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Many of my friends tell me that I'm a young man, but I'm afraid all these friends are
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I'm in my late 40s, and when you get here, you realise how fast time passes.
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It seems like just yesterday that I was feeling the oppressive pressures of adulthood and
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And boom, blink a few times, years have passed.
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The scarcity of time becomes real.
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And I guess one way of dealing with this is a modern way of living.
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Do everything fast, fast, fast, throw yourself into the world, spend every waking moment
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doing something, even if it is only on your smartphone.
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Life is always moving, but it doesn't go anywhere.
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I am not berating others as much as I am lamenting my own choices and the weakness of character
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that has stopped me from breaking out of this.
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I want to live a slow life.
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I want to have long conversations, sit with friends without the pressure of performing
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I want to go out, look at the world, instead of being lost in my own head.
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How can we learn to do this?
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How can we stop throwing ourselves into the chaos around us, but just sit back and observe?
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How do we give ourselves a space to reflect?
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One way of doing so is to write.
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If you build a habit of writing, then when you write, you withdraw into a quiet space
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where life slows down and even becomes clearer.
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You examine your own thoughts and perhaps even form them.
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Because by writing every day, you don't just see the world a little better, you also shape
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And maybe that's the best way to fight against a relentless march of time.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is my friend Amitav Kumar.
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Now, where do I start talking about Amitav?
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He was born in a small town in Bihar in 1963.
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He did his schooling in Patna, went to college in Delhi, then went to the US where he joined
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academia and is now a professor of English at Vassar College.
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He has written many books that are so varied that it is hard for me to describe them in
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There's memoir and personal essays, there's reportage, including about the 2002 Gujarat
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riots and the Bhagalpur blindings, there is poetry, there are novels.
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He has written screenplays for documentaries and his latest book is in a category of its
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It's called The Blue Book and it contains writing and art by him.
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He discovered the joy of drawing and painting a few years ago and he would often juxtapose
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his art with his writing on his Instagram page.
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In fact, it's like a journal from decades past, before the internet, when we weren't
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always lost in our smartphones, when we had the space to reflect, when we had Tehraav.
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The Blue Book moved me and inspired me so much.
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It's full of magical moments and it's a book I will keep going back to for the rest of
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I also loved this conversation.
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Amitav is a highly regarded writing teacher and I felt I was also learning about life
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Before we get to this conversation, though a quick plug, registration is now open for
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the March cohort of my online writing course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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Head on over to IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing to register.
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Even if you're listening to this episode at a later point in time, the course is ongoing.
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So go to IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing for more details and listen to this episode.
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It will inspire you to write more and live better.
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But first, a commercial break about why you should also read more.
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way, a couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ
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Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
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ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code UNSEEN.
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Amit Ava, welcome to the C&D Unseen.
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I think it's definitely more than a decade, but yet there is that sense of familiarity,
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I mean, I don't know about you, but I feel that when I was young, because I would think
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this year, you know, first of January was half and I would think I will write a short
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I'm talking about maybe when I was, I don't know, 20.
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So at that time, achievements were so scarce.
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And even once goals were so limited, that the passage of time was always very clear
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to me that this year has passed, the next year is starting, now I'll be 22.
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Maybe this year I will get a girlfriend, etc., etc.
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You know what I'm saying?
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Now years of years, it all collapsed together, you know, time.
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So this sense of time has also, I don't know, it has just changed in this middle age.
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Entire eons seem to have vanished.
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But I remember that evening we were sitting outside and we were talking or not to put
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it in very romantic terms, but there were waves of the sea, etc., etc. in Mumbai.
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It was one of the seaside hotels, I forget which one, maybe it wasn't Marriott, I don't
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No, in fact, that's a theme I was going to kind of bring up, which is the compression
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Like I teach this online writing course, and I teach four webinars.
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And the fourth webinar is about process, where I say I'm going to move past the craft and
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talk about the process and how you build writing habits and all of that.
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And the reason that was important to me, which I have shared with participants also, is that
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I think that is one area in which I failed, where I say that I look back now, if I did
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this course in my 20s, I would have learned so much.
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But this is the most important thing I needed to learn, because in the blink of an eye,
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15-20 saal nikal gaye, the time just passed, the 10-20 books I should have written never
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And I was also thinking of this when I was rereading your excellent book, A Matter of
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Rats about Patna, and you mentioned Patna's glorious history and you know how people confuse
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Chandragupta too and Chandragupta Maurya and all that.
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But regardless, you know, you were talking about the glory of the fourth century.
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I think at one point, Fa Hein called it the Florence of the East, wo sab tha.
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And I thought ki theek hai, you know, when I am 20 and I'm looking back, I am saying
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ki my God, so many centuries have passed.
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But when in my own life, already 48 years have passed, a little more in yours, it doesn't
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It seems like, you know, in a sense, it must have been just, you know, you just go back
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a little bit and you're in a glorious Patna again, you're in Nalanda University again.
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So do you teach in your course, ki bhai, how will you stop time or how will you measure
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time or how will you record time, yeh aap sikhata hain, do you teach them?
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Itni ghaerai mein nahi jaate hain, do you mean that in terms of technique or do you
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mean it in that broad romantic sense of writing?
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I'm thinking for example of the occasion for our conversation right now is the blue book.
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It came out of in some ways measuring time, recording time, yeh jo waqt bit raha hai,
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how to be faithful to it in some ways, yaani ki hum log lockdown mein haman lijhe, if you
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talk about that time, how to be faithful to it and how also to be active and respond to
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To mai obituaries par jaise New York Times ke obituaries pe tasveere banane laga, you
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know, I made drawings on these newspapers.
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I'm trying to say to you that what you and I are agreeing about this passage of time,
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this blink of time, you know, how were these decades last 18 years, you said for example,
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they would have had a different density if we had every day written something or every
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morning recorded something, simple, to that is something I am teaching, you know, mai
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abhi aap se London mein baat kar raha hu, I have brought 13 of my students from Vassar
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where I teach in upstate New York, I have brought them here and I just sent them the
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other day an excerpt, one, two pages from Sally Rooney's latest book where a woman
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called Eileen says that every day she thought she would start a book called the Book of
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Life and in which she would record a phrase, jaise ki there were leaves blowing on the
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Yeah, you know, today it rained all day, jo bhi hai, and she says that now when she reads
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that phrase, it brings back something, the taste of that day, theek hai, toh mai apne
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students se kya raha hu, bhai aap log, when you are on the tube, when we are going out,
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jaise ki Saturday ko hum log Brixton ja rahe hain, you know, where the Caribbean community
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came and stayed and where there was a riot to protest against police brutality, toh mai
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karo ki aap waha jaayi jab jaayein, toh you write down a phrase or two, main toh hu khud
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kar raha hu, jaise ki aap, you know, I am talking to you, there is this journal in which
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I am writing a few things, you said about time, I wrote about time right there, so that
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time doesn't seem to, jaise ki aap, okay, okay listen, can I read to you something that
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I noted the other day, please, I am listening to Mrinal Pandey talking about her first memory,
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a procession of people was approaching them, she was a small child, who are these, the
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child Mrinal Pandey asked, her elder sister said that they were refugee, toh hi toh tumhari
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show pe padha suna maine unko, but that's a little story that I just wanted to note
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especially the way it was articulated in those three, aur yeh note agar mai phir se aaj se
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10 saal baad, if I just pick up my journal and I am flipping, this little description
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will bring back to me the entire conversation that I heard between you and Mrinal ji and
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it will bring back also, I want to insist, it will bring back also the moment of my sitting
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on this table in a flat in London and where we were, how my son was here and my wife was
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in the other room, etc, samajh rahe na, and my expectation that soon I too will be talking
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to my friend Amit Varma, so what I am trying to say is a practice of writing in a journal
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of making a record of things is the way to mark time, not to stop it, not to stop time,
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but to mark it in a way so that all is not lost.
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So let's dig a little deeper, one of the things I was, you know that really struck a chord
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when I was reading or rereading your books as it were, is the excellent process advice
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you gave to yourself ki har roj 150 words likho, and in my class it's 200 words where
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I tell these guys that every day just write 200 words, even if you are ill going to the
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airport, aap smartphone pe lik sakte ho, it's not a big deal, and this sense of the importance
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of constantly writing is captured beautifully by the Susan Sontag quote in the start of
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the blue book where she says, in the journal I do not just express myself more openly than
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I could do to any person, I create myself, the journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood
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and there is a Joan Didion quote I use in my course to talk about the importance of
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writing where Didion said, I do not know what I think until I write it down, stop quote,
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and it seems to me that what we do when we write regularly is that we are not only capturing
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the moment or that time or the flavor of that time, but we are also deepening our sense
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of self, that when we write we are forced to reflect upon what we have seen, when we
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know we are going to write, we see more deeply and more clearly because we know we are going
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to write at some point, wo sab kuch ho jata hai.
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So is this a sort of a process that you've noticed in yourself kya aap matlab shuru se
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aase the or was there a point in your life where you gradually began to realize that
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my God this writing is not just about me expressing myself to the world, it's about me shaping
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Wow, yes, that's a very good point, I don't think that realization came till much later.
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There's a story I think I tell in the blue book, kya maybe I would have been in the sixth
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standard in Patna, an uncle of mine was trying to bribe a transport bureaucrat because he
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would the bureaucracy worked this way, kya bhiya wo banda batata aapko kya aapki bus
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kis line pe chalegi aur on some lines you get money, on the others not, anyway.
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So he was taken to a restaurant and I was taken with him and main upar jab dekha restaurant
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ke when I looked at the ceiling, there were these shiny bangles, pieces of bangles embedded
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in it aur mujhe khayal aaya ki but how ye kaisa likhenge isko ki and maybe I made a link
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with the fact ki hotel ka naam amber tha aur ye sky hai aur ye sky badi bangle ke shimmering
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To mujhe laga, how will I write, I very clearly remember thinking about this and I also clearly
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remember the shot of envy and admiration, I felt when just a little while later in the
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school magazine, some boy had already described it, just that sky.
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So for me shuru mein, it was more about the question of the self had not entered which
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I think you are very right to say is the real point.
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It was more about finding a language that was adequate to the surroundings I was and
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another defining memory is my coming to Delhi after I got a scholarship and coming to study
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and reading people like Dom Moraes, Khushwant Singh because uss samay tk jo pahai hoti thi
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na we had learnt or read things where people were describing distant places, England ki
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I mean you know the cliched story about this is ke bhiya sare desi log ya colonial know
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about daffodils lekin jasmine ya you know champa ke aap ko kis tar se describe karein
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So there Safdarjung airport ke paas seeing the bats wheeling in the sky and thinking
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ki iske baare mein hum kaise likhein, is aakash ke baare mein aur is janwar ke baare mein,
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yeh hmein pata nahi tha and then I read Mano Majra bhai Khushwant Singh ho dekha ki aah
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he has described the slow relay of bats aur mujhe laga haan I have found a language you
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Now your question is ki was there also an idea of how that by writing one was finding
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oneself I think I only dimly perceived it at that point and I think it was only after
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a few more years the idea that writing and by writing I was shaping myself as a perceptive
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or quote unquote sensitive or socially aware or at least an observer yeh thodi der se aayi
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but that was the critical thing you know.
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One thing I want to add is aap abhi Mumbai se humse baat kar hain and you know I always
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associate among other so many other wonderful people that city with my friend and our friend
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may be Suketu Mehta, main uske baare mein humesha yeh sosta hain that when I go when
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I am walking with him why is it that I find things happen or stories happen and I think
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that's because he is looking for stories.
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Let's say two people go to a platform one person goes to the railway platform to catch
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a train the other person goes to the platform to write a story to observe and then suddenly
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they hear a clamor at the end of the platform jo banda train pakarne aaya hai he will stay
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with his luggage because he has to catch the train.
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The person who has come looking for a story will rush towards the clamor and he will probably
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find that oh a child has been left behind.
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The parent went into the train thought the child had followed and now there is a child
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the child has to be reunited with the parent a story has started.
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So Suketu Ji wahi re jayenge bache ke saath or till the child and the parent is found
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he will have a story to pursue.
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That is the difference.
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The idea that now I do inhabit the space when I think that I am both looking for a language
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but I'm also looking for the narrative of my life where am I who is around me what is
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happening to us where is the world going.
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So yes what you were earlier asking me my answer is yes but it was a long journey to
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that realization and it always takes time but here we are.
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So I'll dial back to the first part of your answer and in fact leaving the self out of
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it just talk about observation and how one sort of learns to see like I'll quote from
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a couple of places from your books which that I really enjoyed from a matter of rats I was
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struck by this passage where you write quote in the middle of the night one winter during
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a visit to Patna I was sitting at the dining table with my jet lag two year old son watching
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a cartoon on my computer I had turned on only a single dim light as I didn't want my parents
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We must have been sitting there quietly for about half an hour before my little boy asked
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Baba what is that he was pointing beyond the screen there were two enormous rats walking
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away from us they looked like stout ladies on tiny heels on their way to their market
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I wouldn't have been surprised to see them carrying small elegant handbags stop code
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and this is such a delightful moment later on there's a similar moment where somebody
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asks you to write a few sentences about Patna and an issue that that magazine is doing for
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vacations and you say quote I wrote that going to Patna for a vacation was rather like going
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to a bus stop for a martini which is again just absolutely brilliant says so much later
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on in husband of a fanatic there is this brilliant description I won't read out the full thing
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but you talk about what sort of the burnt houses you would see in parts of Ahmedabad
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like Narodapatiya and so on and you describe it in detail but I am struck by a couple of
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images one where you talk about how the blades of a ceiling fan had dropped in the fire and
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resembled the wilted petals of a flower in another a sack of sugar had turned to dark
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amber syrup and flowed onto the steps where it had dried which again I thought was just
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such a powerful image and in the blue book at one point you write about this photograph
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that appeared on your Facebook timeline about a railway an accident on a railway line 16
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workers who were sleeping on the railway track because they were you know walking on the
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tracks to go home because they didn't want to be harassed by the cops on the streets
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they were run over by a train and you've written quote the first item I noticed in the image
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was a red hawaii chappal I think abandoned footwear tell their own forlorn story a solitary
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chappal or shoe narrates a tale of his tea exit not from a glitzy ball like fair Cinderella
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but from life itself and later on you talk about the rotis scattered in the cinders on
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the ground a lemon one blue mask a pair of black trousers no torso attached to it and
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so on and so forth and these are really powerful images like I remember that you know when
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in the aftermath of the tsunami I was traveling through the coast of Tamil Nadu and blogging
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about my experiences and my most powerful memory of that time and of course one saw
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dead bodies in Nagapattinam and walked with charred bodies all around which had been there
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for three four days and all those things are there but my most striking memory is still
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a set of disparate memories of clocks and watches in different villages across the coastline
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all of which had stopped at a different time and by looking at the time when they had stopped
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you could make out when the wave sort of hit you know going back to your earlier theme
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of sort of capturing time a very poignant way of that now my question to you is also
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partly a lament I think I don't observe things well enough when I set out to write about
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something then I am seeing but otherwise I am not often enough in the moment in some
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ways I am a third guy at that railway platform one guy is looking for a story one guy is
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waiting for a train one guy is lost in his own head yes right so I am that third guy
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you are clearly a bit more like that second guy right so tell me a little bit about like
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you mentioned earlier that you were jealous of your when you were a child of how that
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other person who had seen that thing on the roof had written about it so obviously your
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own power of observation came from conscious effort is part of it a conscious effort because
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I have to write and therefore you see and does part of it become then a reflexive habit
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where every day whether you are writing or not you are noticing things in a different
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way I do think that if you are writing things you actually almost create feeling or affect
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in other words you do something because you know you are going to write but let me explain
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that a little bit more like how it happened in the my own evolution as a writer in case
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there are young people listening and there was an essay by George Orwell that we read
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in which he explains that there was a voice running in his head always like providing
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a narrative just a cake almost you could think of keep a film Chalriya or nature subtitles
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are which would be right now for example would be the Sun streaming in a very unusual London
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Sun a very bright very harsh was streaming in through the sunlight was streaming through
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the window and hitting the right side of my face even as I was talking to Amit I thought
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I should move the plant that had toppled over yesterday into from my windowsill into the
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sunlight so that it received some light so this idea when I read this description in
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all well I thought oh this is probably happening to me too that I am in DTC bus and they are
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passing through Chandni Chowk and I am looking at that woman who is standing beside the vendor
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and this is how she is looking and I suddenly remembered that film that I had seen in which
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Bhairav Raman was doing this or that okay so that conscious cultivation that you were talking
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about became this cultivation of a voice in my head describing the slope of a roof or
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the smoke rising from a chimney or an egret taking flight or the dark descending after
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And I think that's how I consciously that I would say is the practice I also think that
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in teaching writing I set up challenges for my students and doing some of that myself
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also encouraged me to see one thing I remember very very clearly is I don't know how it happened
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but I would have been I don't know 17, 18, Delhi mein I quite clearly remember that I
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would enter a room and try to think if I closed my eyes how many things have I seen here that
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I will remember there was a Sai Baba ka temple and a politician turned writer or writer turned
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politician invited me to come and meet him there and I very clearly have this memory
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I must have been 18 or 17 I very clearly have this memory that I shut my eyes for a second
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to think how many things do I remember here in this hotel room because it felt like an
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alien room it was an alien room for him it was an alien room for me and I thought this
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is new and how do I what do I remember okay so I remember the chair on the brush I remember
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that table I remember you know those types of things and a small towel which has been
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folded in a particular way and that just became fixed lately which is a much more recent thing
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now I have started drawing so that is what you see in blue book and that has been another
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way which really people like John Berger etc explained to me you do not see the world unless
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you draw it so that is also a part now of my regiment I am doing one drawing also every
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day apart from writing every day I am trying to do one drawing every day so not trying
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I am doing it actually which is a way of training oneself to observe and to see that's one of
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the things that kind of struck me about your very interesting book like the first time
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I noticed something like this being done images used with words was W.G. Sebold and Austerlitz
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and so on those dark black and white images and your stuff was also very powerful in the
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sense there is one particular drawing where I loved the caption where I think you made
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it from a photograph where a guy was kneeling on the street and covered in blood and your
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caption was something to the effect of man with red marks on him which was so ironic
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and kind of went so well with the image how has sort of getting into that practice of
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drawing all the time changed the way that you see like does it change the way that you
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then come back to words and use those words has it made you kind of more economical in
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what ways has that affected your imagination?
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The same way as I said earlier that there was this voice running through my head that
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was telling me what I was noticing and I would try to translate what I was seeing into words
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now this recent practice of drawing what it has made me do is that I am drawing with my
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eye all the time just like in London streets where I am walking and these buildings and
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their chimneys are just so distinctive about this city that my eye is always doing that
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you know so that is an immediate thing I have seen.
