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Where are you from? If someone asks me that question, I don't have an easy answer. I
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can tell you where I was born and where I grew up and where I worked and so on and so
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forth but I am shaped less by geography than I would have been a century or two ago. The
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biggest influences in my early years were the books I read and the films I saw, most
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of which came from the West. English is my first language and once the internet came
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into my life, it became my window to the world and that world became my hometown. I read
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Alice Manruwa and Yokohogawa, I listen to Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell, I'd rather
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watch pain dry in a Tarkovsky film than bullets fly in a Shah Rukh Khan film. I also love
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Indian authors and music and films of course so I am not quite a deracinated product of
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the remote West. Some days I have pizza, some days I have biryani and my weighing scale
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doesn't like it. But while much of my surroundings in Mumbai are a comfort zone for me, out of
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pure habit, I do wish sometimes that my roots were deeper. I like the idea of being a global
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citizen but this globe is an abstract thing, unlike the earth beneath my feet, which is
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unseen to me as I walk all over it. If one is to be cosmopolitan, one should be, in a
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memorable phrase used by my guest today, a rooted cosmopolitan.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Sugata Srinivasaraju and while he's
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been a writer and a journalist, those terms seem inadequate to describe him. A better
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term perhaps would be a man of letters, or even better, a man of culture. Born to a literary
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family, Sugata wanted to be a writer from a young age, hung out with legends of Kannada
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literature, found equal fluency in Kannada and English, and by engaging with the world
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of ideas, he made himself into what Ram Guha once called a dying breed, the bilingual intellectual.
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Sugata's latest book is Farrows in a Field, a biography of H.C. Dewey Gowda that is as
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much the portrait of a man as of Karnataka politics itself. I went to Bangalore in February
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intending to chat with Sugata about this book. I read it carefully, I took copious notes,
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they were passages I almost knew by heart. And then, Sugata and I spoke for over five
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hours and we didn't spend even one minute of that talking about the book. His life itself
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was so fascinating, especially when it came to describing the milieu where he grew up.
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A world of letters and ideas where every neighbourhood in Bangalore seemed to be home to a different
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school of literature. I learnt about the rich world of Kannada literature, a vast ocean
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of art that our Anglophone elites miss while staring into a tumbler of water. I learnt
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about his journey through Indian journalism, a field in which high ideals and petty corruption
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are always jostling each other. We discussed how our culture and politics are changing,
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the narrow visions of both nationalism and our many sub-nationalisms. I was struck most
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of all by a phrase he used to describe himself, rootedly cosmopolitan. I know few people to
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whom that lovely phrase can be attached. I'm not one of them. Sugata Srinivasaraju is
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a rooted cosmopolitan. I love this conversation and I'm sure you will as well. But before
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we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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On the 20th of July, 2007, a lady named Mrs. Gavare returned to her home in Dombivili to
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find that her daughter Snehal, who had been relaxing in her room, was missing. Snehal's
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slippers, her spectacles, her braces, without which she never left home, were still there.
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There was a hunt for the girl, a police complaint was filed and Vari gave way to panic. The
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next day Mrs. Gavare entered Snehal's room and noticed that a water jar that was normally
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in the storage under the bed was now outside. So she opened up the storage and found her
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dead daughter inside, her hands tied behind her back, a towel around her mouth.
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This happened just a few kilometres from where I live. But I hadn't heard of this till I
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came across the Desi Crime Podcast, the sponsors of this episode. The Desi Crime Podcast is
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hosted by Aishwarya Singh and Aryan Mishra and they talk about crimes from India, Pakistan,
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Nepal, any place you'd call Desi. In it, they talk about crimes like the bed box murder,
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Snehal Gavare's case. We learn about Hercules, a vigilante in Bangladesh who punished rapists
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by killing them. Who was Hercules? Why did Hercules act where the law had failed? Great
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stories can raise fascinating questions that keep us up at night. And the Desi Crime Podcast
#
has plenty of those. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen
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to your podcasts. So check out the Desi Crime Podcast and remember, there's a killer on
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the loose in your neighbourhood.
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Sugata, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you, Amit. Thank you for having me. So this interesting thing happened and the
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first time I really thought I should invite you to the show, and I must confess I hadn't
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followed your work or heard a few months before that, was a couple of years ago, if not three
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years ago, I did an episode on Maharashtra politics with Sujata Anandan. And it was really
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insightful and she took me through, I mean, I just understood Maharashtra politics so
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much better and she took me through, you know, many decades of it. And then someone on Twitter
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commented that you really must talk to Sugata Srinivasaraju about Karnataka politics, at
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which point my ears perked up. But then I thought that I have to have some baseline
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knowledge of a subject to begin with, to be able to talk to someone about it. And I am
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completely clueless about Karnataka politics, was then and to a lesser extent now because
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of your wonderful book, but you know, that's kind of the extent of it. But I've been following
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your work since and the book gave me an opportunity to invite you on the show. So delighted to
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have you. So, you know, let's let's kind of, you've got such a rich and varied career
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and there are many aspects of that I'd like to touch on before we get to your book. But
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first tell me a little bit about, you know, where were you born? Where did you grow up?
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What were those years like?
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Thank you, Amit. I was raised in Bangalore. I mean, I was born in Bangalore, bought up
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in Bangalore and my ancestors, in a sense, been at least two or three generations were
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all in Bangalore. So I never sort of got a chance to sort of go to the rural hinterland
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or be part of a rural, you know, setting. So I was always an urban boy, but then Bangalore
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of what it is today is not the Bangalore of the 70s when I was born. So I still always
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had this feeling that I was a provincial boy and it was a provincial town or it was a small
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town. And so this, and it was a very pastoral kind of city because if you, you know, went
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into the smaller bilanes of Bangalore, you would still see people having cows, milking
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their cows in the morning. And it was very laid back kind of a city. There was no, the
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city was not, you know, I mean, set to the space that it is set to today. That is after
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2000, you saw a sudden shift and many of us don't recognize the Bangalore that we grew
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up in. And I think this is the constant complaint of everybody who sort of has grown up in cities,
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you know, and has seen say 20, 30 years or 40 years go by because everything has dramatically
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changed, drastically changed. And that is my experience too about Bangalore. So I was
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basically born and brought up in Bangalore. My mother's side came from a place called
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Thumkur, which is right outside Bangalore, which is now connected by a six lane highway
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and you can reach there in an hour. And it's almost an extension of Bangalore now. And
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my father's side came from a much closer place in rural Bangalore district. I don't know
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if you're familiar with the Big Banyan tree, you know, you see it on all the record books
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and because it's a real Big Banyan tree. And we were, my father's, you know, forefathers
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were Patel's of that village. And that is supposed to have come to us as some kind of
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a Jagir from the Mysore Maharaja. My mother's side came, I think they migrated after the
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fall of the Vijayanagara empire from that area, Balari area. So they trace their ancestry
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back to Anegundi kingdom. So, but these are things that I've not fact-checked and these
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are things that I've heard. And, you know, I mean, there is in other cultures, there
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is this genealogical thing, maps written and all that. But here, you know, some of the
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property papers mention this. But then, you know, I've never, I mean, I should say as
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a journalist and as a writer that I don't think I've fact-checked any of this. This
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is what you've heard and I'm just sharing that with you. So this is basically my background.
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And my father was a professor of Kannada language and literature and he taught at the Christ
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College, which has now become Christ University. He was one of the founding faculty members
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of that institution. And he was a huge and major influence on me. He was, he went to
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the St. Joseph's College in Bangalore. His father, I mean, who had come to Bangalore
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from Ramohaldi, which is that big banyan tree thing, was a police officer. You know, he
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was in the first batch of CBI officers those days. And so they were educated. He was the
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first generation. He was educated. That was the first generation that got educated in
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the family. That was my grandfather. And my father was, you know, I mean, relatively better
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off because of his father's education. And he went to the St. Joseph's College to study
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science. So he did his BSc and then got into a job in a mining company again in Karnataka.
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But then I think in the 70s, there was this resurgence of Kannada, you know, activism and
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pride and the burst of literary activity and all that. And I think he was drawn into that.
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And he shifted from sciences and mining and all that into literature. So he came back
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to the Central College in Bangalore to do his MA in Kannada Literature under stalwarts.
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So GP Rajaratnam, who is one of the big names in Kannada Literature, was his teacher and
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he sort of almost called himself a disciple of this man. And it is very important to mention
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GP Rajaratnam because GP Rajaratnam did a lot of good for Kannada, not in just terms
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of creative literature, but also he brought Buddhist literature into Kannada, Jaina literature
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into Kannada. He himself sort of became a kind of Buddhist and wore white, you know,
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all times. And this man put this seed into my father's head that it is not just enough
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to write literature, but you also have to create a literary atmosphere and a culture.
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So wherein younger people sort of, you know, come in and thrive and do good things. So
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culture, it's about nurturing that environment was an idea that came from GP Rajaratnam to
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my father. And GP Rajaratnam got it from another stalwart or a contemporary of his called A.R.
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Krishna Shastri. So they used to run this Karnataka Sangha in Central College and they
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actually nurtured really great writers like P. Lankesh. I'm just giving you one instance.
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Nisar Ahmed who passed away recently with another very big name. So that was a kind
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of, you know, cradle for young writers and they sort of picked their writing, looked
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at it, you know, edited it and put it into an anthology, published it and sort of made
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them feel that they were writers and then nurtured a kind of environment in Kannada,
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which was a selfless, thankless kind of a thing because these writers themselves were
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not very rich, you know, they were themselves first generation literates perhaps. And they
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were just doing this out of their own, you know, I mean, volition and, you know, I mean
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certain kind of commitment and, you know, different kind of philosophy totally. So my
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father was in that tradition. So my father thought that because he had received so much
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from this tradition, he also has to continue that. And besides being a poet and a playwright
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in Kannada, he also started a small publishing house in Christ College, which was a Christian
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institution as the name goes, but run by monks who came from Kerala, you know, it was a kind
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of congregation which was that, you know, because that distinction has to be made because
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there are monks also from Mangalore, you know, the St. Joseph's College is run by mostly
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fathers who come from Mangalore. So this was a Malayali kind of environment, Christ College
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and so he starts the Kannada Sangha there and the first book that he brings out is an anthology
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of poems on Christ in Kannada. And that becomes a controversy because, you know, I forget
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exactly why it became a controversy, but he handles that controversy. And what he did
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was that he kept a small, you know, portion of his salary aside to bring out these publications.
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So my mother used to always tell us that your father is sort of, you know, is more worried
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about what book to bring out next rather than, you know, worry about your education, you
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know, and she was teasingly, you know, I mean, she was a willing collaborator in his enterprise,
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but then, but this was the kind of, so he sort of did that. So today in Kannada, a lot
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of big writers, including H.S. Shiva Prakash or K.V. Narayan or a lot of people were products
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of his sort of, you know, I mean, a nurturing, you know, enterprise, literally. And a lot
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of, I also met my wife through one of his, you know, he brought out an anthology and
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my wife had published a poem, so she used to come to see him, my later wife, you know.
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So that's how I sort of met her. So I keep telling my, you know, I mean, friends and
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family that my father's literature, you know, I mean, indulgence and all that did not, after
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all, go waste because, you know, I sort of found a life partner and it has done well
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and it has sort of given us so much of goodwill and there are so many writers. You know, today
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I am, I mean, I may have worked in publications in Karnataka, I mean, nationally, internationally
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and all of that, but in Karnataka, I'm always known as my father's son. So, I mean, that's
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another thing which I always, I mean, sometimes I swell with pride that it is that way, but
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sometimes I feel that what more should I do to sort of be recognized as, you know, I mean,
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on my own terms. So that is essentially the kind of environment that I grew up in and
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my father was not a person. Again, this thing has to be told in the environment that we
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are in today that he was not a chauvinist. He was not, you know, he did not think of
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literature and Kannada and Karnataka in very narrow terms. So he was, he was rootedly cosmopolitan
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as a phrase that I later came to use in my first book. So he was rootedly cosmopolitan
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in the sense his assignments to me, summer assignments to me, Amit, was asking me to
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translate, say, he used to leave the house in the morning, so he would say, by the time
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I come back, this is a short poem or a short story and you should have translated it by
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the evening. So he put me on this bilingual swing, you know, right, very, very early.
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So I mean, I think I started translating when I was a three-year in my third class or fourth
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class and so there used to, he used to subscribe to a lot of magazines, you know, including
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Encounter used to come home, Quest used to come home, only later did I realize that Quest
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was a CIA operation, right? Then London Calling, the BBC magazine used to come home, then we
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used to get Soviet literature, which is again, you know, I mean, from the Soviet Union, those
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days used to subsidize all this. Then Chinese literature used to come home, you know, printed
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on lovely glossy paper with lovely paintings and so this was there. And then we also sort
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of, he used to, you know, he had this habit of taking the loan from, say, the State Bank
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of Mysore or Canada Bank to buy encyclopedias or volumes, which we could not just buy one
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stroke, you know, I mean, it was very expensive. So the encyclopedias that I have at home,
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you know, the American ones or the, he gifted me a six set, tell me why series and that
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was expensive those days and I don't think a teacher's salary could afford that kind
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of indulgence. So otherwise, you know, there was always Premier, Mr. Shahan Bagh and they
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were great friends and he paid his bills only once a month at the end of the month. So,
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you know, that was the kind of houses fully stacked with books. And so he introduced us
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to not just Kannada literature, trying to tell us that you should read your K. S. Narsimhaswamy
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or your K. V. Puttappa or P. T. Narsimachar or say Lankesh. Lankesh was a huge, huge influence
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on me later after he started his tabloid. I mean, I would call it a compact newspaper.
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I wouldn't call it a tabloid. It became a tabloid later for various reasons. But then,
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so he would ask me to read, you know, look at Russian literature, especially and European
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literature. You know, I don't think I would have ever read Standal or Balzac or Victor
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Hugo, you know, Baudelaire, all of these people were being just, you know, they were names
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and then they became reality in my imagination and in my whatever. So he sort of pushed me
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to look at them and he just did not ask me to read them. Then he just gave me passages
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to translate. So they became part of me in a very different way. It is not just about
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reading them and, you know, I mean, making them part of you, but also of your consciousness,
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but also sort of making them a part of you in an entirely different way where those phrases
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and those. So you had to actually dabble in two languages, wondering what this is. I mean,
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I was just thrown a challenge once, you know, I mean, there is a lovely poem of K.S. Narsimhaswamy.
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So I used to tell my father, why are you asking me to translate only into Kannada? I'll try
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and translate into English. So why is it that I should not attempt the other way round?
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So he said, yeah, you're welcome. Try and do it. So I just picked a poem of K.S. Narsimhswamy
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to translate and in which there is a very idiomatic expression, which says, Padumalu
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olagilla, which is, she's, this fellow is newly married. He's come to his father-in-law's
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house and realizes the wife is actually not, she's having periods and they can't sort
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of, you know, I mean, there is this whole cultural thing about not being together when
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you're having your period. So, so he comes there and then this line is there and it is
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very subtly communicated in the poem. So now how do you bring it into English was the challenge
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to a boy who's still in his early teens, who does not understand the idea. And then so,
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so my father's friend was also a great literary critic in Kannada. He came in the evening
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and then he said, okay, so apparently you're trying to translate Narsimhswamy. Let me have
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a look at it. And then he said, how, how will you go, how will you translate this line?
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So then I said, and I, I just said, she's not inside or something like that, you know,
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Paduma is not inside. It's the literal translation of it. So then he, he just had a good laugh.
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And then I don't think, you know, they tried to explain it to me, but I realized it much
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later that, you know, I mean, this is culturally that that's when I realized that there's so
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much culture, etiomatic, which you cannot translate. There's so much that this culture
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sort of holds together, which another language finds it extremely difficult to capture or
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the registers of another language or idioms or expressions or phraseology of the other
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language cannot capture. So then that gave me an idea that this is unique. This world
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is unique and there is another world there. So I'm trying to be an ambassador between
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these two worlds. So I always sort of had this idea that I was an ambassador between
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two worlds or, and, and I wish that it became more than two worlds. And therefore I went
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and learned a bit of French because Lankesh translated Baudelaire into Canada called and
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it was called Papa the Hoogalu. So when I read it, I was so thrilled, you know, I mean,
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so I said, okay, I should go and read these poems and their original. So I went to learn
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French at the Allianz process, but then, you know, I mean, the French that you learn there
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was so inadequate. You just, you know, got a bit of an idea of what it was, what the
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language is all about. Like, but then I never got to read it in the original, but then at
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least there was that kind of trigger, you know, I mean, to go and seek it out in the
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original. But when I, even as, even as I sort of recount all this, and I, you made me sort
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of look, look back on all these and talk about this, which I don't think I would have ever
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sort of pulled out, but I was a student of science. I was not a student of literature,
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you know, I mean, when, when I joined, when I finished my 10th class and that's another
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story as to why I said, I mean, I wanted to be a cricketer, like every other Bangalorean,
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I wanted to be a cricketer. So I went to the St. Joseph's Indian high school, which was
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started in, I think 1904 as an alternative to the European St. Joseph's European high
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school, which is a, which was where the elites went. And this was for the common people.
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So I went to the St. Joseph Indian high school and there, there was a great sporting culture.
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So I wanted to play cricket too. So I, then we had Salus Nazareth, who played Ranji Trophy
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for Mysore as one of our coaches. And then I thought I should get into the school team
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and I wasn't, I wanted to play the BT Ramayya tournament, which was like playing the world
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cup those days, you know, I mean, so I never succeeded in getting into the team, but I
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was always in the B team. There was an A team and a B team. I think the school people understood
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that there are lots of kids who have to be accommodated. So they created a B team. So
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you always waited in the wings, you know, to take the place of a person who's injured
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or, you know, I mean, who's a revout or whatever. So you would carry drinks to the field and
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come out. And so that cricketing thing was very, very important because hockey was another
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thing in our school. Ashish Balal was our contemporary and he was, he later went on
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to play for India. And then Roger Binney and Syed Mustafa Hussain Kirmani were the alumnus
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of this school. And 1983, the Prudential Cup thing was a big moment because they had won
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the cup and I think Binney had taken 18 wickets or something like that, if I remember right.
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And Kirmani was a big hero. So they were invited to the school and I was given the opportunity
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to speak at the assembly. So, and invite them. And I was some kind of a school leader, you
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know, I mean, there were different houses and I was the captain of the Nehru house.
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So I was, I was expected to invite them onto this whole thing. And then I did that and
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that, that again rubbed off on me. And then, so I was always again shuttling between cricket
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and hockey and I thought I should be a hockey star when the school won a tournament and
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hockey. Then I thought, no, no, no, hockey is my calling. Then, then you saw cricket
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and the paraphernalia that, you know, bads and it was very, you know, you, you actually
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went to cricket because you liked the gloves or you liked the pads, you liked the bat and
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you liked the name Schlesinger written on it or whatever. And then of course, television
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was reiterating that ambition and you were seeing all this. And then you had these stars
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were coming and watching you play in the morning. You know, I mean, Benny used to be there in
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the grounds or Kirmani would come occasionally. And there were, and I had a classmate called
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Krishna Prasad who went on to play, I think the under 15 for India or something. He went
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to England those days. And I don't know what has happened to him, but then he was there
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and Rahul Dravid was playing for the St. Joseph's. He was my contemporary again. So,
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so they sent a batch of students for these selections to the KSEA, the Chinnaswamy stadium.
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And I was not one of them. But then I thought, this is very unfair on the school's part.
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I was a wicket keeper and an opening bat. So I thought I should just go and try my luck.
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And there was Ian James, there was a Anglo-Indian boy called Ian James. I don't know what's
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again happened to him and what followed. He used to open the bowling thing and they were
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all there. They were sent for the selections and some of us who wanted to very badly be
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there were not there. So I think a three or four of us decided that let's just go and
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take a chance. We'll just land up there and just also bowl or bat or keep wickets. So
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I went there and I still remember Dravid coming and playing and then Dravid keeping the wickets
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and A.V. Jayaprakash who later sort of gave this 10 out of 10 to Anil Kumble was the selector.
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So of course we didn't get selected. And then I think my father was noticing all this and
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he said, see, you don't have to always be a player. You can also, you can enjoy the
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game like I do. You can sort of, you know, enjoy it and you focus on your studies. I
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think that's more important. So that's when I sort of turned my back to cricket and got
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involved in studies. And so I got into science, which was actually a kind of a natural thing
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to happen because there are two reasons for that. My mother's side, they had an engineering
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college and they were pretty wealthy. My father's side was more into education because my grandmother
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herself was English educated. That's my father's mother. She was a fantastic chess player and
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she used to read novels in Canada and English. And for me, the sight of my grandmother still
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today is not about she being in the kitchen or making pickles or anything like that or
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making papadums or whatever, which is the usual thing, but she playing chess with my
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father. So this lady was used to consume novels in Canada, like nobody's business. And I think
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she also pushed my mother to do a bit of that. So, so that reading of the two women in the
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family was very, very crucial. And all my aunts, we were a joint family living in Maleshwaram,
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a locality that was created the turn of the century because of plague and people had a
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new locality had to be created. And so there, my aunts were there, they were all into music.
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They were all performing artists. So there was a lot of music happening, bhajan happening.
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And my grandfather in the evenings used to recite from Jaimini Bharata, which is a 16th,
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17th century Mahabharata written in Canada. Then Kumar Vyasabharata, tell us stories about
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it. And these two women used to go to the circulating library, bring all the pulp fiction,
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read and cry and keep sobbing over some passage in the thing or the thing about a character,
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the death of a character or whatever. And we used to wonder what all this was, but it
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had an effect on you. And so this one side, it was the mainstream thing coming from your
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father who's actually putting you into it. And then you're seeing your grandmother and
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your mother doing this without doing it in a completely different way. And then there
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is your patriarchal grandfather who's finished his evening chores and then sitting and reading
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it like in the traditional times, reciting from it. So this was the kind of environment
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that I had at home. And then you are seeing Western magazines come home, you're seeing
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books, you're seeing your aunts perform, Carnatic classical music. And so this was the kind
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of environment. And I went into science because I think the primary thing was also because
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there was an engineering college that my maternal grandfather ran with a few of our other relatives.
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And so there was a seat that was guaranteed. And there was also this long-term thing that
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I should probably become an administrator of that thing because they were all first
#
generation entrepreneurs who had made the money and they were into construction business,
#
building dams and bridges and roads and highways, all that. So they had made money and they
#
were all very close to the Ramakrishna Hegde regime and they had got a license to run this
#
college. And so there was that kind of, it was, I think, intellect. It was mapped in
#
the minds of my mother especially that I should sort of probably do that. So I got into science
#
and getting into science was not difficult because I had decent scores in my SSLC. But
#
then once I got into my PCMB course, it's physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology
#
at the National College, which is again a great institution, I was there almost ambushed
#
by a very good English teacher called Mr. Badrinath. So he used to teach English extremely
#
well. He made it very, very interesting for us. So there was an environment at home which
#
already sort of, you know, put you into that kind of, you know, gave you that orientation.
#
But here was a man and for the first time it was an external influence. And of course
#
there were other intellectuals coming home, you know, D. R. Nagraj, all the big names.
#
They were all juniors in age to my father. So they all used to come home, you know, stay
#
for long periods, have food. So that was all there. But this man had a great influence
#
on me and I think he's now a professor somewhere in Canada. I'm not in touch with him and he
#
did his PhD in sociology. He was a very young man. He had himself just finished his MBA
#
and was teaching younger people. So at that point I started thinking whether it was engineering
#
that I really want to do or medicine that I really want to do. So I quietly started writing
#
poetry and bad poetry in English and reasonably okay poetry in Kannada. That's my assessment
#
because at least the Kannada poems got published here and there. So the English ones never
#
saw the light of the day. And I still keep that diary of English poems that I wrote,
#
which I feel very embarrassed looking at now. So you pick the biggest words in the dictionary
#
and try to play with it. You know, the usual things that all of us do when we are starting
#
this whole exercise. So this Badrinath was a kind of influence who sort of shifted my focus away
#
from, he was also an engineering student by the way, had given up, if I remember all this correctly,
#
and he had given up his sciences and had come into humanities and was doing a great job. And he wore
#
a dhoti and a white kurta and came to class to teach. So there was some spiritual element
#
in my head which was associated with the simplicity and all that. And I never went to ask why he wore
#
as a young man. Now I mean a couple of pictures that I see now he's wearing a suit and all that.
#
But those days I think it was some strange idealism that was there. There was already
#
another teacher called Prof. G. Ramakrishna who had studied in England, was a professor of English,
#
professor of Sanskrit, professor of Kannada. I think he had expertise in all the three languages
#
and I'm still in touch with him, he's a great man. And he wore this Gandhian attire. I mean he was
#
also at the National College, but another branch of the National College. So he was his student
#
and I finally became Dr. G. Ramakrishna's student also when I went to the National College,
#
Basundari to do my BA in English Literature, Sociology and Economics. So after my pre-university
#
I got into an engineering college but I went and told my father that I think I want to do literature
#
like you. So I thought there would be resistance. But you know the first thing my father said was
#
I'm very happy that you made this decision but don't tell your mother the way you told me.
#
I will convince her, but you know you sort of do what you want to do. So I think that's a very,
#
very rare thing for the father. He was very happy that I wanted to do English Literature. And
#
my father was very good with his Kannada and all that, but I don't think he ever dabbled in
#
writing in English or speaking in English. I mean it was his Kannada only kind of a thing,
#
but with a very good reading of English classics and English literature and European literature
#
and all that. So he was I think he was quite a liberal father. I mean a hugely liberal father
#
who said don't worry about your mother, I will tell her. But once my mother came to know of it,
#
I think she told her father and her father sort of ridiculed my decision. And then my grandfather
#
here, he influenced my paternal grandfather and he was also very upset. And I think they were all,
#
they did not speak to me properly until I finished my degree you know, BA in Sociology, English and
#
Economics. So but then of course you know they all reconciled because they saw me sort of going
#
abroad and doing things well. And so they all came back later, but then nobody sort of made a good
#
prognosis of my thing. You know not that I was going to make a lot of money or get a Nobel Prize
#
or something like that. But then you know I mean they did not give me a chance, but my father gave
#
me a chance. He said this is fine, it's great, you do what you want to do. But he said whatever you
#
do, I want you to be the best. Now it's like telling, fathers telling their sons that even
#
if you're a shoeshine boy, be the best shoeshine boy. And I don't think they would have literally
#
meant it, but then you know that was the kind of encouragement. And then he, then I started
#
accompanying him to seminars where he was speaking or his you know, I mean I was to start started
#
looking at his editing process very closely. His table used to be stacked up with manuscripts of
#
young writers. You know he used to get up at four in the morning and you know I mean I've written
#
about it somewhere. And I think the introduction to my translation of his plays, he wrote mime plays
#
during the emergency. So that is the only mime plays that exist in Canada even to this day. So
#
I translated it much later around I think 2004 for which I got the Sahitya Academy Prize also.
#
So I think in the introduction of that I speak about how I saw my father you know waking up and
#
sitting at the table and he looking at his manuscript and there's a serenity, a picture
#
of serenity which I portray. So this was happening and at the same time when I was doing my BA,
#
my mother you know she was a homemaker and I think she had started accessing a different set of
#
novels which were in translation. And this is fascinating because again translation comes
#
back into my life in a different way. And this time my grandmother is out of the picture because
#
she has passed on and we have moved to another house because my father needed to be closer to
#
his institution college too. He couldn't travel long distances because he had become diabetic
#
and we wanted to cut his travel time in the morning. So we were in a separate setting now
#
where it was not a joint family, it was a nuclear family and my mother had started accessing
#
translations of Bengali novels into Canada which was published by Kavyalaya and Mysore.
