It is also not a very smart marketing tactic because after the tiring process of proofing and putting the book together, the author would simply be exhausted. He or she would be too brain-dead to think up even one smart sentence that could ensure the sale of an extra copy of the book. So, in the interest of the book that has just been released, the author should ideally refrain from making a speech and in the grand old tradition allow the book to do the talking.

But, I realised first hand a couple of weeks ago, when my book (Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue - The Anxieties of a Local Culture) was being launched, that you can't always subscribe to your idealistic and somewhat unfashionable views. The market forces think otherwise. I was given to believe by some of my friends, as well as the publisher, that the audience at the book-launch awaited a grand statement from the author. I did not muster the courage to counter this argument for the fear of being perceived as chicken-hearted. So I went with a prepared statement that had been rehearsed half-a-dozen times for pauses. Never mind whether or not I read it out fluently, I will be curious to know if this statement inspires you to pick up a copy of the book or if it piques your interest. Your vote, I am sure, will go a long way in deciding for or against the tradition of an author speaking on the occasion of his or her book launch. So here goes, the speech I made:

"Like most debut authors I feel terribly exhausted to make a speech on the day of the launch. So, I won't get into telling you why I wrote the book, how I did it and how long I took. All that is amply clear in the fairly longish 'introduction' and 'endnotes' that I have written in the book. But I would only like to emphasise that it was personally very important for me to put this book together. The theme I have chased in this book broadly suggests my own journey from imagining myself as a provincial Kannada boy, growing up in Bangalore's Malleswaram as the son of a Kannada academic and activist, to reaching the fringes of the so called cosmopolitan world by the virtue of being part of the English language media. My present and this book is about the struggle to reconcile the best of the two worlds that I have experienced.

The theme of this book occurred as a result of a set of questions that were nagging me. Roughly reconstructed, the questions were something like this: Should I read Kannada at the cost of English, as the great Kannada poet Gopalakrishna Adiga had once advised me? How much time should I devote to keep myself up to date in the Kannada world? Is it worth it at all? Will it be of any use to spend so much time when most of what I need to manage in this world is available in English? Etcetera. All the while, I knew there was something deeply abnormal about these questions. I soon realised that I too was caught in the dilemma that millions of my generation were facing in a globalised world and that caused enormous guilt in me.

I clearly knew how richly I had gained from my Kannada milieu and how deeply secure and rooted I felt sharing the Kannada identity. At the same time I was also aware of the fresh perspectives and access that the English language created. I did not want to pursue one at the cost of the other. I wanted to be a good bilingual integrating my reading and writing interests in the two languages. Since I constantly travelled between the two worlds, I knew how dubious it was to dub all that was generated by local languages and cultures as 'provincial' and 'parochial.' In the everyday sense, cosmopolitanism was narrowly defined or equated with the use of the English language and the 'benign' global environments it was said to 'naturally' create. This wasn't true and I started wondering as to how to get the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the local and the global, the inside and the outside, the passion and the profession to coexist. How do I get the two worldviews to complement each other? To put it a little more pompously, I began my exploration of the middlepath. It was a dire necessity for me. Almost a question of survival.

I have sometimes even found myself wondeing if this book is about avenging my father's humiliations at the altar of English. Despite being so accomplished, learned and creative, I suspect that in some remote corner of his mind there was this regret that the world did not open up as much as he wanted to because of his limited access to English. Some obituarists of my father have pointed out that before his silence acquired a meditative temper, the silence of his younger days that produced the mime plays were more a result of his shocking encounter with the English-speaking cantonment world in Bangalore, when he came from small town Chikkaballapur to study at the St. Joseph's College. Since English assumes itself to be the world, it has acquired the power to extract regrets from even the most marvelously accomplished people. Garcia Marquez in his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale recalls a debate that took place between his parents over the school he was to join. He says: "My father would have preferred the Colegio Americano so that I would learn English, but my mother rejected it with the perverse argument that it was a den of Lutherans. Today, I have to admit, to be fair to my father, that one of the defects in my life as a writer has been not speaking English." One does not know how to make sense of such regrets.

Perhaps to ensure that his son does not suffer from a similar angst, in my early teens, the only serious holiday homework I remember my father assigning me was translation of short stories or poems from Kannada to English. So even before I had picked up the nuances of the two languages, I had become a translator of sorts. That was the destiny that he was trying to carve out for me - to take my mother tongue to the world. I took the path he showed me seriously. In an altered way, I continue to feel the same even today. As a journalist, I am merely a translator between two worlds and between peoples. In that sense, this book is so much about being my father's son. I have dedicated this book to his memory and I only wish he was alive today to see it in print."

This statement was followed by a long 'thank you' list. Perhaps you would be glad that I have edited it out here.