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Has it changed my relationship to words?
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It's very interesting that you mentioned Sebald because what he's doing is he would take an
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He's writing about some period close to the Holocaust he would take an image let's say
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that image is a postcard he would take the postcard but instead of simply printing the
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postcard he would introduce a corruption in the image almost if I could use the word because
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he wanted to complicate the relationship between word and image he did not want to say look
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this is the illustration he wanted you to actually engage in the mystery of science
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s-i-g-n-s it's a much more subtle engagement that then the reader has with what he or she
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is reading and what he or she is seeing so I am what am I doing am I introducing ambivalence
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about the image in the case of the example you said of a man being lynched I wanted to
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just as I say that I wanted to slow jam the news in other words where some things happen
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and the news is quickly spread and consumed I just wanted to slow it down or my sense
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of him as he's pleading for his life also gets slowed down I'm absorbing it even emotionally
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in a slower way in a more thoughtful way maybe also and if I do that and if I'm surrounding
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it with a caption and a caption that you rightly said was you know interesting because it's
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a little bit more oblique I'm again slowing down the arrow of time so that our absorption
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in the moment and in the trauma itself is more it's slowed down actually really yeah
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that can look just this is go absorb that go just say I'm look we don't go past it
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but we linger with it a bit so that's what I'm doing and I guess therefore the answer
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to your question would be the relationship is changing in the sense that it becomes a
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little bit more instead of being facile it becomes a more meditative you know like my
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work advertising quickly swallowed quickly passed on but like a longer song the caption
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that you gave was actually a man with red marks on his body and I was very struck by
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that because it seemed to reflect a theme that you have gone into in earlier books also
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including in husband of a fanatic when you're traveling through all these places where so
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much violence has happened this is page 92 by the way it seemed to indicate the banality
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of what's happening that the man is covered in blood and he's begging for his life and
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you describe him as you know a man with red marks on his body where something so significant
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is described in such a banal way and in a sense in all of these places what we see what
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you've wrote about so eloquently in husband of a fanatic as well when you travel through
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Gujarat after the riots and everything that goes down there is that normal life resumes
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that you know there will be this explosive event which will upend lives forever and the
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world will never be the same again and yet normality at some level will resume like that
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old cliche we use these days of the new normal and all of that this caption seemed to have
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the same kind of effect but we'll get back to that I wanted to sort of double click again
#
on one aspect of your earlier answer and my earlier question about observation and drawing
#
and all of that I thought back to your description of those rats, stout ladies on tiny heels
#
and you could imagine them with small elegant handbags now the thing is if you were drawing
#
this you may not draw them like that you might draw them differently so what's happening
#
in a sense is that what you're drawing and what you're writing is different because your
#
skill sets are kind of different your interest may be different your aesthetic style may
#
be different and therefore a larger question that came up in and that has come up in earlier
#
episodes I've done with creators is how much is your style an expression not just of what
#
you can do but also what you can't do an expression of your limitations as it were like you can't
#
draw the rats as fat little aunties right but you can draw them in a very interesting
#
way which is your own and which is your own voice so here obviously I'm thinking in the
#
context of drawing because I would not be able to draw anything at all and in you know
#
and you've had decades more experience of writing so much more fluid there so what are
#
sort of your thoughts on this because these are two different forms that you're expressing
#
yourself in and at different times you have thought about how do I find the language for
#
this and what shapes that language so yeah yeah interesting thoughts very interesting
#
questions yeah the reason why you were drawn to if drawn is the word I want the reason
#
you were attracted by or you found amusing the come that that that line about the rats
#
was because it brought together in a surprising relationship two things and yet it held some
#
truth it seemed to and I think that so one aspect I want to say there is that it is a
#
way of seeing which really is about metaphor about it is about seeing one thing in terms
#
of another and that ability is something that I have seen Jessica no one in my village back
#
in Bihar might necessarily be a writer or might even actually be literate taken my grandmother
#
was not literate but her language was more writerly than many of the writers you will
#
find at Jaipur Literature Fest too because her language was in Hindi there was an element
#
of adornment in precisely because everything everything was expressed in terms of metaphor
#
I would say that I will marry a white woman and I will come back I will introduce you
#
she would say nana from in Bhojpuri which was our language she would say that my nose
#
is as flat as a bed bug's back how would she say it in Bhojpuri so my mother my grandmother
#
would say I remember I was again our conversation is taking me back to my earlier memories but
#
because I was struggling with words and language again as a teenager studying in Patna going
#
back to my village I saw that he was moving very slowly so I
#
asked him how he was and he said meaning that what can I tell you my forehead is burning
#
like the pan on which the roti is baked or toasted and I thought how quickly and how
#
vividly using an idiom that is drawn from something close enough he has however brought
#
this alive so the economy it is an economical evocation of a situation through a quick metaphor
#
and I think I feel I'm failing as a writer when I do not find a metaphor on every page
#
in my writing just thinking of something that makes a quick and surprising the other thing
#
about what you can't do that interested me immediately when you were talking about it
#
and it struck me was when I was you know during this period that I'm describing to you when
#
I was searching for a language adequate to describe my surroundings it was also it coincided
#
with another discovery which was my total inadequacy as an artist okay my parents would
#
take me on the steamer from Patna we would cross the river Ganga and you know to go to
#
our village leaving my small home and getting on the boat would always make me as if would
#
make me feel ki bhaiya main bade khubsoorat jag mein hu yaha phailao hai there is such
#
a beauty even just the flat expanse of a brown muddy river with a single port and a red pennant
#
would suggest to me ki bhaiye isko toh paint karna chahiye and every time I attempted it
#
I failed lagta tha ki there's no there's no there was no correspondence so my failure
#
as a artist what you can't do I think further propelled me into the art of writing but now
#
drawing interests me because having accomplished but because writing has become easy to a great
#
extent the taking up drawing is an entry into what I can't do is an entry into the art of
#
the amateur and therefore it is discovery ki bhaiya it doesn't matter if I fail it doesn't
#
matter if I'm an artist what matters really is that I'm doing it every day and I'm trying
#
to do it as honestly as I can and as creatively you know not to be complacent about it but
#
instead to challenge oneself ki bhaiye achha ye watercolor mein kiya toh toh raha sa goaash
#
mein karta hain and you know bhagwan saad diya toh agle summer mein I'm thinking ki oil
#
mein bhi jaunga you know just to try it out how it feels so this is really about how creativity
#
is also about the art of the amateur someone who is trying something and I think writing
#
ho drawing ho dance ho who knows even chess or poker ho at which you excel hamare liye
#
ho those are amateur arts you know a seven-year-old can beat me but who cares chess ka maza lehra
#
beautifully said and I'm reminded of this quote in your book where you know in the blue
#
book you in your third section writing a novel you quote William Maxwell as saying quote
#
after 40 years what I came to care about most was not style but the breath of life and that
#
just seems to express what you just said that at least in your art like in your writing
#
certainly you would be thinking deeply about craft and noticing imperfections but at least
#
in your art is it's that breath of life it's a man with red marks doesn't have to be perfect
#
like Picasso would have done it or whatever I mean by the way I'm so glad that the William
#
Maxwell quote interested you and attracted you I would place it among my you know top
#
ten I think everyone should have let's say ten books on their shelf which they can return
#
to and they should also have a list of at least ten quotes which they can always close
#
you know adhere to and that is one of them not style but the breath of life to ask oneself
#
ki har har samaye ki bhaiya isme breath of life hai ki nahi you know just to catch something
#
you know and often mai bahut I remember you know Doordarshan came when I was a young man
#
I mean the television came to my life into my life after the Asian Games and we were
#
watching a movie and then Mrinal Sen was being interviewed and Mrinal Sen either quoting
#
himself I mean producing an original quote or quoting someone else said well and I think
#
he was in my mind at that time I saw him as a different from let's say Satyajit Rai who
#
was a perfectionist Mrinal Sen said yeah I like imperfections imperfections are the cracks
#
through which poetry comes in and I thought I'll quickly go and write this because then
#
think that the imperfections with everything that will look improvised but will nevertheless
#
have something of an immediacy everything that will have a little bit of an imperfection
#
will nevertheless be what will make it come more alive murili bada valuable lesson laga
#
so I've held that close to me too beautiful you know earlier you spoke about how you'd
#
go back to the village and how the language was so musical and that reminded me of this
#
anecdote in a matter of rats also where you write about Ravish Kumar and how when Ravish
#
Kumar was in college he was jealous of a friend who could write a 20 page essay in English
#
so once for an exam apparently he wrote just in Hindi he wrote and the examiner came to
#
his hostel and he asked for Ravish and he told everybody quote and I absolutely loved
#
that and I was also sort of struck by something that you said in your book where at one point
#
a magazine called Samkaleen Janmat which was being published from Patna gave you a regular
#
column called letter from America and you would write in English and they would publish
#
it in Hindi and you were so moved that sometimes you would cry and you've also given an example
#
on the very next page of the blue book these are pages 57 and 58 I love this book so much
#
I've noted down page numbers of every author by the way you quote a short poem by your
#
friend Alok Dhanwa a Patna poet and I'll read this out and he the poem goes rail har
#
bhale aadmi ki ek rail hoti hai jo maa ke ghar ki aur jaati hai seeti bajati hui dhuwan
#
urati hui right and you've attempted you know an English translation of this but the
#
fact is the music of this is simplicity the lil tinnit you know seeti bajati hui dhuwan
#
urati hui cannot be captured cannot be translated and in fact I read this late last night and
#
I was so excited I sent this by whatsapp to my writing students and I said ki dekho this
#
is why translation is impossible and I've discussed translation a lot with them in terms
#
of ki har language ki character hoti hai which cannot possibly translate through and this
#
also has an effect on us who may not necessarily translate from one language to the other but
#
we are bilingual a part of our lives is lived in one language naturally you know jaise
#
hum donon ke beech me beech beech me Hindi ho rhi hai as it kind of comes naturally and
#
yet we are sort of writing in English where the sensibilities may be different like all
#
languages have such particular characters you know Japanese and Korean can be so spare
#
Urdu and Punjabi can be so expressionistic and maximalistic and you can't just translate
#
one on one you will miss these little kind of nuances now in your own life in a sense
#
you are always like of course there is you know one view that any writing is an act of
#
translation you have thoughts in your head and you are translating them into the language
#
in which they are coming out but also a lot of your experiences are experienced in Hindi
#
or experienced in bhojpuri and then you write about it and you are trying to capture the
#
flavour and all of that what is the role that languages have played in your life like how
#
much of what you are as a writer in English is shaped by what you have lived in Hindi
#
and bhojpuri how much of a challenge is it yeah those are all such wonderful reflections
#
what a beautiful poem boss what a beautiful poem rail har bhale aadmi ki ek rail hoti
#
hai jo ma ke ghar ki aur jati hai city bajati hui dhua udati hui amazing beautiful I think
#
of it and I think of my mother you know I think of my mother waiting for me when the
#
train from Delhi during all those college days would bring me and sometimes because
#
people always pull the chain and stop the train earlier sometimes I got out earlier
#
and arrived home by just crossing one fence I had to just climb over the fence and I could
#
drop into my garden because my home was very close to the railway line and to surprise
#
my mother it filled me with tears when I read this poem because I remembered my mother who
#
has now died waiting for me and being delighted you know by my early arrival and saying areh
#
to humko firse surprise kar diye you know amazing to answer your question I experienced
#
the loss of Hindi when my grandmother died because I would at least after coming to the
#
west kamse kam unko to kahan chithi mein Hindi mein likhta tha so that someone in the village
#
could read it out to her you know she would stop my cousin of mine or anyone else who
#
was literate she would say bhai chithi paddo so my the letters that I wrote were in some
#
ways almost public letters because so many people heard it you know and I felt after
#
her death ki Hindi se wo nata chhuti gaya now the point you have mentioned from samkali
#
janma boss I'm not lying I don't think as I have said before I don't have any immodest
#
expectations or ideas about my writing lekin jab yeh log translate karke baiste the meri
#
to my the hairs at the back of my neck would stand sometimes because of the emotion they
#
aroused because just that making it into Hindi what I was saying made it so much more closer
#
to my heart it became as if it was somehow language became at once more intimate and
#
also eloquent actually so that's why and yet the tragedy is you know Manoj Rajbhai
#
once said to me ki bhai usko toh when he was at Ramjas his roommates and others in
#
the hostel would make him read out the times of India because then they could laugh at
#
him because of the way he pronounced the words.
#
So I coming from a similar background you know Manoj's village is just 40 minutes from
#
mine coming from a similar background and you know so too with Ravish she's also from
#
Champaran like me we would the idea of English being this other thing that we had to master
#
was always a challenge you know it was something I certainly set out to do I wanted to find
#
a place for myself in that landscape called English literature.
#
And I think in various ways all these three figures we have talked about or these two
#
other figures we have talked about have responded with great alarm you know in case of Manoj
#
Rajbhai he said ki sarey Angreji me se bolwa ho gaye main bhai batata ho ki Hindi kaise
#
bolna chahiye and the enormous energy he brings on the screen is that of someone who is coming
#
up through the trap door of history on the stage and he's occupying the stage with great
#
bravura you know and with Ravish I mean the way in which his presentation of news achieves
#
a quality of lyrical eloquence is a marvelous achievement it makes him stand out from all
#
those people who are not only the purveyor of cheap or subservient news it marks him
#
out as distinctive from all those people who do not have a grip on language and how it
#
should reach the public ear.
#
In my case I have to say that earlier on when I was studying in Delhi all the debates would
#
be about English Indian English and I was for a while interested in things like you
#
know let's say Raja Rao ki writing mein bhai kis tarah se work kar raha hai to Nise Mezekial
#
mein ek homeliness kis tarah se aati hai toh what is Arun Kolatkar doing in Jejuri but
#
later on thinking of I it didn't seem so much of a preoccupation except I loved it when
#
my first novel home products came out and Rajkamal Jha wrote to me and said ki boss
#
yeh toh kitab hai when one reading it in English one thinks one is reading it in Hindi wow
#
toh mujhe laga ki haan boss aapne dil ko chhu diya mera you know but that's what I also felt
#
you know there aren't many books you know it is wonderful that so many more Indian writers
#
are so at ease with English that their books come out without any degree of self-consciousness
#
they are all in English they write but they are also in many ways very urban and urbane
#
I am despite my stay abroad I am not urban and urbane in that way at all I feel I feel
#
ki yu ek dehati pan mere ghaan ek chota sa gaun kahin mere andar basta hai you know and
#
therefore I speak from that place and therefore Rajkamal's praise or observation really touched
#
me and I think that what there is an idea of a provincialism or provincialism kaise
#
negative term hoti hai toh there is an idea of a provincial articulation in one's language
#
jo mai abhi bhi practice karta hain so I cannot make it too I cannot make it too kya kahoon
#
I cannot make it very beautiful or very adorned or very chic or very fashionable meri bahasha
#
mein hameisha kabhi kya kahin daal aur yaas se Dilip kumar ne ek baar kabhi shayad kaha
#
tha Lata Mangeshkar ke gaane ke baare mein isme se daal aur chawal ki boo aati rahegi
#
you know what I'm saying ek something small town will always be there and that is true
#
of the language also That's a beauty in your writing it's a feature
#
not a bug frankly I mean I've noted down so many quotes in my notes from your writing
#
because I was so struck by them and what you said about Ravish is also interesting like
#
there is a place in one of your books I think A Matter of Rats where you write about non-fiction
#
and in that you come up with a credo for non-fiction writers where you say quote to show on the
#
page that despite what you're saying there is another story waiting in the wings stop
#
quote and I think when Ravish delivers news that's exactly what he is doing the news he
#
delivers are the same events that everyone else will deliver but nobody you know delivers
#
the same news which is brilliant now I'm also sort of struck by this notion of English as
#
a language which must be learnt which must be mastered now in my case because of the
#
kind of privileged upbringing I had and all of that English was always sort of natural
#
to me it felt like my language you know with other languages I might have struggled and
#
during my writing classes one of the participants wrote to me and she said that look here's
#
the thing the problem is that my first language is Hindi I'm trying to learn English I'm
#
passionate about it but it is hard work and we started having a discussion on that I had
#
heard this beautiful interview of Jhumpa Lyari when she appeared on the show conversations
#
with Tyler Jhumpa of course learned Italian from scratch and then wrote a book in it right
#
and in that interview she pointed to a writer called Agata Kristof whom you must have read
#
and Agata Kristof was I think a Hungarian writer or something and because of the war
#
or events in Europe she shifted to France when she was 21 22 and she started learning
#
French when she was 21 22 basically and wrote a brilliant series of novels in it especially
#
one called the notebook trilogy three novels together and I was just blown away by the
#
starkness and power of the writing you also begin to see how she stripped it down to its
#
elemental bits and made it all her own and when I pointed out this to the student who
#
would ask me this she actually got the notebook trilogy from Agata Kristof and she started
#
copying it paragraphs you know in her own handwriting just to get a sense of the rhythm
#
and the lay and all of that which I thought and I thought what often happens and when
#
I give writing prompts to my students also I put in all kinds of restrictions like don't
#
use multisyllable words don't use adjectives and adverbs so the whole point not being to
#
impose a sense of values but the whole point being to build that mindfulness where you
#
look at language so closely and in your case I would imagine that because it is a language
#
that you're setting out to master as you said that you are looking at it more closely not
#
taking it for granted like someone like me would where I just read it and you know I
#
read it for the story or I read it for whatever but you're looking at it kind of deeper so
#
over the years can you tell me about this process that when did you start looking at
#
writing in that mindful way where you're noticing craft you're noticing all the tricks of the
#
trade so to say how rhythm is built how all this is done and how you know your own writing
#
kind of evolved who were the early writers whose craft you looked at who were the people
#
you identified with who were the people you liked and said hey that's great but I can't
#
do that guess at them yes one thing that happened when I would go back to my village in jamparan
#
I'm talking when I was seven or eight or nine for example one of the things that happened
#
within hours and certainly in days would be that I would be called in front of an assembly
#
of male elders and someone would give me a line in hindi and say how will you say it
#
in english wow train ke aane ke pehle hi main station se chala gaya tha this was a more
#
complicated formulation let's say mere pupa who was an advocate in moti hari would offer
#
this line and then I would perform by translating and then people none of the audience knew
#
english but just to hear these words out was the first lesson into how you were supposed
#
to be a master you are supposed to be a master if you could translate a sentence of english
#
now that exercise of course didn't interest me too long it was really the physical description
#
I can't tell you how exciting it was mere teachers mere unimaginative or dull the meh
#
jab college mein gaya delhi mein pahne so I would often go instead to libraries like
#
sahit academy library on those days on which I was not trying to actually have a wills
#
nidhi cut and some tea with one of the girls who would sometimes talk to me o campus pe
#
toh jeen dino wo nahi hota tha waisa koi plan nahi tha toh I would get down and it
#
was a great discovery jaise ved mein tha kushwan singh whom I mentioned before dom morece
#
aur arun kholat kar because they were describing our own streets jaisi ki delhi ki shahe ek
#
description toh mujhe ek tarah se bhaasha hai I would think ke haan just the idea ki
#
main bhi baitha hoon let's say if I'm sitting in sahit academy library in Delhi and there
#
was a description of I don't know Aurangzeb road which I'm told has now been changed into
#
something else there would be a frizz off jaisi ki Karnat place ke dukano ke pillars
#
ki hi description se mujhe aata thi kya re I'm getting a sense I'm getting a sense of
#
how to map my place in this world se ke so those were those were those were really wonderful
#
main ek shaam ko yaad hai mujhe I again must be 17 18 I can't remember 20 I was listening
#
to a koel garmi ka din tha I thought if I write a few lines kaise hai I mean can I can
#
I evoke this feeling and I wrote it and immediately mailed it to kushwan singh and a few days
#
later a letter from him arrived said very very nice very evocative this was the word
#
he used continue writing or something like that you know you're very young someone like
#
that says that you know you think okay theek hai ma toh ma kuch kar raha ho sahi so those
#
were the great influences now at that time and then I was not able to get a place in
#
the hostel in Delhi but the such is the generosity of young people up to you know at old age
#
you become more cantankerous I was allowed to sleep on the bed on the floor with my own
#
hold all bedding ek na bedding kam hold all ek hota usko in another friend's room aur
#
uske paas Naipaul ki ek chhudi kit ek autobiography thi you know it's a it's called like a fragment
#
of an autobiography and that was a wonderful discovery for me uske baad mein Naipaul ko
#
padhne laga and he was a great influence to again because he was giving a language to
#
something that was familiar and if you read something like a million mutinies now the
#
idea of observing cities and people and places in India is a great manual for acquiring a
#
vocabulary of looking and describing padh mein people like J.M.