#
And this was the entire Tagore, this was all of Bimal Mitra, then this was you know I mean
#
Bhatair Panchali into Canada and all of it was translated by a great soul called Ahobala Shankara.
#
He had translated four thousand, five thousand pages of literature into Canada from the Bengali
#
originally. He had learnt Bengali and he had translated them into Canada and he was with the
#
Free Press Journal and then of course he also learnt Malayalam and translated Nambudri Paats
#
autobiography into Canada. He was a great man but you know those days when she was reading this and
#
telling me you know summaries of what is happening in those mega novels written in the 19th century
#
Bengal and you know there was also this affinity to Sharada and Ramakrishna, Paramahamsa and all
#
that in the house. Anyway Bengal nationalism and Bengali culture was the elite culture at the time
#
so it had an influence on all literate, I mean all families, middle class families and so they came
#
through Sharada or through Ramakrishna, Paramahamsa or through Vivekananda into all our households
#
and there was a big you know photograph in my grandfather's you know I mean it was a pretty
#
huge thing frame of Vivekananda the Hindu monk of India you know standing like this with a nice coat
#
and so it had come into our house like that and so Bengali was an idea that sort of sort of got
#
into the culture and there was this translations now. So she was reading accessing all the classics
#
and translation and I don't mean she was not interpreting it like my father was a literary
#
literature man trying to do that but she would tell me stories you know I mean tell me see this
#
is happening and so this fellow is going to die or this is I think he has wasted some 25 pages
#
writing on this why should he do that he can come straight to this story. So there was a very
#
different kind of kitchen you know she's cooking and she would tell me these stories and I got
#
interested and I started reading for me it was not Tagore, it was not Bimal Mitra, it was not
#
Bankim Chandra, it was Ahobal Shankara. I was reading the so powerful translation can sort of
#
come to you in such a powerful thing I only much later realized this Ahobal Shankara was none other
#
than the a maternal uncle of Akumal Ramchandra who discovered Harold Schepinski the abstract
#
expressionist and got a 32 page profile in the New Yorker those times you know in the 80s so
#
he says there was it was a Telugu Brahmin family I mean so this man was had translated all this so
#
translation started coming into me in a completely different way again so that again made my reading
#
and my looking at the world and the worldview that I had to you know this whole idea of the
#
world you started coming in you know you need to have a worldview because you know you had started
#
I had started reading Lankesh by then and Lankesh I tell you all of European politics today there's
#
so much happening in Russia and Ukraine and all that but those days you did not have access to
#
the internet there was no internet in the first place you could not have got subscribed to an
#
economist or you could not have subscribed to a mother Jones or something else or New York Times
#
so all that you got to know about the about international events or personalities came to
#
you through some very enlightened writers in Canada like P. Lankesh there was another one
#
called Sita Ramayya VC we used to call him V. Sita Ramayya he used to subscribe to the Times
#
Literary Supplement those days he wrote on economics and all that but then he was of an
#
older generation much older generation to Lankesh and Lankesh used to tell us about what's happening
#
with Mithuram what's happening in Germany what's happening in America and used to write as if he
#
is there and talking to all those personalities used to he had brilliant prose and when he when
#
Gauri passed away and I was interviewed on Gauri I said see don't get me wrong Gauri was not the
#
great journalist or great writer it was her father and her father always came across to me as a
#
French modernist because he used to write so much on European culture and he had made Steffi Graf
#
a household name and he used to call his dog Steffi right so you know you he he sort of presented
#
material to you in a very very fascinating fashion and that's when I thought that you have to write
#
you have to have a worldview you have to be rooted but at the same time you have to present the
#
material before you in a very interesting fashion you shouldn't you know write with 2000 footnotes
#
and you know I mean 100 pages of whatever you know I mean which doesn't sort of communicate
#
whatever you have to make it interesting for people and getting people to read you and their
#
attention spans you know I mean fixing their attention spans is far more important and
#
interesting and challenging than sort of you know just writing and you know I mean letting your ego
#
you know be there all the way all and I mean in all places so so I think Lankesh was a very
#
decisive influence and then at the same time you know I mean it's it's it's so happened that I've
#
been lucky ahmet that there is Lankesh who's trying to give you these lessons there's your
#
father who's being just gentle mentor and then there is I was also not completely alien to
#
abstract ideas and theorization and the culture of insight as I call it you know it's not the
#
culture of it's not empirical you know I mean stacking up of data which was important but
#
you know trying to look at a culture of I mean trying to develop a culture of insight you know
#
so my father used to always tell me that you shall not write anything if you don't have an insight
#
and something new to say so it's not just you just you know put things together and then say
#
that this is your piece no you have to have something to say until then don't write and
#
don't make writing so easy for yourself which of course you know I could not have done as a
#
journalist later but but then I later realized the importance of the culture of insight which he sort
#
of taught me but abstraction was another thing which you know trying to sort of look at abstract
#
ideas you know I had become interested a little bit in Barth Rola Barth at that time and then
#
but I I but you know Barth or Foucault and Derrida I'm I sort of came to study formally later
#
but you know I mean in my BA and whatever there was this great literary critic in Canada and a
#
cultural thinker in Canada called Kevin Narayan and Kevin Narayan was the one who introduced me
#
to Chomsky's linguistics and I mean ideas of ideas on language and then also and he had this
#
enormous ability he was he was the teacher of D.R. Nagraj also and he had this enormous ability to
#
theorize things in a way you know I mean look at something and say that okay this is the
#
kind of broad structure into which it fell so I was fascinated by the way he designed his ideas
#
you know conceptually put them in boxes and he was a student of science too so he was bringing his
#
knowledge of science and learning and all that into looking at literature and making literature
#
look more like science there was a phase in Canada when you know you they thought of making
#
it very precise and you know I mean speaking of it like quantum theory or whatever so there was
#
that phase which I learned immensely from that phase because abstraction and theory theoretical
#
ideas and how to build you know when put things in a larger frame how to put them in a context how
#
to sort of link them and how to sort of bring this culture of insight into all of that all of this
#
started happening inside me and now it's you know it's just that as I sit here and reflect with you
#
I feel surprised that all these processes processes have happened inside me I mean you're
#
giving me an opportunity to sort of you know I mean reflect on these I'm just having a free
#
flow thing with you but but I was not conscious of all these things so this is how things I think
#
get into anybody's mind anybody's personality and shapes you into a person that you finally
#
become or are constantly becoming you know I mean so I think that was happening with me
#
and Narayan was a huge influence Badrinath was an influence my father was a constant force
#
and my mother was doing this something which is very fascinating and my grandmother was doing
#
something and my grandfather I still keep his jaimini bharta in my study today even today even
#
to this day it's a old thing the fact thick text and so classical traditional modern European
#
Lankesh trying to take you across the seas now Lankesh never crossed the seas Lankesh
#
never went abroad but he wrote about Europe as if it was his you know I mean the gully next door
#
you know I mean he he wrote so insightfully about Hemingway he wrote so much about Spanish civil
#
war he wrote so much about the the Mithra Mithra's france then he he is the one who told us about
#
this great writer called Bozhez he said there is this you should read latin american writers
#
and then there was another idea which of course there was a secular environment which I now call
#
secular but then it was a very organic environment those days but I my father and Lankesh were
#
friends and it was a very strange kind of friendship because my father was spoke very little so but
#
Lankesh always used to sort of talk to him and my father would listen and probably respond a week
#
later or something like that I still have cards that Lankesh would write and my my father would
#
send a card and then stick a I mean another card asking him to respond because he would I think
#
that was a practice you know you would just spin that and Lankesh would just sign at the bottom
#
empty so I have many cards like that at home so so Lankesh and my father had this thing and once my
#
father I think he would never visit his office he was already a very famous journalist and a writer
#
and much much bigger than I mean you can imagine you know I mean I would you know in in the Canada
#
space you know and I it is Lankesh who is much much bigger than a Karnad or ananthamurthy or
#
whoever so I mean because he had the masses and he had the classes on his side and I went to see him
#
once and then he asked me very strangely he asked me tell me the names of your friends you know I
#
mean it's a very strange thing a question to be asked and I I named a few and then he said but
#
there is no Muslim name in it there's no Christian name in it you should you should have you should
#
have a Muslim friend you should have a Christian friend I mean it is almost like didactic you know
#
telling you that go and get these people into your life also so your life becomes richer that's all
#
he said and then he spoke about nothing else and then he was very dismissive about this and that
#
and he was very erratic in his thing and very brusque in his you know expression so we one
#
wouldn't want to stay there for too long and my father was a tea total and Lankesh always enjoyed
#
his drink and all that so so we just came back and but Lankesh was a huge huge influence so all of
#
these things were happening in my early life and then after my BA I mean I had finished my thing
#
and then I got a seat at the Central University of Hyderabad in the English department and that
#
was another huge huge change because of the first time I was going outside of home it was not very
#
far off as Hyderabad but still you know it was like flying abroad so you you went and you put
#
yourself in a hostel and then there are these students from postgraduate students from the
#
computer applications department computer was a big thing just about getting off the thing and then
#
there were students of doing PhD in physics and then you're interacting with all these fellows
#
sitting in and then the hostel at your dining table and then I was also introduced there to
#
radical student politics you know I mean Hyderabad was a hotbed of radical politics student politics
#
and I it so happened that I became a roommate of a person who was on the extreme left
#
and later that person became the son-in-law of Varavara Rao right so okay Satya Narayana so he
#
had contested an election new student body election and then I mean you know simply you
#
went and campaigned and then that's also when I realized that you know I mean how ideologies
#
are constraining and limiting and they try to exclude you because how much of a loyalty I showed
#
these people they would never make me part of them they will never invite me to their secret
#
meetings so I felt very disturbed and then in my second MA I think I wrote a letter saying that I
#
have nothing to do with any of you so I still keep that letter which photocopy of that letter
#
and so I thought that this is very limiting and then I got back into my literature studies
#
but literature studies literature department itself were going through a transition at that
#
time and there was this huge conflict about colonial curriculum curriculums you know I mean
#
so people who wanted to study Shakespeare seriously or Shelley or the romantics or the
#
key or Keats or Dunn or all these people were looked down upon you know I mean what is it that
#
you are what is it that you're doing you know you're you're studying only what the British
#
has asked you to study there's these are canonical texts there's so much that's happening in America
#
and post structuralism and structuralism that have dismantled this whole idea of education
#
etc etc etc so this was being constantly being thrown at us by one or two teachers and one of
#
them later happened to become my MPhil and PhD guides Tejaswini Niranjana and it so happened that
#
Niranjana's father and my father again they had this teacher-student relationship and it was a
#
lifelong very very good relationship you know I mean so so she was she had just come back from
#
the United States I mean I think she had she had she had done a PhD and she had come back and she
#
was very high on literary theory and Foucault and all of that and she wanted me she wanted us to
#
read all of that you know and I really appreciate what happened at that phase but then you know it
#
was trying to sort of make you look at your what you had until then thought was literature and I
#
mean it put a lot of questions on that and that was welcome because you know you reconcile your
#
new exposure and your old thing later much later and it sort of blend beautifully inside you
#
but then at that point it was a kind of a disruption for me and then I mean so I moved
#
from the literature department after MA after I got a good MA degree into the comparative
#
literature department for my PhD and I chose her as my guide and I again because I was so familiar
#
with the idea of translations and Ramanujan was a was a friend of ours you know he used to come home
#
and I still keep letters of that between my father and him and so he used to I mean
#
out of the blue write to my father in an airmail saying that I need this book Raju can you please
#
keep it for me I'll be coming on such and such a date I'll pick it up from you and then he was
#
very interested in some of the poets that my father had published so he would say that this man
#
is the next Adhika so Gopal Krishna Adhika is another very big name in Kannada and a stalwart
#
of person who sort of shaped the Navya movement in Kannada and Ananthamurthy and others were all
#
influenced by him big man but a Jansang he contested on a Jansang ticket now that's a
#
separate thing you know how ideologies again did not matter when it came to literature because his
#
literature was good so I mean I used to when he had a he had a stroke and he could not write my
#
father used to send me to his house great man and he would sort of I was I used to write down what
#
he would tell me and then you know I mean that's how I became very very close to him before he
#
passed away I think in 93 or so I'm not sure about the date but then so he was another person but
#
then coming back to Hyderabad and this literary experience and these new challenges that were
#
being thrown at me and trying to sort of undo all that I had thought was literature was a was a
#
great thing and then there is also this little bit of you know radical politics entering into your
#
horizon because you were a protected boy from a family which was which had a literary orientation
#
and you know and very cultural kind of a thing and suddenly you're being asked hard I mean being
#
told that there are harsh realities there and this is all useless you know I mean your poetry is useless
#
because it's very romantic after all it's about individuals you know you should write poetry for
#
the society and that's when I very seriously when I came home for a holiday thing I took
#
an anthology of socialist verse with me which was in my father's library by Alan Bould
#
it was edited by Alan Bould and it had even to this day it's the most delightful anthology that
#
I've read you know when I read Neruda for the first time there I read Mayakovsky I read Vasco
#
Popa I read I mean a lot of people and used to you know translate a few of them that I liked
#
and I would keep them so so so so I started opening up myself to bigger questions that were being
#
asked so there's not just literature there was this not this cozy relationship of stories and
#
there's not that literary questions or literary criticism and framing and abstract whatever ideas
#
within a certain area and being familiar with the registers of literature and literary criticism
#
but also larger questions that concern society and those questions were thrown at me without
#
my asking suddenly in the hostels of the University of Hyderabad Central University of Hyderabad
#
so that sort of again so I my my mother's dream again because right from my childhood she would
#
make me listen to the AIR news at nine o'clock and she had kept a diary and I had to write the
#
headlines and show it to her and then I would be allowed to go to sleep so that was the ritual
#
that was practiced for years and apparently she did that because she wanted me to be an IAS officer
#
and one of my father's colleagues had written the UPSC exams and had become an IAS officer not not
#
so much an IAS officer but he had become the postmaster general officer I mean another service
#
which you get if you get a slightly lesser score so so she wanted me to be an IAS officer and then
#
IAS officer the connotation was of power and you know you know prestige and all that so I think she
#
had driven that into me or put that into my head and it was there somewhere in the back of my mind
#
so so now that you've not done engineering at least do this you know I mean you know that kind
#
of a thing but that was also completely shattered when I went to Hyderabad you know I I thought
#
that this was Ghulam Giri of a different kind you know I mean of course you know I mean later
#
some of the finest bureaucrats became my friends and friends of our family and they still nurtured
#
me and great men but you know at that point of time you know this this whole disruption is
#
happening and then literature is being exploded so everything is being exploded in your mind
#
and even this idea got exploded so I never took the UPSC exams and my mother was even to this day
#
I think she's terribly terribly disappointed so when I became an editor and chief secretaries
#
used to call me up or principal secretaries secretaries used to come to see me I used to
#
go back and tell her that see you wanted me to be an IAS officer see so many of them come to see me
#
today they seek an appointment so but she was not very happy she said that's the end something has
#
gone into your head so don't don't don't really think that you've become something so you know
#
she was still not convinced about it so this was so these ideas got exploded so again you started
#
looking at world very differently and I remember there all night people are reading out revolutionary
#
verse you know the Telugu boys especially you know reading out Sri Sri's poetry to me and saying
#
that see look at this look at this is does your K.S. Narasimh Swami write like this does your
#
Gopal Krishna Adigar write like this he's a reactionary so they started labeling writers for me
#
saying that he is this he's that why do you need to read this fellow you know I mean oh Tolstoy
#
you're I mean you're something else no that's not sufficient you know I mean so so so these things
#
completely changed in my mind around that time so this is then I'm sort of there and doing my PhD
#
and then I've picked a very interesting subject because translations was very dear to me I thought
#
I'll become a translator in my life you know that was an academic researching on translations doing
#
literary translations I was never meant to be a journalist I was never studied I never studied
#
journalism so I picked on nationalism and translations the idea of nationalism and
#
run because my PhD guide Tejaswini Niranjana had done her work on translations and so I thought
#
I mean I think we discussed this and we thought I thought I should look at the the early translations
#
of modern Kannada literature and try to see why those translations happened so linking it up with
#
Kannada sub-nationalism linking up with nationalism so I was trying to look at that and of course she
#
was putting a very heavy theoretical framework and she was not very enthusiastic about the local
#
literature that I was discovering and showing it to her so at some point I felt very slighted that
#
she's not interested in what I'm showing it's it's a one-way thing so I suddenly decided I will not
#
I'll take a break from doing PhD go back to Bangalore for some time and then probably I mean
#
I was still very young so I thought I'll always come back to do my PhD and in I mean at that time
#
also there was this huge subaltern history conference that happened in Hyderabad so there
#
was Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak there was Ranjit Guha all these people congregating and I was
#
an volunteer to that whole thing and at that time there was the Deccan Herald and Prajavani people
#
the Sunday there was an editor who I was looking after that and he said this is happening I mean
#
I had spoken to him very interestingly about the idea of subaltern history why it is interesting
#
how it is different and I think I had spoken to him at length about Shaheeda means peace
#
on Gandhi as Mahatma or something like that you know I mean I think I remember speaking to him
#
about it and then he got very fascinated he said why don't you write a long series so I said I'll
#
do a three-part series on subaltern history for you and I wrote a three-part series on
#
subaltern history for the Kannada newspaper which also got into the English newspaper later
#
I wrote in Kannada for Prajavani primarily so that made me a bit of a local you know I mean
#
antenna went up people started saying oh we read your piece so there was this instant recognition
#
and there was this crisis happening in my PhD program so I thought I can do some journalism
#
some cultural journalism literature literary journalism and then go back to my academics
#
so that's when I came back home and again I met my father I used to take this overnight bus if you
#
don't get you didn't if you didn't get a train ticket you took an overnight bus with which used
#
to play movies all night on that you know I mean they used to have a television set and Anu Malik's
#
music used to run all through night and it was terrible you know those journeys but then I
#
landed up in Bangalore at six o'clock and my father was up he was a very early riser so he
#
was having his coffee he said no I mean you've come back I said yeah I want to tell you something
#
I didn't even wait for anything I said this is what I've decided I'll go after a point of time
#
I don't want to sort of pursue it now because I don't feel happy he said is that so why should
#
you be worried okay again he was very cool about it he said did not ever tell me that you should
#
no no no this is not the way to do it I mean I enough tell my son that you know me no no no don't
#
take the breaks that I took you may never go back to what you want to do so but he never said said
#
that he said okay good you know I mean fine that's all that's all fine you know I mean if you're not
#
happy you shouldn't do it so you'll always sort of you know understand as to why you need to do it
#
so you'll go back to it so and and that phase when I came back and then there was nothing to do and
#
I was reading and reading consuming literature again and you know when trying to read biographies
#
at that time you know I mean I was reading all this kind of stuff that was coming up after the
#
breakup of the Soviet Union I think there was a string of biographies that was coming out in the
#
west which was dismantling the character of people like Brescht or Einstein or making them look like
#
you know I mean trying to speak so heavily about their private lives and and and I mean trying to
#
break the icon of these you know the it was an iconographic kind of a thing iconoclastic sorry
#
iconoclastic kind of a biographies that were coming out and I was reading all of that and then
#
suddenly one day my father had another very elderly writer friend who said if Sugata is doing
#
nothing Girish Kasirvalli is making a movie why doesn't he sort of you know go and spend some
#
time with him so I just went to Girish Kasirvalli's house and he was so welcoming and he said see I'm
#
making this movie called Kravya it's based on this short story so you read the short story and come
#
tomorrow let's discuss so I just read the short story and I next day I had a lot of ideas because
#
of course you wanted to prove that you know you've you've you've come out you've come out of
#
university and then you've read all these new things and you have great ideas and so I started
#
discussing and we used to discuss for three four hours and he was very patient with me and he liked
#
a lot of ideas and then I mean I sort of did a conceptual design for the film which you know
#
means it was very interesting project for eight or ten months and then when Girish Kasirvalli
#
finally released the movie I was thrilled of course I didn't get paid because it was I was
#
volunteering or he never sort of drew up a contract for me but then this in the in the in the scroll
#
in the in the credit scroll my name was right at right on top with B.V. Karanth and you know I mean
#
that that that that kind of joy and you know you jumped off the chair and I mean I told my father
#
see can you see my name it's with the great B.V. Karanth and B.V. Karanth my father were great
#
friends again they used to come to premier together to buy books and they used to go to
#
koshis and have a coffee and then disperse in fact Ram Gohar mentions it in his obituary recently
#
for I mean Shanbhag Mr. Shanbhag so I mean I was very happy and I thought oh I mean I mean I can
#
do a lot of things there is movies there is these people have published a series for me you know in
#
Deccan Herald so I mean I can do journalism and I can do all this for the next two or three years
#
and then go back to academics so I sort of very promptly applied for a job in Deccan Herald
#
and I mean my application went up to Mr. Hari Kumar and then of course you know with
#
with all the you were bragging about yourself that you've done this you've done this and you've read
#
this and all that so he called me for an interview and that interview went on for easily more than
#
an hour for a trainee's position and there he sort of started discouraging me at the end of the
#
interview saying that you're not meant for journalism he said you won't fit into this whole
#
scheme you don't know how a newsroom runs so you just think because you've written a article you
#
think you can become a journalist no that's not how journalism that's not what journalism does
#
so I kept you know I needed this job so I kept telling him that no sir you know I mean I can I
#
can be very useful to you I can do cultural journalism and I at that point of time I never
#
thought I'll do politics or write on politics or it was only about literature and culture and things
#
like that so then he sort of gave a very strange offer he said okay I'll allow you two months in
#
the newsroom then come back and tell me if you like it I'll give you a trainee's job so I have
#
to work for two months without pay in Deccan Herald you know writing and collecting my bylines and
#
then filing it with the executive editor and saying see I've done all this so why don't you
#
give me a job so at the end of two months after much persuasion prodding and nodding and all that
#
he gave me a trainee's job and for a princely sum of about two thousand rupees those days and
#
that was you know I mean some in Prajavani and Deccan Herald that group was immensely respected
#
at that time it was a number one paper the Times was nowhere in the picture those days which year
#
was this this is 95 1995 so Times was nowhere in the picture it was just tottering so to say
#
Express had its own problems and Hindu was a very mild presence you know I mean as it is today in
#
Karnataka so this was the number one paper and if you added and had and it had Sunday Herald
#
articulations books it used to be a thriving paper so you got into it then you thought you were you
#
had arrived so but he took a liking to me once I sort of was confirmed as a trainee he took a liking
#
to me and then instantly decided to send me abroad on an assignment and there was this
#
Mumbai was the minister of HRD and then he was going to Moscow for some cultural festival he
#
said send Sugata and I was a trainee so he was extraordinarily generous that and then of course
#
it raised the eyebrows of all the seniors in the newsroom all that happened but then somehow he
#
took a liking to me and then I mean I thought I should exploit that thing and then I wrote a
#
note to him in 96 and I'd by then be become a regular journalist and I mean my training
#
training period was over one year become a regular journalist I said Jacques Derrida is
#
coming to India I have some understanding of his writings and his philosophy and his
#
and the polemics that surrounds it so if you permit me I will go to Delhi and interview him
#
I just wrote I without even asking Jacques Derrida if you'll want to give me an interview
#
so I wrote and he used to sort of have a very strange way of saying yes he used to just write
#
an okay at the edge of the paper so that okay came back so they bought me a ticket and I went
#
to that landed up in Delhi and attended the lectures of Jacques Derrida at the Delhi School
#
of Economics it was on the short history of the lie and then I somehow wanted his to draw his
#
attention and get her get an appointment with him and ask him a few questions and I was trying to
#
very seriously brush off my French you know tutaputa kind of a French and all that but then
#
you know I sent a note and left it with one of those people who are accompanying him and they
#
very promptly called me and it was very strange you know people are so generous and kind at times
#
you don't know why they pick you or what I was his rookie fellow you know I mean with absolutely no
#
background and then they called me he said see Mr Derrida will be free for about 15 minutes you
#
can ask him whatever you want just before he starts this other lecture so I went and I honestly
#
don't remember what I asked him I didn't have a tape recorder to record I think I had a record
#
or something some very old tape some very strange thing so I asked him about Gandhi asked him about
#
Chomsky and I asked him about his own thing one or two things of grammatology of youth questions
#
very very academic theoretical something that would not fit into a journalistic piece that I
#
had to write I had been sent to write so I came by I was very happy so I went around telling that
#
Derrida has given me an interview and I'd taken a picture with him so I had everything that one had
#
to so this was just 10 or 15 minutes of his tape but then I sat back in the room that night and I
#
was staying at this Tandoor hotel what had become called as Tandoor hotel and then I sat there there
#
was this I still remember the table was you know I mean it was a stone slab kind of a table and I
#
said I should you know I mean this is my great moment I should craft a piece which will appeal
#
to a larger Kannada audience and it I should introduce Derrida instead of saying that I
#
interviewed I should introduce him so I was reading Feynman at that time you know Richard
#
Feynman's books you know I mean you're surely joking Mr. Feynman all the usual stuff that
#
you read at that age and then there was a poem that he had used in some different contexts I
#
wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why so I took that and I sort of tried to apply
#
the principles of deconstruction to that and then the question that I hadn't I'd made it a
#
kichdi of something but it had a narrative the most important thing was it had a kind of flow
#
and a narrative and when I gave it to my editor immediate editor here she said it's very good
#
so I was stunned that you know when I had pulled off something and it it was published as full two
#
pages in Deccan Herald those days in the Sunday Herald I still have it full two pages I don't
#
think any newspaper would ever you know give space like that today even I have been an editor of big
#
newspapers I don't think I would I would think 10 times before giving that kind of real estate
#
you know to to any writer so they gave me two full pages and my father was on cloud nine that
#
day because you know I mean he he thought his son had arrived and he had bet see as a he was my
#
father was also used to bring out little magazines so he used to bring out a little magazine called
#
Ankana then as a student he had started a magazine called Vimochane and then this so this whole habit
#
of betting on people and writers it was a different kind of gamble was always and I think instinctually
#
was there in him so he thought probably at this time that my son's the batter I put on my son has
#
worked so he's actually sort of pulled off something so because he was damn thrilled because that day
#
morning I think around 7 15 because I remember where we were sitting and what we were doing and
#
having coffee he got a call it was landline and D.R. Nagraj was on the other side my father used
#
to be called Mestre in the sense teacher Mestre I read Sugata's piece has done a great job
#
so my former and and D.R. was a rising star in Canada those days and my father for my father
#
to hear that from D.R. Nagraj was a very very big thing and he said D.R. said this and he would not
#
show it off but then he said good great but don't stop here you know you have to read more your
#
responsibility increases because now the next time you make a mistake people will tear you apart
#
now you are still a young fellow and you are publishing early in Karnataka tomorrow you may
#
have to write for a bigger audience and people will not be as generous and kind so you have to
#
be more thorough you know you have to be pucca with what you write and always make margin notes
#
my father's books are always full of margin notes and pencil and all that and he used to keep notes
#
he used to tell me that you have to do that too so I mean that's a habit that came to me also so I
#
make a lot of notes when I read so that is something that happened at that point of time
#
so that was the big break and then next year Chomsky came to India for the first time
#
so again I wrote this thing and now I had a thing so they said okay go and I and another good thing
#
was Chomsky's PhD student was my linguistics teacher at Hyderabad Central University,
#
Prabhaldas Gupta so I spoke to Prabhaldas Gupta and he said don't worry you come I'll get you
#
access so I went and I met him and then I wrote pieces again then when Edward Said came I did
#
the same thing so I was more on this other side writing about literature philosophy and I mean
#
um big theoreticians people with big ideas in the world and trying to make news out of them and
#
trying to write features on them so that is how I framed my early journalism which was again a very
#
very accidental kind of a thing from literature trying to be an academic and this academic thing
#
I have to tell you this you know when I was going to Hyderabad and because I was so close to Gopal
#
Krishna Hadiga the the great poet in Canada had just won the Kabir Sanman or something like that
#
very big and there was this unhappiness that he had not been given the Gnanpeet and his student
#
or his I mean the person who the next year Anant Purti had been given and there was this huge talk
#
in Canada literary circles that oh Anant Purti had lobbied it should have actually been Gopal
#
Krishna Hadiga because he was the trendsetter in Canada and all that so I went to him and then
#
then he said what do you want I have nothing to give you you've done so much for me he was
#
he was actually a quite a quite a rebel actually you know I mean he had given up his jobs and
#
his poetry was something that had very humane and that connected with me so
#
I did something very stupid so I told him I love this poem of yours
#
it is so philosophical and it's so small can I have it in your own hand
#
I would like to frame it so he said okay get me a paper and get me a pen which with good ink
