What happens when your e-mail is shared with 2 Million Times’ readers …
One of the pitfalls of being a journalist is that you send heaps of e-mails and notes to other journalists - and before you know it your trivial jokey little message has ended up in print and is being shared with over 2 million readers.
For instance … I have a friend, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to work for The Times. Tunku is an Indian and as such is bonkers about cricket.
Since India is currently touring Australia, I couldn’t resist chaffing Tunku over the latest eruption. (When India plays a cricket series, by the way, there is always a row - absolutely without fail. This latest spat is over an Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh allegedly calling a black Australian player "a monkey". Or so it’s alleged.)
I sent an impish e-mail to Tunku on Thursday - and not two days later, a huge op-ed piece by Tunku appeared in The Times newspaper. It began thus:
"Yesterday I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine, an old Etonian in Edinburgh with free time on his hands. "Hello Monkey Boy," it began, charmingly, "Tell me - does this recent spat between Australia and India mean that I am no longer allowed to address you as ‘monkey’?"
"Since not everyone spends every waking hour bent double over the sports pages of newspapers, I should point out that this seemingly puerile note drew its inspiration from an incident that is alleged to have occurred in Sydney last week in the course of the second cricket Test match between Australia and India."
Idle Tom, the publisher, liked the story. Very much. But he did have a small complaint.
"Why does he have to describe you as an Old Etonian?" said Tom. "Couldn’t he have given a plug to the book? Couldn’t he have called you ‘The author of the fantastic ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’?"
"I suppose he could have done. But it’s much easier journo shorthand just to pigeonhole me as an Old Etonian."
"But …" Tom was at a loss for words. "But what would you need to do to get yourself into another pigeonhole?"
"It’s not easy to get out of your pigeonhole, Tom."
"But we don’t describe George Orwell as an Old Etonian … or Shelley … or Aldous Huxley … or Anthony Trollope."
"Or Wellington for that matter. But I’m not really in their league am I?"
"No - you’re not. But it just seems so unfair to always be tagged as an Old Etonian."
"Welcome to the world of hackery -"
"Maybe if you won a really, really big award, people might start thinking of you primarily as a writer."
"It would have to be a pretty big award, I can tell you."
"Like?"
"Like maybe a Nobel Prize."