Shashi Warrier | That time I got asked to vlog about my book

Most of my work is writing. When I finish a draft, I send it to a literary agent who then tells me what needs to be changed for it to be a reasonable book. I make those changes, and she finds someone to publish it, while I move on to writing other things.

Between books, I surf the web, TV channels, and YouTube. I found a truck driver’s YouTube vlog about where he goes and what he eats and how his sons, who go with him, are doing. I was watching this video when the computer told me I had mail.

It was from the hard-working agent. The mail said that that there was a YouTube channel that posted videos about Asians who write, and would I like to send in a video of myself holding one of my books and talking about it.

The truck driver’s vlog seemed pretty simple. All he did was to place his camera or phone on the passenger seat, pointing at him, and, while looking at it from time to time, say whatever he wanted to say, and then shut it off and post the video on his channel. If a truck driver can do it, I thought, so can I! After all, I’ve been lecturing college students for a few years about nothing in particular. “Sure,” I replied. “Give me a couple of days.”

A video of a few minutes shouldn’t take more than an hour to make, I thought, so I followed my usual style of time management and put it off until the last minute. And thus, at 7pm on a Saturday evening, my conscience began to trouble me. I placed my tablet on the table, positioned myself in front of it with the book in my hands, and discovered that it was very hard to get my face and the book in the frame unless I propped up the tablet at a very specific angle. A few books piled up behind the tablet did the trick, and I started off.

Thirty seconds into the recording I realised that even though I’d written the dam’ book I couldn’t talk about it coherently without notes: I’d hemmed and hawed all the way. My respect for that truck driver went up a couple of notches: he could speak for five minutes about aloo-palak or daal-chawal. I shut off the recording and prepared my notes, realising only when I finished that I’d spent a couple of hours over it, and didn’t have the energy to continue.

Next morning, I did a little test run of thirty seconds to make sure everything was fine, and discovered it wasn’t. The picture was clear, but not the sound: there was an echo and a background hum, which, put together, made my voice almost inaudible. That left me ashamed, because this truck driver managed to record his voice perfectly clearly while driving a truck with the glass down and the engine running and so on. So what was I doing wrong?

The echo disappeared when I closed the windows, and the hum when I turned off the fan, so I turned on the air-conditioner and did another trial. This time the sound was fine, but something else went wrong: the lighting. The light seemed fine while recording, but afterwards it was clearly uneven, leaving one side of my face in shadow with the other brightly lit, besides shining in the middle of my spectacle lenses, giving me a deranged look.

I brought in another lamp or two to fix the lighting, but the mad glint remained, and I decided to go with it. And so, a day after I started recording and 23 hours after I’d expected to finish, I was ready.

The first two minutes of the recording went well, but in the third minute I stumbled over a sentence. That truck driver never made such a big mistake, so I abandoned the recording. Later, I found I made mistakes only towards the end of the recording, so I took an hour off and practised the script until I’d got it down pat. Two days behind schedule, I set up the tablet for the final recording, brought in the extra lighting, closed the windows, started the air-conditioner, and began to record.

In the fifth minute, with everything going smoothly, someone knocked at the gate, and the dog began to bark furiously. I finished the recording but the dog drowned out my voice. The truck driver wouldn’t have accepted it, so we brought the dog in and I started all over again.

Ten minutes later, it was done. After two days of sweat and toil, here I was, holding my book and talking coherently about it. “Great!” I thought with a distinct feeling of achievement, and called my wife to look at it. She sat in front of the tablet while I played it. Ten seconds into the video, she said, “But you’re holding the book upside-down!”

It couldn’t be, but it was: I could see for myself. For a moment my being dissolved in an ocean of hate. I hated myself! I hated the dog! I hated the book! I hated the video! I hated the universe! But most of all, I hated the truck driver! I set out grimly to do the recording all over again.

Fifteen minutes later, it was done. I stumbled from time to time, there was a wild look in my eyes, what little hair I have was disarranged, and my beard looked as if it had been trimmed with garden shears. The truck driver wouldn’t have approved, of course, but at least the book was right side up!