#
Kudzeer or more you know journalists for journalistic sort of thing Joan Didion or for a slightly
#
more psychoanalytic take on the self and on and an ability to criticize the profession
#
of journalism itself Janet Malcolm you have to become a bit more theoretical and sophisticated
#
Susan Sontag yeh sare naam mere liye bade influential the later you know with age and
#
with back after publishing writers became also you know my friends and so then it became
#
a different kind of circle so you know people like Arunati Roy or Kiran Dasai, Pankaj Mishra,
#
Amit Chaudhary these are people who have had great influence I think because I feel as
#
if I'm in conversation with them you know so that am I answering your question ki ja
#
se ki kais tera se evolution hui yeah aur bolo to main bataunga kuch aur uspe I want
#
to double click on a couple of things here but before that ek aside lette hain aapne
#
postcard ka mention kiya pehle bhi aapne mention kiya ki you know aap khathe bhejthe
#
the and I remember this recent conversation I had with a mutual friend of ours Chandrahansh
#
Chaudhary and Chandrahansh as you would know has a habit of writing these delightfully
#
charming emails jaise pehle dinon mein khat likhte the nahi nahi nahi he doesn't write
#
anything like that to me he does that only for you oh my god I think I got him into trouble
#
but yeah so he sent me this delightful long email you know with memories and with this
#
and that and I was like okay I remember writing and receiving such letters in the 80s and
#
90s abhi aisa kuch nahi hota hai abhi email mein hota hai pura matter of fact hota hai
#
it's all transactional that oh what date are you in Delhi when are you in Bombay are you
#
okay I hope you're better now yeh sab chalta hai but this whole thing of reminiscing that
#
you remember we were in Pune and we had samosas at that place and they were such they are
#
the best samosas I've ever had and all of that to uska ek sort of charm hai of that
#
kind of communication and we kind of got talking about this because I pointed this out to him
#
that you know this is something that I actually miss and I didn't know I missed it till you
#
know he sent me that beautiful letter you know in your book also there are traces of
#
this in the blue book for example Cheryl Strayed you reproduce a postcard that she
#
has sent and you are sort of communicating by postcard as well in a couple of places
#
which is interesting because when you sit down to write like that and especially a pen
#
or paper leke you sit down and you're writing a letter out by hand it seems that there is
#
a tariff to that there is a consideration to what you are writing and again like we
#
spoke about writing in the self you are thinking in that moment you are reflecting there is
#
reflection happening and that is shaping you because you are writing like that and that
#
is something that goes missing when everything is whatsapp messages and you know emails and
#
everybody is immediately within reach so everything becomes functional and therefore you maybe
#
you become a different person because that self reflection that shaping isn't happening
#
I wrote an essay once about the form that one uses shapes the content that one produces
#
and that changes the person that you are like just these long conversations because I have
#
four or five hour conversations I am forced to listen I am forced to listen I am forced
#
to digress I am forced you know me and my guests will happily go into all kinds of little
#
rabbit holes on the side like you and I are and I think that changes the form changes
#
the content like a half an hour interview would be very snap snap staccato it's shallow
#
it's very different something like this the form shapes the content and shapes me because
#
I think in the course of doing the show I have become a better listener more empathetic
#
more whatever so you've sort of lived through so many changes in form when you are writing
#
one more paper after that you are doing it on a laptop even the way that you drew then
#
and you know you said you used to fail when you were drawing historical figures in class
#
which is why you were drawn to writing and later you you know the way that you draw and
#
you paint now the way that we live our lives what what are your thoughts on this?
#
First of all I am so glad you mentioned why your show is so long because one of my friends
#
made a joke that it is longer than Sholay I am glad that you mentioned it because every
#
work of art I believe and I tell my students this should also tell the viewer or the reader
#
how it should be consumed in other words should explain its own logic at some way in a subtle
#
way but it should and what you have done very cleverly I think is explain that why the hell
#
are we talking for three hours or four hours whatever it is this juggalbandi like you know
#
why is it going on for so long because people are going to improvise and they are going
#
to draw upon their training and their discipline to extract something in a rigorous way for
#
a while and see where fate or time or art leads them that's what we are doing so good
#
job talking about the form.
#
When you are talking about the letters and the letters being now dropping out as a practice
#
my first thought actually was all those books that I have read which are letters written
#
by people and which I have enjoyed so much is now going to be lost you know Robert Lovell
#
or Elizabeth Bishop so Nehru ji is writing these little notes but they are so they bring
#
back history they show the dynamics the other day someone posted on Facebook I saw a letter
#
written by Subash Bose to Jawaharlal Nehru oh my god yeah very lively stories are there
#
and that we have lost I am you know I don't know about you are you going to I'm I'm thinking
#
that I'm actually going to use emails I try sometimes to use screen grabs because we are
#
talking about blue book I got a note from a writer I admire a lot ZD Smith so I told
#
my editor that I will put this in the next book which is called yellow book I will put
#
this in the next book this is our first presentation he wrote that I love your blue book I meant
#
to read a page of it late last night and instead I read the whole thing and then suffered on
#
the school run this morning a lovely thing so I wrote in reply that there is a mutual
#
friend of ours called Teju Kaur so I always joke with him that because I am older than
#
you I always tell him that if I write a vicious letter about a Dean or if I write something
#
about a writer that both of us find obnoxious he will say or I will say that in my funeral
#
he will read it aloud okay so we have a whole list of those things that he will read so
#
I wrote to ZD that Teju and I have this constant back and forth about what he's going to read
#
out at my memorial we joke about all kinds of things including my angry letters but I
#
think I'll leave instructions in my will about this message from you okay and then I said
#
I think he might want you to tape it on your phone and send it before the music starts
#
in the vassar chapel or school many hyperlinked because the music I wanted her to know was
#
going to be this from this hungarian composer henrik gauraki or film and it's called bracket
#
malika you can see that we have given some thought to this to ZD new letters is java
#
diya ki my phone record my phone cannot record anything I'll just have to come in person
#
in the same way as in the blue book this whole exchange I have with Ian Jack about what's
#
you know should I do art should I not do art why is writing the more difficult enterprise
#
and then what sentences to keep and what sentences to remove so I put that in so I put that in
#
so I am certainly in the spirit of what you have been saying I do want to actually preserve
#
even though you're right about the form often these it makes the writing so much more truncated
#
and brutally swift I want to preserve some of these exchanges and make it a document
#
of sorts beautiful I'm going to double click on the Ian Jack conversation that you had
#
with him in your book which I love but before that you know I did this recent episode on
#
the debates of Jawaharlal Nehru with Rupur Daman Singh and Adeel Hussain have written
#
this excellent book about Nehru's four debates with Mohammed Iqbal Jinnah Sardar Patel and
#
Shyamaprasad Mukherjee and it is incredible these people are writing letters to each other
#
or sometimes replying to each other through columns and all that and the erudition is
#
mind-blowing like Nehru jail mein bat ki chithi lik raha hai where he is from memory he is
#
coming up with all these quotes and drawing all these connections and it is so lucid and
#
clear you know Jinnah is not at his best in this particular exchange but if you read other
#
things by him it's much better and one thinks that these people are constantly in dialogue
#
with each other and therefore they are deepening their own thinking and that makes a difference
#
you know one might agree or disagree I agree with a lot of what Nehru did I disagree strongly
#
with a lot of it but there's an engagement with ideas with opposing ideas which somehow
#
I feel in modern times is kind of missing but the part about your conversation with
#
Ian Jack that I wanted to double click on and ask about is at one point when he replies
#
to something you have written he says that you know if novels were roads his favourite
#
road sign would be danger imagination at work right and part of what this seems to imply
#
is that the world is what it is you see it and you see it and you write it don't add
#
anything to it don't embellish that's how I'm interpreting his words and I'm thinking
#
that you know when I was much younger I of course I never heeded that sign because young
#
writers tend to go overboard har cheez pe you want to show off how well you write tarqa
#
lagana hai yeh sab karna hai you know in a sense he was saying that this is a sign that
#
you should watch out for so how does one balance this because I talk about this with my students
#
also a lot that sometimes you want to you know in Naipaul's words avoid the abstract
#
embrace the concrete you want to make something vivid but in the process of making something
#
vivid you can go overboard and you may not have the discipline to murder your darlings
#
as the phrase goes you know how has this been in your own writing because when you are learning
#
to write the way that you did looking at craft you know the writing itself is an act it is
#
performative you know it's not just a means to an end as all good writing should be but
#
it is also for that moment and end in itself for you if for no one else.
#
So how have you evolved over the years in that process and I must put in the caveat
#
here is that I love all of your writing from your early books to the blue book which is
#
just beautiful but you have a better inside view of how your writing has evolved and how
#
you think about all of this writer's role in all of this because at one level you want
#
to be faithful to the world you write about but at another level the world you write about
#
exists only for you you are seeing it it is imbued with the personal so how does one deal
#
Yeah you know when I came from Patna to Delhi when I was I don't know 16 17 whatever one
#
of the books why these thin booklets I discovered was called words are important so it was sort
#
of a vocabulary or acquisition and I have to say the other thing I was doing was a notebook
#
so if I was reading a novel that's it I remember reading Thomas Hardy and noting down the word
#
I think it was tests of the day herbivores or word lucent mana sikha L U C E N T ussi
#
tara word sanguine the distressing thing about this acquisition of new words however was
#
that I wanted to use them rather than you know the sky was always the cerulean sky rather
#
than a blue sky and it was a big problem with that I flinch every time I am reading something
#
by students say and I see that the emphasis is falling on the use of a more extravagant
#
vocabulary I feel like this person is missing something they are missing the wood for the
#
trees which is by the way a cliche which should not be used but anyway point is so my passage
#
from there to something more serious over has again been a journey now do I agree with
#
Ian well Kiran Dasai who has given a nice blurb to this book did write to me and say
#
I do not agree with Ian Jack you should paint of course you should draw you should do everything
#
I went for a walk with he as Jack and we were talking about these things you know because
#
as you know he comes from a working class background so there is a suspicion of everything
#
of anything that is embellished and I understand where that comes from what that also means
#
is seeing the to me you know you used the right phrase you said seeing the world as
#
it is you know it is a certain emphasis on a certain emphasis on an unembarrassed plain
#
speaking and using that plain speaking to get to something incisive and probing and
#
he does that well he does that very well I teach in fact I am next week teaching an
#
essay of his called unsteady people which is wonderful I think I want to be just a little
#
well let me tell you a story about Ian I do not know whether you have read an essay of
#
mine called pyre which is about my mother's death I was writing it for Ian because he
#
was editing a special issue of granta on India there was a little episode in that in what
#
I submitted to him which he wanted to cut and he did cut it it was an episode where
#
I had said how my mother was becoming frail or debilitated for several years before her
#
death and I described how we had visited a public monument in some part of Gujarat or
#
Rajasthan and my mother needed to pee she needed to urinate and I couldn't find a bathroom
#
so in one particular room of this big abandoned place I felt it was abandoned I said to her
#
you I'll stand at the stair staircase she was getting desperate I said you just pee
#
here doesn't matter near that hole and when I came down with her there were two or three
#
men standing near a pawn shop and they were looking at us the wetness on the wall above
#
there you understand and I said in that piece I had written that this was very embarrassing
#
to me and I don't know how much much more humiliating and embarrassing it was to my
#
mother you know but this is what mortality means you're seeing death you're seeing your
#
body weaken and I said it was very interesting to me I had written in that piece that on
#
the night when I was sleeping beside my mother's body which we were going to cremate in the
#
morning a dream came to me in which a man had said something humiliating at a wedding
#
in a public place about my mother and that I wrestled him to the ground okay I gave you
#
a small incident Ian said you have to take this out because this is you're going to embarrass
#
your reader and responsibility of the writer I remember exactly how he wrote he said the
#
responsibility of the writer is to never embarrass his reader so I thought this was
#
a good rule you know I do not agree with it I think one should bear one's heart when one
#
should be as honest as possible in one's writing and this was my attempt to be honest about
#
what had been embarrassing about my mother's decline and how I felt it internally inside
#
myself so I think he's coming out of a certain kind of an English tradition of not revealing
#
too much of having a certain honesty but that honesty is expressed in terms of avoiding
#
extravagance of being happy with bread and potatoes instead of going in for some fancy
#
cereal that sort of a feeling it is coming out of that ethos
#
and so I think one has to be true to oneself and if you're true to yourself you will find
#
a form that does adequate justice to your writing you know and in that case I cannot
#
hold it against someone let's say Martin Amos born in a family held up for its literary
#
achievement then goes on to do something that is like fireworks in the sky that's his inheritance
#
almost it seems to me he can do that I have to do something else you know what I'm saying
#
it's not a point so much about accepting one's station because I don't think it is one is
#
better or the other but of being true what feels natural to you having said all this
#
I must say I always also feel the commentators will never the South American commentator
#
who says in Wimbledon it will be now we'll have to see if Christina can achieve it will
#
be a struggle after her three double faults she has had three double faults Venus had
#
only had one that hush in these posh places on in these games which is a very controlled
#
voice so how to how to avoid how to avoid the hush that often falls on me when I'm trying
#
to be the English writer and how to embrace an identity of someone who comes from a place
#
where when the Bollywood song when the song comes and you're sitting in the theater men
#
will tear their shirts off and they will sing you know what I'm saying so matter how far
#
is gesture me a earphone be Nicalia bugger you see what I'm saying Banuja Vajpayee would
#
accept here with you may have a gun out of Hanna so I'm look though I'm not so like
#
Kameez harder than yellow first day first show so that exuberance also I must say that
#
I feel that I should embrace in my writing that kind of wild energy to they can have
#
a shot so it is not so much finding a balance to answer your question it is just a back
#
and forth in a little dance where you're trying to retain while doing but while achieving
#
some in unnatural postures you're still trying to retain your balance no you could not have
#
answered this question more beautifully and and thanks for sharing that passage which
#
you know Ian Jack cut out because you know as an editor that would have delighted me
#
the most at particular passage because I think it really does get to the heart of mortality
#
and how vulnerable it makes you and how helpless it makes you and it's just it really kind
#
of speaks to me but I think the larger answer there is that you have to be authentic to
#
yourself which is what I tell my students I tell creators of all types that you have
#
to be authentic to yourself and even the English man who's giving the restrained commentaries
#
Wimbledon is at some level being authentic to himself exactly exactly you know like issue
#
gurus captured in remains of the day for example or is you know that classic sort of restraint
#
you know and whatever it takes to be authentic to yourself you do that now that kind of brings
#
this deeper question because I think the biggest hurdle to writing and in fact a hurdle in
#
life itself is this ever-present anxiety of what other people will think of us we are
#
social creatures we crave validation and therefore in a sense we are all being performative in
#
certain ways we are being performative even to ourselves you may go from a small town
#
to a big city or from India to abroad somewhere and you are conscious of that how am I being
#
perceived and you're performative you're being performative and sometimes a face becomes
#
a mask and in trying to project yourself as something which you would like to be seen
#
as you lose a little part of yourself now what you have done and this is so evident
#
in all of your writing in the in the flavors of the language that you capture in the places
#
that you visit is that you haven't done this but what was this process like was this and
#
this was really an anxiety that I only noted in myself in a sense when I reached middle
#
age when I said ki when I realized ki boss we spend too much of our lives paralyzed by
#
this anxiety when the truth is no one gives a shit about anyone else we've all got our
#
heads up our own ass koi nahi soch raha hai isne kya likha screenshot lo isko twitter
#
pe mock karo actually that twitter pe bahut hota you know it's such a pointless anxiety
#
and something you have to move past so what was that process for you like you were a small
#
town kid who goes to a big city you were a desi kid who goes abroad and this must have
#
been an ever-present anxiety it must have at some level shaped your writing even when
#
you begin writing there is that Indian writer in English thing happening there are those
#
big role models even you I'm sure would like a fat advance maybe not consciously but the
#
thought must enter ki kaisi book hai jisko advance milegi so on and so forth tell me
#
about this anxiety has it played a role in your life how have you overcome it when did
#
you begin to see it for what it is I have not overcome it boss I I still crave good
#
reviews and get get angry or disappointed or disgusted with those that do not offer
#
praise but you're now comfortable in your own skin say say say then just in the interest
#
of honesty I just wanted to say have you watched that chaitan ne tamhane film the disciple
#
I haven't watched the disciple yet oddly because court is my favorite Indian film of the last
#
20 years it's an amazing film sahi baat hai bhaiya tumne cho kaha na baat I'm trying
#
to link it also with your last question about being authentic you think at one level I you
#
know chaitan ne tamhane is someone I don't know he seems young or tear who is full of
#
both promise and achievement but I'd love to know him koi bhi jisko sun raha hai please
#
tell him that I admire him immensely you cannot watch that movie whether you're talking about
#
the court but also certainly more importantly I want to talk about the disciple without
#
thinking that here are characters who are being authentic to themselves theek hai na
#
yaise wo court mein wo jo singer hai wo apni pure soul ki jo pura sat hai usko present
#
karta hai apne words mein it is an unswerving arc towards his fated destiny it's an amazing
#
thing it's like us it's as firm and as shiny as a sword being swung in the air you know
#
it's just there so you you sense that of the characters but also you sense that of the
#
artist behind the camera that this person is trying both to express something of his
#
own what he is seeking in life what he is seeking in art and he's trying to shape who
#
he is through this expression though my main anxiety is not so much about the advance which
#
I don't get anyway or about the reviews which are not always good anyway or about finding
#
admirers though it's great to have someone who has read you as sympathetically as Amit
#
Verma has it is about doing what that guy is doing yeah jo bat ke riyaz karta hai and
#
finds himself distracted but returns to it because he thinks this is what is the path
#
I find and you know nothing nothing absorbs me and this is one way of answering your question
#
nothing absorbs me as the story of this seeking of the self and the seeking of the self through
#
art because you can't do it bio industry agar main ek you know ek hajaar crore ka
#
industry agar set up kar diya toh se mere true self mil jayegi wo toh kabhi socha bhi
#
aur na kar sakte hain so instead how to find and write a poem or a story or a novel that
#
will achieve let's say what I saw someone doing with great austerity even in the disciple
#
bada appeal karta hai mujhe ki bhaiya zindagi de di toh the acquisition of the right and
#
I did not know in a disciple there's a scene for example where the teacher says hmm he's
#
dissatisfied with how the boy is singing now for someone unschooled in music like me I
#
do not know what is going wrong but I appreciated the rigor of the master saying this is wrong
#
and I appreciated the enthusiasm and dedication of the student who says okay let me try this
#
again and it was amazing to me so the search for art or the search for a form that articulates
#
whatever it is I'm looking for or seem to have found at that point and what I can say
#
about the world that is how I have maintained or at least found a place of comfort in today's
#
world and do you look back on your older writing like whenever you write something what you
#
have written at that moment is a reflection of yourself right and when you look back on
#
your older writing do you look at it differently do you sometimes say ki yeh kya lag diya
#
which of course I think all writers go through everything I've written before makes me cringe
#
but in your case you've been accomplished for a very long time so do you look back at
#
your older writing and think sometimes that this was written by a different person like
#
how different is the 22 year old Amitav Kumar from the person that you are today and perhaps
#
a person 18 years ago when we first met or whenever how different are these people what
#
do you see when you look back on yourself what do you feel?
