses. The idea of sharing a laugh with readers and other writers, aspiring as well as published, by looking at the absurdities and non sequiturs of the publishing world, she said, “is to turn neurotic misery into common grief”.