#
or whatever so I took a sketch pen and a big poster kind of A3 kind of sheet and went and
#
gave it to him and the next day he had kept two copies there I did not realize till that point
#
he had had a stroke and he could not write and this man did not want to deny me that I still
#
keep it in my study it's the most precious thing that I have of a great Kannada writer having
#
written this poem for me and he gave me two and he said see this this too much of my hand is shaken
#
a lot here I could not write properly so when it stabilized a little I've written another one I kept
#
both and I had tears in my eyes and then he said Sugata you're going to Hyderabad you're going to
#
Hyderabad you're going to a very good university those days I think it was only JNU and HCU were
#
the only two central universities said you're going to a good place and when you come back
#
you know people should stand up and say call you professor Sugata and you know they should
#
you know respect you so you should I want you to do well of course I mean by the time I came back
#
he was gone so so that was the kind of academic dream that my father put into me Adiga put into
#
me my mother of course was dreaming of something else but then this is the kind of intellectual
#
environment so I think I'll stop there and then probably wait for you to ask me the next thing
#
yeah yeah the thank you for these remarkably rich recollections I have like 15 20 things to double
#
down on I'll begin with this when you know when I first recorded with Ram Guha like this time I
#
recorded my fifth episode with him but when I first recorded with him I think it would have been
#
in 2018 or so I forget the year we did a couple of episodes on Gandhi and I think when we recorded
#
the second of them he said you want to come with me in the evening and I'll be you know Rajmohan
#
Gandhi's book on South India is being launched and I'll be chatting with him and I said sure I'll
#
come so in the evening I went and Ram and Rajmohan were having a chat and it was like Shahrukh Khan
#
and Amitabh Bachchan would have a chat in Bombay it was that kind of crowd like I was blown away
#
there was like standing room only it was completely packed absolute pin drop silence
#
when they were speaking incredible engagement from the audience when the audience questions
#
came about and I thought to myself that my god if you had this in Mumbai you would have like four
#
people and a dog show up right and not a dog because you don't allow dogs indoors but it would
#
be like that and again and that was kind of my first exposure to sort of seeing this environment
#
in Bangalore and subsequently I have come here I like to tell people that you know Church Street
#
is my favorite street in the whole world because all these bookshops including Blossoms and all
#
that you know I remember once when I was recording with Ram I told him that when I was leaving after
#
the recording he said where are you going I said I'm going to the best book store in the
#
world it's Blossoms he said you fool it is not even the best bookstore in on Church Street
#
right and he meant Bookworm and I'm kind of kidding and exaggerating but in fact this time
#
when I came he said have you visited the two best bookstores on Church Street but I want to then
#
ask you about this sort of intellectual culture this respect for the intellect like you spoke
#
about Harold giving you two pages for a piece on Darida I can't imagine a Mumbai newspaper doing
#
that or you know I'm not sure maybe in Calcutta they would but I don't think that would happen
#
in Delhi either you know so on the one hand it's pretty obvious that you were kind of lucky to be
#
born into a family of the sort you were born into with a father like that and therefore all his
#
friends circle and all that but it's you know Bangalore itself seems to have some of that so
#
tell me a little bit about you know am I over reading am I overthinking the intellectual
#
culture of this place or you know has it always been this way for you and does it create a kind
#
of a vicious virtuous cycle that once you have a culture like this it perpetuates itself younger
#
people get drawn to it and it grows and in some other place where they might be similarly smart
#
and intelligent people you don't have an ecosystem to begin with so no one gravitates towards it and
#
that becomes a vicious circle so thank you Amit yeah that's a very interesting question because
#
you spoke about Ram Gohar and Rajmohan Gandhi's meeting see the one thing we need to realize is
#
Bangalore has many such circles and you know there's not one but many and you're obviously
#
referring to a English kind of an environment but there are many such Kannada environments
#
and there are a lot of infighting between those things so it makes it far more interesting
#
so at you know I mean the 70s or the 80s or the 90s or even in the early 2000s you know I mean
#
if you went to the senate hall of the Bangalore University and there used to be these debates and
#
people used to come prepared to tear somebody down you know I mean I still remember there was
#
this some presentation on post-colonial theory or some eliot or something was happening you know
#
I mean I forget what it was but then Anant Moti was there in the audience and that used to be
#
common you know I mean people used to come even if they are not speakers they would come they would
#
sit down and they would raise questions and one of the speakers said you won't even read the text why
#
are you asking questions ask reading the blurb you know I mean that kind of combative thing you
#
know you were exposed to that even as a young boy of in my ninth class D.R. Nagaraj actually
#
sort of pulled down I mean of course pulled down this is in the seminar hall you know he sort of
#
you know accused another literary critic who was very close to our family of course I called him
#
uncle and unfairly and so there was a three-day seminar on Adiga or something you know when I
#
forget what it is it was at the MES college that much I remember and a lot of small little magazines
#
record have recorded that episode so there I mean I mean I was so disturbed I came back and I read
#
the original essay and I thought that D.R. had completely misrepresented that whole thing so the
#
next day morning I asked the chair who was presiding over that session and I said I have
#
to sort of you know speak for two minutes I want to make a submission on what happened yesterday
#
and this was extremely unfair because he was attacking him because D.R. those days was a
#
Marxist whatever thing this man was more central and centrist and whatever so there was this kind
#
of ideological thing happening I didn't even realize all that you know I mean I just wanted
#
to defend someone whom I knew so I went promptly read up and I found that this man had misrepresented
#
so I went up and I just said that this is what he quoted that is not there in the essay this is what
#
he said that's also wrong and this is the third thing so I just wanted to it was kind of fact
#
checking of course the phrase fact checking wasn't prevalent then you know I was just trying to
#
counter so in the audience was this great man called his mentor of Girish Karnad who rewrote
#
his plays initially helped him write his play as well he was from Dharwad he was an English
#
professor who had taught in Gujarat and he had come back and retired there his name is not coming
#
and he'll come back so he was there in the audience and there was there was another great
#
writer so the moment I came down they just patted my back and they said taming of the shrew
#
things like that so there were several such things and in Karnataka if you
#
just go a little beyond Bangalore see Bangalore of course Gandhi Bazaar was one hub so I mean we
#
don't even consider this side this side this was all later when crosswords and other big you know
#
I mean bookshops came up that they started holding discussions all that for us this doesn't did not
#
exist there was a iron wall between old Bangalore and Cantonment Bangalore so this was Kant so we
#
did not know the koshis you know we used to come to koshis because my great my maternal grandfather
#
was a great fan of the chicken patties there so he used to bring us there but then otherwise you
#
know this was a different world for us we didn't consider this part of Bangalore so for us it was
#
Basangudi one big hub then Gandhi Bazaar was a great thing then Jainagar, Maleshwaram so there
#
were different hubs you know and different kinds of people congregated there and they fought and
#
they you know had a drink at the end of the day and then they just left so there was this great
#
Kannada critic called Keeram Nagaraj and he was you know I mean he had he would he was great on
#
bendre and he was great on all the old Kannada writers like Kumar Avyas and all that and we
#
learnt a lot of poetry from him and he would sort of you know and he enjoyed his drink so he would
#
come a little inebriated and you know create ruckus in seminar halls and that was a great
#
thing for youngsters like us okay okay Keeram is going to just you know screw this person today
#
let's listen or he would you know get drunk and get very upset with people writing songs for the
#
cassette industry in Kannada let's say you write a song for I mean it was canonical of course you
#
know I mean now I understand that this is there's a kind of you know I mean canonical structure
#
there there's a hierarchy which is not correct and should not be looked at that way it is all
#
something that came later but at that point he would say you write you were born you know in
#
Karnataka where Narsim Swami wrote where a Pampa wrote where a Kumar and you write this dirty song
#
I will tear it apart and that fellow would have taught him for five years or six years in the
#
university and he would just and everybody would take it in in their stride because he was such a
#
genius and a marvelous character and those characters you know I mean were allowed today
#
everything is you cannot have such characters you know I mean today you only the such characters
#
are there only in the right wing thing where they come and disrupt but here you had liberal
#
characters who would come and confront you on on your reading of poetry and my reading of poetry
#
so in fact the one phrase that he taught me he had read Harold Bloom or something and he told
#
me Sugata it's okay you completely misread a poem no problem it's called the map of misreading
#
he said I think it was an essay by Harold Bloom or I mean was it Leveson I forget but then he came
#
he was the first who told me that you don't worry you misread everything that is also very important
#
and it's that misreading actually leads you to a different kind of reading so he was a very
#
insightful man and one day when I was at the Hyderabad Central University there was a knock
#
on my room and I open it I see Kiram he has come and he said sir you didn't even tell me he said
#
no I told your father you must have forgotten to write a letter to you so then I said sir why have
#
you come he said no first buy me coffee I heard that there is a nice coffee thing there let's go
#
so we I bought him coffee and he said no I have come here looking for a book by Alfred B. Lord
#
it's called the singer of tales this is establishes conclusively it's like he is Alfred B. Lord was
#
Milton Parry and all these were one group of people looking at classical literature and it
#
establishes that Homer's thing was a was part of the oral culture it is not a written classic
#
so I want to look at it I wanted to read that book that book I heard there's one copy in your
#
central university library it's not even available in JNU so can you get me that I'll photocopy leave
#
by the evening bus my god so he had come there to just pick up that book then I was so happy
#
and I had heard a new name of an author and I wanted to read it and then for me it gave me a
#
new leg up right I could go to the classroom and they say what are you talking about Odysseus or
#
Homer or Iliad you know I mean this is all part of the oral culture it all got stringed up together
#
and then at some point in history it got written it got published and then you now think it was a
#
written work there is no authorship to that see Barth had argued about authorship so much about
#
work and text and he was making a distinction between all of that so here I had this new let
#
thing to go and say that come on you know I mean what are you talking you know so Keeram
#
he used to be called Keeram so we used to pun on the word rum because he used to always be consumed
#
by old monk right so so so he was so passionate about his poetry and his house was full of you
#
know I mean papers and you know things thrown around and there was I mean I still remember
#
reading the bathroom door open seeing him in bathroom door open he's sitting on the
#
commode and reading you know Pampabharata Deepika which is an introduction to Pampabharata
#
and you know that was the kind of image that he gave so there were a lot of such characters
#
in in Bangalore and Bangalore University was a great place it allowed it assembled a lot of
#
good people there was Kevin Narayan was a great theoretician there was Keeram who was a genius
#
and who never wrote a word but you know I mean was in Kannada we call it thondi oral you know I mean
#
critic so he was there there was G.S. Shurudrappa who became the poet laureate and he was the head
#
of the department he was keeping all these people together there was Siddhalingaya who passed away
#
with the Dalit writer who had been brought in and there was Bhargur Ramchandra who was another stream
#
of Kannada consciousness so there were different kinds of people they were all in the same
#
department Kannada literature department and they were all looking in different directions they would
#
come together to fight you know come together for some social whatever thing and then you know
#
explode these ideas on you you know and just throw it at you so that was the environment in Bangalore
#
but if you stepped out of Bangalore there was Mysore again which was a great hub so you had
#
the great man Kuvempu sitting there you you went to Bangalore the coast you had Karan sitting there
#
and you went to Dharwad you had the great Bendre sitting there I don't know if you've I mean for
#
for a non-Kannada reader you should read the just is those two pages of Dom Moraes's introduction
#
on I mean Bendre where he says and this man this is a journey through Karnataka a book that
#
was commissioned by the government of Karnataka and Devaraj Ras was the chief minister in that
#
he says this man goes there to meet a great poet who's won the Gnanpeet and all that and he speaks
#
to him only physics and numbers he's there with Leela Naidu his wife interviewing this great man
#
and he confounds him you know confuses him completely he's speaking only numbers asking
#
for his date of birth and telling giving him some formulation and he does not discuss poetry at the
#
end of the day so there was that person and then there again these kind of fights were common there
#
were three or four streets were one literary thought another three or four streets another
#
so there was Shamba Joshi one of the finest minds that Karnataka and Kannada has seen was there and
#
who would not get along with this man and then there was Kalburgi who was shot down because he
#
was not he was not seen as in in their league but then he was very important of course and then
#
there was if you came to Hubli and I mean there were many more such things and then there is
#
there is Gokak of course VK Gokak was a very important figure who became the who won the
#
Gnanpeet of course but also became the chairman of the Central Sahitya Academy and he was he had
#
gone to Cambridge and he was from the time of Karnad and Karnad studied there if you
#
so that was another intellectual hub but then that was the Bombay Karnataka region then there
#
was the Hyderabad Karnataka region which was always you know presented this victimhood that
#
we have been neglected our writing has been neglected so there were streams of Sufism and
#
Adil Chahi literature and all of that getting you know mixed up there and it it was producing
#
wonderful stuff so that was there so Karnataka was full of such groups literary groups and
#
intellectual groups and cultural groups scattered across Karnataka in fact there's a very interesting
#
book in Kannada called Gelayara Gumpu by Dabakul Kanni it speaks about the alliance between you
#
know these relationship between these friends in Darwad and how they sort of built a literary
#
culture there and of course there was Manohara Granthamala the publisher of A.K. Ramanujan and
#
Karnad and Ananthamurthy and they had their atta there and that was a small little bookshop
#
it's still there and and these people would get that was another group so these were different
#
lobbies and Chandrashekhar Patil was there he was a great polemicist he had studied literature at
#
Leeds and come back and become a hardcore Kannada person and wrote great absurd plays in Kannada
#
took on Lankesh and you know I mean marvelous poetry he wrote and then he used to when he came
#
from when he shifted from Darwad to Bangalore he used to say I've come to Lobby Nagara this is a
#
place of lobby you so you come and lobby here actually Bangalore has nothing you know that kind
#
of a thing Gulabi Nagara Lobby Nagara you know that kind of a pun used to used I mean Garden City
#
right Gulabi Nagara and things like that so he was there so there were different groups you know
#
across Karnataka so all these groups played different kinds of roles and put different
#
kinds of pressures and brought in different kinds of ideas during the unification of Karnataka
#
itself so they all the all you can trace all of this back to the unification movement then there
#
was of course Sriranga Shashi Deshpande's father the giant Kannada writer you know I mean for us
#
Shashi Deshpande is of course known to the English world for us Sriranga is more important
#
similarly Gauri is known to the world outside now for very unfortunate reasons but then it
#
was Lankesh who is more important for us so I mean there is Adiga who is more important than
#
an Ananthamurthy known to the western world of course Ramanujan is equally respected that's a
#
very strange thing because Ramanujan had his firm footing in Kannada he wrote extraordinarily he did
#
extraordinarily good work in Kannada and then Tamil and then it was a genuine trilingual
#
English and all of that so there were there were these kinds of very interesting fights and
#
intellectual disagreements and things that were happening in Karnataka and being my father's son
#
I was a witness to all of this so this this thing that you mentioned about Ram Gohar and Rajmohan
#
Gandhi was a was something that was taking off in Bangalore which was a literary culture in English
#
so that came to dominate in a different way through translations and others and now it's a very sad
#
thing that you don't see those arguments anymore literally I wrote a piece it's it's part of my
#
first book where I spoke of the death of little magazines and I spoke about how little magazines
#
had just died in Kannada and why it had happened so why it so happened and that you know I mean they
#
had lost team and they had to shut shop and how they were run in fact I I was I I quote if I had
#
I quote if I remember correctly and please pardon me if I'm wrong I quote from the obituary that was
#
written in the Boston Globe for Plymouth the person who had started the Paris review he had
#
passed away I think around 2004 I mean I don't remember the date again I may be wrong so there
#
the little magazines were described as showcases of you know I mean I forget the phrase also
#
I mean it was beautifully described where where where the the kind of fragile economic environment
#
in which they always ran but had great amounts of passion and all of that so that is sort of
#
gone now even your cultural heroes are different now in Karnataka and Bangalore your cultural
#
heroes are people who have by default have become people who have were philanthropists
#
who have made money who have sort of you know I mean led IT industries so there are no longer
#
people you know I mean Akiram cannot be a cultural hero and Adiga is nobody's cultural hero
#
a Kuvempu I mean a stalwart I think he would have made any language feel great you know I mean he
#
was I mean he was a remarkable mind he is I mean lost in some sense but I don't want to say lost
#
because they'll all be recovered in different ways and I don't want to have this nostalgic kind
#
of thing I don't want to live in the past and say that was great and today is bad but this is these
#
are trends and phases that we are seeing where your heroes are dead you don't have heroes like
#
you had then you know where you said okay this is this is a character this has to be nurtured
#
it's straight out of a novel so he probably will get into my novel you know you looked at it in a
#
very fascinating you didn't judge there was a narrative that was always running in your head
#
so you did not stop to judge so that was something that is something that I miss in Bangalore today
#
today it's more corporatized even the book event is very corporatized even you know I mean I mean
#
I have seen what has happened with my own book you know I mean you have to do it you know I mean
#
it's a very kind of it's not organic you know people don't come and fight in the middle of
#
the street and say you have written nonsense you know and I would have loved that that doesn't
#
happen you know and very carefully crafted WhatsApp messages that come to you and they say oh it's
#
it's good but you know I mean but this you're missing this oh I mean there was no such kind of
#
holding back because there was people understood each other and people knew that at the end of the
#
day you're not going to be an enemy of that person you can have a lifelong grudge and
#
that he said this but then you would always go back to it was a small culture you were
#
interdependent and it was a feeling of community I think that is the word there was a sense of
#
community and running a little magazine I write in that piece was like a cottage industry see my
#
father used to edit he used to proofread but the book post wrap that would go around it was used
#
to be done by my mother she would put the Gandhi stamp a one rupee stamp or whatever at the edge
#
and then they would both go you know taking this to the post office and mail it so that is that
#
used to be a bimonthly activity that I was witness to as a child it started in 79 and
#
shut shop in I think 91 91 is very significant Indian economy got liberalized opened up at that
#
time so so that is that was the kind of and people did not worry about you know they're losing money
#
or you know I mean oh this is an investment gone bad or this is an investment that will get you
#
nothing now you did it you know you had a higher purpose culture or this whole linguistic environment
#
and I mean you also need a small group which pushes you to do that you have to be supported
#
in different ways you have to be told that you know I mean this is good this is great this is
#
something which so I think everybody lost that at some point that that disconnect started happening
#
of course it'll all get connected back in different ways but then that did that that disruption did
#
happen in with with huge money with huge real estate booms in Bangalore and now we know what
#
Kannada professors do in Kannada Karnataka's universities you know they all do side businesses
#
you know of different kinds I don't think there is serious kind of work that is happening and
#
at least you know I mean I mean I'm not really aware but of course there are pockets there are
#
islands of good work there are there's still a lot of hope and you will reconstruct all of that in a
#
in a different context at a later point is what I feel I think you're comparing what is there
#
now to the past you know while I compare it to the present in other places and I'm like saying wow
#
what a rich culture and even though I can only see one tiny part of it the English elite kind of
#
part of it so you know before I go back to some of the other questions I you know have planned
#
there's a slightly provocative question and this starts with like a slight anecdote so you know
#
there's there's a guy in Bangalore his name is Shakeel I've never I haven't met him yet
#
and he's a huge fan he's been a huge fan of the scene on the unseen been writing to me for years
#
listens to every episode take takes notes did my writing course so for a while he was insistent
#
that he wants to send me a gift and I was like that no boss it's okay you don't need to send me
#
a gift and he said that no no let me send it to you or I'll have to give it to you when you come
#
to Bangalore he's he's in Bangalore and it's very heavy I don't know how you'll manage so give me
#
your postal address I will send it to you so finally I relented and said okay let's do it so
#
then two weeks later this big carton comes right and I open the carton and it's full of books in
#
Kannada right by one guy I've forgotten the name now so please forgive me but I think it's a poet
#
but it's it's essays and poems and all of that by so and I don't know Kannada right so I asked him
#
that you know what's the deal so he said no Amit your work means a lot to me and this other person
#
his work means even more to me and I wanted to introduce you to his work but there aren't
#
translations and I'm hoping that you will learn Kannada and read his books now it is a sad reality
#
of our modern times that I may not do that but having said that while I have you know while we
#
moved house I gave away a lot of my other books because there wasn't space I've kept the carton
#
because the sentiment means something to me right but why I'm bringing it up here is that it shows
#
that it shows a deep passion for language and literature right and it it strikes me as something
#
that I would expect more from someone in the south of India whether it is Karnataka or Tamil Nadu or
#
whatever than someone in the north I can't imagine and I don't mean to be harsh but just in probabilistic
#
terms it is far less likely that someone from a patna or wherever is going to sort of an apologies
#
to all patna heights I think I just got myself into trouble and and clearly from what we just
#
discussed about the deep cultural sort of little neighborhoods all over Karnataka and all of that
#
there is this engagement with culture with language with the arts in south India that is not so much
#
there among the Amits as it were as twitter people would say because Amit has become a sort of a
#
shorthand for north Indian buffoons and sadly I have to bear that name so this is therefore a
#
provocative question it just struck me we have many more interesting things to talk about but
#
I just wonder that don't people like you sometimes look at what is happening in the rest of the
#
country and you're like why the hell have we been buffeted together with these you know uncouth
#
morons you know and it's incredible you know up there they have no idea of south India they think
#
that you know Hindi should be natural language and we have tolerated you and whatever and all
#
of that shit and they have that kind of attitude right and and they are of course you know multiplying
#
like rabbits while south India is chilling listening to good music watching good plays and which is not
#
to say there aren't outliers in the north as well but if I was in the south I would be like to hell
#
with this shit and a question that I've asked my guests in recent episodes also is that we often
#
take the status quo for granted in such a way that it seems like it is solidified it is granite
#
and to me one of those concepts is nation states lines on a map right where you look at the current
#
nation state a lot of it is happenstance right to me like a delhi has much more in common with
#
Lahore in a good way than it does with Chennai for example you know a few years later we'll have
#
the delimitation problem coming up which can also be sort of something that and I can totally and
#
friends of mine joke about this that we should have the republic of south India and blah blah
#
so yeah so it's just it's not even a question per se it's just a provocative thought but I wonder
#
if you feel this way sometimes and that you know I mean I come to Bangalore it feels like a different
#
country in a sense I mean it's the same country and I love the whole country but you know what
#
are your thoughts it's very interesting that you say this but then I mean I've also been
#
fairly acquainted with say through my father as well as later too with the kind of
#
Lucknowi kind of literary environment or I we spoke about the Bengali literary environment you
#
know people are very very passionate my father had great linkages with writers in Bengal and
#
Nabilita Shandev you know I mean there's he he there's a joint kind of travelogue that he
#
writes with us I mean he's his part of the travel he's a character in that travelogue where they go
#
to meet this lady and this great grand lady of Bengal and they don't know what to call her they
#
come out of this thing and they call her lady Kiram the Kiram that I was referring to because
#
she's so passionate about poetry and she's spoken to them so much about that so for me you know I
#
don't know if it is a problem with me but I was shown only these things the good things my father
#
had a good relationship with Bisham Sahani so we still have a lot of letters exchanged between the
#
two of them and I have a copy of tamas which is signed for him and then he would so meticulously
#
inquire after my grandmother's health and stuff like that you know I mean so so there was always
#
these Kartar Singh Duggal is another name so Bengal Lucknowi even in Delhi if you mention the
#
partition thing and then and then and then in Delhi I had we had rather the family had a Sharda
#
Prasad who mentored me you know I mean and Sharda Prasad was such a cultured man who would
#
host Malik Arjun Mansur and Shivram Karan and all these people who were dissenting against Indira
#
Gandhi's emergency at his house you know and he was still part of the PMO so it was that contradiction
#
he never thought that you know I mean he was compromised you know anything like that
#
because Karan used to stay with this man and Karan he has translated Karan's book you know
#
the autobiography and has a couple of novels and all of that and Sharda Prasad is extremely good
#
and so we were always painted this I don't know if my father painted these romantic pictures for us
#
so there was this problem until and unless I started writing seriously on say federalism or
#
finance commissions and her GST and looking at the federal issues between the south and
#
the center and how how the whole centralization problem operates and that's I've been writing
#
a lot about it in my columns in the times these days on that so I now feel that you know I mean
#
feel more strongly that we are a union of states and there's less common but even having said that
#
and I think I should also sort of add this caveat which is see you had a Andhra Pradesh right a
#
united Andhra Pradesh and it was the one of the first linguistic states that was created after
#
Poteeshwar Ramlu started protesting and he has he dies and all that but look at what happened with
#
Andhra Pradesh there was a cultural kind of breakage so the Telangana culture was different and the
#
Andhra culture was different and when we were growing up you know when there was this pride
#
injected about Canada because Canada had got so many Nanpeets so we thought that Telugu was a
#
lesser thing or Tamil was a lesser thing but that was not the case but then you know I mean you
#
always sort of you were you were you were allowed to go on a certain highway or a certain path and
#
you only saw these kind of markers so I may not be a fair judge of you know what what happens in a
#
Patna thing or other places because I was not exposed to that but my political writing later
#
took me to you know cover elections and all that then I saw that these places were you know what's
#
wrong with these places why aren't they developed if you go to Hassan I write about it in 2009 much
#
much before I even dreamt of writing a book on Deve Gowda that it's an island of some kind of a
#
great development because Deve Gowda had everything going in that thing you know every scheme
#
every central scheme the highways the roads you know I mean fantastic development in that place
#
but if you go to say Raibareli or Annameti you know you've you feel like crying as to what is
#
it that these people have done why is it that they have been showered with so much of affection by
#
these people continuously you go to a fill bit where Nehru used to contest his election you know
#
everything looks completely dilapidated and dismantled and nothing seems to be working you
#
know I mean but in Karnataka that was when I started making that it was not cultural see
#
culturally you still got you you you sort of entered into something through a text or through
#
a person or through a song right so Urdu for example I was so fascinated by Urdu at some point
#
I wanted to learn to write and read Urdu but it never happened but then all my Urdu came through
#
the Hindi films so these 60s and the 70s and the great lyricists and I was obsessed with Hindi film
#
music and now I have Mr. Chiranjeev Singh you know whom I call up was a great bureaucrat who
#
served the state a Punjabi extremely cultured India's ambassador to UNESCO at one point
#
and I just call him up and I ask him sir why don't you explain this to me he can
#
I ask him about Bengali poetry I ask him what Urdu poetry I ask him about Punjabi poetry he
#
himself writes Punjabi poetry and he's so kind to explain all of that to me so I mean these things
#
were happening so you you enter through text and there is this politics which you enter through
#
experience and you're you know you're sort of seeing it there happen so these two were different
#
worlds for me when I was shocked when I started writing for outlook say on on these states and
#
all that and and but this this cultural thing never came up to me because I thought that that
#
is still relevant that is still sort of there subsumed subterranean and it does not manifest
#
itself in popular culture the way we need to but but we should also recognize that Hindi films
#
probably sort of finished off all of this right because you know it was such a dominant thing in
#
the north that it finished everything but in Kannada or Telugu or Tamil I think there was still a bit
#
of literary export into into films one of the great literary influences my father had was his
#
uncle who was a bank manager and he was a great literary influence because he was the first reader
#
or one of Karnataka's great Kannada's great novelists Tarasu Tarasu Barao and Tarasu Barao
#
wrote historical novels size which I mean huge novels and many of those were made into movies
#
for Rajkumar right so so there was a lot of this that we were exposed to and not exposed to the
#
other side but I became a very serious political writer only after I think uh went to Hindustan
#
times because I had it was by force that I had to look at different kind of material and even there
#
you know you when I when I went to Jaipur to be an editor I used to go and create my own little
#
you know I mean comfort zone of culture and literature with the writers there and with
#
oral historians and and think that that is there that is the soul of that place and this is there
#
of course there is Gaylord there is Bhairav Singh Shaqawat whom you have to deal with for your
#
but then you all also bought the experience you also took the experience of your literary and
#
cultural thing there and started looking at them as characters and so Bhairav Singh Shaqawat was to
#
used to be very fond of me used to be very nice to me in fact you know I mean even before he became
#
the vice president of India he used to lock up the latch up the door and used to give me a single
#
small peg of black label or whatever whiskey I mean I've had whiskey with Bhairav Singh Shaqawat
#
and the age difference must have been you know me say 50 60 years you know you don't know so he was
#
very very great and he liked me because I came from again very interesting he liked me because
#
I came from Karnataka he liked me because I was somewhat related to Devraj Aras and Devraj Aras
#
whom he saw as a great administrator statesman and all that and a person who had revolutionized
#
you know political thinking and all of that so there were lots of these connections so then
#
he was nice and then you sort of started looking at these people for what they were but then there
#
was other there was politics of course so that made my copy interesting so I used to sort of bring in
#
this little insight about the man who newspapers would be rubbishing as you know we know he's sold
#
out or whatever this is but then there was this little thing about the man which would sort of
#
come into my copy which would sort of give my copy a bit of a extra sparkle which made my copies more
#
humane and I used to sort of look at them not to judge them I used to look at them to sort of
#
understand them and that's something that I got from my very early literary training and my father
