Look who is bullshitting here!

New Delhi: If renowned lawyer Ram Jethmalani's utterance of the word "bullshit" on live television raised your eyebrows, you are surely sailing behind time.

For, America's one of the most-talked-about book and a phenomenal publishing success last year happens to be a title, called On Bullshit, a slim philosophical treatise by Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt.

The book became such a huge obsession that at one point of time, Americans were racing against time to learn the "philosophy of bullshiting". There were heated online discussions on the subject on the cyberspace.

There were reviews in learned journals and debates on the Internet, trying to resolve a question still not fully answered: Did Frankfurt's first book owe its success to compelling reasoning, clever marketing, a provocative title, or a growing public distaste of the verbal nonsense most people encounter daily?

Frankfurt's own view on the subject is that those engaging in bullshit do not care whether what they say is true or not as long as it is effective in manipulating those who listen.

Frankfurt's book created such a storm in the US market that a succession of books with the word 'bullshit' in the title flooded the market soon after. In fact, none of the other books carrying provocative word in the title rose to 4,00,000-plus best-selling heights.

To name a few -- Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit; The Business of Bullshit; The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk; Bullshit and Philosophy; 100 Bullshit Jobs... And How to Get Them; The Dictionary of Bullshit.

The first print run of On Bullshit, in March last year, was 3,000 copies. "Since then, we printed another 460,000 and most of them were sold,'' says Andrew DeSio, a spokesman for Princeton University Press, its publisher.

All of 67 pages, On Bullshit has been translated into 25 languages and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

Riding on the success of his book, Frankfurt has now come out with On Truth, a sequel to On Bullshit, which is "meant to plug an analytical gap in the first book - why does truth matter?"

On Truth hit the American bookstores in November with an initial print run of 115,000 copies and it remains to be seen whether it can match the success of its predecessor.

(With Reuters input)