Wine, glamour and desperate deals

Publishing parties are the liminal space where relationships between editors, authors, publicists and agents are forged in a variety of ways-and with a lot of wine

- Somak Ghoshal

There would be plenty of boozy lunches, I was told. On workdays. And parties. Evenings filled with glamorous and frightfully intelligent people that would be the talk of town for days afterwards. Not to forget the adventures of fishing gems out of the "slush pile", being surrounded by books all day, every day.

As far as USPs go, my boss couldn't have sold the job better because the pay was abysmal. Delhi it was, I decided, and moved to the city on a salary that just about covered the rent and kept me fed and clothed.

I had turned 30 that year, that age when people start settling into professional monogamy, building a vision of a "career". Instead, there I was, throwing caution to the wind, shifting gears from media to publishing, daring to start an affair when I should have known better.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I didn't have the security of family heirloom that came in the form of three-bedroom flats in Jor Bagh or Defence Colony, but I had the all-consuming love of reading to justify my place in the pecking order.

It proved to be a torrid and short-lived fling in the end. How many summers can you survive in Delhi for love without being able to afford an AC? One day the penny dropped and I found out that a love of reading didn't make you fit for the business of publishing, a non sequitur if there ever was one.

My brief stint inside the bubble of English language publishing richly compensated me with sentimental education I couldn't have anticipated, though. "Your most important KRA will be to meet three new potential writers every week," my boss had told me at the outset. And so, into the glamourised world of book launches, festivals, talks, and after-parties I dived. It was the way to do business-meet new authors, poach others, find out the next hot trend.