#
was someone like that who would listen even to this day he's mythologized you know in Kanada
#
memoirs and a lot of people have written now about how they used to come sit in front of him talk for
#
hours he would not just speak anything and then they would just leave that's it and they would
#
feel happy after that so that was the kind of person my father was I am not so reticent as him
#
you know I'm I was my mother used to call me you know punning or the word Churchill Churchill in
#
church in Canada is debating so she would say you're a Churchill so you always you know you know get
#
into an argument about something or the other so but my father was not like that but that but that
#
that you quietly absorbed that and that came into my political writing also which did not make me
#
did not sort of make me feel that I was doing something else completely divorced from my cultural
#
reading or literary reading or whatever because when I I took all of that into my political thing
#
so when I sat with these big people and I still remember Shekhar were telling me he came back from
#
Delhi that evening and then he telephoned he said and then I went and had good food and he spoke
#
about his son-in-law and some unhappiness and all that in the family and then he said you know what
#
I did today I went and had lunch with Advani so I said why did you do that he said no I want to sort
#
of make a watch by very alert about it you know watch by is ignoring me so I just want want him
#
to know that I've had lunch with Advani and then I said were you successful he said huh by the time
#
I was leaving I got a call so watch by called me he said what are you doing what were you doing
#
there why are you doing this to me come let's have a chat so then they had broached the issue of
#
becoming he becoming the vice president so so I mean he used to he used to be such a he used to
#
just disarm you by sharing things which you thought was was you know I mean high intrigue
#
or whatever he said this is human see he would he would make watch by was human Advani was human
#
and shekawat was human and then they would sort of you know that those jealousies or those kind of
#
dynamics between them he would sort of share it in a very interesting fashion and then he said I
#
just had to go to Advani's house for lunch to sort of get the antenna up there and watch by his house
#
and watch by came to know obviously so he called me and then of course we broached this whole thing
#
so I may be the vice president of India so this was how he revealed to me that he would he may
#
be the vice president of India so I was in Jaipur at that time so so political writing too for me
#
was an extension of my cultural understanding of things I mean it was a it was a it was very
#
important for me not to look at it as data so that is the reason why I keep sort of saying that you
#
know people who really don't want to sort of speak about politics hide behind data because
#
good political writing for me of course data is there it's very very important it's it's extremely
#
important to read it very carefully but then it's both a mix of emotion and reason because politics
#
is full of emotion it is not reason alone you cannot sort of say why they were gonna did this
#
or did not do this or why he goes to his temple so often I mean why did you know in shekavat sort of
#
do this so I mean this is something that I have not been able to sort of effectively pass on to
#
to say the generation after me to tell them that see don't yeah your your your graphs and your
#
data is all very important but that does not say much about the person but if you want to write
#
about the person you have to spend time with him look at him a little with with critical sympathy
#
is is a phrase that my other guru the great guru who who changed me after I went to England was
#
Jeremy Seabrook was the one who used it first and he has used it for my book as well which makes me
#
very proud so so critical sympathy you know you can you can be critical you know because all these
#
seminars that and the conferences that I used to go where people used to you know I mean tear each
#
other apart and then be having a whiskey at the end of the day or a ram at the end of the day
#
it was all natural to me I mean for me it did not sort of make me look at this this thing as a black
#
and white thing or a confrontationalist thing yes it's like as part of a culture it is a culture so
#
when politicians you know I mean just shoot away in the on the floor of the house you know call
#
names and then they're having a nice chat it does not surprise me because you know I mean it's
#
I've seen that happen elsewhere in a different setting so I mean they're human beings you know
#
I mean primarily I think we don't look at our politicians as human beings we seem to look at
#
them as power you know filled with power some instruments of power which which they are not
#
actually they are very humane they can be very humane they can be very cruel and that cruelty is
#
also part of you know I mean you'll observe that cruelty much more only if you are willing to go
#
beyond your data and sort of look at them interestingly so so for me it is I mean the
#
silos that you spoke about does not really operate in in those ways it's it's a one continuous thing
#
for me I take this with me there so therefore I see that there and then when I don't see that there
#
I try to reason it out in a completely different way so so but but this whole republic thing of
#
south as a that south should secede kind of a thing I don't want to create a controversy but
#
but you know I mean India is a union of states what Rahul Gandhi said was correct in the SM
#
and in the parliament I wrote a column on that yeah you've you mean trying to create you know
#
manufacture a nation with so much of diversity and so much of you know I mean dissonance and
#
whatever it's it's it's a very false idea right you cannot you cannot you know in any it's
#
inconceivable to sort of think that everything is flat you know to say one nation to say one
#
you know religion one language it's it's it's utmost stupidity to sort of speak of that and if
#
somebody is trying to do that they're actually should be you know I mean they're they're actually
#
trying to break up this nation you know they're accusing others of breaking up this nation
#
actually the ones who speak of oneness are the ones who are to be charged with the the severest
#
of sedition you know laws because they are the ones who are actually trying to break this whole
#
thing up because if you don't allow this nation to exist the way it has been knit now loosely
#
for whatever you know in some destiny of this nation you know and has put it together in this
#
form if you want to retain it if you're serious about retaining this this whole nation in this
#
form and it's in the same contours that it is in now I don't think you can impose I mean anything
#
on this nation forget about doing it in the south you can't do it even in Kashmir you can't do it
#
in Bengal you can't do it you've seen reaction to the whole thing now this whole federal argument
#
is coming back I'm very happy it's coming back because in 2018 I was a loner when I used to
#
speak about it even Stalin was not back in power Stalin was not interested to listen to these
#
arguments so federalism argument is coming back for me cultural federalism is more important
#
than political federalism I think they have to move a step further so the tamils try to make
#
the Dravidian thing their cause but you know I mean if they are to argue for the Dravidian
#
cause they have to actually be more inclusive they have to look at Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka,
#
Kerala far more inclusively so the Tamil exclusive idea is also not going to serve them well which
#
they don't seem to realize at this point of time because you know the Dravidian thing has been
#
completely captured I mean is seen as a kind of their idea their thing their civil if it's a
#
civilizational thing it can't be just yours so if you are using that to confront the north if you
#
are using your the alternate epics that you have to confront the north and try to say that we are
#
a different country I mean they're fascinating I don't know Amit if you have had this chance to see
#
these fascinating debates in in Rajasabha in the 60s when Anna Durai was a Rajasabha member my
#
brilliant speeches on this whole thing and you could speak about you know breaking away from
#
India until 65 I think this whole idea was different so so brilliant speeches and he makes
#
a cultural argument and even if you look at forget Rajasabha even if you look at the assembly
#
Karnataka unification debates it's fascinating A. H. Ram his name was Ramchandra Rao I think
#
he's Deva Gowda's mentor in Hassan he was the education minister he has a three hour
#
speech where he speaks about cultural differences and why Mysore should not integrate with the rest
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of Kannada is this on youtube or something no it's you know it is from the 50s yeah so it can't be
#
there it's there is a it's an official record of the Karnataka legislature assembly it was
#
those days it used to be called the Mysore legislature assembly you had you renamed only
#
in 73 so it became Karnataka in 73 so you those debates are fascinating and you are not you don't
#
want there was a huge resistance to Mysore integrating with rest of Karnataka because they
#
were impoverished areas they were this would it would bring down the GDP of Mysore right so they
#
didn't want that and as a result culturally Mysore dominated the rest of Karnataka culturally
#
political power has shifted but culturally because the standard dialect that you use in
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Kannada today is a dialect that was spoken in Mysore so that became the standard thing that
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became your textbook language so the others who sacrificed because they were all fringes of
#
other linguistic states they were desperate more than the Mysoreans to become part of Karnataka
#
so they gave up their dual identities they surrendered their Marathi there's their they
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surrendered their Urdu they surrendered their Dakani and Telugu Tamil everything and they became
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part of Karnataka and wanted to be identified with a Kannada state and now you see the kind of you
#
know I mean rumblings that there are that people are not at all happy this this whole thing is
#
this after the Telangana's formation I think it has become even more sharper where people say
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development is one part not giving enough funds for development is one part but the cultural
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differences the if you know the kind of characters in Kannada movies if you I mean since you don't
#
see Kannada movies you may not realize this all the guys who are cooks who play the role of
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characters of cooks or whatever they're all from coastal Karnataka so they're not given the lead
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role then the the jesters and the comedians and all of them speak a certain kind of Hyderabad
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sorry Darwad Hubli Darwad kind of Kannada which is very you know I mean it's it's not very smooth
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it's like the East Godavari Telugu and the Telangana Telugu you know it's very rough edges
#
are more in the Telangana thing they have rough edges they they come across as very very you know
#
I mean it sounds very harsh the language sounds very harsh so but they're not people like that
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they're see it's their expression is like that they've spoken like that for centuries
#
but you know I mean the Mysoreans look at it take a take offense to that kind of a usage in fact I
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was on a train recently to Goa and I was looking at I mean because I I mean I was there was a
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family which was sitting and they were using the word gussa so beautifully in Kannada you know in
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in their Kannada sentence so she that that lady who was you know I mean sitting a family and this
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little kid and she was telling me how this girl gets gussa and she was putting it in Kannada you
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know I mean I mean and then repeatedly I didn't want to make her conscious tell me how it sounded
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I mean even if I don't understand listen this man see I mean you see and I instantly could
#
understand that they had come from the Hyderabad Karnataka region and they had settled in Bangalore
#
and they were going to go for a trip and similarly if you go towards Kolar and KGF and all that
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Telugu you know Telugu is another language but that you know I was very familiar because my
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father was very familiar with Telugu and he studied in Chikbalapur because his aunt was
#
widowed and my grandfather had a I mean transferable job so they kept the children in one place so that
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they could go and study there and all that so he had his Telugu was extremely good he could read
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and write Telugu so if you go to those regions you go to Kolar, Chikbalapur, Chikbalapur is now a
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separate district but was part of undivided Kolar district so if you go there Telugu is
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is a street language if you go to Mangalore you have Tulu, you have Bihari, you have Konkani
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and then you have Kannada so I mean none of the Karnataka's see Karnataka is not a state which
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wears its chauvinism on its sleeves like a Tamil or Malayali whatever thing happens not so much
#
Malayalam but they don't because you know when there are only three or four hardcore Kannada
#
districts rest of them are all bilingual or trilingual areas the street market language
#
is different from your kitchen language the language that you use in your kitchen to converse
#
with your family is your mother tongue or whatever and then you come to the street and you speak
#
say Tulu if you're in Mangalore and then if you're you know into trade and whatever you use Bihari
#
because it's the Muslim traders who use Bihari and then there is the schools and other places
#
set up by Christian missionaries where Konkani is very dominant there is a whole debate as to
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how Konkani should be written in which script because that language doesn't have a script
#
and my wife is a Konkani so that is a fascinating thing so Karnataka is again if you look at forget
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as we spoke the rest of India and the diversity that exists even in the small little state which
#
is the size of a big European country of course there is so much of division and so when I go to
#
Europe and when friends make arguments about Catalonian or Basque or Breton or I understand
#
it completely well and I don't judge them for that and they say what do these fellows know you
#
know they don't know anything Basque has this thing this expression is so beautiful in the past
#
language so that's why that's how I became very very close to my friends in Ireland when I used
#
to work with the Irish Times in Dublin for a very short period so because there was a revival
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happening of the Irish language and I went and made a very controversial statement in a newspaper
#
article that I wrote for the Irish Times and I said all these Yates and Beckett and Joyce all of
#
you all of them you call Irish writers but for us they're English writers because it came through
#
the colonial curriculum and these people whom you celebrate as Irish writers had turned their backs
#
to the Gaelic language or the Celtic culture so why do you celebrate them you know that kind of
#
a very provocative piece which was hugely appreciated because it was the literary editor
#
of Irish Times at that time wonderful lady called Caroline Walsh she sort of drowned
#
herself very sadly a few years ago but she was so appreciative of it and I only later realized she
#
was the daughter of the great Mary Levin the short story writer of Ireland and she had dabbled with
#
those issues and she had was very familiar and when this argument was being made I said she said
#
you just write and I was a I was just 26 27 I think and then they got my photograph my my mug
#
photo for an article first appeared in a European newspaper not in any of the Indian newspapers and
#
they were so happy and then they called me for a radio debate like this and then I just explained
#
my ideas and they were so surprised that I know so much of English literature without realizing
#
that we had we were only exposed to Shakespeare and Beckett and Yates and Joyce all of that so
#
so so I mean I was a small hit you know I mean when I was there with them so Caroline Walsh and
#
they were so welcoming they took you home and they say she was she was so happy with that argument
#
she took me home and her husband was a novelist so she said he has made this argument I'm getting
#
him to write and then she took then there was another person called Paddy Udward who was in
#
the foreign desk and he was very familiar with the Basque thing you know when he was very
#
so he was very interested in this argument and then they got me to write a piece on Rajkumar
#
had been kidnapped by Virapan here and that was a completely they didn't know how to understand the
#
whole thing they said please explain to a European audience as to why a film star is being kidnapped
#
in the first place and why is why is it such a big issue and why is the state shut down because a
#
film star has been kidnapped and why is the state government negotiating why are the state agencies
#
getting involved in this whole thing then I had to tell them that this person called Rajkumar is
#
not an actor he's a cultural icon and he was such a powerful guy that in 1954 I think he's made his
#
debut in Canada and then his the the reunification movement was happening at the same time and you
#
know how they identified the outer reaches of Karnataka wherever his films ran were considered
#
Karnataka wow see it's it's it's great for an actor I mean to get such so so so involved with
#
the you know map map of the state or you know contours of the state and it was just accidental
#
but then it was a great thing to happen so and this Canada that he spoke was the was the standard
#
Canada they said he speaks Canada the best or one should speak Canada like him so he was not very
#
educated in fact he's in all his speeches he says why are you giving me this doctoral degree I am a
#
I am not very educated all that but then to explain all this to a western audience was a
#
fantastic experience for me and then that is when I started thinking about all this also so diversity
#
you go to Europe you go to come to south you look at Karnataka you look at India it's completely
#
foolish and completely idiotic and it's not a sustainable project to speak of this one nation
#
one one religion one language and all that and uh and of course I mean I'll speak to you later
#
about how nationalisms and sub-nationalisms themselves have undergone a transformative
#
kind of a thing so I'll sort of allow you to ask the next question no there's so much to
#
double down and and this whole picture you've painted of our diversity multilingual diversity
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is so beautiful and and the one part I'm going to double down on before I move on is that I agreed
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so much when you spoke about what you would call anti-national in the sense that you know
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it's a cliche on my show to talk about how we contain multitudes and you you've kind of eloquently
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described so many of the multitudes even within a state all the different languages and all
#
and it is absolutely anti-national to then impose upon that this monolithic vision that this is
#
nationalism only this one thing and try to sub I mean in a sense it's it's a murder of cultures
#
when you try to do that it's it's just a crime on humanity so I I couldn't agree more on that now
#
agree more on that now I have a ton of questions for you a ton of things to talk about rather
#
let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll come back and do that
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have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it
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well I'd love to help you since April 2020 I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course
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clear writing that's india uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require
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god-given talent just the willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do
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to refine your skills I can help you welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with
#
Sugata Srinivasaraju about his rich life as it turns out I mean I thought we might talk about
#
his book with Deva Gowda and maybe we'll get to it at some point and maybe we won't because I'm
#
thoroughly enjoying this conversation and this trip you're taking me you know through your life
#
and through your times and all of that my next question actually comes out of something two of
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the guests I've recorded with earlier this week I've mentioned and one Ram Guha was talking about
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this classic essay he wrote the death of the bilingual intellectual where he lamented that
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once upon a time there used to be bilingual intellectuals and now they're not and it's a
#
loss and Akar Patel when I mentioned to him that I'd be chatting with you he said oh Sugata is a
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true bilingual person right and and that's actually something that I envy and feel as a loss in the
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sense that I am multilingual in the sense I can speak and understand multiple Indian languages
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but there is only one language really in which I consume art and in which I can express myself
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which of course is English which I'll consider an Indian language but it is just one language
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and I feel that loss more and more when I speak to people like you or Mrinal Pandey or Sarah Rai or
#
others who've been on the show and they talk about and there's so much richness all around me
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which I don't have a means to experience and and when you were talking about sort of growing up
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and being bilingual and translating from English to Kannada and trying to translate the other way
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and so on and so forth one of the things that struck me and I did an episode on translation
#
with Arunawa Sinha and I couldn't agree more and he was of the same view that translation in a sense
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is impossible every language is so fundamentally different that you know it's almost an act of
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creation to translate something because you try to capture the essence and then you try to
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you know recreate that as it were but it also strikes me that if you are that fluent in
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multiple languages you are living multiple lives you have multiple brains you know in the because
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languages are so different and they are gateways to such different worlds that you are no longer
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one person you are as many people as the languages you are and it's a little simplistic you are
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exposed to multiple milieus within each language perhaps as well but you know and and therefore
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it seems that that sort of you know richness and diversity is just incredible so what are
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your sort of thoughts on this? Amit, yeah I mean it's the depth of the I remember that essay by
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Ram Guha I think it was in the EPW if I am right I don't know if I wrote to him after that essay
#
after reading that essay and around that time I delivered the H.Y. Shadaprasad Memorial Lecture
#
this was I think 2012 of April for his birthday and it was titled bilingualism as a cultural idea
#
so it was a long lecture and I think I raised a few questions about that essay in my lecture
#
I of course forget what what it was I don't I don't remember the specifics of it
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but I mean in general I agree with what both with what Ram Guha is saying speaking about the
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death of a bilingual and there are various reasons for that you know I mean one of the
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reasons that I have actually been discussing in my books I mean my earlier books on language not
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the Devakapda book is that see the subnationalist thing model earlier that is I would you know if
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one would roughly put a kind of ballpark decades say from the 30s when the consciousness started
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I mean 30s 40s 50s up to the 60s even early I mean 70s it started getting distorted a little
#
little so those precious four of four decades you imagined a Kannada nation as an inclusive nation
#
so if you look at the early proponents of the Kannada nation like B.M. Sri Kantaiya or
#
people of his generation they are even you know I mean someone who is referred to as the father of
#
the whole idea Alur Venkat Rao and others you know they were all extremely inclusive in their
#
imaginations you know me and B.M. Sri Kantaiya in fact translates a bunch of hymns and songs and
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poems from English into Kannada and calls it English Geethegalo and those English Geethegalo
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were never English Geethegalo for a Kannada audience it became Kannada songs nobody remembers
#
in fact that they were actually originally written in another language and they were
#
translated into Kannada for example there is a very popular prayer in Kannada which nobody
#
remembers and I don't want to remind them that it was written by a pastor and I think it's a
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Welsh pastor whatever I mean I mean it's a song it's a poem it's a prayer which is so popular
#
so popular in Kannada that nobody remembers that it was a transliterate thing so that is
#
the it speaks about the quality of the translation but it also speaks about the reception of a
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culture so and it is completely Kannadized you know it's not a verbatim kind of a translation
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so it's Lead Kindly Light is the poem so it's become Karunalu Babalak it's actually more
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beautiful in Kannada I mean I've been listening to different versions of Lead Kindly Light being
#
performed in orchestras and others in the west but then this is so beautiful and it's composed
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in Kannada so beautifully it's it's it's you have it in your memory can you
#
that is the that's how it sounds so lovely it's so beautiful it's lyrical it's it's it's amazing
#
and it makes you feel like you are a middle class person making a prayer in the morning
#
and you are sort of I mean there's a reason why I say middle class because it's it's literary and
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all that because there is another thing which where it is it wouldn't be a prayer for another
#
community so so you are making this prayer yours you're sort of inviting light to sort of lead you
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and there are these tough times and all that and it became one part of movies it became part of a
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singing culture became part of the light music what is called as quote unquote light music in
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Kannada what is as opposite to the classical music is called light well bhava geethe bhava is emotion
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I think it in hindi it would be called sugam sangeet yeah it's Kannada also it's called
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sugam sangeet but then bhava geethe is a more popular and more appropriate way of sort of
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looking at that so all of these became great bhava geethe's in Kannada so that was an inclusive kind
#
of imagination of Kannada which you see in the translation of Greek plays coming into Kannada so
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they were borrowing heavily you know they were constructing a kind of modern literature because
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there was nothing modern in Kannada everything was you know I mean 15th century 16th seventies I mean
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that was all you know closed court kind of literature so you had to create this and you
#
had someone like Masti Venkatesh Ayyengar he was a you know I mean Mysore service officer of those
#
days and he creates a writer's fund to publish young writers something that my father did
#
in a different generation in a different time and he was inspired by all these people he creates
#
a fund because he is he has this big fat salary and he's working for the Mysore administrative
#
service and he's a big commissioner of this and that and he keeps this money aside from his salary
#
and publishes you will not believe the first work of KV Puttappa who became the great mighty
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Kuvempu later and Kuvempu is now not just a literary figure in Kannada he's like Rajkumar
#
a cultural figure in Kannada so he publishes Kogile his first anthology of poems he would be
#
staying in the Ramakrishna mission hostel in Mysore so he goes finds him and you know publishes
#
these poems he publishes the first work of he gives money to Bhendri to publish his poetry
#
anthology he gives money to Shivram Karanth to publish his anthology so there is this activity
#
happening and look at all those people Shivram Karanth the kind of work that he wrote was liberal
#
humanism you know I mean the kind of thing that he brought into his literature you know I mean
#
speaking about god or philosophy or anything for that matter human really all of it had a
#
great enlightenment influence right so it was it was an enlightenment kind of a thing renaissance
#
kind of a thing that was happening in Kannada and these people were constructing from the
#
broadest possible kind of platforms and broadest possible influences and they were bringing it all
#
into Kannada and all of them I mean at least Kuvempu and these people desired to be English
#
writers and they were sort of you know course corrected and made Kannada writers and so they
#
were not opposing this or that and saying oh this is not mine this is not mine I will not take this
#
this is so there was no such compulsion on their thing and of course there was a mild cast thing
#
underlying thing but that was not so pronounced as it is today but they were making their choices
#
very wisely and they were constructing a broad platform like Nehru constructed the idea of India
#
in a very broad fashion these people and I think in every literature it was happening every regional
#
space it was happening they were all seeing Aurobindo they were seeing Nehru they were seeing
#
Gandhi and they were constructing a very different kind of cultural space see in Kannada Ramakrishna
#
Paravamsa Aurobindo all are huge influences Tagore the Bengalis the Bengali cultural you know milieu
#
and literature and all of that had a huge influence and they were constructing similar and they were
#
there was a spiritual kind of a you know I mean element to their writing and there was a liberal
#
humanist streak and there was experiential elements and the two novels that Kuvempu wrote
#
I think the two of the greatest novels that I have read I mean I have read Marquis I have read
#
Joyce I have read you know I mean Hemingway and I mean sort of even Tolstoy but I think it stands
#
in that same kind of place it takes the same kind of importance in my mind you know I mean and
#
unfortunately it's not translated well there have been attempts and it's not so great but then you
#
know I wouldn't worry about the translation bit because why I mean it's it's I mean it's it's
#
difficult it's difficult to translate and convince another audience I'll I'll I have another comment
#
on translation itself see I mean there are people who write to be translated and there are people
#
who write for an audience they have a dialogue with their people so therefore you don't see a
#
Lankesh being translated because he's having a dialogue with his community but there are certain
#
writers in Canada who are only known as pan-indian greats for example Karnar did not write Good
#
Canada at all and he he speaks about it himself so so I mean Ananthapurthi did not have a body of
#
work he spoke more in fact Sharda Prasad very jokingly used to tell me that I think P.V. Narasimha
#
was the chairman of the Nanpeet committee when Ananthapurthi got it and P.V. and Sharda Prasad
#
were great friends so P.V. asked him what do you think so he said I told Narasimha to sort of give
#
it to him with the condition that his you know he writes more so you know that's a that's a kind of
#
interesting thing so there are I mean I'm not trying to say that they only wrote to be translated
#
and if Samskara was not translated by Ramanujan I don't think it would have become such a big
#
thing you know I mean because there were lots of similar stuff being written in different Indian
#
languages at that point of time and there was the central Saiti academy which for which which had a
#
mandate to get Indian languages to have a dialogue between themselves it was not English centric not
#
everybody wanted to get into English so you're enriching English you're not enriching your
#
regional languages what is coming into you is a third or third degree or fourth degree removed
#
kind of a thing reality that's coming into your languages so you're translating a polocoilo or
#
some other person or another person but you are not actually translating between Indian languages
#
so this is something that I raised when recently there's some very big translation
#
a fellowship was announced by the New India Foundation I wrote up my column in the express
#
saying why this is you know I mean something that lacks vision so you are giving so much money for
#
somebody who's translating from an Indian language into English and so finally English gets enriched
#
so you know that's something that has happened with English all the while because of its
#
colonial kind of legacy or whatever English has borrowed so much from these
#
languages and it has enriched itself but Kannada or a Telugu or a Tamil or a Marathi see
#
there it's it's it's understandable because they they don't get the same kind of importance or
#
same kind of value if it is if it is between Indian languages because it gets sort of dissipated for
#
them you know it that philanthropy doesn't look big if it doesn't come into English English is
#
like an approval gang right it is like academicians who become approvers of everything that is getting
#
written or spoken about they say somebody sitting in JNU or in Harvard or wherever or they say this
#
is great oh it's great so these kind of approval gangs get created and they start judging literatures
#
and without knowing much about what is happening inside them and that becomes possible because