#
You know when I first really thought started to think of myself as a writer I was writing
#
poems against the border patrol and in America and they were very angry poems and I do cringe
#
a little bit but I also am quite taken by that person who seems eager to speak in such
#
My first book was called Passport Photos and I thought that was a very you know coming
#
to this country was a transformative experience and the encounters that I had and the feeling
#
of being a marginal man and I thought that when someone gives you a visa it's a very
#
humiliating experience you know when you go to ask for a visa and the way they used to
#
treat you at least they used to treat you I don't know how they happen now and I used
#
to think that he asked me what my name is he asked me what I do and when you look at
#
your passport the guy at the border asks you a few questions again in a very blunt way
#
have I ever got a chance to tell my story?
#
So if I open my passport it says name, place of birth, date of birth, identifying marks
#
what is the story I can tell about these?
#
So everything that is on my passport you know on the first page those are the chapters of
#
that book and there is a passport photo as well but the passport photo I have used there
#
is one of you see an old woman and then when you turn the page you see the photo of that
#
same woman the same photo except now it is a bigger frame and you see that she has her
#
arm raised in protest and it is she's a protester from Bhopal outside the Supreme Court office
#
in Delhi and I was trying to tell the story what is the story that the passport does not
#
tell and what is my book passport photos what is the story that it is telling in other words
#
how to take the form given by the state and how to alter it.
#
My passport does not ask me what is my language but it is in language that I declare my independence
#
and my identity to my chapter language.
#
So when I now look back at it I'm rather pleased that I found that form I'm also pleased by
#
the various liberties I have taken by doing the reportage poetry photography you know
#
I photographed in five different countries I think I have covered migrant workers in
#
that book so I'm pleased with that but one thing that I don't find often that has become
#
more a feature of later books is narrative just to settle into narrative and that has
#
been the change I used to all the other aspect is and I will go back to India when I came
#
to this country for several years because I thought that I'm going to go back and be
#
a journalist you know Arvind Das used to be alive then I used to you know he would say
#
yes you come you will get a job here no problem and they were that was a wonderful place at
#
that time so I stayed here and then I mean I began thinking that in academia the kind
#
of writing is going on and especially in postcolonial theory it's very limiting there is no search
#
for a wider readership and so I began thinking so I wrote Bombay London New York or husband
#
of a fanatic because I wanted to have a larger readership and to have conversations that
#
were a bit more reportorial rather than written from a seminar room so that has been one change
#
by the time but still it was about India but by when I was writing Immigrant Montana which
#
was published in India as the lovers was my experiences and so I tried a little bit more
#
of an exuberant language also mixed up language and I tried to write about here you know but
#
maybe the county is that of a company that was from Bihar during the partition he goes
#
to Pakistan and then his name was Iqbal Ahmed and then he got a scholarship and came to
#
America and from America he went to Tunisia and became involved in the Algerian struggle
#
he was a friend of the PLO and when he returned to Princeton where he was a PhD student he
#
got involved in the Vietnam in the protests against the Vietnam War and then he was jailed
#
for conspiring to kidnap Kissinger.
#
So John Berger wrote his story but it ended with the time he crosses over into Pakistan
#
so I thought I should follow that and I wrote my novel Immigrant Montana based on that.
#
So from then you know this idea of how to bring the two worlds that are most closest
#
to India and US that has been the main attempt and that is why if you look at the British
#
cover of A Time Outside This Time you will see that it is split in half.
#
One half is Narendra Modi the other half is Trump and they both meet in a nicely symmetrical
#
So this is my aesthetic attempt to bring these two worlds together to understand what are
#
things happening similar in both places and not very similar in both places and that has
#
become now in some ways a focus of my writing.
#
Sir, bhaiyana cover hai, vote kare toh kiske liye vote kare ye aapne kya gaya.
#
So here's a question there is at the heart of being a writer it seems to me that there
#
is a contradiction and there are two aspects which seem to go against each other and I
#
will talk about both those aspects and one of those I will read out this bit from your
#
book where you wrote this message to Michael Ondarje and you wrote quote, my wife called
#
me from her car she was crying she had been on her way to the pharmacy that is only five
#
minutes away but something bad had happened driving on the dark road it was late evening
#
night gathering all around the glow of day lights she had struck a deer she said she
#
had been unable to react in time and now she couldn't move in her seat a man in the car
#
behind her had stopped and asked her if she was okay he then used his phone to call animal
#
control a woman slowed down to inform her she was offering judgment that the deer was
#
suffering my wife said nothing to her but to me she said it was a beautiful animal after
#
a while she saw the animal controlled truck she told me it had come to a halt behind her
#
then she heard a shot and she didn't want to talk anymore stop quote and I love the
#
detail of then she heard a shot you know just that much extremely powerful and you write
#
in your and this is again from the blue book and you write how Ondarje thank you for the
#
account and he said he had a story for you and I'll quote the story quote a man driving
#
in Dorset was stopped by the cops he looked very disturbed the cops grew suspicious and
#
made him step out of the car the man said that something had happened an hour earlier
#
and he could not get over it he said nothing more the cops searched the car and in the
#
boot they found a dead badger the man had hit and killed he was still grieving the driver
#
was Ted Hughes stop quote remarkable story this is one aspect and this is the aspect
#
of empathy key what happens when we read literature is that you know we are born to live one life
#
but by reading literature by reading novels we can inhabit the heads of others and live
#
the lives of others and that it seems to me is something that would naturally build empathy
#
which is why I can look at various people such as your two cover models for which you
#
just showed and assume that they've never read a novel in their lives now the other
#
aspect of this again comes from I think this was in one of your other books that you quoted
#
com Toybin and and I'll quote again from their quote Toybin had told the class he was teaching
#
that his quote now you have to be a terrible monster to write his quote ends everything
#
is material the writer was saying even confidences that someone has indiscreetly shared with
#
you Toybin's advice to writers was to go ahead and use the story even if readers were going
#
to identify the person you were writing about the writer's credo must be use it because
#
it will make a great story Toybin had said if you can't do it then writing isn't for
#
you you have no right to be here if there is any way I can help you get into law school
#
then I will your morality will be more useful in a courtroom stop quote.
#
So these are interesting contradictory aspects which despite being contradictory it seems
#
to me must both exist one is tremendous empathy and the other is basically the mind of a sociopath
#
ki mujhe kahaani batani hai kisi bhi tara batani hai yeh log to mar jayenge kahaani
#
So what are your thoughts like you mentioned Janet Malcolm and her thoughts on journalism
#
earlier and this second aspect of it is also a question that she brings up that these people
#
you are writing about become instrumental to you you speak to them not really to listen
#
to understand them to empathize but to look for material kahaan se ek acha yeh mil jayega
#
which you can use in your story.
#
I like the point you made about empathy that's something I think about every day in fact
#
miri jo last novel hai a time outside this time it started with a question about empathy
#
I asked him you know I what happened was that it was in 2016 a few months before Trump was
#
elected aur main college mein padak ek I had gone to give a talk in upstate New York and
#
I was driving back aur Mohammed Akhlaq ki jo lynching hui thi Dadri mein uski it was the
#
first anniversary was to maine suja ki kya likh sakte hain which will remind people of
#
what happened and maybe make them think a little bit it was an exercise in empathy frankly
#
so the first line I wrote I was driving sitara ka ek notebook mere haath mein tha ek chota
#
sa notebook I wrote a lot of life is left in a man being killed aur phir maine sushka
#
ki jo aadni mar rahe hai jisko maara ja raha hai what are his thoughts as he is being killed
#
what does he think it was a presumptuous act but at the same time that is what a writer
#
must do they must presume to enter the lives of others with an effort to touch other people
#
or to make them think about other things and then that question got linked to another question
#
which was that of what can you give a dying man what can you write that will make someone
#
give a dying man a drink of water tohki maine ek aur video dekhi thi in which a man maybe
#
in Hapur is asking for water after the cow vigilantes have hit him so badly no one gives
#
him the water and he then settles down and dies so I think if you do not think about
#
empathy you cannot write but on the other hand I also think it's wrong to assume that
#
reading will necessarily make you more empathetic.
#
My friend whom I've invoked earlier in this conversation Teju Kol once wrote about this
#
and said isn't it true that all those people who were the guards or the officers in the
#
concentration camps did they not listen to Beethoven and Mahala before turning on the
#
gas in the gas chambers all these officers had their bungalows next to it after killing
#
people they would go to their homes and their children and they lived perfectly normal lives
#
and listened to music great achievements of German culture so there isn't a clear link
#
necessarily between writing though one hopes there is certainly in writing in producing
#
it how can you write without having an empathetic imagination how will you enter the lives of
#
others so that's a crucial point accepted does it exist in contradiction with this other
#
desire yeah my friends including again my friend Teju disagree with Kolm Toibin's command
#
that you have to be a monster to write because I went with this feeling I armed myself with
#
this sentiment when I went to Patna I'm not going there to celebrate it I'm going there
#
to be as honest as I can and there was this poet whom I admired a lot and I thought his
#
marriage was especially difficult I should be honest in writing about it and I had this
#
thought even as I was walking with him in a park in Patna and talking to him and then
#
I went somewhere else with him and then I went to a mall with him I was thinking I was
#
thinking he must think I will he must he must feel betrayed and then I thought but that
#
is what I must do I frankly did think that and I'm not you know I'm not necessarily
#
proud of it but neither am I ashamed of it because I thought that is my Dharma to write
#
what I have come to find out and I'm sure he was upset and then when my mother died
#
he came to the funeral and I went out I saw him so we embraced and then he began telling
#
me a story and he's always a great storyteller so I just listened he said he mentioned another
#
writer and he said when he died and I think the death might have been in Mokama or somewhere
#
I can't remember somewhere in Bihar and this other writer was in ICU and death was
#
imminent and his daughter came out and said to my friend the poet she said to
#
I know I cannot let my father die so my friend the poet said to me
#
let's say his name was Vinod the writer whose name he said
#
Vinod come back come back come back he said and he's saying this in this large public
#
gathering mournful gathering for my mother's funeral and everyone is spellbound listening
#
to this man this tall bearded fellow telling the story about calling someone back from
#
the door of death the friend died of course but this was a great story and I thought I
#
should tell the first story and I will tell this story somewhere and I am doing the same
#
with Amit Aruna I told you the story of brother so what has to be I think again to talk about
#
Suketu for example Suketu always says he uses the term writer's dharma and I am with Janet
#
Malcolm boss that if you tell me your story I am a storyteller I will repeat your story
#
so you be careful Amit in whatever you write to me in your emails no you would the kind
#
of person that I am I don't think you want to write boring books so I am fascinated listen
#
listen listen listen this is why Chandra has doesn't send you long emails it was amazing
#
I have a short a very two light things about both these things that you've just said one
#
is I always I do not understand it but I am fascinated by the stories that you sometimes
#
reveal either on a blog or on Twitter about your experiences playing poker it is very
#
interesting you know that and so I don't think it is boring at all first second talking about
#
Chandra has this is the story that will probably not interested because I have repeated it
#
a few times with him but it was amazing he and I probably on the same evening that I
#
saw you but he and I got into a taxi and the taxi wala turned around because I was joking
#
with the guy he was an older man I was talking to him I was joking with him and he said the
#
here he wanted to sell us aphrodisiacs and he said here you have your hair you go here
#
it has gold in it or gold in the capsule you buy it and you take it and then you see its
#
So I said that I have a lot of power, this Chandra has a lot of need, sell it to him.
#
So there was a story there also anyway so let me stop them yeah go ahead one of my friends
#
with whom I did episode 250 Narain Shanoi who is known as a great storyteller, no matter
#
what you say he will tell you an incredible story which actually happened and we always
#
wonder ki yaar we have also lived in the same world we don't have such stories and to some
#
extent I guess it's a matter of noticing but I have lived in Bombay all these years boss
#
no taxi driver has ever offered me gold ka pill that's because they look at you and they
#
know that you don't need it that's because they look at me and there's a lost cause kuch
#
nahi hone wala iska so normally when I start my conversations pehle ek do ek der gante
#
we talk about the person's past their childhood growing up all of that and I realized we got
#
into all these thematic digressions and didn't touch upon that at all so we'll take a quick
#
commercial break and when we come back we'll kind of go all the way back you know to when
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love
#
to help you since April 2020 I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course the art of clear
#
writing an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops
#
a newsletter to showcase a book of students and vibrant community interaction in the course
#
itself through four webinars spread over four weekends I share all I know about the craft
#
and practice of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction a lovely and lively
#
community at the end of it the course cost rupees 10,000 per GST or about 150 dollars
#
and is a monthly thing so if you're interested head on over to register at india uncut dot
#
com slash clear writing that's india uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer
#
doesn't require God-given talent just the willingness to work hard and a clear idea
#
of what you need to do to refine your skills I can help you.
#
Welcome to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with Amitav Kumar whose latest wonderful book
#
is the blue book a writer's journal and and he's written a whole bunch of sort of incredible
#
books and I want to sort of now know about the journey of Amitav Kumar before he you
#
know became the Amitav Kumar we all know by the way you know I was thinking earlier today
#
that I realized that we think of each other as friends I realized that when you come to
#
Bombay we meet I cannot for the life of me remember how we know each other in the first
#
I think I used to read your blog that's how I came to know him and we have several mutual
#
friends you know I think Prem Panikkar might have said something or Nilanjana Roy or maybe
#
Rahul Bhattacharya because you used to write on Crick Info so I think maybe that was the
#
introduction I don't even remember.
#
Interesting again just thinking aloud the other day I was thinking that we live in unique
#
times in the sense that all my friends are sort of friends that I've made well into adulthood
#
you know none of the people I am with in touch with a daily basis are people who were in
#
school with me in college with me or even in a workplace with me you know they are all
#
people I have met because of the internet people like you and I or all of these people
#
Prem Panikkar, Nilanjana I would not have met any of them or Chandra Haas Chandra Haas
#
perhaps but otherwise if not for the internet it wouldn't have happened and we are the first
#
generation who are kind of benefiting from this ability to create a community of choice
#
to say these are my people whether it's mutual interests or mutual inclinations that kind
#
of bring us together and therefore I think the texture of our lives is far richer than
#
if we were born in say 1920 and you are restricted by geography the people you can choose as
#
friends from around you are you know it's a very small pool.
