How Parliament can save publishing

Just in case you decide to quote from a book in Parliament, do ensure that the book has been published. Reading anything from an unpublished manuscript kept in the archives or a drawer won't cut the ice any more. The logic is impeccable: words, apparently, are not words until they wear the ceremonial robes of ISBN registration. Until then, they are spectral utterances, floating in the ether, unfit for parliamentary debate. Tagore's unpublished drafts? Forbidden. Savarkar's marginalia? Nahin hoga. The diary you keep under your pillow? Dangerous samizdat. One shudders to think of the countless unpublished shopping lists, letters, doodled manifestos and chief ministerial poem that may now be deemed worthless to quote in the literary soiree that goes under the name of sansad.

But there's a silver lining. Forget 'Booker Winner' or 'Oprah's Book Club Pick'. The new marketing gold standard of publishing can be: 'Quotable in Parliament', or QIP. Publishers will rush manuscripts into print not for readers, but for legislators desperate to cite something without being accused of trafficking in phantom prose. It's triumph of paperwork over thought, of bureaucracy over imagination. And in that triumph lies the possible revival of the publishing industry that does away with the need for readers: publishing schedule synced to parliamentary sessions.