#
everything is getting into English and they access English and they think they can understand or
#
judge or make pronouncement based on their reading in English which is so very limited
#
so that's why I mean I have nothing against anglophone elites but you know when I always
#
look at it look at them with a bit of suspicion because you know I mean they are so confident
#
because they're using a language of power which is English they are using a language which is
#
which is economically very very sound and it is that which is giving them confidence to make
#
pronouncement about the world and and there is it calls for a greater humility to sort of speak
#
about anything that you don't understand or anything that is alien or anything that you
#
have not accessed in their originals so you know I mean and to just say that this is a he's a great
#
writer in Canada or you say he's a great writer in Bengali without having read even an original
#
text in that language is a little you know I mean shoddy kind of a thing so one has to be
#
very careful of approval gangs is what I always tell myself because I don't need endorsements
#
when you know I mean I've I know that you know I mean things are far more complex
#
so so this was the kind of the larger broad-based even a person like Ananthamurthy until that
#
generation and Ananthamurthy or a Lankesh or all these people created a idea of Canada
#
or the after the earlier whatever it was very broad there was so much of enlightenment Europe
#
in it there was so much of reason there was so much of you know I mean experiential elements
#
getting mainstreamed and so much of different castes coming in bringing in their experiences
#
of course that got expanded in the 70s and the 80s but that took you in a different direction
#
so all of this was happening but what happens in the 90s or yeah late 90s I would say
#
is that the sub-nationalist cultures start borrowing the what I call the Shiv Sena model
#
so they that becomes a kind of exclusionary thing oh no this is not Canada oh no this is not
#
it had started in Canada in the 70s in fact I refer to an incident in my book where Anakrishna
#
a great man otherwise you know objecting to MS Sublaksmi singing you know not singing
#
Purandara or whatever they were great friends but then he sort of you know makes a symbolic
#
protest and he says you should sing Purandara and all that so I mean at a particular concert
#
you know it was just there and so that kind of a streak entered into the sub-nationalist
#
cultures where they it started in a very gentle literary specific way but then it got expanded
#
into a larger culture and then the change the activism the language activism had wonderful
#
faces as great great faces but they all became lumpen elements you know and suddenly used
#
I mean people who represented Canada or who spoke for the primacy of Canada or who sort
#
of started painting the boards black a people who sort of created a kind of environment
#
which started excluding a lot of things and then they started there are certain people
#
whom who are very very close to me who sort of taught me how to look at the world in a
#
wonderful way to sort of perceive Chomsky a Derrida a Lacan or a Foucault or everybody
#
you know I mean try to trying to you know grapple all of that those very same people
#
in the 90s started speaking a very different thing they started saying that it's enough
#
you know Canada is enough why do why do we need the crutches of any other language why
#
do we need to they were not see they never they were not bilinguals in the sense that
#
they did not write in both the languages they were you know monolinguals in the sense that
#
they wrote in Canada but had new English read in English read English but did not write
#
in English now that is the kind of another little thing that we need to make so these
#
people started saying that you the knowledge the epistemological thing you have to create
#
knowledge in Canada so Canada is enough you don't need mirrors of other languages so that
#
you know they were all professors and teachers and were heading institutions and departments
#
and all that they started changing the way their students think so these people who were under them
#
started thinking that it is enough to be a Kannada person it's it's not important to have
#
a dialogue with somebody who is outside of Karnataka and those dialogues were not to be
#
had in the in the manner that they were being held earlier which is you know I mean on broad
#
terms even if you had it was on very narrow terms it was for a seminar so you go you get
#
it translated you read you make a kind of you know show off it and you just come back so there was no
#
organic kind of exchange that was happening so that got I think that phase made Kannada
#
and the sub-nationalist thing very very very sad in fact so when you became an independent state
#
or when you became a linguistic state in say 56 there was a huge difference between the idea of
#
the nation and the idea of the sub-nation so you again build bridges you said I was the daughter
#
of that mother and mother of this daughter you try to create a kinship relationship with an
#
abstract idea called India and there was this real ground beneath your feet and you try to create
#
that kinship relationship and that was an arrangement you knew everybody knew that was
#
an arrangement that you were creating because Gandhi had created that atmosphere there was this
#
idea of independence and all that had happened so but now and so you were different and therefore
#
you became a union of states in the first place you were culturally different you could not be
#
put with say the Assam or Bengal or whatever you were different so you there were pebbles in a
#
thing they were not a soup lovely way to put it right so there were pebbles they were all there
#
so now what happened was now we speak about so much about Hindutva we speak about this whole
#
nationalism one language so now now these people sub-nationalist agenda and nationalist agenda
#
have sort of somewhere merged or sort of come closer together because these people also speak
#
of an exclusionary language they also speak of an exclusionary language they say it's only for
#
it's only for Hindus only India only for only Hindi and these people say only Kannada and when
#
they say only Kannada they're excluding everybody and Kannada becomes only a language an instrument
#
you can what you put into that Kannada you could be speaking the language of NRC and CA in that
#
language and you can be speaking the language of anti hijab or anti whatever in that language
#
so but that language became alienated from the linguistic culture linguistic culture and language
#
became two different entities so linguistic culture had a broader thing had a bigger thing
#
so you forgot about that you just made the language you know you reduce the language to
#
a kind of instrument of communication that's it it did not carry the culture and the tradition
#
and the heritage and all that you had used to build this wonderful plank for 30 40 years so
#
that is where so so when when this whole Hindi thing was happening and that hashtag don't impose
#
an imposition of Hindi and all that I wrote a piece in the mint a long 2000 word piece saying
#
opposing Hindi alone is not sufficient if you're talking you talk about linguistic cultures
#
because it's okay you will oppose Hindi you want Kannada in its place or Telugu or Tamil in its
#
place but what is Tamil and Telugu doing Tamil and Telugu are speaking the same language that
#
they are sort of advocating in a different context and in a different space so you have to sort of
#
actually draw from your own past your own history your own heritage and make yourself
#
more acceptable and more accommodative and more open and more inclusive and that is something which
#
is not happening and that is where these ruptures have happened and that is why the initial question
#
that you asked about the death of a bilingual is a far more serious thing for me than just two
#
people I mean one person talking two languages having gone away it's not just as simple as that
#
it is actually a cultural crisis of a huge magnitude which we don't seem to be paying
#
attention to so it is not about just merely felicity with two languages it's about the
#
imaginations and cosmologies and world and then the worldviews of two languages which don't seem
#
to sort of sit next to each other anymore they sort of you know operate in silos and operate in
#
compartments and then you know there is a very false agenda that is being put forward to
#
notionally or nominally keep the idea of sub-nationalism alive so it has become very
#
tragic actually you know you invoke the same activists invoke the name of Kuvempu but haven't
#
read Kuvempu Kuvempu has not advocated that the same people speak of Karanth they put all their
#
pictures and they say we are a Kannada organizer but they don't seem to have read anything that
#
these people have written and that is not the Kannada that's not the modern Kannada imagination
#
that they actually built for the initial decades of this new state so for me the trigger is very
#
interesting but the death that Ram spoke about is very correct very genuine but it's not just
#
as simple as two languages it's far more far more that's very illuminating and and the part
#
that I want to double down on is the irony that movements that look so different like the nationalism
#
that stresses Hindi or the sub-nationalism which stresses a particular kind of Kannada
#
are actually similar if you look deeper because they're both exclusionary as you put it and I
#
think that too much of political difference really isn't political difference you know
#
these days we think in terms of tribes well I think we need to think more in terms of ideas
#
so it might seem for example that you know that Hindutva today is the opposite of what
#
happened in Pakistan but the point is it's it's in a sense it's the same thing you're saying that
#
this is you know one nation one religion basing nationhood on that similarly a Hindi nationalism
#
and a Kannada nationalism may seem opposed to each other but they're actually they're actually the
#
same and similarly even like you know I keep saying voks and bhaktas are the same because
#
it's you know you're reducing a person to their identity and forcing upon them a narrative of
#
either victimhood or oppression when of course we contain multitudes and we have to be able to
#
have those conversations my next question is actually about what appears in my mind to be
#
even contradictory or two opposite things simultaneously existing or two opposite processes
#
simultaneously existing and I don't know what I make of it I don't think I've thought through it
#
enough so I'll ask you what you think of it one is a danger of homogenization for example uh you
#
know I did an episode on Indian food with Vikram doctor and he spoke about the Cavendish banana
#
and the funda of the Cavendish banana is it's a kind of banana which was in India it got taken out
#
it got exported out and then in the US and Latin America and whatever it got mass produced factory
#
produced and it was amenable to scale it would last a long time and it basically took over the
#
world and other bananas died and now the Cavendish and then the Cavendish banana came to India
#
where it is now destroying all indigenous varieties and you have a homogenization there
#
where there is a fear that all these other beautiful banana types will disappear now I
#
I sometimes worry about a similar thing happening with language like even within elite circles or
#
academia you spoke about the approval gang which is a phrase I love so much and you know
#
Stigda Poonam in her book dreamers and I did an episode with her about young Indians also spoke
#
about this craze in small towns everywhere for learning English English became this big aspirational
#
thing so a Kannada person will want to learn English a Tamil person will want to learn English
#
English is that common point similarly when you spoke about translation what which is such a great
#
point that you made that Kannada is getting translated to English Tamil is getting translated
#
into English why not to each other why not that dialogue so there is this danger of a kind of
#
centralization and a homogenization so that is one strand but a strand that seems to me to be running
#
in the opposite direction which I have a lot of hope for is a sort of decentralizing strand where
#
across different fields I find that the mainstream is dissipating the center is not holding like I
#
would say this is true of music for example or at least western music which I'm far more familiar
#
with where there is no longer a mainstream you know rock was mainstream maybe from the Beatles
#
or Dylan going electric to Nirvana as Steve Van Zandt sent in a recent interview a link
#
and you know but the mainstream has dissipated and now it's decentralized I won't even call it
#
niches it's just decentralized in media we have seen that that you had your mainstream media in
#
the 90s you had a consensus on the truth now I feel mainstream media is completely irrelevant
#
in India and we are completely decentralized and I think it's a good thing because it empowers
#
individuals of course there are problems like the fake news economy and all of that where we are
#
constantly in narrative battles and truth doesn't have the value and in some senses I feel that even
#
at the level of governments the power that nation states have will dissipate with technology where
#
a nation state cannot stop you know a culture and cannot constrain it within its borders we
#
are all talking to each other one way or the other so these are two you know two different
#
movements that I see going in two different directions one is this homogenization driven
#
by you know economic imperative self-interest and it's all rational everybody's learning english
#
that's what they want to learn right so there's one language for the home and there's one language
#
for the rest of the world and the other is this sort of decentralization you see it in
#
entertainment also like I used to love tiktok because there was so much great entertainment
#
great art I would say coming from small towns and villages and different languages even when
#
I didn't understand the languages you could make out what was going on and just love it you know
#
so what's your take on you know I mean I think this whole one you know I mean the nation state
#
idea itself is sort of limiting in the sense it's sort of you always are looking for an official
#
thing you know one language you know one I mean there is a constitution but then the constitution
#
has a different role to play but then it's not about oneness it's about a
#
set of rules that we have given ourselves or promised ourselves so that impulse is always
#
there when you sort of when the moment you frame something as a nation then that impulse to
#
homogenize is always very strong so the moment you made a karnataka the moment you made an
#
andhra pradesh the impulse to impose a certain thing as the standard because this canonical
#
hierarchical arrangements are always sort of you know I don't know whether it's default to the
#
human mind or civilizational thinking or cultural thinking but it happens so you want to have these
#
hierarchies you want to say this is good you want to approve so that approval gang thing comes there
#
also you want to say this is right and this is wrong you start thinking in binaries so there is
#
the moment you start thinking in binaries it's easy see that diversity is a cost in most of
#
the time it's a cost so even companies don't want too much of diversity because it's a cost
#
it's you're you're actually bringing upon yourself into doing a lot of things which
#
actually don't need to be done and it's on in the name of political correctness or whatever
#
so this whole impulse to homogenize is part of the idea itself you know because you have to look like
#
you have to you are this and therefore you need an there is an enemy so you create Pakistan becomes
#
your enemy although they were your brothers till for 1947 so you you have to create an enemy one
#
enemy we don't speak much about one enemy but we speak about one language but one enemy is also
#
part of the same agenda so so that homogenization thing is part it's it's it's there in the it's
#
it's embedded in the idea of the nation state itself so you think you have to think through
#
those terms otherwise it doesn't make sense but what happened why there is this kind of counter
#
thing that has happened is because the borders became irrelevant economic borders became
#
irrelevant and and and you know I mean this migration became such a big phenomena and
#
every Indian family now seems to have traveled right so all that started getting dismantled
#
so the whole if at all I write a next I mean I'm writing two other books but then
#
the big book that I want to write is about the decline of the linguistic state
#
wow right so the whole your how did you premise your idea of linguistic state when it was
#
conceived in the 20s and the congress passed a resolution all of that happened you conceived
#
of it as a sealed border which had this language this language this language you thought of it as
#
the imagination itself was faulty you never thought there would come a time when airplane
#
travel would become cheaper they would there would be internet the borders would collapse there would
#
be liberalization people would move within inside the country outside the country all of that was
#
not imagined when these ideas came about so I think this is a phase from the 90s I think
#
from the 2000s of the millennial generation is trying to make sense of all that we imagined
#
say 75 years ago this is a good time to think about it because we are speaking about the
#
Amrit Mahotsav and all that so what is it that we imagined then and what is it that we have
#
become now and how much of it is not our own making it is because the world has changed
#
and we have benefited immensely from that see you can say globalization is bad there was a phase in
#
karnataka when all these seminars would have this theme about globalization and every god damn
#
writer would say globalization has killed this or globalize but they don't realize that globalization
#
also brought great ideas into you the internet also gave you a lot of great ideas you started
#
accessing a lot of things books that were not available and you know were very very expensive
#
and a father of mine had to you know take a loan to buy books you know became very expensive
#
inexpensive if you walk down the street you'll get any book for you know I mean an affordable
#
price so a lot of good things happened so we are not this we are struck this earlier generation
#
which sort of framed these ideas and bought these ideas I mean and are stuck at those stuck with
#
those ideas don't know how to reconcile with this opening up and I think that is a kind of
#
negotiation that happens in a culture we have had this I'm telling you this is not an experience
#
that is for any culture the first time I can go back to the eighth century I can go back to a
#
text called Kaviraja Marga in Kannada and it's a book of poetics and it tells you how to deal
#
with Sanskrit how to deal with Sanskrit alankaras and it actually looks like it is borrowing a lot
#
from Sanskrit but it's actually creating an agenda for a Kannada kind of cultural space
#
so you know I mean you have constantly dealt with such a cultural influence Sanskrit was a huge
#
problem for Kannada so Kumar Vyasa Bharata is seen as the original Kannada Mahabharata because
#
he sort of shunned Sanskrit in a way that you know I mean is still celebrated so these kind of
#
what you call as like Russia has invaded Ukraine such invasions have happened culturally also and
#
a culture figure takes time to figure out but for the first time these cultures feel a little more
#
threatened or endangered if one has to use that kind of a language is because English also has
#
an economic power which is not just soft power which Sanskrit had Sanskrit borrowed its soft
#
power from several other kind of institutional arrangements so English has economic power so
#
money speaks so how does one counter the influence of a language like that which leaves any local
#
language I mean within gives it a clipped existence you know you will you will stay there you will
#
stay there as an artifact your language will survive as an artifact but it will have a clipped
#
existence it will not have the ability to actually sit across the table and speak as an equal it
#
loses that ability and that is why I am a little apprehensive about fellowships or whatever which
#
only promote translation in one direction so you're actually contributing to that stream so there is a
#
larger argument to be made so you know and your software also the the Microsoft thing that when
#
it happened and when all of that was getting into regional languages they were just templates that
#
were coming from English so I met a very interesting I don't know what has happened to him now he was
#
used to be at the Harvard Kenneth Keniston so I interviewed him for Decanary way back in 96
#
or 97 and he spoke to me about localization of software and he gave me an example of Argentina
#
and he said I had been to Argentina and there all the teachers in schools where free software
#
and free computers have been given a ruin that all our children are becoming little Microsoft
#
ends or whatever you know I mean because you what we don't realize with the software thing it's a
#
binary code that is written the idea of time see when you talk in your languages time is very
#
circular time operates in a very concentric thing but here it is always linear there are lots of
#
such things elements even without you understanding gets into you and you start your imagination and
#
your approach and your cognitive things get a little affected or or warped or you know it moves
#
away from your whatever thing so how does one handle the economic strength of English and how
#
does one handle the the technological aspects which all again has English that the primacy is
#
English right see the whole structures and templates are all built primarily for Western
#
audiences so that is the worry now so how does a small culture which is you know I mean so so
#
they have surrendered so this culture now if you look at it the audiences are lost I keep telling
#
these people that okay you are now trying to dumb down do it you may get your TRP today but you're
#
actually killing your culture killing your audience sorry not culture killing your audience because
#
a slightly educated fellow will move away from watching you so how many television or you know
#
I mean channels in Canada does a middle-class family watch I don't I mean it's it's it because
#
it's not of their thing there is an aspirational element they are moving up the chain they are
#
getting software jobs they're being so they're being sent on jobs to say Germany or somewhere
#
in Europe or America whatever they see new things and they can't reconcile what he's speaking there
#
you know in an absolutely narrow strange terms and then he says that is not important I'll
#
consume my news on internet so you're losing your audience newspapers have lost their audience
#
because they've become very narrow they've said I mean most newspapers I made this comment some
#
years ago I said the Sunday supplements of most newspapers reads like an obituary thing because
#
they're only involved in speaking about the past it's nostalgia somebody dies or you give
#
a full page and you say oh this man died and this is gone so the so you're only speaking about your
#
only sort of recording the decline of your culture you're not trying to reverse the whole
#
thing and say there are there are small groups there are of course enthusiastic small groups
#
trying to do this and that but you know of course you know they don't have that kind of wherewithal
#
to sort of scale the whole thing and become mainstream there are always small groups and
#
they do very interesting and fascinating work which one should not dismiss so lightly even in
#
Canada it happens and I'm I really appreciate what they do for example the audiobooks kind of a thing
#
that they're trying to do there are lots of good work that happens but then the the the mainstream
#
Canada thing which you very rightly pointed out the mainstream thing looks very very weak and
#
nobody people are getting disengaged with it the larger audience the educated the upwardly mobile
#
audience is getting disengaged and you know what happens when that happens advertising stops coming
#
into that media and then it becomes a rag and I mean you know in one of your shows I heard
#
General Pandey speak about this constant thing about Hindi newspapers not getting advertising
#
and why it doesn't get advertising and the scale and so numbers may be very quote unquote sexy
#
because the reach may be high but what is the purchasing power of that audience which reads
#
those newspapers is a very very interesting question that comes back and in the kind of
#
economic arrangement that we have now there is no input of money that is going and philanthropy
#
which in a place like Bangalore plays a huge huge role it does not understand the complexities of
#
these cultural questions at all because all these people have been software engineers or made their
#
money through you know mean new economy industries and for them you know mean philanthropies to sort
#
of create a soft power for themselves and they don't engage with these real cultural issues that
#
is where the death of the bilingual is more important so I mean the death is because you
#
don't understand the other side not because you don't know the other language when I have
#
far greater respect for Ramchandra Guha because he understands that the other side is sort of
#
there and I have to respect it and for me that is a huge thing that acknowledgement is a huge
#
thing but a lot of people don't acknowledge that right so he sort of he may not be accomplished
#
in two or three languages like a lot of people but to know that there is that world out there
#
which is far more interesting complex intricate is an acknowledgement. So let me respond to some
#
of the things you said because you know just thinking aloud like I spoke about that seeming
#
contradiction between the centralizing impulse on the one hand the homogenization impulse on
#
the one hand and the decentralization and while you were speaking I realized that one way of
#
looking at it perhaps simplistically but largely still might have something to it is that politics
#
has that centralizing and homogenizing impulse while culture goes in the other direction you
#
know because for politics number one as Carl Schmitt the German theorist famously said that
#
in politics you need an other and therefore in politics it makes there is this incentive to
#
define everything in stark terms which leads to this kind of centralization conceptually which
#
leads to homogenization and all of that and that's a political imperative but culturally
#
you know culture is getting more and more decentralized now and the incentives there
#
kind of go the other way and you know that minor aspect you pointed out about Microsoft
#
creating on Microsoft and time goes in a linear way I mean I use some software which is organized
#
differently like for my notes I use Rome research which is based on the German system of Zettelkasten
#
where everything is not quite linear or even orderly it can be circular it can you can go off in
#
different directions so I think you know there is scope for doing a lot more than that but the
#
other interesting thing that struck me was what you said about the dumbing down of the media and
#
that's been a constant lament and I think there it's a combination of things that happen like
#
when I started this podcast for example my you know my early episodes were 20-30 minutes my
#
impression was that listen people have a short attention span everybody wants shallow content
#
you got to hook them in the first 15 seconds and don't do more than 15 minutes 20 minutes one
#
episode I did was 11 minutes and then over a period of time I realized everything about that
#
was wrong one of course there are the you know people listen to podcasts as a captive audience
#
when they're you know working out or commuting and so on so they're less likely to be distracted
#
and also they listen at higher speeds like 2x 3x whatever and therefore they're consuming like
#
one hour of content in half an hour of running but the most important factor was that we are
#
wrong about what people want we don't live in the age of the short attention span people crave
#
depth and they especially crave depth more today because a media doesn't give it to them and the
#
media for all kinds of incentives economic incentives being a big part of that because
#
of the way our systems are structured they want to go what my good friend Prem Panicker calls a
#
mile wide and an inch deep right and you know because you have you pay these enormous license
#
fees to have a TV channel you you have price gaps on you know subscriptions so at its advertising
#
heavy you know unlike many other countries in the world so you have to cater to the lowest common
#
denominator you don't have a choice and therefore you have that screamy shouty race to the bottom
#
that we see in our news television and that holds for all other medium I mean that's where radio is
#
different from podcasting because radio also you have license fees you have restrictions so you're
#
going wide you're not going deep and and that's one thing I realize that people crave depth so
#
much and the problem is when you're a mainstream media house and you're functioning under those
#
kind of incentives where you don't have an option you have to go broad then you don't realize how
#
many people there are who want to go deep and the point is the people who want to go deep they are
#
also more engaged so even if my absolute numbers may be lower than say for the audience of a
#
Shah Rukh Khan film just to take an extreme example or maybe that's a wrong example but the
#
point is the engagement that anything that gives you depth is way way more so you know and that's
#
again something that ideally should be sorted out but it isn't because you know what are your
#
thoughts being a media person? Being a media person and having been an editor with brand managers
#
and CEOs around I mean you're absolutely bang on on this you know they constantly try to tell you
#
that attention spans have become smaller and people are not interested and I always wondered
#
as to where they got their feedback from you know I went to the same market I saw the same
#
television channel I read the same book see but there again you know I mean my I mean I'm not
#
and I don't mean disrespect to any any any degree any any person who holds an MBA degree but you
#
know I mean look at the kind of people put in charge of media houses and I worked with some
#
of the biggest media houses and look at the people who are put in charge of those media houses who
#
are trained to make money who are you know told that you have to make money and they don't sort
#
of distinguish between this and a Pepsi you know most actually many of the media managers came from
#
Pepsi in fact who made a lot of money for these big houses came from you know I mean people who
#
sold sugar water so so they actually they these same people when they're sent to the car industry
#
now we had a very interesting general manager I mean when I was still a news editor and whatever
#
so this man would had come from this thing that shut down you know so he would come and he would
#
say no no no front page you put this and therefore there's a problem so I would always ask him see
#
did you say the same thing in your previous company did you tell them the headlights are
#
looking a little wonky therefore I can't sell the car so your job is to sell what we have given you
#
because we think that we have done a good job so go and sell it now don't come back and tell me
#
that this product is not working because of this problem so I mean the numbers rose we were doing
#
well but there's under such immense pressure from the owners that for them you know I mean they
#
they try to sort of make money everywhere and that that basically does not agree when you're
#
dealing with something like a newspaper or a magazine or whatever because it's a different
#
product it's a knowledge product so they don't seem to have that kind of their training their
#
academic training or their intellectual exposure or their whatever thing is very very limited and
#
narrow and confined and I wish you know I mean different kinds of people are put there and
#
different kinds of things happen I mean not it's not that everybody is like that but you know
#
unfortunately I have in every other person that I have met in newsrooms are like that so I mean
#
I used to have a lot of problem with these CEO kinds and the brand manager kinds who would come
#
and talk glib English but would have absolutely no ideas to what they were talking about and then
#
at the end of the day they would come and say you know I mean we are trying to get some advertising
#
feature from this politician for one week please don't write anything against him so things like
#
that you know I mean so you they are compromised all the value systems that you sort of had that
#
you should not compromise your own uncompromising journalists you have a certain kind of professional
#
you know I mean ethical framework all of that they actually push you to violate every single day so
#
how will journalism survive so you may have made money in a small run but you've actually
#
killed the industry that's what I meant when I said you have killed the audience so that is why
#
the non mainstream things are doing so well people rely more on the non mainstream thing they would
#
like to listen to you more they would like to read something that is being offered and a bunch
#
of very interesting new media products in India now or abroad so I mean they have killed their
#
audience they don't realize that in the long run everything is gone and they've permanently
#
deleted that audience and then they go once that becomes mainstream they go and play the same
#
havoc so at least one has to sort of build a kind of firewall and ensures that the whole thing has
#
to be looked at differently as going forward so that is why I always say when it comes to politics
#
these congresses and keep speaking so much of nostalgia I get really bugged they keep saying
#
Nehru said this Nehru did this for India he built the idea of democracy you know this all of this
#
has been done so the simple question if is that if you ran the country like that or if you did
#
good things then why do you have someone like person that we have now so the project that we
#
need to sort of political project or the cultural project that we need to have is not about restoration
#
of the past or the the glorious Congress regime is not the restoration project that we need to
#
have as liberals today there we have to sort of make correctives and build something new and
#
far more diverse and interesting so restoration is a huge huge problem because you have made a
#
lot of mistakes and therefore you have you are in the situation that you are in today and if you
#
are not reflective and if you think you were good and you were suddenly overnight thrown away by
#
some some kind of a current that came is wrong because everything builds up and I often tell me
#
in spite of my deep deep respect for someone like Manmohan Singh Dr. Manmohan Singh I keep telling a
#
lot of my Congress friends in my arguments that see they were gonna had far greater democratic
#
engagement than a Manmohan Singh Manmohan Singh was a technocrat you put him there for ten years
#
and there was no political engagement and people thought that this is the weak weakest prime minister
#
we have in his during his term I don't think he was ever described as a strong man in 2009 I think
#
that was the electoral plank of Adwani they called him the weak prime minister but you know the
#
economy is doing well and there were other reasons as to why they came back to power but the tragedy
#
is the Congress could not give a political person at the helm for ten long years I understand that
#
as a stopgap arrangement that's not the ideal that we have to go back you have a CEO running
#
your government and you have a power system elsewhere so that is what this created an urge
#
for a strong leader and somebody sort of made use of that space so things have there is a reaction
#
and there is a reaction to things that you have there are consequences to the your actions and
#
we don't have to think of restoration so similarly culturally or media or it applies to everything
#
that we are speaking about I don't think we have to you know say that I mean Madhubala was great
#
so let's get another Madhubala now there are new people coming so you don't have to get into this
#
nostalgia trip each time or retro thing and say that all was great with Nehru and therefore we
#
need to bring back the Nehru in India and that was the biggest thing I don't think it was correct
#
and and Nehru operated in a completely different time and Nehru after the partition this is my