#
Say I mean that is true and yet I feel and this is I'm saying that just because I've
#
been thinking about it I feel that this that while all that you're saying is true but even
#
this community of choice is not an unchanging community in other words if you think a little
#
bit internet has been with us for I don't know at least 25 years let's say 20 years
#
of some if not email then at least social media that sort of interaction you have indeed
#
made new friends and you have created a new community it is true but then now think how
#
that has changed also in other words what have been the conditions under which one close
#
internet friend has given way to another and now why has that happened if we understand
#
that then I think we would have a better understanding of where we are going you know for example
#
what was the era of blogs you know I don't know whether you remember I'm sure you remember
#
when you started a rave out I was also one of the contributors to it who are those people
#
did we feel very close to each one of them and if not why and now where are those folks
#
and who are the others who have given way and why is it because blogs have given way
#
to Facebook or Facebook to Twitter or Twitter to Instagram or what other things are happening
#
I sometimes think about these things and basically I think since I once earlier invoked the idea
#
of my funeral and ZD's note I often think who will be at my funeral you know which friends
#
will come and sometimes I also think that maybe those friends come to funerals who are no
#
longer friends because they want to honor a certain past and they want to remember who
#
they were in that past so maybe you and who knows even Chandrahas will come to my funeral
#
even Chandrahas what is the inside story about even I have to find out from one of you one
#
day no you've sort of set me off on a path of also thinking about that rave out by the
#
way for listeners who might be wondering what it was at one point India uncut my blog was
#
on blogspot 2003 onwards and then I took it to its own domain and when I took it to its
#
own domain I very foolishly thought that itni following hai let me start some other sections
#
one of them was rave out where people write about books music films which they like so
#
they're not reviews they're recommendations and dosa thinsa word and you were one of the
#
people who kindly joined in Al Anjana was there Chandrahas was there Jai Arjun Singh
#
was there and so on and I soon realized I'd made a big mistake because people were coming
#
to the blog only to read me to Baki section ki kuch matlab wo thi hi nahi well and that's
#
also you know when I don't as far as my own creative work is concerned I don't think
#
of scaling I don't think of making it something bigger because there is an intimate space
#
I have created for example with this podcast and that's a comfort zone for both me and
#
my listeners and I don't want to kind of mess with that but I want to sort of follow up
#
on what you said about and it's and I'm thinking aloud because I haven't really thought about
#
it in these terms before about you know how have these friends changed and I think one
#
of the very dangerous things that social media has done is that it has made everybody performative
#
especially what you see on Twitter or in fact Jonathan Haidt had spoken about the rise in
#
depression among female teenagers in the US over the last 10 years and his point was that
#
look people said that the boys will go awry because they're playing violent video games
#
all the time but actually the boys were fine because the video games helped them with problem
#
solving and logical thinking and all that it's a girls for whom it was a problem because
#
earlier what would happen is teenage or pre teenage girls and I'm simplifying from what
#
I remember or what he said so forgive me if it's simplistic but earlier teenager pre teenage
#
girls would you know hang around in the school or hang around somewhere and they would talk
#
about this or that and it was casual and it was comfortable but Instagram and other social
#
media made everything performative where you had to compete with the other person to portray
#
a certain image of yourself and this of course led to bad mental health issues like I think
#
I heard this one story of how these parents felt that Instagram was messing up their daughter's
#
mind so they forbade her from going to Instagram for two weeks and she killed herself because
#
she couldn't do without it you know and well you kill yourself even if you are on Instagram
#
and you kill yourself if you are removed from it actually is that depressing yeah it's that
#
depressing and that's one aspect and the other aspect is Twitter where the incentives are
#
towards finding your tribes or your echo chambers in on one extreme or the other and once you
#
figure that out then you have to rise in status within that tribe you have to signal you know
#
either your purity to the cause you attack people from the other side you're always talking
#
to people or rather you're always talking at people or mocking them you're not engaging
#
in dialogue there are no conversations everything is personal if someone disagrees with you
#
they are bad it is not that they disagree they are just bad period you know and what
#
I think that often does is that there is an incentive to cause judgment you go on Twitter
#
you quote tweet somebody you snark on that person you feel wise and virtuous and better
#
than the other person that you are snarking on and this can also affect relationships
#
now thankfully I haven't lost any friends because of this per se but I see people I
#
am acquainted with who are on the edges of my social acquaintance we may share common
#
friends who will behave in ways online that they would never behave in real life because
#
no decent person would behave like that in real life you know I mean what is a quote
#
tweet if you think about it you and I are standing at a party and suddenly you turn
#
to a third person and while I am there you point at me and say see what Amit said you
#
know lol he is such a moron and that would be such an incredibly rude thing to do a uncivil
#
thing to do in a real world setting but it happens all the time on social media so I
#
wonder if you have any thoughts on that in the sense that how because it's changed the
#
incentives for how we behave and how we perform it affects friendships and relationships as
#
well yeah I mean the first thing we were talking about with con turbine you have to be a monster
#
to write well everyone is now a writer then and everyone is therefore a monster it goes
#
it shows the poverty of I mean I don't know whether I should say it that way but you know
#
what con turbine was subscribing that ideology begins to appear very pernicious because it
#
becomes legitimate or legitimized behavior I'm very interested in the fact that you know
#
earlier you used the phrase we will talk about my childhood in a bit but you talked about
#
the community of choice well you have a community of choice but you also have an unwanted community
#
that you know because everyone is there now in your bedroom or in your living room because
#
I was writing a novel about fake news I was interested in following some of the conversations
#
on twitter or on being there at least or being active there some sort of a presence I don't
#
find it a space of release or freedom or calm or solace it is some place where I might go
#
if there is an event happening that is that important you know just to see what people
#
are saying but I find it a heard thing and I find it I find people are which are stampede
#
over there I find it a more of a akin to a stampede than to a conversation I find mass
#
thinking of that sort also disturbing so I think it narrows the spectrum of thought and
#
nuance and feeling though I'm not a fan on the other hand I don't think one can shut
#
oneself off from it so I want to keep a presence and most probably after you air my show or
#
air this conversation I'll tweet the hell out of it though well we'll talk later maybe
#
I found it interesting that you don't try to think of scale that you think of an intimate
#
space and I think that's a smart thing you're doing because then that whole earlier conversation
#
we had about being authentic to oneself that also holds sway because then we realized that
#
you're not trying to structure something or shape something to please someone else you're
#
doing something for a certain choice community and that's great everyone who appreciated
#
the conversation with Mrinal Pandey I hope is going to appreciate our little chat though
#
I have not yet had a story as fascinating a refugee you know I loved the story she told
#
about Shivani and Dharamveer Bharti and how she sent those letters how her mother would
#
give her and I thought of my own children my god maybe I should assign them some tasks
#
that brother correct this you know and then her mailing the and I also thought this is
#
a silly thought but please forgive me I thought oh my god from a small city she would have
#
the article sent at that time there would not be photostatic Xeroxing you know to trust
#
the mail you know that brother will go to postal service what a loss would it be if
#
it had been lost you know these are the things I was listening to it was a fascinating conversation
#
it was fascinating and I think this is also fascinating and you and you're right that
#
people who like that episode will certainly like this I mean because it's I mean I mean
#
these are themes I keep going back to because I just kind of find them so fascinating but
#
fascinating how many times will I say I think you know there are tropes on the show that
#
oh you know take a shot every time Amit says multitudes or whatever fascinating is one
#
of those things I picked it up from a guess I've forgotten which guess otherwise I would
#
give credit but it seems a very nice way double click mouse over but let's now go back to
#
your childhood tell me about that you know where were you born when were you born tell
#
me a little bit about the texture of your days growing up because when I speak to someone
#
like Minalji for example as you would have noticed I find that magical because that is
#
a world lost to us I mean one illusion that all of us suffer from is that the world that
#
we see is a world that it is and there's nothing else and speaking to anyone from the past
#
from that generation pre liberalization pre technology pre all of this you realize that
#
life had a certain enforced era of there was no choice but me time because where is the
#
smartphone but look you know we were limited by what we could read you have to see a young
#
filter and they have everything available to them we did not you know my god so tell
#
me a little bit about growing up and how your view of the world kind of expanded what kind
#
of kid were you and so on yeah I cannot narrate any story from my past without at once as
#
if on the same page or next to it see how I have represented it in my books in other
#
words this might be apocryphal but I remember Amitabh Bachchan saying at some point that
#
he would not and Usama Harivansh Rai Bachchan ji was still alive but I remember Amitabh
#
Bachchan saying that when his father would die he would perhaps and I might be misremembering
#
it but the way I remember it is that he would perhaps think of all the times he had heard
#
the news of his father's of a father's death when in a film that where he was playing the
#
role of the son and what I got from that was the idea that when his father his real father
#
died the experience would not be so much empty as much as it would be layered he would remember
#
these other deaths you know what I'm saying where he had played the bereaved son to us
#
etc I you are always drawing upon your own past in your own books I am certainly the
#
opening I mean very close to the opening of my book the Lovers which was as I said published
#
abroad as Immigrant Montana there is a line which goes something like this the red-bottomed
#
monkeys climbed down from the tamarind trees and peeled the oranges left unattended on
#
Lotan Mamaji's balcony so this is a memory from Ara where I was born an early early childhood
#
memory in the story we read that a monkey a middle-sized young male instead of peeling
#
the orange left unattended that day he picks up a gun a pistol that belongs to the narrator's
#
maternal uncle and he points it first at the cousin who is lying in her crib the narrator's
#
cousin and then the monkey turning the gun around with a primate finger thumb joining
#
pulls the trigger and blows his brains out now there were monkeys when I was growing
#
up I was born in Ara in Bihar in my maternal uncle's home and I had a cousin who was a
#
little younger than me there were monkeys all around there was a tamarind tree it was
#
not a monkey but it was I as a boy who have been told took the gun from under the pillow
#
of my maternal uncle and pointed at my cousin and everyone just held their breath not wanting
#
to startle me till I turned it around and then the gun was taken away but because I
#
associate especially because my uncle was an alcoholic and wrought great devastation
#
in that family and other things I associate that period or that act with this violence
#
that I then brought into the scene so that is one story one story which I don't think
#
I've put into the any of the books is that I don't know whether you know it there are
#
an astrological sign here under you are born you are called a sataisa which means in Bihar
#
this happens so for 27 days your father can't see you and when he sees you if he sees you
#
he will be suspicious he will have problems and when the father first sees the child it
#
has to be as a reflection or something I can't remember the story but I was that kid so when
#
the story was told to me I immediately thought that I must of course be a malign presence
#
in the life of my family or and especially when I was because I was a very bad student
#
I thought of course I am because you know I brought such disgrace to my father who after
#
my 10th grade exams came to the door and said what will you do? Will you drive a rickshaw?
#
What will you do in Patna? You think about it. You can never be a doctor or engineer.
#
So anyway so for 27 days my father could not see me he was a young magistrate at that time
#
and then he came to see me and I believe he first saw me as a reflection in a small pool
#
of oil so that and that's how our alliance began as father and son. I was a great disappointment
#
to my parents because I had a very erratic academic performance you know I was alright
#
in college in school but the kind of bad luck you know I was even when I came to on a scholarship
#
to Delhi and I was studying in modern schools I was at least very good in English. And before
#
exams there is a pre-exam kind of exam in which I got the highest marks but when the
#
12th standard exam which was the CBSE exam they gave me 53 marks which was a great shock.
#
I was going to do a BA in English but with 53 marks they allowed if you paid 250 rupees
#
or something I can't remember they they allowed you to it was called a reassessment of some
#
kind I can't remember the formal term. But I remember I went to NCRT office or whatever
#
CBSE office and I filed that application but I could not improve my grade 53. So my father
#
said that I got very low marks in English and as luck would have it I topped in political
#
science. So my father said that you are studying political science. So I was also very disappointed
#
and enraged to study political science. I never did well. It was very embarrassing.
#
I also found my as I have mentioned earlier I found my teachers disappointing. Yeah by
#
the way I should also mention people will I think it was a friend of Jai Arjun or someone
#
who on Facebook wrote against me on this point too or maybe I can't remember now. I was invited
#
by Hindu college where I was a student to come and give a talk after my book Bombay
#
London New York came out. So I went and in a spirit of honesty I said that there were
#
students there were teachers whom I had known myself there were the principals sitting in
#
front. I said my teachers here failed me. Nothing that I was taught here ever connected
#
with what was happening on the street outside. Bahar mein main bus pe baitha hoon aur you
#
know we pass the Shamsaan ghat jaha par mein dekhta tha fathers taking small bundles to
#
be buried. Badi gareebi bahar aur avai rasta corruption. Tara-tara ki tragedies happening.
#
Bhopal tragedy happened at that time. I said and then I would come to my classroom I was
#
studying political science. Hops, Locke, Rousseau naam to lete the lekin kabhi ekne. No not one
#
teacher in a lucid way connected what we were learning to what we were seeing in the street
#
outside. When I was saying all this the principal first walked out then a few teachers walked
#
out. The students seemed to be enjoying it but a couple of the students didn't and I
#
remember one of the students complaining about it on one of the malls that she felt that
#
I was being an arrogant asshole but you know I don't know. Mai ek din jitna mehnat karta
#
ho apne class mein apne students ko padhane mein. I think these people had not done it
#
in a year. When they would lift their notes when they opened their notes to read out their
#
lectures little bit they were the notes were so old that little bits would flake out like
#
dandruff. Toh mujhe toh bhi disappointment thi ush education say and I therefore did
#
not and partly of course it was my failing I wanted to be a writer at that time or even
#
the nights before the exams I was reading I don't know works of literature. I remember
#
one day trying to be reading Herzog agle din exam thi mujhe koi idea hai nahi tha. It
#
was a sad experience during the education you know the seeking for literature of language
#
but not finding it in the classroom anywhere. A couple of things I did at that time which
#
helped me was India International Centre mein videshi films dekhaya jate the. Aur pragati
#
maidan mein there would be retrospectives. Toh Sean Beningale ke films for example maine
#
wahan retrospective mein dekhaya. Gurudat Satyajit Rai. Aur India International Centre
#
mein Renoir, Truffaut wagara, Goda aur toh you know by the way pragati maidan mein toh
#
Falaknua mein bahar baith ke free rata tha. Ya vada nominal ticket aur niche ek aur kya
#
I can't quite remember the name of the theatre below that. But in India International Centre
#
you could enter only if you are a member for these films. Toh main bahar khuda tha. Passing
#
guests puchta tha main aapke saath aas sakun. It was like being a beggar really. And some
#
people took you know offense at it. The other people were very kind. There was an IPS officer,
#
a South Indian man. He would see me and he would let me come. You know we never spoke
#
but he would say okay come. I wonder what his name was. I am forever grateful to him.
#
Because main film dekhta tha. As a Truffaut ke film dekh rahe hoon. And I would look at
#
two characters. They are on a bicycle. They are biking. Woh music hai. And I would think
#
things like oh istar se narrative ki jaati hai. Rhythm hota hai. Or there would be a
#
cut and I would think ah this is how you edit something. You can introduce a certain tension
#
or surprise. So that was my real education. I really think that many people are natural
#
born artists or they do things that is amazing at a very early age. Mera aisa kuch nahi tha.
#
It has been a long hard struggle through unknown roads to arrive at a place where one can at
#
least put down on one page a certain testimony of what one sees around oneself. The other
#
thing that happened was that I came abroad. And here finally I was able to do. I had already
#
done an MA in linguistics in Delhi University. That's when I applied. And then I did an
#
MA in Literature. To yaha par aaki meri academic career jara bhehtar hoge. In fact I started
#
getting 4.0. To you know it's a nice marks like that etc. Mere advisors ne aapne kaha
#
ki bhai you should do PhD. Aur main ne. I had thought ki bhai main 2 saal rahunga. Kuch
#
reading waiting karunga. Phir wapar jaake journalist pan jaunga Times of India mein.
#
Aur after the MA the teacher said ne nahi aap PhD ki jay. To aap PhD mein then you get
#
sucked into a routine and a different life. And I thought no I'll be an academic. And
#
you know I became an academic. But on one hand there's no argument against learning.
#
On the other hand it also delays the actual act of creation. PhD ke bhaja bhai ye kitab
#
list dete toh bhehtar rahata mera khayal se. So I always feel that as a loss. I also feel
#
the loss of as I have said before the language was lost to me when I stopped writing in Hindi.
#
But I also feel as if India se connection tod gaya. So the idea of going back and doing
#
journalism aapne kahi baar naam liya Husband of a Fanatic ka. You know it was a useful
#
thing. For example Husband of a Fanatic started this way. It was Kargil war. I got married
#
to a woman who was from Pakistan during the Kargil war. And I wrote a piece because India
#
and Pakistan were playing cricket in the World Cup at that time also. And someone was wearing
#
a sign that said cricket for peace. Toh maine socha bhaiya je zin shaadi hui ki maine quick
#
peace likh du. Marriage for peace. Aur woh maine Hindu me chapa aur mujhe ek right wing
#
ne. Hindu organization ne ek hit list pe daal diya. Toh wahan se ek kahaani shree hui.
#
Now regarding journalism one thing I did was that I went to my school in Patna and asked
#
the kids whom I have not known but it was my school. I went and said ki bhai aap log
#
aapki tarahiye aapke umar ke. Can you write letters to children in Pakistan? And the letters
#
they wrote some of them were full of hate, some were full of love. And then I thank God
#
got a visa to travel to Pakistan badi dikkhat se mili. And I went to my wife's school in
#
Karachi and I read out the letters and I had the Pakistani kids write responses. Now
#
I am trying to say to you that by employing a certain degree of creativity in journalism
#
I was able to reduce the distance that always threatened to divide me from my origins. Jaipur
#
jaise Gujarat me riots ke baad jaana ya Kashmir jaana ya kahi aur jaana ya Jharkhand jaana
#
aur thodi si investigative story karna. Yeah if I think about this book that I was holding
#
up a moment ago or time outside this time you know going and trying to investigate or
#
write about the killing of a gorilla leader. Ek naxal ki maath basically on meeting the
#
in police informant or meeting police officers wagar. Usse laga jaise ki main I am bridging
#
a gap not necessarily becoming Indian but at least trying to find out a little bit about
#
what I have missed out over the years by being abroad. And that has been a story in some
#
ways of a formation where a mix of memory and a mix of reportage has led to a few narratives
#
which we have discussed so far. Lots to double click on as the phrase goes in all of this.
#
But before that I want to sort of address another question and I will read out a bit
#
from husband of a fanatic in fact. And in that you wrote quote in Razaz Adha Gaon and
#
you are referring to Raheem Mazum Raza's famous story Adha Gaon and you write quote in Razaz
#
Adha Gaon the protest against the nation is made in the name of the village. When the
#
fiercely well-educated Muslim students come to Gangauli to preach about partition and
#
the necessity for the creation of a new nation of Pakistan the Muslim villagers are genuinely
#
bewildered. One of the villagers is a young man called Tannu who has returned from battle
#
fighting for the British in the Second World War. He argues against the urban visitors
#
in the name of his village and now you are quoting him. I am a Muslim but I love this
#
village because I myself am this village. I love the indigo warehouses, this tank and
#
these mud lanes because they are different forms of myself. On the battlefield when death
#
came very near I certainly remembered Allah but instead of Mecca or Karbala I remembered
#
Gangauli. Stop quote. And I found this so moving and I want to ask you what is your
#
Gangauli? What is home to you? And I ask that not in the sense that I want a definitive
#
answer because in my own case I don't have a definitive answer. My sense of home was
#
contained in people and memories and things which have kind of drifted and dissipated.
#
So in a sense I feel homeless. There are places where I am more comfortable than other places
#
but I don't think I have a Gangauli. So I want to ask you what is your Gangauli or what
#
has your shifting notion of home been? I think those people are very lucky who have a Gangauli.
#
And that luck is part of an ethos and is a part of a time that is now gone. Aap Gangauli
#
hai nahi. People like my father, it has been very difficult for me to convince my father
#
to sell off the small bit of land that we have in the village. His connection to it
#
is almost as if a connection to an umbilical cord. I mean he is going to remain connected
#
to it and he doesn't have a life outside it. There will always be certain scents, certain
#
sounds, certain tastes that make me feel as if oh I am more alive now.
