For a book priced at an astronomical Rs 1 lakh (that would be $2,250 or thereabouts), it ought to be your unfettered right to know what on earth lies between the blazing covers. But Ritu Beri isn't telling you. You need to buy the book to find out as much, that has been her repartee all this while. What the blazes!

Anyway, don't you tax your brain too much about the issue, having read those eulogising agency news items; this blog will actually vindicate your ill-founded fears. The book is not going to tax your brain much either. Yes, it is a no-brainer. The tome only proves that Ritu Beri's 28 inch waist matches her two-digit IQ. No, that's not a nasty one – there are nastier ones to come. Read on, pray.

Before we get between the sheets, nay pages, let's do a Beri quick recap about what we know about the person in question. No, dears, this is not her first book. She penned one for Penguin once, priced at an embarrassing Rs 95. Her pricing factor has sure taken a quantum leap now. The way she keeps pouting the price, you will know what growing by lips and bounds means.

That book was called – sorry, no prizes for guessing that one, come on – 101 Ways to Look Your Best. The grapevine has it that Beri had wanted Penguin to repeat its mistake of publishing her once. Penguin, one reckons, has its own compulsions of harbouring just one infantile writer. Beri is grossly self-indulgent – 144 times worse than the puerile Shobaa De (err, did one get the name right?).

Our Beri beautiful designer in question is known to stay in the news, for all sorts of reasons. All other designers are known to bitch about her. Unabashedly so. Rohit Bal was once supposed to have dubbed her a no-talent-success-story. Maybe Bal is a case of sour grapes. But our Ritu does not take such bitchings to her heart (we will come to the heart bit in a bite). As she shamelessly avers, she just happens to hear these things. Quite right. Things flow in from one of her ears, and out the other – there is nothing in between to block the thoughts.

And yes, coming to the question of hearts. The invitation card to her book launch function was heart-shaped. There were hearts all around at the launch ceremony just as well. Akshay Kumar, who proudly claimed that he was one who had never read a book in his life, did the honours because he has a large heart. And Ritu is soooo soft-hearted. And a brain to match, need I add?

Somewhere in her book, profoundly titled Firefly, she writes, "I celebrated my incarnation as an Indian designer, privileged to play an international role, in the globalized world." Are we glad that she is not a reincarnation of anything? No one can be as dumb as she in one lifetime.

Okay. Enough. Let's get to reviewing this firefly.

Beri starts off telling us how it all began.

When I was very small… I always wanted to be a doctor. Complete with stethoscope and a black bag for my medical tools. I must honestly admit my doctoral ambitions were somewhat thwarted by the fact that I spent more time musing how the wardrobes of the medical team should look rather than on the more noble and gory aspects of the trade.

Medical tools? Aren't we glad she did not become a doctor? Medical tools? Now, what does she think of "tools"? Not hammers and tongs, surely.

Mentally, I was always designing the doctor's over coat with an interesting pocket detail for his stethoscope. My mind would buzz with designs for dressing up the nurses, designing starched headgear and improvising their aprons, adding frills at the hem. It didn't take me long to figure out that this was my calling.

Well "over coat" has been one word for a long time. Maybe someone forgot to tell Beri about it. And now, what was she thinking of designing nurses as? Eeeks. By the way, anyone seen Carry on Doctor?

My earliest memories are those of any child brought up in a military home. No chauffeur driven cars or expensive toys, only museum holidays abroad. No, I worked hard and I played equally hard at extra-curricular activities. Discipline, focus and single-mindedness were the bedrocks on which you were expected to build your life. While I was protected in the army, a part of me sensed that it was only a temporary haven, that there was a tough world out there which had to be tackled and that this was the time to hone my skills to take on future challenges. This protected world was fleeting, changing.

Military home. Hmmm. As in a "remand home"?

Single-mindedness? Of course, where else could that halo come from?

Museum holidays abroad? Well, that coming from a fauji daughter. Well again, her Colonel father must have been quite well-endowed. Or maybe, he managed to get some attractive endowments.

Fleeting? Here we have someone who has her verbs all mixed up. Someone, please get Beri a Wren and Martin for her to find out the difference between the transitive and intransitive forms. Of verbs, I mean. Okay, she is no trained writer. But for pricing a book at Rs 1 lakh she could have surely afforded a hack to rework on her words. She could have added it to the cost factor, priced it at Rs 1,05,000. Never mind.

As the years went by, I put up barriers to stop people from coming too close to so that I could avoid dealing with the pain of separation. The result is that I became a loner, preferring my own company. Sometimes it hurts when people today look at my success and my reclusive nature, cold, dispassionate, are the words I hear in reverberation.

Oh yes, she is condemned to be a loner. Lonely in the company of the very ones who have made her a media creation. You should have seen India TV's Rajat Sharma drooling over her as he tried to throw some "hardhitting" questions in his Adalat. Beri fended well, Sharma was happy that she did.
No comments about Beri's sense of punctuation. Only if she could put a big full stop early on in the book. Put an end to our misery. But, nay. Read on, please.

Today, I recognize these forces are responsible for inspiring to achieve what I have. The constant moves made me dream. Dreaming was the fabric of my existence. I wove them around me, I breathed them like air. Without dreams, my life would be empty and on my dreams, well, I became irritatingly focused. I wanted to create; there was much I wanted to express, to say. My parents encouraged us to dream constantly. It was a race for perfection, and we ran it with glee. Tagore said, "Great human societies are the creations not of profiteers but of dreamers."