#
understanding I may be wrong after the partition had to build reason into the system so he used
#
reason a lot of reason he built brought in scientific temper he spoke of scientific temper
#
he spoke like an enlightened statesman you know when he used the principles of enlightenment and
#
all of that and created an India which was which which thought logically you know or propounded
#
that or put it there on the table and he had such big cherishment nobody cared what he spoke he
#
they voted for him or they voted for the Congress Party because there was also the element of I mean
#
independence and the memory of independence and all that but now if you continue in that stream
#
which Rahul Gandhi never gets which is you Rahul Gandhi is logical he is very sincere he has reason
#
sorted out but there is no emotion but politics is all about emotion it's a fantastic blend of
#
reason and emotion and a great leader whoever across the world has operated by actually fusing
#
these two elements brilliantly the formulas could be different the the percentages could be
#
different but you don't communicate only invoking a certain kind of academic logic in the in the
#
parliament no and I honestly don't think that there is even reason there in fact I think the
#
Congress blunders continuously instead of celebrating Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh
#
they celebrate Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi you know every every year when it's his birthday
#
all the official Congress handles will talk about what a great guy he is and even Nehru you know
#
the point is we have the sedition law today because after the court ruled the courts ruled
#
it unconstitutional in 1950 Nehru brought it back you know we remained a poor country for more than
#
seven decades which is why 2014 happened you oppose the current guy I completely agree with
#
you you oppose the current guy but understand where he came from and what's going on and frankly
#
the current guy is more of the same right we have the you know you can think in tribal terms and
#
they can look like opposites but it's in a sense more of the same and little worse and some margins
#
you know earlier you made the point about the suits the MBAs the CEO types as you put it who
#
only care about money and even there I think that they're not good suits and good MBAs if they care
#
about money in the way that they do because they're caring about it in a short-term way if you
#
actually think long-term you would kind of learn to sort of segment the market and realize that
#
you know that this is not sustainable and earlier you'd mentioned very evocatively when you spoke
#
about the little magazines how your father would put it together your mother would put the little
#
stamp on it and you know you'd go on cycles and you deliver it to people and I think what was
#
happening there and the reason that it worked was that there is that direct sense of who is reading
#
it there is a sense of the human beings who are reading it and they're paying you for it and they're
#
taking it and that keeps it alive and it dies out to some extent not because the audience dies out
#
I feel but because the connect dies out and what I think we need to figure out all the metaphorical
#
little magazines of the day is that one we need to realize that that audience is there if anything
#
it's bigger than ever before and what we just need to figure out is figure out the logistics how do
#
we get our work to them which is easier than ever before because of technology and more importantly
#
how do they pay us and I think that's easy to sort out because you know one thing that I'm seeing in
#
the creator economy is that more and more the one big shift is that creators are being able to get
#
money directly from consumers you don't have to go via advertisers via sponsors all of that so I
#
want to sort of talk about this personal aspect this people aspect also in a context that you
#
brought up earlier where you spoke about you were reporting from Rajasthan and you're chatting to
#
Bhairav Singh Shekhawat who by one section of the media would be painted as one caricature another
#
section would paint him as another caricature and you try to get behind the person and kind of go
#
deeper in a sense what I try to do as well and what I find in in modern times is that we live in a
#
world where there is almost we are incentivized to pass judgment all the time either to gain
#
status within our own little tribes or to feel virtuous for ourselves that oh I made fun of him
#
and therefore I'm better than him and so on and this really means that we start looking at the
#
world in black and white ways and that there is a constructed world anywhere where you have polarized
#
rhetoric so and so is evil so and so is you know a paragon of virtue and we start kind of falling
#
into those lines and it strikes me that what we need is more of what you were doing and more of
#
what good journalists do today where you go deeper figure out the personal you know figure out
#
basically you delve in all the shades of grey and you make that concrete like you know to me a lot
#
of the dangerous ideas that we have around us are abstract ideas nationalism and purity and all of
#
these and our lived reality when we are actually engaging with the concrete is not like that at
#
all you know you you know in your Devagada book which maybe we'll have to talk about in a separate
#
episode because it's just got so much I want to talk five hours about that but in that book you
#
speak about how his secularism was a lived secularism it came from concrete things you know he could see
#
his you know father employ a Muslim in the field who's teaching him Urdu and all of that and his
#
lived experience is leading to a secularism not some ideological abstract thing and in your view
#
what can people like us or people like whoever's listening to this conversation or just society as
#
a whole what can we do to sort of start privileging the concrete more over the abstract because we
#
are ruled all around us by abstract rhetoric by constructed realities by these imperatives that
#
we have to pass judgment on others that there's our tribe and then everybody else is evil and so
#
on and so forth and these abstract things break down the moment you have you know I mean maybe
#
I'm being very idealistic but they tend to break down when you have you know engagement with the
#
real world so you know what are your thoughts no that's a very very profound question see you
#
can't separate the abstract Amit actually in the in a common man's life if you think of it the
#
abstract the biggest abstract is the God it begins with a prayer every morning and you don't know
#
where you're sending it up and you're reconciling with a lot of things you know your there are
#
religious ideas that have become so much part of you that you have you either believe in your karma
#
siddhanta like my character of my book they've got our beliefs and destiny and things like that
#
and he's never offended with anything because he thinks that oh I must have made some mistake in
#
my past life so it's come to haunt me today so so you reconcile all those are abstract ideas
#
religion has given you that abstract ideas it is what is constructed by politicians for a certain
#
purpose and for a certain thing which becomes problematic I don't think it's wonderful to be
#
in a abstract kind of a thing and also bring the concrete so that you see in a lot of these 12th
#
century vachanas like it was beautifully translated by ramanujan I mean in english it's it's it sounds
#
like this you know I mean my legs are pillars my body the shrine they had a cupola of gold right
#
so you know I mean you are see that that particular thing so you are blending the two
#
so that was written for a common man so that man is actually weaving you know mean something or he's
#
sewing I mean there is something happening in the fields or he and he's speaking of this and he's
#
invoking the god he's invoking the lord so nature itself sort of actually throws up a lot of abstract
#
questions at you and I don't think you can escape the abstract the political abstract is the question
#
the political thing is a problem and there I think it is common sense which has to come to play and
#
we need more deva gauras there you know people may not like what I say or whatever but then if
#
they read my book they'll understand why that common sense plays such an enormous role to blend
#
this whole idea of the abstract and the thing and then sorts out politics in a completely different
#
way so so you can't escape the abstract the nation is of course the the idea of a nation was
#
as I probably you know I mean not as foolproof as the idea of religion because religion sort of
#
appeals to us something else you know I mean it's about your being itself this is an artificial
#
construct that was created and even the linguistic state you know I mean I was reading this Lisa
#
Michelle who wrote a beautiful book on the South Indian linguistic states and there she says that
#
this whole idea of linguistic state was a late 19th century idea it was not even there before
#
that that you could construct a state around the idea of a language where did it come from
#
so so those things are the abstract I mean I'm fascinated by the abstract poetry is abstract
#
for me I mean half my life would not have been so I mean interesting or enriching if there was no
#
poetry and and if bendre doesn't make sense half the time but the sounds are so good language
#
itself is abstract at times so there is no escaping the abstract it is that that is this
#
engineered abstraction that we try to bring and put it there and make politics out of it
#
is something that is the problem according to me but I mean this is something that you threw at me
#
and I have just tried to think about it on the spot so I may be wrong no no it's it's opened up a new
#
dimension for me to think about and you mentioned poetry and you know when you mentioned that editor
#
at the Irish newspaper where you worked where she sadly drowned herself and I thought yeah and I
#
thought of this beautiful poem which I really love which blends the abstract and the concrete
#
in this lovely way so I'll read it out it's uh it's called not waving but drowning by Stevie Smith
#
nobody heard him the dead man but still he lay mourning I was much further out than you thought
#
and not waving but drowning poor chap he always loved locking and now he's dead it must have been
#
too cold for him his heart gave way they said oh no no no it was too cold always still the dead one
#
lay mourning I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning just just that image
#
of not waving but drowning that concrete image but it really kind of speaks to you and since you
#
mentioned common sensical I want to read out this a little bit by Montaigne Aloualia on
#
David Garda from your book where Montaigne says and I'm quoting you quoting Montaigne so these
#
are Montaigne's words quote you know he had this habit of looking very sleepy I have noticed that
#
even when he appeared to be in a somnolent kind of state one ear was always open and whenever
#
something needed to be said he would say it without missing anything my favorite recollection is that
#
on one occasion we were trying to raise the price of LPG gas a subsidy was building up so we said
#
that it is one thing to have targeted subsidy but to keep all cooking gas at low price is not
#
helpful one minister was arguing that if you raise the price it will hurt the common man
#
immediately Gowda who was in a somnolent appearance disagreed and now these are Gowda's
#
words you know what is happening in Delhi cooking gas has been used by all rich people to cook seek
#
and tikka kebabs for their parties he said and offered to take us around one evening to show
#
how many lavish parties were fueled by subsidized cooking gas these guys can afford to pay why
#
should we subsidize that was an earthy response this would not have been the response of a civil
#
servant and then of course you kind of go on to point out what an actual geek or civil servant
#
would have said where they would have said oh 20 percent of the people are using 80 percent of the
#
benefits and rubbish like that and he went straight to the concrete and obviously that can also hurt
#
because then you can confuse anic data for data and make wrong decisions they were good with both
#
data and experience which is which was a surprise to me as i yeah i mean everything that you have
#
written about his research habits his incredible work ethic and all of that is something we have
#
to discuss in detail so the next time i come to bangalore we can talk about deva gowda but
#
right now i'm kind of enjoying this conversation too much so you know earlier on you spoke about
#
how your view of the world was sort of shaped by this fortunate circumstance of having a family
#
like you did parents like you did an environment like you did a bilingual environment environment
#
like you did when it comes to journalism you know you did journalism here you went abroad and you
#
did journalism you came back you've been an editor you know you worked in english journalism you
#
worked in language journalism tell me a little bit about how your initial view of journalism
#
was kind of shaped like why do we do journalism what are our values what is good journalism in
#
a definitional sense how you kind of arrived at that and tell me a little bit about you know
#
that sort of journey and whether you feel that whether you feel more hopeful now or less hopeful
#
now the last part is very difficult to say no but i never sort of defined journalism for myself i
#
was never a student of journalism and i never went to university to study journalism i was a student
#
of literature and culture so culture studies comparative literatures so i was in a whole
#
different world and then i happened to sort of get into a newsroom and the editor was not very
#
trusting of my me sustaining interest but somehow i sort of stayed back i never went out went away
#
or you know because i was i thought i was a little successful and i could continue
#
so i never defined what good journalism is for myself because i was i thought what the place
#
that i was in Deccan Herald and the kind of multiplicity of views that i was seeing
#
and the kind of assignments i was getting and what was getting published it was not very different
#
from a very ideal kind of a situation you could write about some philosopher called Derrida and
#
you could get published you could write about Said you could write about Chomsky you could write
#
about a new director of the Max Muller Bowen who was taken over and was great great new ideas you
#
could write about Brecht in Kannada cinema and Hindi cinema and Kannada plays so you could i was
#
just completely immersed in my cultural and literary writing for Deccan Herald i did not
#
think outside of it and also the very first piece that i published was you know it was some kind of
#
a tribute to Adiga where i sort of wrote about Adiga and his poetry and sort of translated a
#
small little piece that he had written about me and my poetry and it was a very intensely passionate
#
piece and it was run again one page so i mean it became a kind of default to get one page for me
#
in Deccan Herald i mean i mean i have so many of those clippings and if anybody cares to look at
#
the archives they'll see how is this fellow you know i mean getting so much of space it's not that
#
i was writing something very big or i was a great writer it didn't it wasn't that it was about
#
the generosity of the editorship of the time it was like you know i mean i always imagined
#
that i should work in an environment where someone like this herald evans worked and the sunday times
#
and that kind of an ideal kind of an environment where even a philip nightly was encouraged and he
#
did a lot of great stories but all of that came later see only after 2000 did i start looking at
#
journalism as journalism should be looked at until then for me it was a venue to get my i mean half
#
fulfilled literary or cultural ambitions in so it could be poetry or it could be short stories or
#
whatever but after 2000 something changed because i went on a shivning scholarship to england and
#
then so there was a it was a for print journalism and it was a program for young print journalists
#
there was this great man who was running the program john talak who succumbed to cancer i
#
think in 2016 if i remember right and there was adam hopkins who was a travel writer and they
#
were running the program and they sort of put you in touch with great people like edwin taylor
#
edwin taylor was someone who had designed the deck and herald and designed half a dozen newspapers
#
of the world and written a great book with herald evans called pictures on the page on
#
designing newspapers so i got terribly terribly interested in the mechanics of putting a newspaper
#
together the design the the layout and you know picking a picture how should we look at that and
#
of course reporting and writing and there was a putin glare summit and because you were a
#
shivning fellow you were you were given a pass to go and sit in the media you know thing so i went
#
and watched that i mean it was a great opportunity to grow and there i still when i went to england
#
i went as a provincial boy with my canada baggage and my literary baggage and my cultural baggage
#
and besides john talak and adam hopkins who are putting me who are getting me to look at the
#
mechanics of journalism a little more seriously i met this great mentor who is still with he still
#
mentors me mr jeremy seabrook and jeremy seabrook was such a distinguished writer in england he was
#
in england he was writing a column from the guardian and he was given to me as a personal
#
mentor there was a system where you were given big writers as your mentors i just i think initially
#
the plan was to give me julian barnes right i mean there's some such talk you know i mean that never
#
happened but of course i i mean i happened to run into him and said hello and all that but then
#
just imagine getting a julian barnes and jeremy was no less because jeremy had published some
#
30 40 books he had an india interest and he was more than anything else he was someone who would
#
give you time and he was empathetic he would listen and not many people had that kind of would
#
give you that kind of time so he had i think enjoyed his ankle and therefore he was at home
#
and it gave me great opportunity to sort of you know go and vomit all my ideas before him
#
and then he would listen for an hour or he's a great listener like you he would listen to ours
#
together and then he would give come back with a response which was so terrific he would say see
#
you are looking at it in a very limited way so frame it this way look at it this way so go back
#
and write it this way and come back to me having read this so he was he gave me i think the granter
#
edition which was being edited by uh ian jack and it was about england and its loss of you know
#
greatness the great britain had become just britain so it was something around that and i forget the
#
exact title of the granter issue and he had an essay in that about something related and he gave
#
me that and he said you can keep this copy and getting a granter free for a student you know i
#
mean was itself a very big thing so he said you can keep this and i'm not giving it to you because
#
i've written a piece but then i want you to sort of critique what i've written so then this was i
#
thought he was sort of being very nice to me and so i read that i went i discussed i keep going back
#
to him his house was in muswell hill so i mean i used to take the metro underground and reach his
#
place and it was three springfield avenue muswell hill is shifted to another house now closer by
#
but i used to go and i mean i thought i was i was boring him but he was very empathetic and he was
#
he was always someone because he was a writer he would ask me very personal questions he would
#
tell me you tell me tell me something about your father what what kind of a person is here what
#
did he ask you to read you know how did you grow up you know what kind of an so he was basically
#
also soaking in my cultural environment he was trying to understand my family is understanding
#
where i'm coming from and then this whole canada canada canada business that i had in my head
#
literature literature and culture all that he sort of brought in a gently introduced polemical
#
ideas you know just just ruffled a few of them and then that expanded the way i look at the world
#
so i mean that is when i decided that this whole canada pride thing had because i'd written i
#
think i translated a piece in for decadent called canada pride and prejudice for the one of the
#
november issues and i showed it to him and then he said how that idea can be sort of expanded why
#
you should not sort of limit yourself to you know i mean one particular stream how you can actually
#
make it richer by sort of taking in other things and exploring it there and language is a great
#
dynamic you know i mean you put it into your language it becomes something else it is like
#
you know i mean a recipe where you mix a certain ingredient it becomes a separate dish so he said
#
you should you should sort of start exploring these things and then for the first time there
#
was a huge problem of migrants and there was this very harsh rhetoric that was being spoken in the
#
papers and british tabloids you know how they so he would tell me stories about migrants and he
#
would tell me why we shouldn't speak this language what is the history of the world what is the
#
history of migration and why you know these politicians are wrong and why you should go
#
and listen to that fellow who's talking at the completely nonsensical thing but then you come
#
back to me and tell me what he spoke and i'll tell you why that is wrong and why you should
#
always sort of have a broad worldview and inclusive worldview but also be extremely
#
conscious of the kind of atrocities committed by people in power how the policies are shaped to
#
suit a handful of people so he would give me examples and there was a huge influx of russian
#
money at that time that had just about started i think at that time so we would we used to sort
#
of whenever we went for a walk you would say see this is bought up by some some billionaire in
#
russia who's a faceless guy there's only a small little outhouse where a servant stays and this
#
house has never been lit up fully it is just that little light that glows you know when he used to
#
he had a very poetic language he had a polemical sense he is it was superb in that sense and he had
#
visited india innumerable number of times and he had friends here he had written a lovely book
#
for pluto press called another india and he was quite well known in bangladesh because he had
#
learned i mean he had worked very closely with the government workers there the workers there
#
and written a lot and he had worked in thailand so he has extremely he was very very familiar
#
with south asia so the moment i said something he would just you know build the chain in such
#
a way that it would be became started becoming very fascinating so for the first time when i
#
went to england i started reading newspapers completely differently i wouldn't start with
#
the supplements i would start with the front page and then go to the edit page read the edit in a
#
very serious i would read edits here i would sort of do all that here but you know the way i looked
#
at a newspaper itself changed because the way i looked at the world had changed can you elaborate
#
on that yeah that is because this these inputs were being given to me and what was appearing in
#
newspapers i was allowed to critique them so there were certain newspapers which were speaking a
#
language a foul language and a very unwelcome language about immigrants and then there was
#
this teacher here a great teacher was telling me that but great britain's economy was built
#
by immigrants see look at how much they have contributed and he was he was from northampton
#
he had studied at cambridge he was a local person and when a local person tells you that it becomes
#
far more authentic so then then you start transport when transpose yourself into the canada situation
#
and you're sitting here and if you say that that fellow who's a hindiwala or a marwadi or a bengali
#
fellow so i became extremely conscious and i said i shouldn't talk that language that is not the
#
language that has to be spoken in a civilized world so look at how jeremy is speaking about
#
people who have come to his land to his city and have made a life there and and sort of enriched
#
that thing in fact he wrote a intellectual history of immigrants later wow which was i think released
#
in the house of commons later so it's a it's a thick fat book so so he was he was that is the the
#
the way i looked at newspapers changed because there was a teacher who was telling me see you've
#
come yourself to come here to sort of train yourself to become an editor later or become a
#
a better journalist so you have to lot of absorb all these things and then of course there was
#
i i read harold evans very seriously the good times and the bad times and the murdochian
#
revolution was taking place so then the whole thing was getting dismantled the layoffs was
#
happening i read john pilger very very seriously when i went there because i think i went and
#
listened to a lecture that he was giving somewhere and then he had problematized all this whole
#
revolution that was taking place inside journalism the commodification the the kind of straight
#
jacketing of ideas the kind of dumbing down you know reduction of pages for literature or whatever
#
all that sort of you know was put into a context for me when i went to england
#
and then there was a magazine that used to come to jeremy's house used to i think write also for
#
the new internationalist so he used to new internationalist had a completely different
#
perspective of the world and there was new statesman of course and there was the a bunch of other
#
magazines and then you went out to make calls to india there was these red little boots and you saw
#
all these porn stickers stuck there saying call this number i am available you know there was
#
that was also a shock there was soho and there was all those things it culturally shook you up
#
and saying that oh the world that you imagined staying in bangalore all these years is not just
#
malayswaram or basangudi here you are not even willing to accept the cantonment and here you are
#
in this huge big city that everything is so very big so it i became completely conscious of that
#
fact that what i know what i understand what i perceive is very very limited it's better to be
#
humble and pick up things as i go on rather than be didactic and say i am right i have come from
#
india it's a great culture i have a family like this my father is this so and so and my father was
#
a very influential figure in kanada so i mean i i had gone with that baggage but then it sobered
#
me down so much and then that changed my journalism so so it was basically a shock and then because i
#
was into this there was a placement thing that would happen as part of the fellowship and i think
#
it was john deluxe idea to send me to irish times in dublin so i went from one city to another
#
european city and that oh my god that was completely different from london and here
#
you know people would you know very very with great difficulty nod at you or smile at you
#
when you're in the tube or when you're walking on the street or in the supermarket and supermarket
#
was not so difficult because you had indians but you went to south all to bring your masala and
#
stuff like that but here in dublin the very first encounter was different you know i met this editor
#
called kieran fagan and kieran said what are you doing here come let's have a drink that was a
#
completely different language it's not that i was much of a drinker or whatever i mean i i did not
#
sort of alcohol you know i mean my my family was a vegetarian family because you know there was a
#
this whole process of sanskritization that umbedkar and later mn3 was speak about which
#
was i think part of that part of that family construct that if you're you know elevating
#
yourself you have to give up these things and they were more loyal to the shringeri mutt and
#
the shankar mutt and all that so here was i go there and this man who's supposedly you know
#
going to take care of me for the next few months and he's saying come let's have a drink and he's
#
sort of giving getting me the dark stout thing you know and then ask me saying this is tested
#
it's not going to knock you off and then one comes the second one comes and then i'm i become very
#
very so i mean my this whole inside the the i mean it it sort of i became this moralistic there's
#
this element of moral thing fiber that gets woven into your learning and reading and all that if you
#
are in a certain setup and that you know you use because if you drink you think you're a bad man if
#
you smoke you're you get you start to start you know classifying people like that oh he has bad
#
habits so drinking was a bad habit which was sort of put into me very early in my life eating
#
non-vegetarian food was a was not such a welcome thing smoking though is is no no you know that
#
kind of a thing because my parents and my grandparents were all in that kind of a bubble
#
and you you learn to judge people on on the basis of their habits or their orientation that
#
orientation was still not clear to me gay or or or being a being a lgbt person you never learned
#
all that here you know because your culture never even people did not even bring it on their lips
#
and their tongues and this book but all of that started because opening up there so you went here
#
and your first thing that a man says was he was your senior who's supposed to take care of you he
#
says come let's have a drink and that completely brought down walls for me and it was such a
#
fascinating you're such a great good man he was he treated you as an equal he took you there to the
#
pub and then he bought you a drink and then he put you into the newsroom and he put you and he sort
#
of made such a gave such a glowing introduction to all his senior colleagues and the other senior
#
editors he said he's a bright young man who's got the finest fellowship and he's come from india he
#
was in london but the london people have some good sense they've given him to us so we have to sort
#
of take care of i want him to go back with good memories that's what he said what a remarkable
#
man he was and then he then said caroline this boy i think knows a lot of english literature
#
you you will find him useful so why don't you sort of speak to him you know the people were
#
so welcoming and they would take me home in england i except for my mentors drawing room i
#
would have i had not entered anybody's home and here people said you come home saturday oh come
#
we'll go trekking yo we'll go to that island things like that started happening i was too i used to
#
share an apartment with a lady called barbara clinton and this lady is again you know i mean
#
she was working with another rival newspaper or i think she was doing some work for other newspapers
#
and she was a single lady and she was again very welcoming in our home you know i mean this whole
#
dynamics changes right you're a hindu boy provincial boy going to england staying in
#
an apartment shared with by another lady and you are you don't know whether you have to tell your
#
parents or your mother especially that you know is this lady also living with me i mean it's all
#
perfectly normal there and you learn to navigate those choppy waters or which is cultural shock
#
for you and because nobody in my family had gone abroad to study my father was so enlightened but
#
he had never crossed the seas he went abroad much later after all of us took him abroad he went to
#
europe and my brother settled down in the u.s and became a citizen there so he he we facilitated it
#
much later but all of that came later for him england he would he could speak so beautifully
#
about london streets through his reading he could speak of you know i mean russia so you know i mean
#
with such passion i mean that through his reading so everything was a textual kind of a thing that
#
had reached him but he had never crossed the seas physically so this was for me you know in
#
a lot of ways it opened up and so journalism obviously had to be a cosmopolitan idea it could
#
not have been a kind of narrow whatever agenda with which you drive it so it was a cosmopolitan
#
thing because you had benefited from it and you had seen it function you had seen the great examples
#
there and so then i did i had to figure out where does canada figure if i am trying to embrace the
#
world with such speed so canada has to be somewhere you know it can't go away and even if i want to
#
sort of you know flush it down it won't go away so how does it work out so that is when jeremy
#
sort of navigated my my journey and he said that you can be for the first time i think i heard it
#
from him he said you can be rootedly cosmopolitan that's such a lovely phrase rootedly cosmopolitan
#
and i use it much a lot in my writing later i've used it later and i don't think i've attributed
#
to my guru because guru is part of me you know i there i sort of invoke the indian thing i mean i
#
am part of him and he's part of me so i mean it's like the guru sishya parampara so what is his is
#
mine you know that kind of a thing so he used it very very i don't think he used it in the exact
#
same way but then he spoke about you can be rooted and you can be cosmopolitan at the same time and
#
your cosmopolitanism is not confined to the english language alone because there was this construct
#
that if you had to be cosmopolitan you had to speak the english language and if you were living in
#
banglore if you want to appear cosmopolitan you have to go to koshis and come to the mg road and
#
roam around the brigade road looking at all the girls in many skirts and go back and say that oh
#
i've had a cosmopolitan experience so so that those notions of the english divide of the other
#
girl all of that sort of so to this great man sort of you know pushed me to sort of i mean it
#
made me dismantle all of it so it more than say again as i told you earlier amit it was not it
#
was not always trying to bring correctives to my journalism it was about everything so if you bought
#
correctives to the way you look at then your journalism automatically changes the kind of
#
topics that you pick to write will change the kind of you know i mean language you use will change
#
the diction will change the tone will change the way you approach people will change so with all
#
this i came back to india and i mean i would have happily settled down in dublin but then
#
there was a huge labor problem and union problem and all that they could not have absorbed me
#
although they were very very kind and they said we want you for more and they gave me a lovely
#
letter at the end of the day i still preserve and i mean i i feel a little embarrassed to frame it
#
or whatever but then they said sugata was here and he was such a great colleague and he was there on
#
the south asia desk and ltt problem was big those days so then i used to sort of write a few copies
#
on that and then he had special interest in irish language thing and all that but his knowledge of
#
english literature put all of us to shame was the i mean can you believe somebody writing that in a
#
letter of recommendation or a letter of whatever i mean there was there was such good people you
#
know and i felt uh that i was a mini success and i came back to india and here then of course i
#
went to jaipur and veer sangh we had taken over the hindustan times and there was nobody to go
#
to jaipur to look after the news desk so i went there as a news editor and with all this baggage
#
and in a new culture and godhra was just happening and i was just put in the middle of elections and
#
riots and all that and i had to figure this all out which i had not until then because i was in
#
this very secure cultural literary bubble in deken herald and england had sort of shaken me up
#
given me a way to look at all this but then i was now actually thrown there i was a young
#
news editor a very young person and i had people who had served the organization for 30 years
#
25 years there and i had to handle them there was a young team also but there was i had to reconcile
#
and so my my whole approach of managing reconciling these age differences these language
#
differences cultural difference all of them were put to very good use because i had had a good
#
i had a good primer you know i mean so i mean i was i handled it and people accepted me they were good
#
people they were nice people again i was not too it was not too problematic for me to adjust to
#
the new environment and there for the first time i handled assembly elections on my own
#
i created packages i created i got i developed a fascination for polo i still keep in touch
#
with a lot of my friends who played polo there and there was a bit of royalty thing
#
so then you know you just that rubbed off on you a little so i used to bring out a monthly
#
supplement called polo passion because polo was big so i mean i had very generous colleagues i