#
Mera ek particular kind of paratha aur ek particular kind of achar se wahi rishta hai.
#
Aap bhai, yeh theek hai. Ek tarah ka, you know, Ravish Kumar se humesha baat hoti hai, aaye
#
aaye, maans khayi hai, aap machhli khayi hai. This is also because I have invoked Maharaj
#
Vajpayee before, the idea in Champaran of a certain kind of khasi ka maans, a goat meat,
#
is important for a class or a caste of people. They are not from the same caste but you know
#
what I am saying is that the idea is that that is a genuine homecoming. The most honest
#
answer I can give you is my Gangauli is the printed page on which I have created my own
#
temporary map of the Gangauli of my past and my future. Language is the only nation that
#
I can now commit myself to. Does that make sense to you? And I say that particularly
#
while noting that Rahim Asum Raza's protest is against the idea of a narrow nationalism
#
and you and I boss are living in a time where nationalism, a resurgent kind of hyper nationalism
#
has once again staked its claim on our psyches and is condemning lots of our folks not just
#
to death but that other death that is hatred and that hatred that people are carrying in
#
their hearts is very very dangerous and will change our societies for a very long time
#
if not forever. Yeah, I agree with that and we'll come to that and kind of double click
#
on that as well at some point in this conversation but first I you know you've also in one place
#
written about written quote in other words a writer arrives at a sense of place not by
#
mere accident of birth or habitation but by creating again and again a landscape of the
#
imagination stop quote and this goes back to this goes back sir this must be husband
#
of a fanatic I think. Okay so here's the answer to your earlier question about it's not making
#
me cringe I'm like thinking that yes you're right. This is right. I interrupted you sorry.
#
You know and one of the things I've sort of examined in past episodes also is the nature
#
of memory like one of the interesting like I had done this episode ages back with Anshul
#
Malhotra and I keep referring back to it because it made quite an impression on me. She of
#
course wrote the books about memories of partition where people carried objects from the from
#
one side to the other and while researching how what memory was like in preparing for
#
that show I realized that neurologically memory if something happens the first time we remember
#
it we remember it but the second time we remember the remembering and the third time we remember
#
the remembering of the remembering and it and they can be a game of Chinese whispers
#
in the brain so you and I can remember having coffee when we last had coffee but we might
#
have completely separate memories of what actually happened you know and just going
#
to that theme like at the start of this conversation we spoke about how when we write in a sense
#
we are constructing the self and of course a part of the self is memories is that sense
#
of home that we are constructing in the absence of an actual Gangali so to say and that also
#
of course leads me to the depressing thought of what happens when these memories go on
#
you know which I have seen happening to people where I've seen it happening happen to my
#
father for example where at the end of his life everything just goes and then what is
#
your sense of self who are you you know and so do you feel that in all your writing therefore
#
by being so self-reflective which is also something I'll ask you about but by being
#
so self-reflective self-reflective by making your own life by being a monster to your own
#
life in a sense turning all of it into material you know you write about certain memories
#
but at the time was it that for you or is it that in the remembering you have given
#
it significance made it something else sort of shaped an imaginative world which is now
#
your past but which wasn't necessarily like that then.
#
It always bothered me that the 1984 Bhopal tragedy did not at all inspire me to take
#
a train I was you know I was 21 years old I wanted to be a writer why did I not get
#
on a train and go yeah what stopped me I'd never you know there's a wonderful documentary
#
filmmaker in India Rahul Rao he was my neighbor when Indira Gandhi was killed he was going
#
and working he said that evening that he was going to go and work in a refugee camp I was
#
very curious about what he was doing but I did not go that night why did I not go so
#
for me memory has been an examination of the past but it has also led to therefore the
#
act of writing where I then go to find someone where what I missed out on or the so for example
#
I where I was in school in Patna when prisoners were blinded by the police with the use of
#
acid and needles needles and acid I was early teens I think but later on I went looking
#
for those men and the encounter with those men and my asking questions about what had
#
happened was for me a sort of of course it's you know imagination in order to imagination
#
as a motivation or curiosity as a motivation to shape a narrative which had missing parts
#
okay so that's my first response it's not directly answering your question but I'm trying
#
to say that writing for me has always been and certainly so now the most creative thing
#
one can do to record memory to shape memory to make sense out of the infinite chaos that
#
always surrounds us you know and that chaos includes forgetfulness and that's what I'm
#
doing ask me another question so I can narrow it down or properly respond to you because
#
I want to because I think maybe I've not responded right to your question no I think my question
#
in a sense was not really a question it was a sort of vague and imprecise musing at some
#
level because what we remember and our self-image our memories and our self-image are really
#
constructed in a sense by us by storytelling that we do now most of us we do the storytelling
#
just in our heads in a very ad hoc kind of way but some of us are writing all the time
#
and therefore one writing leads to greater self-reflection and therefore there is a greater
#
chance that if you write in good faith and if you write in complete honesty and you know
#
as sort of every line of what you've written in all your book shines through with that
#
then there is a greater chance that you are able to you know see through the BS as it
#
were to see your own see your own role like in another in an earlier episode one guest
#
has said that you know what is you know one question that people should sometimes ask
#
when they're creating something is what is my role in this play I see okay okay let me
#
address that in a slightly I hope I'm not interrupting you can I speak about this please
#
please please please yeah a line John Berger which Arundhati Roy has used as an epigraph
#
to her novel The God of Small Things Kiran Dasai has used the same epigraph in The Inheritance
#
of Loss and Michael Andace has used that same epigraph in one of his books that line is
#
no story can be told as if it were the only one and so and you have of course during this
#
conversation come to it in a different way when you were quoting earlier this line in
#
a different way now I think the desire for honesty or meticulous accounting is one thing
#
but it cannot be it cannot proceed with the complacency that you are telling the whole
#
truth okay and therefore my addition to the line you quoted is you know what is your role
#
in the play is instead like would be more like what is the story that what is the story
#
that you're telling about yourself maybe hiding or what does it exclude and you cannot always
#
be aware of that and so I have just finished a story a novel actually which has now gone
#
now to publishers and let's see who publishes it and who accepts it in which I have tried to tell
#
a story which is the father's story and then have the daughter's story just as a way of
#
thinking what gets left out so often in each of our narratives. When The Husband of a Fanatic was
#
published, some people wrote in reviews or at least one or two people said that this is the story of this man,
#
this is the story of the husband, where is the story of the wife? Now I did not think it was my job to
#
tell the wife's story let my wife tell her story okay but it would be good and I hope I have made
#
space for the possibility that the reader knows that there is this other story I tried to do it I
#
have tried to follow a certain ethic I went to meet a man who had put me on a hit list when I
#
called him he said, I said I want to meet you sir and he said now when he was talking my wife was
#
worried at that time when I was talking my wife had said the police had come to my house to say
#
that you blah blah you know this was in philadelphia in pennsylvania so when I went to meet him in new york
#
so my wife said brother you can call us you may have read this I am telling it for your listeners
#
so my wife had said please call me so there was no cell phone era I called from a public phone
#
and I said you were abusing me so maybe he said some very violent vulgar things about you
#
my wife is a very straightforward is a straight-talking person who my wife
#
said what did you say and I had to say that I said nothing I actually just tried to take notes
#
and I tried to tell myself even as we were walking and he was saying things like you
#
fuck her and you fuck Islam through her I was thinking I must remember these exact words
#
and was I being a good person I don't know
#
but I thought I was doing my job if not only did I listen to him carefully and write it down carefully
#
but I also revealed to my reader that my wife had this question and that I did not have a
#
satisfactory answer for and that I am now telling you this story let me give another example if you
#
don't mind from husband of a fanatic you know I had gone to these camps and I spoke to these women
#
and I was struck by the fact that there had been so much violence that the understanding of the
#
children had been so changed that if you asked someone if you know I have this little account
#
there of a girl being asked what is rape and she says and she says that rape is when you tear off
#
the clothes and throw the girl on the fire you know and I spoke to women who had been raped it was
#
you know it was a great responsibility to both listen and then transcribe and write down what
#
they were revealing about their experiences including what they were trying to shield me
#
from and shield themselves from okay I recounted a little experience where a man asked me who has
#
given you my number the previous night I had been to a dinner where I had asked because an Indian
#
because a Hindu woman had been killed for protecting her Muslim lover I asked at the dinner
#
do you guys know of any couple from the both religions and this gentleman whom I can reveal
#
now because he's dead it was Pratik Sinha's father Mukul Sinha a wonderful human rights lawyer he
#
gave me a number but he said you know it is dangerous do not mention that I gave it to you
#
and so I called this number and the man wanted to know who is who gave you this number because
#
these are you know and I had to lie I said I don't know who he was I met him at a party
#
now I thought I should tell this story and tell the story in order to reveal how I got a story
#
and what happened in the story but when I read this chapter out at the University of California
#
in Riverside where they were considering me for a job a woman said this man lies not only does he
#
lie he tells you that he has lied we should not give him a job I did not get the job I didn't
#
particularly want it but I'm telling this to you that people even when you are being honest
#
and honest and my desire has been to be honest on the page always and of course there must be
#
failings but I'm saying that has been my desire and my purpose people will not necessarily give
#
you credit they'll think that if you have admitted to lying and you have admitted to lying and if
#
you have done though this on the page then you must be a liar and must be condemned as such so
#
there are pitfalls of such honesty but I'm okay with that because the page on which you try to
#
be honest should be an open page it should be open to the interpretations of different people and
#
you should be held in judgment it's all good it's all good it's all good it can't be fixed
#
it should remain an open idea you know first of all what you mentioned about at the Shah-e-Alam
#
camp you you know then you ask a nine-year-old girl what's the meaning of Baladkar and I'll
#
just read her response out in Hindi because I think it's just more sort of evocative that when
#
she says and later on you write and I'll quote you again
#
into the slot and hear a recitation about rape and later on at one point I think you know right in
#
your last chapter before you write about the Bhagalpur blindings you speak about this village
#
called Logan where there is this young Muslim man called Nazim and you know Hindus from neighboring
#
villages and everywhere come and they basically slaughter all the Muslims in the village he
#
manages to get away later he comes and every all the Muslims had gone to this fields where
#
they were slaughtered and he manages to identify his wife's body by the clothes that she's wearing
#
and all of that deeply moving story and at this point you imagine how can he go on again what
#
happens is seven years after this he's got a second wife he's living in the same village
#
around the same people who you know and I'm just struck by that normalization in both these
#
examples where in the one case this little boy has seen his loved ones being killed but he
#
recites it like an automaton like an agony machine as you put it so eloquently and on the other hand
#
there is this person where everything has been destroyed and putting myself in his shoes I find
#
it hard to imagine how I could go on but he goes on everything is normal again and you refer to the
#
times that we live in we see this again and again around us as if there is an acceptance that life
#
is tragic and shit happens and you just go on in the same way so whatever happens you know
#
people just kind of go on living their lives and everything is normalized and this can lead
#
to terrible things whether it's Rwanda or whether it's in Nazi Germany or whatever
#
things get normalized that yesterday would have seemed extraordinary and victims accept it as
#
well that when everything is uprooted and gone so in a sense it's almost as if two opposing forces
#
were as a journalist as a writer you come to talking to these people in full openness you
#
know you are in a sense also bearing yourself in the way that you write because you're also
#
writing about yourself and you know so you've bared yourself in that way but they are either
#
treating behaving like agony machines or whatever they're reciting you're one more person from the
#
press one more social worker who's come whatever or they treat you as instrumental like you talk
#
about when you went to Bhagalpur and you spoke to both the police and the victims of the blindings
#
you know one policeman and one victim both of them asked you for the exact same thing
#
which was that license for a tailor or whatever outside the station and they were looking at you
#
as instrumental in fact the book ends on that very poignant note which I thought was such a powerful
#
way to end the book because there's nothing definitive about it no definitive conclusion you
#
take away there is a man to whom a terrible tragedy has happened but he is behaving in this petty
#
embarrassing way at the same time so what did all of that make you feel that as a writer you want
#
to go deeper into that tragedy and the aliveness of the things that happened but as a human they
#
have just and again this is I mean I don't even know if this is a question or if I'm being
#
particularly lucid or even lucent whatever that is I'll have to look at it yeah but lucent means luminous
#
luminous okay I'm definitely not being lucent yeah so what are your sort of thoughts on this
#
because this disturbs me a lot and as much as something terrible happening it disturbs me that
#
it that veneer of normality just falls upon it again
#
so yeah as we are talking major a lucent come on I just want to be sure especially
#
because if we have presented it on a public forum it was I think it has to be light yeah
#
glowing with or giving off light the moon was lucent in the background I think that's I think
#
Thomas Hardy and Tess had used it somehow about the evening I can't remember now
#
gloaming was another word I had learned the response I have is something like this
#
that young man whose story had actually unfortunately forgotten from logang but I
#
remember visiting it and I remember the story there I met a woman also whose leg had been
#
chopped off when I think of that I think of that young man for example that he must have told a
#
that he must have told a story to himself about what his life has been
#
what it was like and then the story has taken a new turn in other words I want to make a very
#
simple and banal point that he must have a narrative about what has been an interruption
#
maybe he thought of it as an obstruction and then he overcame the obstruction it was and then his
#
story has gone forward okay let's keep it in the background now let's come to the present you and
#
I will remember how on twitter for example during the second wave you your friends were asking for
#
help for x or for y or for z all oxygen cylinder needed there some help needed there a bed needed
#
there plasma needed there etc now my contention has been my worry as a writer has been that that
#
experience or that story that harrowing story will be forgotten by the time the general elections
#
roll around not only will it be forgotten it will be somehow turned by the powerful into a story of
#
triumph we brought you protected to the gates of this new future and please vote us back into power
#
and we will vote them back into power so the normalization that you are speaking about for me
#
is a normalization not simply of life in some ways picking up a rhythm that was there before
#
which probably happened to that young man in bhagalpur for me normalization is
#
is where the powerful manipulate even their worst defeats into a story of glorious triumph
#
and that i think is a huge injustice particularly if it can succeed though i fear
#
that that writing can never succeed because we are not in the business of writing advertisements
#
you know and therefore we will fail we will not you know
#
yeah and what i am also struck by and and by the way there's this one particular sort of tragic
#
story during the second wave which happened to a friend of mine that both his parents had you know
#
caught it and they were in separate icus because on the no icu mejagani mil rata and his dad was in
#
an icu in a hospital called jaipur golden so there were 21 people in the icu ward and one day the
#
electricity went and the oxygen machines couldn't work and the hospital couldn't do anything about
#
it and 20 people died in the icu ward my friend's father was the only one who survived and when my
#
friend met him the next day he said because he had literally seen everybody around him die
#
all the will to live was gone meanwhile the mother is in a separate icu and and this dragged on and
#
on where every day my friend would be hustling with people going to the black market getting
#
cylinders himself and eventually both his parents died and it is what it is you know just as you
#
know when demonetization happened i thought okay the largest assault on private property in human
#
history and they have to lose the up elections and i was completely wrong there because i
#
completely missed the point and and i think what i mean and of course schadenfreude had a
#
role to play in that where people were the poor thought oh the rich are suffering more which of
#
course wasn't true but also i think that we have normalized that nothing will work the government
#
won't work nothing will work that we live despite everything we've normalized that we are apathetic
#
towards it so we don't actually connect our vote necessarily in a causal way to the governance that
#
we get because we have assumed the governance will be bad and i think that assumption is actually
#
largely correct anyway it doesn't matter who you vote for beyond a certain point and and for that
#
reason no matter what happened in the second wave which i think was worse than the horrors of
#
partition because partition was in certain areas in the second wave every family in this country
#
knew someone at least who had been affected in terrible ways the cries for help were everywhere
#
but i agree i don't think it will have an electoral impact and my question here is is that
#
what that tells us is that the most powerful thing in the world is really story reality doesn't
#
matter and of course you could argue there's no such thing as reality because you know whatever
#
story you tell there are other stories to tell if the world is complex every story is necessarily
#
simple t cap but it you know how close or far away from fidelity you are should matter but it
#
doesn't we live in an age of competing narratives the truth is completely irrelevant and it is what
#
it is and and what you say is that okay artists might say that oh i'll be authentic to myself and
#
i'll do what i do and i'll write what i have to and whatever which is fine it is a noble instinct
#
and and those stories won't win like you said you know our three thousand people will read or
#
listen and three crore people will vote there so what is your sense of this also because like
#
recently i remember i was chatting with my writing students in one of my latest batches
#
and i was asked about the difference in writing fiction and non-fiction and i said look there is
#
no difference it's narrative you're telling a story there is no difference it's the same thing
#
and you know over the last 40-50 years narrative non-fiction writers have used novelistic techniques
#
throughout you know there is no difference and at another level i feel that there is no difference
#
between fiction and non-fiction also so i've kind of rambled there isn't really a question in this
#
but you know but but but there's there's something i want to double click on which is that you're
#
you know that when you said that people do believe that governance will be bad if that was true if
#
such belief was endemic it would be bad enough but i actually think it is even worse which is
#
people come to accept a lot of people the majority does and that's why a government can return to
#
power the majority believes that governance was not bad and that will even be better that is an
#
even greater level of delusion and so it is particularly mystifying and depressing for me
#
that there should be such a faith in the great leader and that there should be such an ideology
#
of hatred for minorities and for others that you can coalesce and unite around a certain idea
#
and therefore the hegemonic power of the dominant narrative is even more of a challenge when you
#
think of yourself as a writer you think oh my god
#
you know so it's a very very depressing thing now and yet you have to i mean
#
doing i mean at one level it is just the act trying to take note of the news trying to
#
think of a creative response to it so i think of the blue book for example as an attempt to
#
preserve my humanity okay bad things are happening how do i respond with beauty and i'm not saying
#
i've created the most beautiful thing in the world but what i'm saying is it is my attempt
#
to find something which i can cherish and which i can share with someone and say here here here
#
is a gift of the date you know what i'm saying i have received news of the death but on the piece
#
of newspaper that has brought me the news of the death let me draw a flower because
#
why not draw it you know so i think that is one role that of one at one stage it's a testimony
#
that i am this happened to me this happened to my brother this happened to my friend's father
#
whose father said i have no desire to live now so testimony the other as i said is the gift
#
the gift to tomorrow or the gift even to today
#
that was on my on the creek behind my house
#
lake and a gift in the face of terrible happenings a small offering of beauty
#
and it looks beautiful in the night so i thought that's sort of a thing and then beyond writerly
#
acts boss you think of someone and his daughter
#
Natasha when i think of the young protesting i mean you know in prison give me a break boss
#
does he deserve to be in prison and don't we need people like that in the classroom or out in the
#
streets wouldn't wouldn't his wouldn't he be a great example for the young to think about
#
how to serve their country to think about shouldn't we at least stand in solidarity
#
with people like that who are paying such big sacrifice i think that is our job you know to
#
honor that so i think beyond what we do as writers or something i want to say boss how to lend
#
solidarity to these very brave people many of them young many of them older than even me
#
and i should again double click on a couple of those aspects but i should also point out
#
that to my listeners that even though amitav is aware it's an audio podcast he was showing me all
#
these pages as he was talking about them so that's that's a rustling that you heard so sadly that is
#
for my benefit alone but if you pick up the wonderful book which by the way i i found
#
beautiful and i'll tell you like one approach that i have for this podcast for example is that i'm
#
not trying to just go through space in terms of geography people will listen to me in different
#
places i'm trying to go through time that in 2050 if you listen to this you get a sense of a person
#
or the sense of how an idea was looked at and all of that you know if i have a four-hour conversation
#
with a person a part of that person is sort of embodied you get to listen to it and get a sense
#
of what was going on in that sense this book was very enriching for me in a similar sense as well
#
like already while reading it i went down different rabbit holes and discovered different
#
writers i remember i recorded an episode which ran a bhatacharya a few weeks ago a great episode on
#
the loneliness of the indian woman that was the title and my favorite post episode bit was that
#
she recommended a bunch of great books and i picked up this fantastic book called the odd
#
woman in the city by vivian gonick and i loved it so much and i thought okay this is it's like an
#
added benefit which is why i put so much work into my show notes for example that i want to
#
make these rabbit holes available for others so this beautiful book certainly plays that part as
#
indeed the conversation does though for a moment when you said hegemonic power i was like oh my god
#
he is sitting with the phd sir now i apologize unconditionally for that
#
now you have used the adverb what are your students going to think so here's a broader
#
question for you i realize that all these years of my growing up maybe i'm 48 so maybe for 45 of
#
these years i was under one particular delusion which does not exist and that delusion was that
#
by and large we are a liberal people fringe may could say extreme elements are but by and large
#
we are liberal tolerance here you can see it in our food you can see it in our languages
#
we assimilate by and large or faith that you know whatever you call it a shared idea of india that i
#
think you and i at least would share what i have now come to realize is that i was living in an
#
elite english-speaking liberal bubble and we are the fringe and the rest of the country is what it
#
is and i don't want to pile judgment and say this is good or that is bad but it is what it is and
