What do historians do: They'll tell us how great Chetan Bhagat is
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Chetan Bhagat, you're not Amitav Ghosh. Let 'writers' be
Chetan Bhagat has had an active week on Twitter. After the Dadri lynching and Kalburgi murder prompted a number of writers to return their Sahitya Akademi awards, Bhagat took to the social media site to vent his frustrations.
It started with a tweet on October 7, in which Bhagat first brought up the return of the awards.
So far, it had seemed that Bhagat was simply taking on those who could not digest his "no award to return" remark. But October 12, onwards, he got more and more belligerent when speaking of award returnees, questioning their politics and much besides:
Rajesh Joshi, one of the writers who returned the award, took on Bhagat personally. As quoted by Times Of India, Joshi, said: "Woh ek pulp writer hain aur isse jyada unki aukat nahi hai. Woh sirf aisa hee bayan de sakte hain. (He is a pulp writer and can do little more than make such statements.) Bhagat is an ordinary English writer. He is not Vikram Seth and he is also not Salman Rushdie."
Joshi's statements are indeed in poor taste and I suspect even writers who disagree with Bhagat would not use the language that Joshi has employed. But none of this takes away from the larger truth of Joshi's statement. If Bhagat had hoped to draw attention to the writers returning the Akademi award, he should have expected to be judged as a writer himself. Read more here.