#
had a very generous resident editor initially he moved on later and then he pretty much i
#
was left to run the place you know and that was very incredible of the people of people
#
and there this whole again new thing there again i looked at the the language issue there i looked
#
at oral histories because oral history was big and so i looked at royalties i sort of made friends
#
with some people like i mean i never thought i'll meet the big man bharav singh shakavat but then i
#
he took to me somehow you know when i was pretty lucky about that and then i then one fine day i
#
got a call from delhi and outlook asking if i would like to run their south and the elections
#
were coming and 2004 is when i moved to the outlook magazine and it was always by then you
#
know i mean my father had created this very lovely image of vinod and the sunday observer
#
and then he used to tell me that he also edited a magazine which was not you know i mean a literary
#
magazine but it was a great magazine he would never tell me it was depan air i think it was
#
about some something would stop him from telling me that it wasn't so sunday observer i think he
#
was very he had watched it closely he had seen outlook we had i still remember the sample issue
#
of outlook reaching our home so we had seen all that and it's somewhere in the corner of my mind
#
by then i had realized that here is a great editor a great man who seems to be very liberal
#
who gives you your space and allows you to do your thing so if at all if it's possible i
#
think i should work with him one day and that dream came true in 2004 and i stayed with vinod
#
till the day he retired so i mean i had a job offer and i went and told him and he said i'll
#
walk to the sunset stay with me until i'm there and he took eight months or one year to leave
#
so i had to keep that job with the times of india in abeyance for that long and then i came and took
#
over as the editor in chief of vijay karnataka their biggest regional paper which was making a
#
lot of money but money yes but then it was completely on the right so they wanted they
#
had bought that paper from another person and they wanted me to sort of bring it to the center make
#
it more acceptable so that their intention was to make it more commercially viable so that big
#
advertisers coming for me it it coincided with my mission of making it centrist and making it more
#
liberal so there was a kind of thing together which was running parallel so i think i flourished
#
there it was a real big success so i did not have a problem again transiting from english to canada
#
because i was anyway a bilingual and i was offered this job because i'm a bilingual but outlook was
#
a great phase and outlook became such a enormous thing because because it turned me into an
#
investigative journalist it turned me into a political commentator and writer and i was
#
probably the only one to have this record i've written every single week in the magazine since
#
the day i joined and my very first piece was a cover story which is everybody here i came to
#
karnataka again see the perspectives that you developed become so interesting that i came to
#
karnataka for the 2004 elections so 2004 there was assembly and parliamentary elections happening
#
and i came here and everybody i met was saying krishna is sm krishna is going to come back to
#
power so i said okay tk you're saying this let me go and look around so i went to the hinterlands i
#
went to the different districts i traveled quite a bit see we know those very liberal with all
#
that you could just travel and he did not confine me to karnataka i was covering the entire south i
#
could go anywhere i want i had to just write this proposal and send it to give an interesting idea
#
and then i had a very interesting and a very fine editor who was the political editor was mr ajit
#
pillai and ajit pillai and vinod mehta vinod himself describes him as a very dear colleague
#
and so ajit was not like other editors in between your top man and you who would snatch your ideas
#
and make it their own and you know he was a he was a man with great rectitude and great moral
#
bearing and he encouraged me he whenever a great idea was there he would say don't worry i will
#
tell you travel because we know this busy i will tell him on saturday or whatever you travel it's
#
okay i've given you the consent so initially you know that mattered a lot although you were a
#
senior guy and all that and there was the reporting structure you always had to sort of convince
#
we know through him and and once we know saw that he started talking to me directly and of course
#
ajit would be looped in but we developed this bond where you know knew i was a little stuck
#
up kind of a character who would we know it was not very comfortable speaking the small things
#
of life but only speak of big ideas and big things so whenever we had this arrangement
#
where vinod would call me every saturday at seven o'clock and this was an you know i mean an editor
#
of vinod's stature having a contact with his bureau head down south with this manner itself
#
was a very interesting thing so he used to call me at seven and he would never ask me what story
#
you're doing he would only say who's sleeping with who what is that happening what is that
#
gossip that i hear why is that fellow behaving like that is he sleeping with somebody you know
#
i mean vinod was so much on the gossip side initially it shocked me i would say i mean i
#
would all all be ready to you know just tell him that this is happening sir that is happening next
#
week we should look at this and i think this is the the the idea that we pursued last time is not
#
really working but we know it would lighten the whole thing he would not talk about ideas at all
#
and then when i try to insert you would say no tell that to ajit ajit will take care of it don't
#
worry you tell me the gossip so so so he would come here we would have great time hopping bar
#
hopping pubs and restaurants so the idea of an editor how i should behave as an elder in the
#
newsroom when i if what if and when i became an editor at that time was again vinod mehta became
#
a model he was he i mean a lot of people may have a lot of stories to say but with me you know i
#
always got you know i mean a great response from vinod and he never curtailed me on anything in
#
fact when i did the very big story in 2005 on the infosys land scam that was a big story when
#
everybody was speaking gaga about the infosys and all that i knew that they were you know making
#
putting making petitions for more land and when when they had not actually used what was already
#
with them and they were making all these projections and all that and i wanted to do a story because i
#
had some documents and all that and it still not reached me but then i had seen them so
#
and there was this big debate that was happening in karnataka as to why they are greedy after land
#
and all that so i suggested the idea and vinod said yeah go ahead no problem so i wrote this story
#
and then he called me on wednesday he said are you sure of all that you've written because by
#
then he had started getting calls from various quarters saying somebody had leaked that the
#
story is happening and he said i've been getting calls are you sure of what you've written i said
#
yes sir then he would insist that i call him vinod but then i would never say i could never do it
#
so i yes i said i'm pretty sure i've checked looked up my facts and all that he said do you
#
have doc do you have the documents which support all that you're saying i said sir i have seen all
#
of it this person has promised that he'll give it to me on a friday but he said but we go to press
#
on the thursday or your form is going to the press on thursday how what what shall we do you know
#
i mean if you're going to get the documents on friday have you seen it are you very sure are you
#
sure and this is my first year in outlook 2005 i said sir i'm pretty much sure it was yeah second
#
year in outlook 2004 i joined so he said okay then okay i'll run it because he sort of gave
#
himself this reason he said too many people are calling so it must be correct wow superb he said
#
too many are calling it must be correct we go down we go down together don't worry i'll run it
#
it was a five-page thing it's just went on the thing and and and that was a great moment and then
#
on a friday i got all the documents i just faxed them to ajit and i said i've got everything so
#
nothing to worry and then again saturday the call comes at seven o'clock and he is laughing and he
#
said have we restored the balance i said yes sir so he said everything is quiet and silent and people
#
are appreciating what you have written so it must be true it is correct so he said don't stop with
#
the story it has do it has done well so do two more let's make it a series so i started scrambling
#
for more documents and then i realized that sm krishna had preferential shares in enforcers
#
then i realized that his son-in-law who i mean drowned himself again had dealt with i mean had
#
underwritten the enforcers ipo and there was a great deal of involvement between these two and
#
then krishna had accommodated a lot of enforcers people in his administration you know urban
#
infrastructure airport so there was a lot of conflict of interest so i wrote that and then of
#
course i at that point of time mr mohanda spy was still part of enforcers and then he said i want
#
to meet i said i'll come to your office and then i can never forget that conversation that happened
#
between him and me and i said i stand by what i write so then they sent a kind of rejoinder
#
to my piece and at the end of the last line was this is only for your understanding not to print
#
wow so i still keep that was sent from one of the pr people so so that story was not contested so
#
it was correct so that was sort of give confidence to you know and that led to my big even bigger
#
story that is the breaking of the mining scam in pallari so we went with the headline the ready
#
republic when even when the world had not woken up to anything like that the loka yukta had not
#
woken up and the first criminal defamation case by the reddies the notorious reddies who finally
#
got jailed was filed against vinod mehta and me the very first criminal defamation case
#
so we felt vindicated after that also was proved but in between all of this we know knew that i was
#
this i was my feature side was also very good not just the political and the other side and
#
this sm krishna thing when i came to karnataka the first time the cover story that i first did
#
i went around and i realized krishna is losing i got a sense that this man is not going to come
#
i wrote that we not published it he said krishna krishna and the the the covers cover was krishna's
#
photograph and naidu's photograph and krishna had a red light there and i had explained why krishna
#
may not come back and it turned out to be correct although krishna was very unhappy with what i had
#
written and they sort of somebody from his site site called me and they spoke badly i didn't really
#
worry too much but that turned out to be correct so i think you know when journalists or reporters
#
have to convince their writer editors not not by taking fancy ideas to them but actually
#
doing these stories and those stories turning out to be correct and that builds a relationship
#
with your editor so he impulsively trusts what you're trying to tell him or trying to you know
#
mean the ideas that you're trying to give him and then he gives you a so finally it became an outlook
#
oh sugata's wants to do a story you would not even ask what it is you'd say okay one page enough
#
two page enough you know it came down to that so you felt very happy and in between something
#
very big happened which is the 10th anniversary of outlook and i was made i was officially made
#
the historian of outlook so i wrote this longest essay i think the only competitor i had in
#
outlook was arundhati roy it was as long an essay as that which is titled the history of outlook
#
in 10 and a half chapters it was 10 years of outlook and i began with uh i mean i'd asked
#
julian barnes to i thought of him when he told me the title yeah i'd asked him for uh it was an
#
eponymous title of course i'd asked him for a quote or something he had said i'm too busy or
#
something i start with that and then i this went on and then for that 10th anniversary issue i
#
sort of all my exposure to the to england and all that had came good because one is of course
#
julian barnes which is incidental but then i interviewed harold evans i interviewed shamlal
#
the great times of india's editor i mean i think i had a lot of pages in that you know the biggest
#
essay was mine the cover story was mine and that was a very momentous occasion because it was 10
#
years of outlook an alternate magazine to india today had survived and vinod was at his peak
#
and when there was this party that was organized to celebrate in the evening so vinod came looking
#
for me he held my hand took me to rajan raheja the owner and he said he's the one who's written
#
the history of outlook and that was my finest moment amit because you know i mean you always
#
dreamt of vinod mehta and working for vinod mehta and here was a moment when he sort of you know
#
i mean said well done and vinod was very stingy with praise he would only say well done that's
#
all and you had to even his appraisal letters used to be so very uh you know in increment letters
#
used to be so very tight just two lines and then he would if he really wanted to say that he meant
#
it he would call and he would say well done well keep it up keep it up that's all if he says i
#
would tell my wife he said keep it up twice so which means he's trying to emphasize that thing
#
so i used to be so alert to his phone calls he's a great man and uh he did not make he also taught
#
me about financial probity he never made money he never you know built farm houses and uh he did
#
not sort of you know go on transatlantic trips and he did not like uh going to going and staying
#
in five star hotels used to come here and used to say take me to some dosa place that corner thing
#
that you took me last time on the footpath you know it was that kind of uh so that taught me
#
a lot of lessons without actually besides journalism of course besides the great
#
journalism that he allowed us to do and that was it was a it was a he was living the role that i
#
i you know i had imagined and it was a great it was a great great time for me when i i think
#
i mean i used to then i when i became an editor i was trying to imitate vinod many times trying
#
to be accommodative trying to allow ideas to come inside the newsroom i bring brought in this practice
#
of asking the junior most you know we had a panel you know the junior most in the newsroom should
#
come and sit in the news meeting not just the seniors and they would absorb they could speak
#
and i made this rule that the best idea wins not the senior who speaks uh you know does not get
#
space it is the best idea that wins and these things you know i mean it was a very nice little
#
cushy ride for the for three years in the times of india's vijay karnataka and then of course modi
#
happened so that started disrupting things because i think they started orienting themselves
#
differently and i was inconvenient although i had critical and commercial success the papers number
#
we had touched a readership of nearly eight million readership you know it's not very unnatural for a
#
regional paper but it was huge for a canada paper because the market was a very small market for
#
various historical reasons and it had expanded and the circulation had gone up revenues were good
#
we were all being taken uh you know annual holidays to foreign countries so it was all very good
#
until what happened and that i think is a statement so here's a question that struck me
#
has there been a time where it's saturday and it's 7 pm and you're missing vinod because that's the
#
time you used to call initially yes i think you know i mean i was but also that seven o'clock call
#
stopped after vinod retired and i moved on and i started editing a canada beast called vijay
#
karnataka and then of course i was then i mean yeah i think he passed away when i was with the
#
asianet whatever so so that had broken in a way but then you know the mental association and i mean
#
i always wanted to report back to vinod saying that i've done this so that was always the basic
#
thing you know i mean so if i'd got a if i if my newspaper broke a big story or if when i got a
#
guy to sort of do something very interesting i just always felt that i should tell him and i would
#
occasionally call him you know because it was also a kind of relationship where you know he's a very
#
big man and he used to appear on television channels and used to be very busy also he kept
#
himself very busy he was editorial chairman but then he used to still attend office and all that
#
i would and it became a little complicated with others around and all that i didn't want to sort
#
of cannibalize on his time and also but but i would occasionally call him up and tell him
#
that i wanted to tell you this and very briefly tell him that and my conversations on the phone
#
are very formal so you know it's another thing when i'm sitting in front of him i can confess i
#
can speak i can tell him that this happened so there were a few couple of occasions where
#
i told him about the problems that i'm having in the newsroom and all that and he gave me some
#
wonderful advice and when his Rahul when the Sanjay Gandhi biography got reprinted i was the
#
editor in editor of Vijay Karnataka and he called me up and he said this has got reprinted and
#
somebody in banglore wants to organize a launch function at the Taj so will you be in conversation
#
with me so i was mighty pleased you know i mean you know asking me to be in conversation with him
#
and so i did that so i mean i so that that point i felt that there was this kind of it was reciprocal
#
you know he was seeing me as someone whom he could sort of some kind of a there was an emotional
#
linkage so he never let it out but then it would always be there so so that made me very happy and
#
then of course i read some initial pages from Lucknow Boy and all that and he was very excited
#
about that he would talk about it and then i he asked me when somebody wanted to get it translated
#
into Kannada so after it got published it was a roaring success so somebody had directly
#
approached him so then he said he told them very very very nice of him to say that he said that
#
will be decided by Sugata so so then it became imperative and obligatory on me to sort of quickly
#
fix up a translator but of course he did not live to see the translation which came out really
#
beautifully in Kannada the Lucknow Boys in Kannada as well so i mean of course i i
#
Sumita Mehta was there and she was very kind to give permission to the book and it came out in
#
Kannada and it was a big success in Kannada as well so uh so this was uh Vinod and the kind of
#
bonding and and and you know i mean i i remember a line from William Sean's uh a book on William
#
Sean written by Ved Mehta and that's a one of the one of the books that i really love reading
#
because William Sean i always thought was a character like Vinod Mehta and i always used
#
to tell Ajit that Ajit you have to write a book and it should be called Vinod Mehta's Outlook
#
like William Sean's New Yorker so Ajit of course Ajit wrote a lovely book on journalism which did
#
well Hashet published it it was called off the record it was full of stories and uh his lovely
#
interaction with Vinod Vinod wrote the foreword for that book as well and that's where he said
#
that Ajit Pillai would have thrived even without me he was a great reporter whom i sort of had the
#
joy of having in my newsroom so that was the humility of the man as well so he taught us
#
to extend that kind of courtesies to others you know if you are under a great man and a good man
#
he teaches you a lot of these things and and very indirectly without without being didactic
#
and instructive so so that so William Sean i was telling you about William Sean and
#
Ved Mehta so there's a line there which struck me when i was reading it and this was around
#
the time when Vinod was still alive and i was to do this introduction and conversation on the Sanjay
#
Gandhi book so i was preparing myself and i wanted to impress him and and i took this line from that
#
book and i and it said that whoever i mean i sort of became emotionally attached to i saw them as
#
my father that's that's something like that i'm not quoting verbatim so he's here met William
#
Sean and he's given him a job in New Yorker and is nurturing his talent and he says you know you i
#
developed that what he meant was that i developed that kind of kinship relationship with him so
#
whoever sort of they became my kind of father figures or whatever so i used that for Vinod and
#
i'm very very happy that i used it and he heard it and he never responded he did not say anything
#
and Vinod and Vinod did not say anything that meant that he had registered on him we know did
#
not have children of course he speaks about a girl he sort of may have fathered and must be living
#
somewhere in europe in his Lucknow boy but we know did not have children and i always was curious
#
what he thought of people like us who were bordering on almost worship you know when we
#
we literally worship not mean worship was not the bhakt kind of worship but that genuine respect
#
for his integrity which is very very rare in journalism that financial probity that see
#
i went to cover the crash in mangalore air crash okay i went there and i took the first flight and
#
landed there and i wrote a story and i sent it to outlook and i was supposed to come back and then
#
you know usually the arrangement in outlook was that you got the ticket from delhi you went there
#
and then i had to tell them when i'm returning and they would send me another ticket
#
and this smart i like kind of a mba person someone sitting in the in the marketing office or
#
the the business office i i sent a note saying that i'm supposed to return on such and such a day
#
so please send me a ticket and all that and we had done mortuary visits for three days continuously
#
and the scene was so bad i write in my story that we went to report but we were actually asked to
#
help so we had to pull out people we had to sort of help people identify so you became part of
#
something else you know you went to report and it was a very traumatic experience you know i mean
#
you can't see charred bodies like that and be normal and it was all over in those mortuaries
#
and we had done that for three days me and the photographer and i wrote for air tickets back to
#
bangalore and this fellow says oh the air tickets are very expensive you take a bus back i was
#
furious i asked him who told you to deny me an air ticket i mean i was a senior editor i was
#
already an associate editor with outlook he said no no no we have a the ceo or somebody has said
#
that you know the air tickets are it's it's a bad time for the organization so we have to sort of
#
cut costs so we can't send you the ticket so sitting on the pavement there of a mortuary
#
and i had a luxury of a blackberry those days and i was had this fancy instrument and i wrote on my
#
blackberry to vinod maitha directly saying i have done these many things i have filed my story i
#
have done these mortuary visits i'm exhausted i'm broken in some sense and when i write for what is
#
my legitimate thing for a ticket to go back to bangalore i'm told to take a bus is this how
#
you treat your journalists so you know i wrote that i sent it and i was so furious i usually
#
am a very calm collected kind of i don't do it i was very unhappy because you know i think those
#
deaths and those the environment was so bad and i got an immediate response on the mail
#
vinod said i'm very sorry it has happened without my knowledge i'll ensure that the ticket comes to
#
you i mean which editor on earth of that stature of that kind of thing would say a sorry to a
#
ordinary you know person you know like me a person reporting from some corner of india so that
#
that again was a life lesson he was like with ved maitha you know made william shawne established
#
a kinship relationship with him it happened with me also i have to confess it happened with me also
#
and by then my father was dead my father was gone and i was hurriedly looking to substitute
#
you know i mean people and then you know it came like that so so it was a very special bond it is
#
that bond exists with vinod that bond exists with jeremy seabrook i think there are two people who
#
i think there are two people who sort of i don't i wouldn't say they replaced my father or whatever
#
like that but then you extend those kind of that kind of relationship and have that relationship
#
and extend those courtesies and those respects to these two people so they were we know i mean more
#
than we know that was jeremy because jeremy got involved i mean with the i mean with the family
#
in the sense he was very he would understand try to understand what's happening in my family what's
#
happening with my children he would talk to my wife for long hours talk to my children would
#
counsel them he would speak to them so he developed a very different kind of bond we know could not
#
shake off that thing it was a limited thing but he had a connect with my wife too in a sense he
#
would speak to her would he would ask her a few things when he came here he would be very
#
particular he would tell bring her for dinner when we sort of meet in bangalore when we went
#
to delhi to call on him what was he would be very gracious but jeremy was at a different level but
#
then you this ved mahta thing i quoted just to say that it happens with all of us that people who
#
are you always want to sort of extend this kinship relationship you you see somebody as your mother
#
who's not your biological mother you see somebody as your father because he's been nice and not not
#
a patriarch but then someone who has nurtured you who sort of you know sheltered you what was
#
been who's made you feel very special was you know advanced your career without putting themselves
#
before you you know a lot of such things so i always remember that line from william shawn's
#
i mean ved mahta's book on william shawn a great book you know i don't still have a copy i i read
#
it with some i borrowed somebody's copy and then i have a kindle version of it so i mean i i
#
still have not been able to get a hard copy which i will i hope to buy someday and just keep it there
#
for myself so so that was vinod mahta so that was the kind of liberal journalistic newsroom
#
he built he sustained and he allowed a lot of people to thrive and i should say he spoiled us
#
all because after that working anywhere was a very claustrophobic experience because there was
#
i'm sure we know that to deal with his owners and when i had to deal with my owners directly
#
there was no filter right there was no this man protecting your interests and arguing for your
#
sake getting your money and increments and things to travel and all that so he was i mean i missed
#
him and when i started and then the buck stopped at my table as an editor i used to be as careful
#
and generous trying to be probably i would uh and with whatever limitations that was there
#
you know the first thing when i went to vijay karnataka i realized that i something this is
#
something that bidal pandey also told you on your show the other day i realized that the salaries
#
were pathetic of people who were stringers and refusal correspondents the first thing the first
#
big argument i made was there should be a parity and there should be a kind of structure that
#
everybody sort of knows what they're trying to get or will get or whatever so that happened times
#
was times that have bought that argument and they were quite happy to sort of i would i would tell
#
them that you're such a big organization i don't think your employee should go out and say that
#
we're not paid well and if you're not paid if a journalist is not paid well and if he has a
#
family to run he'll always look for avenues to make supplementary incomes and that's when the
#
politician comes into the picture so he'll try to push something else so let us try and make it as
#
reasonable as possible and they responded positively to that that whole argument and that happened and
#
then i sort of also sort of i was did not want to look very moralistic or you know having come from
#
the english sphere and i knew that you know it was a world of a difference and people were not
#
acclimatized to here so i would sort of very gently bring them around and get them to see my point
#
if you and i would tell them that if you make innocent mistakes i will be the first one to
#
pardon you but if you make deliberate mistakes then i'll kick you out you know i cannot tolerate
#
corruption because those are there was this problem that it still is there in canada which
#
is the problem of rampant financial corruption inside newsrooms you know journalists and others
#
they they sort of find ways to sort of corrupt journalists and there was a history to that paper
#
also and it was completely on the right and those arguments had to be neutralized made more balanced
#
made to look more like journalism and i had to i mean they all sort of mean it's also very nice
#
that people when you speak to them the way you speak matters a great deal and my colleagues never
#
gave me a problem they sort of it was the marketing fellows and the circulation fellows who would come
#
and tell no no no no this we need to put more of this to sell more but i think journalists started
#
seeing this whole joy of doing a great story and the natural reaction that it evokes you know we
#
did so many human interest stories and that they saw the whole thing changing so i was i used to
#
i used to tell them the next day that this is the power of good journalism see this has changed
#
something i still remember there was the story of a muslim girl who had been treated i mean
#
incorrectly in a government hospital and she had been paralyzed and her father was a poor muslim
#
guy who ran a workshop somewhere and he had to sell his i think house or pledge or something like
#
that and he was in debt and for a mistake that he had not committed it was a simple problem
#
he took her to this hospital a government hospital a children's hospital and they gave her wrong
#
medicine and it had all reacted and and she had become paralyzed for life and he was running from
#
pillar to post meeting ministers in a congress government who were muslims and they were not
#
helping him they were not sort of doing anything and then we were getting furious because he came
#
and met one of my reporters and that reporter sort of did not tell us in the newsroom that there was
#
this big story to be done but we somehow you know one of the chiefs one of his immediate seniors
#
sort of recognized that there was something happening and then they said he suddenly raised
#
the issue in the meeting and he said there must be a i think there's a great story there that that
#
father has been coming and eating his head so there must be a story i think we can do a human
#
interest story or something like that so i mean i was trying to humanize the newspaper as much as
#
possible so i asked what the story was then they narrated this whole thing then i said instinctively
#
i said check up the chief minister's relief fund and see who has been given money from the chief
#
minister's relief fund if this child does not deserve money then who else deserves money from
#
the government check up all this you know i mean the chief minister gives doles right to all these
#
people so by evening my reporters had done a fantastic job they came back to me and they said
#
sir you will be shocked one very big canada writer is being paid for his dialysis he was a
#
former vice chancellor he was a former chancellor former vice sitting chancellor former vice chancellor
#
and he has enough money he has a house in bank law he has a house in Mysore he has a farmhouse
#
and he's being given money for his dialysis and his whole thing i mean i'm deliberately withholding
#
the name so he is being given this money so but the child is being denied this child is a poem
#
and we have been putting this whole story on the front page and the government is not responding
#
so i said just contrast that and write a story so that went on the front page and all hell broke
#
loose this writer who was also a friend of my father who had come for his funeral called me
#
and he and he sort of literally abused me and he said i'm sending you a note now and you do
#
whatever you want and i'm it's not my problem if the government gives me money i mean i mean you
#
don't know you're killing me you know what will happen if i see he was in serious medical condition
#
but you know i mean the government is there for people like the little girl who's and and and she
#
has committed no mistake it is she went to your institution and you have crippled her and here is
#
a writer who can afford his costs and you're sort of you know pandering him and so he told me
#
that it's not just this chief minister who gave me money the previous edu rapa also gave me money
#
the other fellow also gave me money i said are you willing to sort of put all this on mail to me
#
i will sort of carry your version so he sort of sent his version and i think he must have written
#
it in complete he was in he was angry and he must have written it in his angry mood and that had
#
some details which exposed him further so i just published that letter also and that sort of created
#
such a buzz i'm just giving you one example of a story and how systems work unfairly and if you just
#
just decide to sort of do a little bit it sort of works to the benefit so the child had of course
#
the child got some aid and all that but it exposed the system and and it was a congress government
#
that was in power and this man had taken money from the congress government the previous pjp
#
government from edu rapa from everybody and i think it was a habit that had been formed that
#
if i am a great writer i have sort of you know contributed to the culture of the state so i need
#
to be taken care of that was a an attitude which i never sort of accepted and it is the same writers
#
and same journalists in karnataka who sort of protected this kind of an environment who took
#
free sites from government you know they were called g category sites so sm krishna distributed
#
it all these people distributed all the all the chief ministers have done that it finally when
#
it went to the high court it got stayed i mean so they were distributing those lodges giving them
#
benefits giving them discounted whatever some people took two sites so that they could sell
#
one and build a house on the other one this is these this is i'm i'm speaking about g category
#
sites in karnataka this was journalism and of course communalism and was on the other side it
#
was sort of on the rise and paper that i edited sort of had made it its ideological duty to sort
#
of promote a certain kind of polarization and it started with that i'm sorry to say it started with
#
that and corruption was another element so there were and so we today when we talk about the media
#
amit we say oh it's all gone bad today it's gone back gone bad yesterday oh it was not like this
#
i'm sorry it was i think there were always people like this if you look at the emergency and the
#
indian media i'm working on a book on emergency and the indian american diaspora i'll be going
#
to the u.s to research shortly they're full of examples of how media compromised how people
#
sort of bored how people sort of did not stand up for what was correct so i mean i mean i'm not
#
shocked by what we are seeing today in the mainstream media so today we have twitter and
#
facebook where we sort of amplify the whole problem but tell me all these senior editors who are in my
#
book on deva gauda i speak about ram krishna egre and the people he cultivated people who did not
#
belong to the state were given sites in the state and they were all big editors in delhi and he was
#
creating a lobby for himself in delhi hoping that you know they will support him and they'll prop
#
him up when the time comes but you know i mean deva gauda's destiny was something else so he
#
got he became the prime minister not mr hegde and hegde was covering up all this corruption
#
that was happening here with his kind of you know many things that were he could manage through
#
public relations in delhi so lobbies and cocktail circuits and mouthing of opinion in cocktail
#
circuits and the anglophone elite and the absence of understanding of the real india all of this
#
has been true even three decades four decades ago and it's true today as well i think today we are
#
far far far more aware of the problems than that existed then because they were just small little
#
institutions tucked away nobody looked at them seriously now anything you do there are hundreds
#
of people attacking you there are trolls and there are people who question you so i think we are in
#
i mean i agree with you that we are in a slightly better situation now not in a worse situation