#
one common trope almost a cliche on my show is when i ask guests and i won't ask you this but
#
i'll share the questions you can see where i'm coming from is that whether our constitution
#
which is actually fairly illiberal but it's more liberal than society that is our relatively liberal
#
constitution and imposition on an illiberal society and therefore can that imposition ever work
#
or can that imposition itself be called liberal and i've asked this to various guests and got
#
various great answers but my sense is that what we see today is that society has caught up with
#
politics andrew breitbart once said politics is downstream of culture and i think that today
#
the elites have been overthrown that what our politics is is reflective of what our society
#
is that this hatred and all of what you see around has come from the bottom up and i was
#
sort of struck by this fabulous quote from husband of a fanatic in fact when you talk to mr jagdish
#
barotiya who is this gentleman who met you and called you harami and kutta and all of that
#
and at one point and you're writing in the early 2000s so i found this very prescient quote where
#
you write the good the internet was a gift to mr barodiya's propaganda it made him a better
#
long-distance nationalist he said to me if the hindus will be saved it will be because of the
#
internet i send out an email and i'm able to talk at once to 5000 hindus stop code and a few years
#
back when i was musing upon what kind of happened in india i sort of applied timur kuran's framework
#
of preference falsification to it timur kuran is a turkish sociologist who wrote this book called
#
publicized private truths and his thing was that people often take stances because of what others
#
around them think the example he gave was the soviet union right that before the soviet union
#
collapses no one is dissenting publicly because they think they are the only ones and then there
#
is what he calls a preference cascade where people realize that others are also dissenters and then
#
there is a cascade and it all blows open and i believe that what happened in india and a big
#
part of the rise of hindutva is that there was a preference cascade that people would not say in
#
polite society that i don't like muslims or a woman's role is in the kitchen or whatever the
#
case might be right and some of these you know maybe i am biased and i'm putting a negative spin
#
on it maybe there's a positive way of looking at it but there were beliefs which were not stated
#
openly because this elite liberal consensus existed that these are things you can say and
#
these are things you can't say and that's fallen apart and that preference cascade is what sort of
#
caused 2014 one of the things that caused 2014 and our society was always like this and technology
#
by empowering individuals actually empowered all the closet bigots as i call it among us who
#
suddenly realized that they were not alone that they are the majority so is this something that
#
you would broadly agree with because you have a lived longer than me you've grown up in a smaller
#
town and you have kept going back as a journalist talking to people with an open mind and endless
#
curiosity what is your sense that was there a shift in the way we were or were we always like
#
this and was this always going to happen i am not a sociologist so i can't give a good coherent
#
answer to that but impressionistically i feel my sense was that it is not that we have become
#
the margins i feel that the liberals themselves are revealing their bigotry make passage from
#
a time outside this time why must one slow jam the news because all that is new will become normal
#
with astonishing speed you will go to visit your father and discover that he has pledged himself
#
to the service of the great leader or you will visit your friend's house and it will take a minute
#
or more to realize that a meeting is underway and now everyone is looking at you with suspicion
#
you notice one fine day that all the signs on the road have changed your town has a new name
#
dogs have grown fat on flesh torn from corpses lining the street where you grew up
#
the beautiful tree outside your window is dead has been dead for some time and has in fact just now
#
burst into flames i do not know why these changes have taken place
#
but i certainly know it these changes have taken place they have taken place in our own homes
#
and they have taken place in our own families it's a big change your question is whether it
#
was always there and i don't know the answer to that maybe it was but it is startling and shocking
#
and i don't know also whether it is reversible it's like it's like the fucking climate change
#
boss it's been massive it's an usher ushering into a new era and you don't know whether it can
#
ever be turned back the glaciers of our understanding not to be utterly glib but the glaciers of our
#
understanding are melting and the waters are rising that's a fascinating way to put it and
#
i love that passage by the way and i'm also really glad that when you spoke of the beautiful tree
#
catching fire you did not say it had turned lucent which no doubt it had but so just you know
#
it's this is all very depressing stuff so i want to provide a little bit of light relief at this
#
moment and i plan to start the episode with this but before we get back to the serious subject
#
i'll quickly go to the light relief which is that a few days back i tweeted and i will put this link
#
and i will put this link in the show notes also about a narrative device run by ai right where
#
this guy created a site or us may you feed in two words and it will create a short story out of
#
those two words right a nice little writing prompt but my god this fucking ai sorry for the
#
language is so mind-blowing that i think at some point humans will just stop writing novels now
#
there there are it's uh it's on a particular site it's a complicated url but since you were
#
coming in your honor i fed in amitavakumar and rats as my two entries and the story it came up
#
with was this amitavakumar loved rats he would take them in and care for them and they would
#
always return the favor giving him food and love one day a rat named rani came to amitavakumar and
#
said i know you love me and i love you too please let me stay with you amitavakumar was so moved by
#
rani's words that he allowed her to stay with him and the two of them lived happily ever after
#
and there's another one where instead of feeding in amitavakumar and rats i fed in rats and
#
amitavakumar and the story i got and and it creates unlimited ones so if you feed them
#
then you'll get something uh rats and amitavakumar and this is a story rats were always a nuisance in
#
the kumar household they would chew through cables and pipes and disturb the peace at night
#
but even more than their destructive behavior amitavakumar was afraid of rats he could never
#
understand why they seemed to bite him despite the fact that he was constantly running and
#
squeaking now let me tell you a story i was in my home in pennsylvania at that time and i got a
#
call from david davidar and he said we are doing a series on cities uh we would like to start with
#
patna it'll be a short series it'll be a short book or maybe 30 000 words will you do it and i
#
said yes because i thought immediately of the rats that had carried away my mother's tensions
#
okay now when i started thinking about rats and i thought of the rats then i thought of my sister
#
in whose hospital they had installed because of the presence of so many rats they had installed
#
a machine to frighten the rats but the rats as you know i have written about that in the book chewed
#
the wire and the machine stopped working it did not emit that supersonic sound whatever what is
#
of interest to me is that then i did other works and you know tried but i was thinking of myself
#
as the rat so many artificial intelligence men the story that really came out was that amitavakumar
#
was interested in writing about rats because rats for example had destroyed the land under
#
the railway platform in patna junction and the platform itself had collapsed
#
okay but he was thinking there of someone arriving in patna and the rats being the spectators of this
#
arrival but what he was really thinking was about his own departure his departure from patna he
#
had left he had abandoned his parents he was the rat who had abandoned the sinking patna sinking
#
ship the interesting story is that the book came out my mother was there she was in ill
#
health when the book came out and a little later she died when i went back for her funeral
#
and this shows you why there is intelligence in the artificial intelligence
#
when i went back for her funeral i woke up at night because a rat had bitten me on my hand
#
and i thought it was protected under a mosquito net but the rat had clipped in there must have
#
been some sense or taste of food or something on my hand i woke up and there was a bite and i saw
#
the rat scurrying away and i could see the bite you know i could see the wound it's a small bite
#
but i woke up my brother-in-law who is a doctor and he said go back to sleep in the morning we'll
#
give you a tetanus injection so that is what i got so i always wondered whether a book critic
#
had taken the form of a rat and bitten me that's a brilliant metaphor and while we are speaking
#
of metaphors i also love how you used it as a metaphor for caste for example you spoke
#
about how the musahars ate rats and you've described that also and how it kind of tastes
#
like chicken and all of that and at one point you wrote quote the reason musahars were looked down
#
on bihar was that they ate rats the official believed that if we all began to think about
#
rats in a more positive way caste itself would disappear and we would no longer think of musahars
#
as a lower caste did this make sense to them did they share this official's optimism stop quote
#
and of course you asked this question and they didn't share the optimism because it was just
#
overthinking it like like what you know so it's you know the symptom is not the disease as such
#
so let's you know go back to the linear path we kind of abandoned and start talking about
#
your writing journey like and by the way you spoke of your getting bad marks in english in the 12th
#
i got more in hindi than in english in both my 10th and 12th it's completely bizarre i can't
#
explain it where did you go to school by the way school was icsc board i was in bishop school
#
puna and my junior college was ferguson college puna my 12th which was what hsc but yeah whatever
#
how come we were in puna by the way my dad was posted there he was in the ias he was in the ias
#
marashtra carder no no he was punjab carder which then became haryana carder when the two split
#
and then he was director of the film and television institute of india fti so he was there
#
between 86 to 91 which was very fortunate for me because i lived in that little red house you can
#
see from the road i've been there i've been there yeah and i grew up watching the greatest cinema
#
you can imagine and not thinking of it as art film or whatever these were just stories i loved
#
films i love examples well i was a early fan of fellini for example you know eva taloni and
#
amarkot were my favorite fellini films which probably says more about childhood taste than
#
anything else and and what they see people whose films or who are the students there at that time
#
yeah i didn't interact much with the students though one of them was sanjay leela bhansali
#
who my dad expelled from fti because he was an editing student so what would happen is you'd
#
have these diploma films being made and you'd team together a director with an editor with
#
pura team bana the the and mr bhansali said i might be an editing student but i want to direct
#
and he kicked up a fuss and there was indiscipline so my dad rusticated him and my sense always was
#
that you rusticated him on the wrong grounds aesthetic ground
#
oh my god very good point that's kind of a different sort of thing so so tell me about
#
you know you've landed up in america what is your image of yourself like did you always want to be
#
a writer or were you even then thinking i'll go back be a journalist what was your self-image
#
and at around what point did that self-image begin to fructify into someone who will write books and
#
if so what kind of books why because you know right from your earlier books there is that
#
self-examination that self-awareness where you're always not just talking about what's happening
#
but bearing yourself as well so tell me a little bit about those processes i think the idea of
#
you know finding kind of an education model in the us which was very different from what i had
#
in delhi was a great inspiration for me and i thought for a few years that i would like to be
#
an academic so even but but but academic writing because i had always i would certainly say during
#
my teen years early 20s my only desire was to be a writer there was a woman i liked and who
#
wouldn't have spoken for me more than seven minutes i think in all the years i knew her but
#
my steadfast goal was to be her boyfriend and the other one was to be a writer the first goal failed
#
i did not have the cojones to approach her again and again but she did admire one piece i had written
#
once and she came up to me to congratulate me on that and i later accosted her after she got
#
her from a university special outside stevenson i said hey would you like to read my poems and
#
she said no and then i didn't talk to her again so because during all those years i had wanted to
#
be a writer even when i did enter this more rigorous pedagogical and rewarding model i
#
thought i should do an academic book but i thought it should be creative and so passport photos came
#
out of that but i was dissatisfied with being an academic i didn't like academic writing i certainly
#
didn't like academic conversations and so i produced a literary memoir called bombay london new york
#
where i tried to discover in all these places a certain trajectory of migrant travel but also
#
literature written in these cities by migrant writers by writers who announced their transitory
#
role etc but my desire was always to have a report quality in my writing so i wrote works of
#
non-fiction that's a husband of a fanatic who a foreigner carrying in the crook of his arm a tiny
#
bomb i wanted to be the person who i suppose brought a scene alive that was drawn from real
#
life and that was journalistic in the sense you know you mentioned William Gornick she's a friend
#
of mine i was inspired by the way she writes she reports on life on friendships on mothers and
#
daughters on conversations she overhears on the street so that was my goal but at some point
#
there was the desire but also the challenge of writing a novel or i was finishing a foreigner
#
carrying in the crook crook of his arm a tiny bomb which was about you know terrorism trials
#
basically in new jersey and new york of desis because 9-11 terror state be emerged global war
#
on terror and they swept up a lot of desis for minor crimes and trapped them into becoming
#
informants and also cooked up conspiracy schemes where they could entangle other people and then
#
you know claim that they had busted terrorism plots my book was a reportage on that but when
#
i was just finishing it i watched satya and i thought okay who is this guy especially when
#
i found out that he was from champaran and so i wrote to sham benegal and said that boss introduced
#
me to this person i want to interview him i had first i had thought especially because then in
#
an interview he had been very candid he had said things like you know pee in bed when i was a boy
#
and was reprimanded for it i thought oh this man will be frank and open and i thought i would write
#
a non-fiction book and then david davidar used to be the editor of penguin random house canada at
#
that time in toronto when we met i told him that boss i've been meeting this guy i've done
#
interviews with him in atlanta i've now gone to the village his village in bihar i'm meeting him
#
now in pombe i think and he said why don't and i was telling him what i felt that i had gotten
#
access to but also how i did not feel it was a book length thing and david said why don't you
#
make it a novel so i thought okay so why not introduce other characters around this figure
#
who comes from a small town betia in pihar and becomes a star in bollywood why not surround
#
him with other figures and then i wrote a novel and i called it home products because i thought
#
many of the novels i was reading especially by indians living abroad were not really home
#
products they were for export only so there is bhojpuri also there are little essays on train
#
travel etc and what trains mean in the indian imagination there is mini essays on virender
#
saheb aag everything in it you know i thought to a desi reader how to make a piece of
#
imaginative writing intelligible now the challenge that fiction posed for me boss was that of
#
invention to you know to you close to life but then to invent things and here i'm going against
#
what you tell your students which i think you're right in telling them that there is not so much
#
of a distinction between fiction and non-fiction both of them are narratives you're making up a
#
story i agree with that in principle but also how to invent things this challenge has appealed to me
#
once i started writing that novel and then i wrote another novel called immigrant montana
#
or the lovers and then i wrote this other one called a time outside this time and now i've
#
written another one called my beloved life the idea of writing something close to life i've
#
always quoted jeff dire who says i write only an inch from life but all the art is in that inch
#
again that is what one must teach oneself one must teach one's students how to be artful in
#
that clever manipulation in that little spot of maneuvering that is that one inch how much
#
and in the novel i'm just trying to widen that inch a little bit more and produce things on the
#
page that are entirely from my imagination and i'm finding that a wonderful challenge
#
how to invent how to invent while hewing very close to life take real life events
#
take some real life characters but begin instead of being faithful to the real that has happened
#
be faithful to the real that is even more real that is my challenge and that is what i'm trying
#
to do in this fiction now to sort of make it clear for the listeners can you give an example
#
of something that happened in that inch you know maybe from a book that you have loved maybe from
#
your own work or whatever but something that happened and then what happened in that inch
#
that elevated it to literature or art or that really you know struck with you in a sense
#
yeah give me some time because an example actually came to my mind of that inch and
#
it's a very moving example so i'll share it with you and it's from a film and there was this is a
#
film i think by a croatian or serbian called echo it's spelt e-h-o there are many films by that name
#
this is directed by a guy called ren jerka and in this film there are two parallel tracks and one
#
of the tracks is that there is this old man who lives alone whose son has gone missing and he's
#
missing his son and there's no way he can get information about what has happened to this kid
#
and in his aloneness you see him unraveling and at one point if i kind of he's got all these video
#
cassettes and all of that where the memories are and he takes these video cassettes out
#
and at one point he takes out all the kind of film in them and then you have a scene in the
#
backyard where he's surrounded by all this film which is hung all over and he's hacking it down
#
you know almost a literal moment that he was living in these memories and now he's just hacking
#
it down hacking it down and just an incredible scene and again something that is real but
#
for me that's the two inches where art happens and it goes to a different level
#
i was telling you a little while ago of a monkey taking a gun from under the pillar
#
and pointing it at an infant in the crib before turning it around and blowing his brains up
#
now that was an inch from life because it was not the monkey but i who had drawn the pistol
#
so indeed there was a gun and there was a child in the actual scene but here it is the narrator
#
who's watching and it is the monkey who does it and it has an greater appeal for me because
#
the violence because when he shoots his brains bits of his skull and brain are splattered on
#
the pictures of the patriarchs hanging on the wall and for me that was the story of familial
#
violence that took place because of what is unseen in the scene is talking about the topic of your
#
the name of your podcast the scene and the unseen is the violence of the uncle who is the alcoholic
#
and what he action sought now in the example that you just spoke about about the art again what the
#
inch is is that i present towards the end of the book immigrant montana a still from satyajit
#
rai's pathet panchali and i talk about it being from my notebook when i was writing the novel
#
so it's my notebook i have cut it out because i saw an article about his storyboards in art
#
look and i took that and put it out and then i have a note in in it about how i wanted
#
wonderful watercolors that rai has done suggests to me the feeling of you know it's as if a light
#
breeze for blowing through the pages and it is the feeling of art immediate and reflecting life
#
and by putting it into my own novel i'm trying to say this is how this novel came to be so this is
#
that other two inches you know again there's another thing i want to tell you i thought my
#
narrator is from a small town his name should be a little bit more provincial it can't be something
#
like i don't know sanjay i gave him the name kailash do you understand it's a little bit
#
different and then in the train to new york i was going to see something and in the train i thought
#
okay he has this kailash has come to america he has an irish roommate who begins calling him
#
kalashnikov kalashnikov becomes then shortened to ak-47 and ak is also my own initial many people in
#
my graduate school used to call me ak so by somehow i was creating a little circle which
#
was resonant in a way it was an inch it was a maneuvering you know maneuvering within a small
#
inch just to produce resonances so that's what i mean
#
with what it really is but also it is a total act of invention this idea of the irish man calling
#
him ak-47 and then it being reduced to ak and everyone in the teaching assistants calling him
#
ak was an act of invention but it and it was spurred by what was real but it is something
#
entirely new so that's what i mean by it i had a friend in college whose mom was german and his
#
dad was marashtrian and we used to call him kgb which was konkan as the german brahman
#
and i'm also reminded of mark war's nickname since we went into cricket
#
you know when the war brothers started three war went straight into international cricket mark war
#
took some time so he got the nickname afghanistan the lost war wow wow a double pun i think i might
#
have read this in on your blog some time ago something is coming back maybe it's common
#
trivia so maybe i don't remember if i've talked about it back in the day but that is amazing that
#
is amazing and and you mentioned satyajit ray and i remember satyajit ray would find inches in places
#
where he just kind of through stillness and not through invention through letting things happen
#
like i think of the swing in charulata for example or the memory game in our nardin ratri you know
#
where it's really in his hands way everything unfolds and i think there is that inch of art
#
in the dynamic between our two main protagonists during that memory game for example and there is
#
that inch i want to say something on that because you had earlier you had talked about
#
authenticity and we were both we were both putting a lot of emphasis on authenticity and now that we
#
have invoked rye i want to talk for your listeners but also just between you and me a little bit
#
about how art is the real authenticity because we have discussed that chapter about the blind
#
men in husband of a fanatic i've always been a little bit suspicious of the desi from abroad
#
coming back to investigate and write a story so i've always had some anxiety about my authenticity
#
after i wrote that thing about the blind man i was having coffee with ashish nandi in delhi in his
#
house i totally adore him so i said ashish i'm not sure i've done a good job can i read a few
#
paragraphs to you and you tell me he loved it he gave it the room and he said listen think about
#
satyajit ray there is no more of an authentic document of indian rural life than pathir panchali
#
and before he made pathir panchali satyajit ray had no experience of rural life
#
ashish that was saying here is a man who ate even bengali food with a knife and fork
#
who produced this document so why are you worried about authenticity if your art is successful
#
in capturing the real lived life then you should not worry about whether you are authentic i thought
#
that was a great lesson so there is authenticity and then there is authenticity let me share with
#
you a lovely lesson i and others got when prem panikar did a workshop for my students
#
our mutual friend and he spoke about this writer i forget this writer's name but he spoke about how
#
this writer was asked how does he write how does he clear his head of all the chaos in the world
#
and write and the writer said okay i go inside my room and i shut the door and then i sit down at
#
my typewriter and i said okay then you begin writing he said no i don't begin writing because
#
even though i'm alone in the room there are still so many others with me and i sit in silence still
#
everybody goes away so the person asked so then you begin writing he says no i don't begin writing
#
because even if they have all gone i am still there and i wait till i am gone and then the story
#
writes itself yeah and when you speak about authenticity when you speak about you know ray
#
making pathir panchali even though he probably had march bhat with uh you know uh silver cutlery
#
that you know i i remembered that and it seems at one level a bit of a romanticization of an
#
overstatement because the story never tells itself the writer is always imbued in it like
#
like you are in fact in all your work but i sort of love this story anyway yes yes let me let me
#
move on to asking this and this is again something that there's a shift that i have seen that has
#
happened over the last couple of decades and i think it is a fantastic mind-blowing shift with
#
which many artists and creators haven't fully fathomed which is that you know there's a
#
shift that we have been released from the tyranny of form like in the 1990s if i wanted to write
#
i could send an article to times of india and it's 800 words or i write a novel and it's 100 000 or
#
200 000 or whatever it is and there are these forms and i have to submit to them if i'm a
#
filmmaker i can make something for television that is 24 minutes into which they'll put commercials
#
and make it half an hour or i make a hollywood film of 90 minutes a bollywood film of three hours
#
you have these set formats what has happened today is we've been released by technology
#
and audience stays from this tyranny of form part of this of course happened during the blogging
#
days where i didn't have to think about writing 800 word pieces i could write 80 words i could
#
write 8 000 i could put pictures i could embed a song in between i could do whatever the hell i
