BENGALURU: My most cherished college memories are contained in my diaries. During the four years of my engineering, I meticulously kept a diary, writing at least a few sentences every day. From the classes that I attended (and bunked) to time spent in the canteen with friends, my diary allowed me to speak freely on all matters from the hilarious to the serious and/or the objectionable. From merely capturing my daily routine my diary grew to become a means of introspection, a place to express my deeper feelings, insecurities, purpose, and even existential questions. Each year these diaries were given to me by my father, the best among those he received as New Year gifts from his business partners.
When I browse through my diaries today, after almost two decades, memories of a time when I was young and carefree come sprinting towards me. Do people keep diaries anymore, or do they record everything on a computer? Thankfully, a diary does not suffer from a hardware crash or the loss of a laptop! The biographer Walter Isaacson said it was easier to write the biography of Leonardo da Vinci than of Steve Jobs because there was more evidence of Leonardo stored in paper than of Steve Jobs in digital form.
Of all the diaries, the most widely read is Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (also known as The Diary of Anne Frank). Originally written in Dutch (this version is available online), the diary has been translated into 60 languages. This classic was recently in the news because some libraries in the US had banned it for some of its sexually explicit content. Anne Frank’s examination of her own sexuality is part of what makes The Diary… so powerful; it offers an honest, unabashed portrayal of what it means to be human (and in this case, a teenage girl).
Another wartime diary is that of Lena Mukhina, an ordinary teenager living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova, the boy she liked, liked her in return. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. A truly remarkable account of this most terrible era in modern history, The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl’s Life in the Siege of Leningrad is the vivid firsthand testimony of a courageous young woman struggling simply to survive. Of the more recent publications, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 ¼ Years Old continues to draw headlines. Hendrik Groen is an alias, and the publisher Meulenhoff released the book as fiction. Most of the sales of the book have happened by word of mouth. The book is an interesting narrative about how we treat the elderly in our society, which in turn is a reflection of society’s values.
Then there are diaries in fiction. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend is the first in a bestselling series of seven, which was adapted for the stage as a musical. The books focus on the worries and regrets of a teenager who considers himself an intellectual. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series became such a craze among children in India that they were demanding that their parents order the books as and when they became available abroad. The immensely successful Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding and The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot have been adapted for the big screen.
Literature too has successfully mined the diary form. The most famous modern classic written as a diary is Dracula, while a contemporary horror classic that used this form brilliantly was Anne Rice’s bestselling The Vampire Chronicles. We also have diaries that turn up as plot devices, most memorably in Lolita where the protagonist keeps a diary of his secret desire for a little girl. Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man is narrated as a diary, and so is the Pulitzer-prize winning The Color Purple. One of the great existential classics of the 20th century was a diary: Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea.
In the famous instance of the Hitler Diaries, the world was shocked to discover that Hitler had written several diaries that a German journalist found stashed away in a trunk in East Germany that was said to have belonged to Hitler. The question immediately rose whether the diaries were a forgery. Experts who were called in proclaimed them as authentic. The German newspaper giant that had bought them for about four million dollars was preparing to release them in installments when everything fell apart. Eventually the diaries were declared as clever forgeries — the work of an illiterate bar owner Konrad Kujau! The book, Selling Hitler by Robert Harris, captures the extraordinary story of the con job of the century.
However, my favourite diaries are the genuine ones. Mahadevbhaini Dayari is a 19-volume publication of the diaries maintained by Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s personal secretary — an important source of information on Gandhiji’s life. There’s Theft by Finding by David Sedaris, and Alan Clark’s Diaries and The Last Diaries. As Clark’s preface states: ‘Diaries are so intensely personal — to publish them is a baring, if not a flaunting, of the ego....Sometimes lacking in charity; often trivial; occasionally lewd; cloyingly sentimental, repetitious, whining and imperfectly formed. For some readers, the entries may seem to be all of these things. But they are real diaries.’
The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books.