There we are. Her mind wanders, and she goes along with it. Boy, we all like to dream, don't we? But if you care to read on (her book, not this blog post, damn it), chances are high that you might just happen to doze off. Ritu too must have fallen asleep while writing this volume of juvenile twaddle. Else, may I ask, why would she need 3-4 years to pen down all her girlish gibberish?

College was not for me. On the contrary, I was intrigued by fashion design. I could not draw, so I hand-knitted a sweater and wore it for my interview to show how it would look. I was accepted into the first session of India's Fashion Institute, NIFT – and from there with thanks, to the rest of the world. 10 balls of wool and 2 knitting needles. A recipe for my success.

Well, why is Fashion Institute written like this? Her sense of cases is quite a sad case. Maybe that has something to do with her "military" background. Faujis, politicians, their obsequious bureaucrats, all have that morbid tendency to CAP whatever they think is important. Rules of grammar can go to hell.

Grammar, then, is something you are not likely to find much in Ritu's book. Fashion knows no grammar, didn't you know? She also seems to believe in the school of thought that poetry is nothing but prose written in bad grammar. Never mind her bad prose, there's verse still to come.

Here's something titled Parisian Odyssey/Labyrinth of Desire. Intense stuff, this.

Fireflies mesmerize
Fire and flight, light, what more could you ask
When fire becomes light, when dreams take flight, in that moment, you want nothing.
Once upon a time, I stood up at the top of a winding staircase, present, detached but
also completely aware
Incese rose, tantalizing, teasing…
Red-stained feet stepped
Twirling like dervishes – India, her colours, her clothes, her women, her sense of the
divine exploded in Paris,
in the first Indian Fashion Show
Mine.
I know every thread on their bodies,
Reckless, chaotic, ancient and profound
I made them.
Taking on a life of their own
Unabashedly exotic, celebratory couture…
Indian couture
Whispers rise from the small, waiting crowd:
"It's life there's a fire in the house"
I smiled for the first time that day.
Fire – yes.
Fly – of course.
Paris is my truth where the firefly lives even when she touches the flame.

No one, including me, wanted to be the first to fail
Reality has a harshness that disturbs dreams
So to protect ourselves, we don't dream in reality
Finding a way to coax my dream into the light,
I re-defined failure
'If I tried, I could not fail,
If I did not try, I was a failure'

No comments.

On second thoughts, just one. Beri can write another book for Penguin. Call it 1 Way Not to Write a Pome. I mean, poem.

What? Having a Beri strong overdose of our fashion diva's literary prowess already? Come on, be a sport. To read about a one-lakh-book, you will have to endure something, at least. My words at least, if not hers.

Before you get caught in two minds about whether to throw the book at Ritu or the comp at me, lemme just tell you in brief what all our woman-still-trapped-in-her-early-thirties would want to do. For starters, she wants to do a fashion presentation in a cathedral in Florence with Pavarotti performing live. Someone would surely want to murder her in that cathedral if s/he were subjected to reading this book all through.

She also wants to see "my creation" on the cover of Vogue without paying for it. No Ritu, you don't really have to. You just need to threaten them once. Tell them your next book will be about Vogue. That will do the trick.*Wink* We, millions of Indians, will all vouch for you provided you promise not to give us even gratis copies of your Firefly.

I will subject you to just one more arduous task – that of reading through her Epilogue.

Paris was my seduction
I was seduced andin turn, I seduced
My dream was to do one show – retire
India's splendor unleashed in Paris
Breathed life into the rebel in me
It must be done again, and again, and it was
With seduction on my tongue, ambition in my heart
I accepted the place at Scherrer
At home, they celebrated
They thought I should change my nationality
Become a French designer
I contemplated the statement like a sphinx
It was tantamount to changing my religion
It made me decide to look at India, again, but not to return to what I once was
I celebrated my incarnation as an Indian designer, privileged to play an international role, in the globalized world

However, in India, I was faced with dismay

Fashion cannot be only for the wealthy, for the beautiful – I pondered …
In India, of all countries, it has to be for millions
For the millions of the silent emroiderers whose names you will never know
For the millions of people who are building their lives in India's small towns
For the millions who dream, the just could be
My challenger now lies in making fashion accessible to people form the largest cities to the smalleest towns – and this is just the beginning
I see India as the next fashion capital of the world – why not?

I chose this purpose formy life: to create beauty
I have an endless desire to explore new freedoms
I touch the earth when I walk
Every so often trying to touch the sky
I muse about what more I can be or do
I am a warrior
I am guts
I am me
I work in a man's world with a man's instinct,
But I never forget to put the right shade of lipstick to match the nail polish on my toes
I am who I am

Now, don't you dare LOL. You are not supposed to do that with an intensely written book worth one lakh rupees.

Just offer her a penny for her thoughts, and you would have been more than generous.

PS:

A few Ritu Beri jokes doing the rounds in the close-knit fashion circles.

• If Ritu puts the right number of candles on her birthday cake, it would be a fire hazard.
• Bobby Chaddha is pleading with Ritu to have birthdays again. He doesn't want to grow old alone.
• The best years of Ritu's life were the ten years between 32 and 33.
• As long as she is capable of juggling figures, Ritu'll never be old.
• Ritu doesn't have an enemy. All her friends hate her.
• Ritu says she's just reached 32. Everyone is curious to know what detained her.