#
wanted in the cinematic medium i see on youtube that people are experimenting with different ways
#
where there is no longer this sense that these are the forms we are restricted to they are freeing
#
their mind they're doing their own thing and great things will emerge out of it and i think
#
most people including most creators still don't realize this completely there is like a hierarchy
#
of forms in our head where if you are a writer you think oh a book is the highest form it's a
#
holy grail and a blog is like very low down and so on and so forth and that's not necessarily
#
the case now you're someone who's experimented with form bombay london new york or you know
#
your short book on rats was a very interesting kind of experiment in uh form as well passport
#
photos was an experiment in form where you're you know taking the format of a passport and of
#
course the blue book is a fantastic experiment in form it could be a collection of instagram posts
#
as many of these were right so how and so you've always been open to someone thinking outside the
#
conventional in terms of form right from the 90s so how has your thinking about this sort of
#
evolved like i think you know a long time ago you know a book like this would have seemed audacious
#
where it's really you know it would just have seemed audacious i don't i mean i know sebal
#
did things with images and all of that and calvino wrote a hermit in paris which is really
#
like a collection of blog posts and incredibly charming but there isn't that much formal deviation
#
going on and yet you've been open to it and you've embraced it completely and this is such a lovely
#
book because while it sort of uses the technology while it kind of takes instagram posts and puts
#
them on the page what it also does is the opposite of what social media does for me
#
in the sense that it slows down life and puts me in a quiet place where i can be reflective in the
#
same way as you are slow jamming with the news so what are your sort of thoughts on this and
#
are there other forms you want to explore in the future and do you think that your work in a sense
#
is limited to writing for example because one thing i have realized is that what is a creator
#
you don't only have to write if you're a writer you know you don't only have to make music if
#
you're a musician this so many different ways now to express oneself yeah well thank you for your
#
kind remarks um i i'm so happy that the blue book which was actually initially himali suri's idea
#
yeah she was starting her agency a suitable agency and she just asked me because i would put my
#
pictures you know my drawings on social media she said can we please use six of your or something
#
like that of your images on our site i said of course take it and then she said you know because
#
of the responses she was getting she said you know we would love this to be a book and that made me
#
think oh to start thinking about different chapters you know so here there are characters
#
there are sections called if i remember right oh yeah there it is presidencies journeys writing
#
a novel postcards from the pandemic office hours so i owe some thanks to her one of the things i
#
have not attempted to do but one day an editor said in india i said in new york can you go to
#
bookshops and say where is your white literature section and then write a piece about what they're
#
one thing i've not attempted to do is a performance of peace like that you know
#
just like sophie cale i think that's how you pronounce her name sophie cal sophie cale is a
#
performance artist in france whose books are just like she hired once a private investigator
#
to follow herself and for him to submit his reports or stalking her basically in another one
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she was on a she asked for a bed to be put on top of eiffel tower and then had people come up
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and read to her speak to her essay question until she fell asleep and kept her record in another
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one she follows a guy and another one she picked up from a hotel room if i remember right
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address book and she called the all the friends on the address book and had them speak about
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the guy whose book it was and then produced a book that is a much more formative
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involving the body also involving interaction of a different kind i have not done
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but i've thought about it lastly i was lately i've been thinking and then i saw that someone
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else had already done it i was thinking
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what were their particular dreams and i thought he would start a website where people would send
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their entries and then i found out that someone had already done it in america
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so experimental cheese performance
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and i haven't done an interactive thing with cinema for example but i've often thought about it
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someone make a little a visual document of it which was filmic and explored some temporality that way
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with those ideas but it has been lovely to just think i think people find it liberating the idea
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of formal invention is not interesting simply because it's a new form it is interesting because
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people finding something new like that find in themselves an impulse towards freedom
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so i hope the blue book does that for people
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in in the blue book you have this passage which struck me and again i'll read this out
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when i think of my youth i'm suddenly running down a long endless corridor the sun is hot
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it sits still bleaching the bones of the afternoon the running figure screams over and over
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what what a waste what a waste you know so you know as we kind of come towards uh you know we've
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gone well over three hours and i should i guess wrap it up during this conversation we've sort
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of been grazing and no doubt we'll have more conversations where we can do some more of
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feasting but this very evocative image of a man running down the corridors saying what a waste
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what a waste also leads me to ask you about uh about counterfactuals about what else could have
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happened uh in your life not necessarily regrets because my sense from the little i know of you
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is that you would say i have no regrets i have lived life fully and all of that that's absolutely
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you know what i would expect from you but in general one thinks of counterfactuals like maybe
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there is a world in which you come back and be a journalist after you i mean you don't do the
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phd you don't teach there you throw yourself into things here maybe you're a vicious colleague
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somewhere once a week you you know get on the phone and talk to each other about what you what
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stories you've been working on this week that's one life there are endless lives endless counterfactuals
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you know and ultimately we are shaped by accident we are shaped by the accident of our genes and
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then we are shaped by the accident of our circumstances the things that sort of happen to
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us and you know luckily i would say that it would probably be part of your basic swabhav to have
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that curiosity where no matter in what situation you are in you are curious you're open i would
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imagine that that is fundamental but otherwise one is shaped by so many other things moving in
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so many different ways so as you look back on your life you know is there a man somewhere
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saying what a loss what a loss what could have been maybe things you could have done
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or haven't done or whatever you know yes i think it's an evocative passage or at least
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feels so true to me because i've gone through especially during those years of you know when
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i was in my 30s i did think what a waste what a waste this 20s were you know when i was in college
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i mean my students under in undergrad okay i teach undergrad students i teach them for example
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you know some classes about literature so they are reading good books every week i did not do that
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unless it was all on my own and it was of a lower the speed was less often erratic totally
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autodidact and the other part is i was not writing stories i asked my students write stories and they
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write stories they write excellent stories and we revise them it's a great training now
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regret seer boss what if that girl had said outside the university special i would love to
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read your poems you know and then and then you know what i'm saying no as to counterfactuals
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i don't know whether you know let's say sankarshan thakur do you know the journalist
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sankar i've never met him yeah yeah he and i were classmates his father asked me to write for their
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agency you know he was his father was a well-known journalist and whenever i think of sankarshan i
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think that could be you know that i would have been doing that because we were together you know
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you would have become journalists i would be doing that kind of work the other thing that always
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draws me is i think of another person who teaches at jnu and i think i would have loved to teach at
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jnu you know and this wonderful social and political ferment and i'm sure some of the
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radical students would have hated me because i would have been a little bit i would have tried to
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go against the current sometimes but also the right wing would have hated me because i would
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have opposed them and would have been interesting place to occupy and to be interactive with students
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who are engaged in the world to be an academic there where i would feel that i was teaching things
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that served my own compatriots you know i would be involved in the life of the people from among
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whom i emerged i wouldn't be teaching a bunch of strangers who do not know how to pronounce my name
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yeah i i get sort of that as well there is so much we could have spoken about the immigrant experience
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about our politics about you know your experiences in pakistan and so on and so forth there's a lot
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to talk about but we've taken a lot of time and one day we'll do this again inshallah but
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yeah so i'll end with a couple of questions and one of them actually comes from this lovely section
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in your book if anyone if everybody should buy the blue book and if you turn to page 85 you'll
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find a couple of pages of advice from writers which they inscribed in their books for you
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and some of them are great like Lydia Davis says read the masters and at least occasionally read
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them closely Yijun Li says there is always more than one story your job is to find that story you
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did not start to tell and then you know Jenny Orphill says if you want to write don't have a
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backup plan also always put a dog in your book and so on and this is all great advice but i'm
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going to ask you as someone who's you know and we could easily do a three-hour session on this alone
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just the art and craft of writing and so on and so forth i'd love to know about all the things
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that you talk about with your students but if you had to give writing advice for people who want to
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write and you you've described yourself evocatively in the blue book as you know when you were at 25
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you had nothing to write about you didn't even have the tools so you you talk about how writing
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is like waiting and i think many people who do my course and so on are in that kind of phase
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where they know they want to be storytellers they want to write they love language and literature
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maybe they don't have the material yet maybe they're learning to use the tools what advice
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would you give to young writers like that or rather i wouldn't say young it's never too late
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to start Penelope Fitzgerald being the great example and hopefully i can also be a bit more
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of a late bloomer so what advice would you give to any writers anywhere well thank you for writing
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all those folks who have written such advice when signing their books for me i end that section
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with this following note i say having asked dozens of writers this question i have now arrived
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at what i myself want to inscribe in the books i'm asked to sign quote language is your closest ally
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and if you align it with your desire for freedom you will be able to live forever unquote so
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one advice is that language is your closest ally and you have to think about freedom because
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without that it'll be empty you're seeking think about freedom for yourself for others around you
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but boss what has really helped me i always tell my students that you any teacher teaches from his
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or her own example and for me what has really helped me is this task of keeping a notebook handy
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and writing every day if you have nothing to write about my dear friends look out of the window
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and write what you can see but you must write every day these days i've started even doing
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morning pages that has been the one thing that has really helped me and the other thing is i insist on
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is this 10 minutes of mindful walking i wish i could say that it should be exercise but
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i myself am unable to do that but i should if you take care of yourself you become much more
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capable of doing that i wish i could say that it should be exercise but i myself am unable to do
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that i should if you take care of yourself you become much more mindful and the body and the
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mind connection is so strong that if you take care of your body you will be affecting your mind also
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so at some level this mantra of mine which says write every day and walk every day is really
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intended to serve both your body and your mind that's how you nourish yourself another thing i
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have been also doing for the past maybe two years starting in january 2020 so now it's the third
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year is that every day i keep track of my time so like every hour i insert what i'm doing i just
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write it's just one line not line even one word dinner or reading oh it has made me so much more
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conscious of time so i want to it's in this country it is called in the u.s it is called
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planner so i just bought that so these things really have been the most useful for me and
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that's what i want to offer as advice to people fantastic advice and part of it reminded me of
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you know in 2006 i traveled through pakistan with the indian cricket team and at one point
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there was an odi in peshawar and from peshawar one of my friends one of my pakistani friends
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did some jogar and because i said i want to see the khyber pass so they took us on this jeep down
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towards the border we actually went to the border and looked into afghanistan so on the way we passed
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these afridi settlements afridi is a tribe which are you know and we passed these settlements and
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there were these small houses without windows there were these narrow slits and my friend said
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oh that is where they keep machine guns i have no idea if that's apocryphal or whatever but there
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were these yeah and and there were windowless houses with narrow slits and when you said that
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even if you have nothing to write about you know look outside your window and i thought but even
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that's an interesting kind of reality now now my final question which harks back to you know earlier
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you said that if i have 10 books in my shelf and 10 quotes that i will always whatever you know and
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i think it was in the context of one of the quotes that i picked up from your book but i'm going to
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come back to that because that is something my listeners and i love as a process of discovery
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were not quotes but what are you know a handful of books i won't give you a number but a handful
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of books which you care so deeply about that you want to stand on a soap box and say world
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read this you know you just want everyone to read it doesn't have to be any subject any whatever
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whatever are the books that mean the most to you recommend some for us you know every day i write
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the book which in india was published as writing badly is easy i offer some writing advice but i
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also have chapters on for example my favorite non-fiction and there's also i use there the
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quote from william maxwell that you read out from the blue book now some of those books are ones
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that i would recommend and i'd also recommend william maxwell's own novella so long see you
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tomorrow so that's number one so long see you tomorrow because you see in it the blurring
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of the line between fiction and non-fiction very small book but feels epic it's amazing
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a book that was written in light of the violence against blacks in america and it was a book that
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is both what was both a finalist for the poetry prize and a finalist for the criticism prize
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and therefore i like it for the way in which it blurs boundaries is citizen by claudia rankin so
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brilliant brilliant book yeah thank you so those two one of j.m. goodzier's book which one it will
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be i don't know but i want to offer a choice between two books waiting for the barbarians
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and disgrace one of those two books would be a lovely book to have to address address violence
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especially on a social and wide scale there is nothing as pure as the human voice speaking to you
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and voices from chernobyl the writer the author of that is the first journalist to be have given
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the nobel prize so i want to recommend voices from chernobyl also because what she does
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svetlana alexievich what she does is she might be interviewing you for five hours or four hours
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or four hours the way you have been interviewing me but everything i've said or with will be boiled
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down to a paragraph or a page and she arranges it rearranges it so how to get something vital
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from long engagement and then to distill it into presenting something so voices from chernobyl
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i think i'd like to i was talking about what have been great influences to me i think that book of
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book of poems jejuri by arun kolhatkar that's one of my favorites as well such is also a great way
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of presenting metaphor thinking about landscapes and people or also rooting it in some tradition
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of india and observance i'm trying to think you know for those who are from up or bihar
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or maybe even from other small towns in india i think vikram sets a suitable boy not so much
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in terms of the trajectory of the book but more in terms of the idiom that it employs in order to
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present small town india something i think is a wonderful work and talking about small towns let
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me end by i think the funniest book that has been written by in india is english august
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so english august i think that's and with you know such clever satire and if you want to
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you read the hindi version of it it is shrilal shukla's rag darbari masterpiece masterpiece
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masterpiece boss so uplifting so sharp so amitawa boss thank you so much this has been incredible
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and i just feel blessed that you spent so much time chatting with me hopefully we can do this
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in person sometime as well so thanks a lot for coming on the scene indian scene i want to thank
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you for talking to me for having read the work and i want to thank every person who listens to
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this for having the patience to please forgive anything that sounds excessive and certainly if
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it sounds immodest it has been a pleasure it has been a pleasure talking about all this with you
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friend thank you so much amit thank you all right if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on
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over to your nearest bookstore and pick up the blue book by amitawa kumar in fact if you've
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gotten this far you'll probably pick up everything by him and that's a good choice wonderful writer
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such an inspiration you can follow amitawa on twitter at amitawa kumar you can follow me
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at amitwarma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at
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scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen
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if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot
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i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