#
worse situation because we are aware far more aware of the problems that confront us and have
#
sort of put us in this kind of a condition and the other issue is of newsrooms is of diversity
#
nobody speaks about it and you know i mean i try to correct the situation as much as possible i try
#
to create a kind of rainbow newsroom where people from the backward classes talents i appointed a
#
delhi bureau chief who was a talent i i had a chief photographer who was a talent i made chief
#
sub editor i mean i consciously mix the casts because you know i mean without your knowledge
#
or without your knowledge with or without your knowledge your world views that have that you've
#
inherited unconsciously now not many people are cruel deliberately it's an unconscious kind of a
#
thing they come in with those prejudices and that gets perpetrated so when you're reporting when
#
you are when you're a medium that is sort of holding a mirror to the society and you're writing
#
it from a certain perspective without even caring so that's where i remember lankesh who asked do
#
you have a muslim friend do you have a christian friend go and make a muslim friend you'll learn
#
much more about society than actually reading 10 books on tolstoy or dostoevsky that was a great
#
thing right so so here diversity is still a very big issue in indian newsrooms it's largely upper
#
caste it's largely men women have slowly sort of made some kind of thing because because of television
#
mostly because of the screen and and i don't know how much of control they have over what gets in or
#
what gets out but then at least there are you see women because it's it's a visual thing right so
#
diversity has been a big issue and i think if we don't solve that all this idea of india
#
bunkum that we keep speaking about will not get resolved because you don't have people in
#
centers of communication who can pick up those ideas real diversity thing see lots of leaders
#
in india we talk so much about nehru why is it that we speak so little about a morarji was he
#
an outright kind of some buffoon no you know if you study morarji if you read us three volumes of
#
macbillan autobiography i mean my respect went up for the man you know i mean he was see you're
#
condemned for one little thing and you're typecast you look at jagjeevan ram who never succeeded
#
he was a great administrator please know that he was a great administrator devraj aris who's
#
never celebrated is the man who gave you the idea of backward class reservation even before mandal
#
was commissioned during the janta party regime he was the one who you know very innovatively made
#
use of emergency to implement a lot of progressive policies in karnataka and and therefore came back
#
to power when everybody lost when congress lost everywhere he came back with a far improved margin
#
and a far improved number so that is something that is because we don't have people who are
#
sensitive through these see it doesn't happen in the american newsroom it is there the problem
#
exists it exists everywhere there is a certain class and a certain caste or a certain set of
#
people who sort of dominate environments but at least that consciousness has to grow inside you
#
that we have to make our newsrooms diverse we have to sort of get people from all shades to come in
#
in this mandalization of politics we speak so much about but the same politicians who benefited from
#
the mandalization process are so bad about advocating these kind of causes so they've
#
actually sabotaged their own revolution so i mean they have made it parivar vad and all that is a
#
separate issue but they never have advocated the kind of things that one needs to and diversity is
#
at the center of indian journalism and the center of indian media and until unless you learn to
#
accommodate different kinds of people in your newsroom you will not be doing justice to the
#
idea of india or diversity of india or its multilingual heritage or the various world
#
views that are around us you will just never get closer to reality i remember reading this great
#
book one of the best books i've read in the last decade by philip tetlock called super forecasting
#
and i came across a study in that which shows that the best indicator of the quality of decision
#
making is not intelligence is not education it is diversity that the more diverse a group of people
#
the better the decisions you'll get which is like the study showed it to be empirical fact you can
#
argue about why it is the case i think why it is the case would be that you have so many different
#
viewpoints that you are less likely to make mistakes and more likely to see things in a news
#
new way and therefore i actually think that this is not even something that you know regardless of
#
whether it is mandated or not a good editor will try to voluntarily bring about this diversity like
#
you said you did like i think if i was running a firm not just a journalism this thing but any firm
#
out of pure self-interest the policy i'd put in place is that every time there are multiple
#
equal candidates for a job multiple equal candidates i'll pick the one who increases the
#
diversity right once you meet a certain you know whatever the requirement kind of is i want to
#
sort of let's talk about journalism because on the one hand i you know in all my time in journalism
#
as well it's just so it's always been incredibly mediocre but on one margin i think it's become
#
worse today and and i've been thinking about this a bit that on the one hand you have sort of on the
#
one hand you have media that's clearly sold out and it's because of carrot and stick you know so
#
many media houses depend on government advertising and that's a carrot the threat of taking it away
#
is a stick and then you have the stick that any media house that has any other business interests
#
you are going to get raided your chemical factory can be shut down and so on so on the one hand you
#
have a lot of media which is completely pliant like in indira's time it was said that you know
#
they were asked to bend and they chose to crawl and if there's a similar thing and on the other
#
hand you have a bunch of brave outliers like the news minute and news laundry wire scroll etc
#
who uh you know dhanya rajendran of news laundry recently put out of news minute recently put out
#
these tweets about how you know they had been raided and the whole thing went on for years
#
and the process is a punishment but they stuck through it and it seems to me that while one group
#
of people who sold out are not fulfilling the basic duties of journalism another group of people
#
are having to go way beyond what should be reasonably expected of journalists in a sense
#
to do good journalism to continue to do good journalism they are almost being forced to turn
#
into crusaders that it is not possible anymore as a matter of course to do good journalism
#
what are your thoughts on this it's a it's a situation is very grave what the picture that
#
you painted is not incorrect at all see there are larger issues like diversity and all that
#
but then this kind of vindictiveness of people who are not ideologically aligned to you
#
is something which is is becoming so very obvious ideologically or you know I mean who presented
#
alternate point of view forget ideology ideology is a very big word so that is becoming very obvious
#
but that is the reason why you know we also have to start thinking about how we structure news
#
organizations or what is the business model or how do we sort of incorporate a company and what
#
should see there has to be some kind of legislative intervention as soon as possible or as and when it
#
is possible where cross holding should be banned you know I mean your cross holdings and all of
#
that also create a lot of problems because you are automatically making yourself liable right
#
so you are a businessman you're doing this you're also using see this all of this started when you
#
started using your business your journalism to leverage for your business interests see it is
#
not innocent on the other side also right it is not just journalists who have started these
#
tutaputas small little digital organizations my sympathies are entirely with them and I'm
#
I've been following their work and I also write for them occasionally but the problem is the other
#
people who were supposedly upholders of this institutional journalism started leveraging
#
journalism for other things you know they had to extend their plant or they had to do something
#
new license had to be got or they had to import something you know I mean I hear ridiculous
#
stories when I go to Delhi from my friends who would be panicking and then I tell them calm down
#
let's have another drink or you can go later madam had called or sir had called they are having some
#
function and the road has not been asphalted properly I think I need to speak to somebody
#
and just ensure that it is done so this and they hold big conclaves in Delhi and then you have to
#
get guests and you have to get guests you have to sort of use your public relations so journalists
#
have become so many things rolled into one public relations experts and people who speak to the
#
local municipality to get roads asphalted and you know I mean of course you know checking on the
#
application of your daughter or granddaughter or grandson in the passport office and then putting
#
in a word I mean this is ridiculous you know it's gone to that level and it is not that
#
it's it's not again a problem that happened on the other side the government the government
#
realized that they are vulnerable and they started there is somebody who came some smart fellow came
#
in 2014 and he thought he could exploit them for that the earlier regime for was see I always say
#
this about the congress regimes which is the the guilt of the emergencies put on them so much that
#
they at least have a little you know I mean qualms about you know doing something with the media in
#
a manner that will deepen the kind of distrust about them so the Chidambaram did get Raju Nari
#
Satti kicked out of India so so all of that these are stories that get you know come back in a
#
different context I didn't say that you said it yeah so so they come back in a different context
#
they get sort of so we've seen again what happened with Bobby Ghosh and all of that is true and all
#
of that is very real and I mean in my own it is autobiographical for me I could not stay in a news
#
room because I had to once I realized that I had to make too many compromises I said let me keep
#
the relationship and move out and I just moved out. Which year was this? This was I mean I
#
both with the times then I moved to the Asianet where I was looking after a very big old Kannada
#
newspaper and also running television channels and then I mean I realized that you know I mean I was
#
just not fitting into the whole thing it is see you're not asked to it doesn't at least in in my
#
experience you are not asked to leave or you're not told on your face but then the situation is
#
made so uncomfortable that then if you have some self-respect left in you you would say
#
Arre Arbaba let me sort of step down and let them continue in the way they want to so that's exactly
#
what happened with me and then I went and started a digital thing you know which is the first of
#
its kind with podcasting video multiple thing you know interwoven thing and that also had to sort
#
of wind up because the people who had funded me their names appeared in the paradise papers
#
and then you know I mean I think they became squeamish about it and they they withdrew the
#
funding so then I decided writing is the best thing for some time because the atmosphere is
#
not conducive for you to sort of pursue your journalism so I stood stood I mean at least I
#
had writing to save me and I had some you know I mean I had I didn't have to worry about a house
#
to live in so so I sort of you know but that is not the case with everybody right people I mean I
#
understand and I completely respect if people have to stay back in newsrooms because they have to run
#
families they have to support families they have to you know support their children's education I
#
can understand that I was slightly older and I had worked in senior positions I had made relatively
#
more money which sustains me for a longer period it's not that it can sustain me forever but and
#
also there was this you know you're this thing idealistic and as I said little magazines were
#
showcases of idealism plimpton obituary you know it said this beautiful line in boston globe
#
showcases of idealism so similarly you know you also have this value system which has been
#
ingrained in you and you want to live up to that and you feel that your conscience is pricking and
#
you're answering answering your people you love who have sort of invested so much of trust and
#
love and affection in you and they thought you'll never violate that so you are you're actually the
#
moral you know quandary and that you're put into it is so stressful it's so stressful it is so
#
difficult to negotiate that moral quandary and I think that is the biggest punishment it is not
#
losing a job it is not having to leave a place it's not about making money it's about how do you
#
answer your conscience how do you sort of navigate that delicate thing you know is the more troublesome
#
thing because you're not answering yourself there you're not just answering your immediate material
#
requirements you're answering your father your forefather your teachers and all your learning
#
and education and the weight of that heritage falls on you at that point of time so you don't
#
want to feel compromised because it's almost suicide so I sometimes think about the value one
#
can bring to the world and you know when I think about somebody like you obviously there is a lot
#
of value in your writing and you're doing everything that you're doing but another way
#
in which you could benefit people is by being to other people what Jeremy Seabrook and Vinod
#
Mehta were to you right so on the one hand that could be just editing a large publication or
#
leading a large publication where you're passing these values on to a younger generation who will
#
carry it forward right so in a sense you're playing the long game where you're saying that
#
okay even if I can make limited difference I can train these people and take it forward and this
#
need not be only through a job where you're an editor of a firm and you have people working under
#
you are there ways to make this kind of mentorship this kind of guidance scale glad you asked that
#
question I'm actually doing it with a couple of people you know there's one investigative
#
journalist who used to work with me and he was so good that he used to bring a fresh story every
#
day and it broke my heart when I was leaving and he said I will also leave and then I told him that
#
see this is technology allows you to sort of work in different fashions so don't give up on
#
journalism if you want to quit this organization it's up to you and he came from rural Karnataka
#
so I mean I knew his strengths he had worked for four or five years with me so I created a
#
product for him which sort of helps him sort of you know publish on his own without a staff or
#
whatever and sustain himself by because those stories can't be written by anybody else he sort
#
of you know I don't know he has a knack of picking these government documents and contrasting it
#
what's his name his name is Mahantesh and he was he was with me in Asianet and he now runs a lovely
#
one-man run site called the file.in and I'm incredibly proud to say that this boy brought
#
out 50 stories of corruption during covid and it was discussed during a session of the assembly
#
in Karnataka he's a one-man person he has nobody and these days he gets small contribution from
#
friends and others and he just about enough to pay his rent in Bangalore and survive and I mean
#
he's not given up and I mean that is the kind of hope that I wish to see everywhere else and
#
and in this I mean he's far greater than what I have done you know this is the kind of circumstances
#
that he was in and the kind of background that he came from he is in his is outclassed all of us
#
and this person makes me very very proud and he was there at my place even yesterday asking
#
shall I run the story or not run the story so he's so focused he's now got a story on something
#
and he says I won't run this but the lawyer friend whom you I get him this pro bono thing you know
#
because there were cases slapped on him and there was an FIR filed by a big pontiff of a big mutt
#
and then there was a almost we thought he'd get arrested so we were just working all this to sort
#
of help him and so he came and he said but your the lawyer friend you suggested is saying that
#
this is not going to work so I should I run it or not run it then I said I let let us read this
#
story you know the proof is in the story that you've written so I to read it and I said see
#
he is telling you not to run it because of these two paragraphs so just eliminate those two paragraphs
#
and bring in another perspective add this perspective and you're free to go and you're
#
free to run it so I mean there are people like that there are people like that and he's
#
so now the thing the sad thing is the big mainstream people steal from him because his
#
thing comes out and and I told him that okay if they are doing that just the next day you say
#
you're very happy that they have done packed journalism they have taken your story and just
#
say I'm very happy that the mainstream has picked this up and so one of the newspapers even served
#
him a notice saying that oh you're saying this and it's ridiculous I said don't even respond
#
let's see what happens don't even respond so see that I see journalism should thrive and somebody
#
is doing good journalism you should encourage and you should sort of but now the other part of it
#
is that one or two other newspapers have given him this little small you know monetary package
#
and they've said we will use your stories also with full credit and because see newspapers
#
don't have creative and investigative journalists like before and they need good stories and they
#
know that this fellow is putting it out day in and day out so they accommodate him and give him a
#
small package which is helping him sustain financially so that gives me a lot of hope and
#
it's a very arduous difficult trick it's a very difficult path but then let's see how long we can
#
hold on is the kind of spirit with which we need to work I don't think we need to give up so easily
#
okay you are challenging us we have the wherewithal to sort of address your challenges the spirit with
#
which we have looked at it so far so I don't know what will happen so in fact he sometimes when this
#
boy I mean I use him as a metaphor for a lot of good journalists around in this country doing
#
incredible work bringing great stories to our attention that he wants sometimes sometimes he
#
says sir when I think I have to compromise I'll give up and go and work somewhere else you know
#
so my firm my friend has a transport company I can be a clerk there or I'll go back to my
#
native Davangere my father has a home I don't have to pay rent my kid can go to the government
#
school there so this is the kind of you know I mean level of commitment that journalists show
#
and he is not from the upper caste again see that is see these are the stories that I think the rest
#
of India has to listen and I'm happy that you asked me this question mentoring yes mentoring is
#
a very I think it would be very arrogant on my part to say that I'm mentoring them what I am
#
trying to do is just to listen give them the time because they are far they are far bigger mentors
#
than we can ever be because they have the pinch of that it's their poor that the poverty pinches
#
them each day and they are not willing to give up as yet so that is bravery of a different order and
#
I and we are I mean we are asked to play a small role in giving them that confidence to sustain that
#
and sometimes it feels very cruel to say that go on that path keep continuing on that path
#
because it's your idealism and you want somebody else to bear the cross so that also makes me feel
#
very guilty at times because you're reflective of these things and you see that things are not
#
shaping up well for him and journalism is dead the way it was and also you know I just think people
#
like this are outliers in terms of courage and commitment and you should not need to be an
#
outlier you know good journalism should be something that should be possible as a matter of course
#
and what I meant about the mentorship scaling is that okay it's a couple of people but and I'm just
#
thinking aloud here and maybe listeners will also have ideas that are there ways to kind of
#
get this across to more people spread the value around you know that's what I sometimes want.
#
There was this platform that was created in Bangalore again to fund alternate media and all
#
that and but that has become a forum for both sides both sideism kind of a thing so again they
#
I mean I don't know if they came under pressure what happened but then you know you are you're
#
funding right left and center so there is a certain value system that you should have embraced
#
certain professionalism that should have been embraced and promoted but see again see the
#
problem is that everybody comes under pressure and everybody comes under pressure they also
#
have to sort of retain their identity and they retain it in some botched up manner
#
and it's a very sad story it's a sad commentary of our times but I mean it's not fair to blame
#
anybody because you know they come under such enormous I mean I know what it is you know I
#
faced it myself so we come under pressure and I don't think we should make victims of ourselves
#
and play it up and say oh I faced this I faced these many cases I they went after me for this.
#
Yes so people have their own way of coping with it and there are some incredible stories out there
#
like this story that I just narrated to you of Mahantesh and Defile.
#
So couple of final questions as we grow older and I think you're on also in your late 40s like I am
#
so as we grow older I've realized that our conception of time changes it can happen when
#
people who were part of our lives no longer are as you know we you spoke about Vinod and it can
#
happen just because you know when you're young you have a very compressed view of time when you're
#
20 you think 30 is old age you know you think 50 is completely out there you romantically say oh
#
I will never get that far but then the decades pass in a hurry like I love this phrase as friend
#
of mine Gautam Johan used while he was having breakfast with me recently where he said the days
#
are long the years are short and I feel that the older I get that's kind of more and more true and
#
this has a number of different effects one is that things which are way back in the past like 30 40
#
years ago when we were younger it would have seemed far away in the past today it's like a blink of an
#
eye we ourselves have seen decades pass in the blink of an eye so does that kind of change does
#
that kind of change your gaze in certain ways where if there's a lot of shit going down right
#
now you can be equanimous about it take a step back see the wider sweep of history see where the
#
arc is going and the other aspect also is like I was very intrigued by you know reading your
#
David Gardner book there is he gets married at 21 right and the thing is that that's very common
#
for someone you know people will get married even younger and you go further back in time
#
and you realize that life expectancies maybe decades ago was like 40 45 you know you and I
#
would be outliers and you know and and I think about how their approach to life then changes
#
that then it makes sense that you're getting married earlier and you're having more kids
#
because you don't know how many will survive and so on and so forth and now we've reached a stage
#
where life expectancies are great especially for privileged elites like us and and you know who
#
knows me perhaps not in our lifetimes but at some point you're going to like extend it to lengths
#
which actually seem dystopian if you think about it because everybody would be bishnupita maha
#
everybody would be what a horrible thought what a horrible thought anyway so so you know how does
#
that how has that changed your outlook on life in general like you know one of the ways in which I
#
think I have changed with time is that earlier I was kind of goal oriented that I had specific goals
#
but now I've become more not even process oriented but more journey oriented that take happiness in
#
the small things you know wake up in the morning looking forward to what you're going to do that
#
day and so on so how has that changed your approach to life like when you wake up in the morning what
#
do you look forward to how do you define happiness for yourself today oh that's a that's a very very
#
tough question it's it's it's it's I mean I mean I have slowed down a little I think that is a
#
a great thing that I've done you know I mean I used to you know be in office from 10 in the morning
#
till 10 in the night I would not see my daughter not see my son and you know these pressures and
#
I would take calls even at one o'clock in the night because the final edition would go and I
#
would I was very I was a very meticulous editor I wanted to see the front page before it went to
#
the press and they would wake me up and and and calls could come at any time of the day and all
#
that so the best thing that has happened after I have stopped running institutions in the last
#
two or two and a half years or three years is and and it took took the whole time writing and I
#
don't know if I will ever get back to the newsroom it may happen may not happen but the thing is that
#
I have slowed down that it's I'm enjoying that that that slowness because you know I mean you
#
don't have to sort of accomplish something or prove yourself to somebody else all that you're
#
left to prove is to yourself and so that is sort of you know I mean I mean I became hypertensive
#
at one point of time and now all my indices are good it's it's touch cold or touch whatever it's
#
sort of looking normal and and I have to just manage a little and then it I don't have to really
#
be worried about it so so that is one thing that has happened so I I usually get up very early I'm
#
not a I mean for a journalist I'm an early riser I'm up by five so I'm looking forward to the walk
#
with my wife in the morning so that is when I get to listen to you your podcast you know I mean I
#
I have a I create a playlist and then I do a certain ritualistic listening and then I
#
work for an hour and so I mean there is a spillover for the next day the the day after
#
so I I look forward to that and then of course you know days that are I'm bored I just listen to
#
music today for instance I listen to Jayatirtha Mevundi who's a rising star in Hindustani music
#
and he was he superbly rendered Chandrakant you know I mean so I mean I was listening to that so
#
I mean the pace has come down and that pace coming down also sometimes brings anxiety to me let me
#
confess because I feel that I have retired although because I'm still writing columns you
#
know I mean I'm breathlessly writing I produce a lot of writing you know I mean I write four
#
columns a month which is a lot and you have to come up with new ideas and then in between there
#
are special requests so you have to do that and I'm working on two books simultaneously and I'm
#
commissioned by Penguin to do those two books so so those things are lying on my mind so library
#
work travel all that is there out there but then sometimes I feel that that buzz that was there in
#
the newsroom is missing and oh I have I semi-retired oh is this how you sort of you know mean live if
#
you're not working full time so then I take solace from from people on Brunton street in Bangalore
#
that is where Ramchandra Guha lives he has lived that life for a long time of just writing so I
#
just calm myself you know when that occasionally comes up and because my father worked for his all
#
all his life he went to teach first at the Christ College in Canada University and he was just
#
working and he retired for me my retirement or semi-retirement or a break has come I mean in my
#
you know I'm just about touching 50 and so it's come very early so when you don't know what to do
#
so you have to you you innovate so I as I work with some startup trying to help them build a media
#
thing and it's it's all it's all mentorship you know basically they come and then I discuss ideas
#
with them so that gives me a lot of joy so there's somebody who's trying to develop a mental health
#
product and they said how does how does one link media to that and then I was just trying to get
#
consumed with that idea so Bangalore that way I mean one thing I've learned is this small little
#
idea that my father told me that as you grow older engage with the younger so they keep you young they
#
bring new ideas and don't think that you have to pontificate listen to them because they would have
#
brighter ideas they would have come with a different set of questions so to answer which you will have
#
to equip yourself so don't be this person that you know you don't go with a set of ideas with them so
#
that listening sort of helps so I come to koshis I go to other places and just listen to people
#
speak and they come home and then there's because of my engagement in the newsroom my the the the
#
colleagues who work with me are all over so they call up they say sir if you were there you would
#
allow this story this editor is not so I don't get into that kind of a thing but then
#
I just listen to them so that gives them a bit of solace and whatever so I think writing I've
#
what I've discovered is that after 2018-19 when I in 19 beginning of 19 is when I started working
#
on the deva gauda book I feel I mean I've told myself that I'm essentially a writer and my wife
#
has reiterated that she's also a writer so she is she's a poet so she has reiterated that thing that
#
I married you essentially because you're a writer not because you were a big editor or that or this
#
or whatever so that reassures me that there is no pressure from the home front where she's expecting
#
a certain kind of you know thing from me and I am falling short of it so it's very very important
#
that you have understanding partners so so so that is there and then my daughter is full of stories
#
and my son is you know I mean full of stories they're reading different kinds of things
#
which I mentioned in the acknowledgement of my book you know I mean they're reading various
#
different things and except reading their father they're doing everything else so which is a very
#
good thing maybe they're reading the father's secretly you don't you don't confess to these
#
I read my father very secretly I never told him when he was alive that I liked something that he
#
wrote which is a very strange thing you know I've written about it in my book pickles from home but
#
it was I mean he was gone by then and then I mean in the final stages of his life he had developed
#
a protocol where if he had written a new poem he would leave it on my table that is my bedroom
#
table and I would look at it from a distance stare at it and then probably read a couple of
#
lines and leave it there and after one week it would have gone back to his room or he would have
#
taken it away so I speak about it I recall Oran Pamuk's Nobel speech Nobel prize speech
#
where he speaks in a similar fashion about his father not that I was I'm not comparing myself
#
with Pamuk or whatever it's just a lovely piece of literature which I'm picking and
#
using it as an anecdote to tell you what exact emotion that went past in my mind so his father
#
gives him a suitcase and it's and that suitcase contained the writings of his father and he
#
never opened it to read and his father always wanted this approval from the son who's already
#
become a big writer right so so in my case that was not the thing my father was already an
#
accomplished writer had won the all the awards that he had to win and he was celebrated all that
#
but somehow there was that I could not build a relationship with his writing because he wrote
#
a lot of one act plays he wrote full-length plays and he was writing a fantastic full-length play on
#
Columbus and globalization and I mean using Columbus as the prop to speak about globalization
#
and he wanted to look at the history of this Vachana movement through the wives of Basavanna
#
Gangambike and Nilambike it's a beautiful way recently I was reading this Direndra Jha's book
#
on assassin Gandhi's assassin and there I thought that why is it that nobody has explored that
#
Manorama as a wonderful literary character you know the girlfriend of that fellow the other
#
fellow who gets hanged Godse's accomplice he has a girlfriend called Manorama she's a Christian girl
#
and she also testifies later and nobody has exploited that character as a literary character
#
so I mean I mean Gangambike and Nilambike that my father was working on I thought I mean
#
adds great potential so but I never got to discuss all of this when he was around so
#
he was his literary he was already a kind of a star and we always responded to his public image
#
of course he was a very kind father but later I think we became very conscious of his
#
public stature I mean the road on which I live is named after him so it's ironically it's also
#
the road where the BJP has its headquarters so you know I mean so a lot of these things happen
#
you know I mean I don't regret but I ask myself why is it that I never could come to speak
#
of course he wrote a great poem called Chasanalabandu his collection was also called
#
Chasanalabandu it was on the the coal collapse that happened in Bihar it was very empathetic and
#
very I mean I really love that poem and now when I look at it I feel he was such a sensitive
#
writer and he should have written more but he spent all his time mentoring people and all that
#
that is also there that sees I mean we always feel that he sort of spent a lot of time nurturing
#
younger writers he published some 200 300 volumes you know of young writers who are all very big
#
today and they all celebrate him and they all make him look bigger than me or obviously he is and
#
I mean I'm never sort of you know I mean put on power with him or made to look I mean as good
#
or whatever but that's okay I can live with that in Canada because he is the star here you know
#
I mean that is there but then but then I always feel that he was a better writer you know I mean
#
probably he should have written more and so I am trying to fulfill that thing I feel sometimes
#
in a personal sense not in a sense of achievements or writing do you sometimes look in the mirror and
#
see him no I no I mean not in the mirror I suppose not in the mirror I am a completely
#
different person I feel I carry a bit of my mother's grit my father was a very
#
humongously sensitive person and I'm not as I feel I'm not as
#
sensitive as him or as empathetic as him or or there's a lot to catch up I feel and he's a
#
he's still a tower you know in towering figure for me and I think parents are always like that
#
it's not just me I mean I probably am exaggerating so he is he's always that he was a fine moral
#
you know that the moral core that he had you know I mean it's a it's a it's a very remarkable
#
achievement it's not his children or his writing or his status as a cultural literary patron of
#
writing in Canada or whatever but I think his moral core was solid and he could empathize he
#
could sort of allow people to come into his lives I'm I'm not that I don't think I'm so much like
#
him but I have huge admiration for him probably because I'm not like him so that is that is there
#
because so a couple of kind of final questions and I was struck by what you said your wife told
#
you that she married you because you were a writer not because you were an editor and there's
#
something in you know the way I'd interpret that is a writer is someone who has a life of the
#
imagination they have an interior life and earlier you spoke about how your maternal grandmother
#
loved to read and your mother loved to read and I was just having this chat with a friend I met
#
yesterday for breakfast where he was lamenting that in the office where he works he can't have
#
a conversation with anyone because everything is restricted to what they do and the lane they're
#
on and otherwise everything is beyond that is like just banal and boring and they're not reading
#
much they're not engaged in art and all of that and clearly in your case you know within your
#
family there is that engagement and I can see why you know that's attractive that you have that
#
interior life where you're always so when you look around you and obviously your circles would be
#
self-selected you would hang out with people like you so they would all be reading books and all of
#
that so do you think in general that this is something that people miss out on do people like
#
like have you ever kind of noticed this do you you know does it strike you that in every
#
generation there must be the same standard fixed percentage of people who don't really engage with
#
art or books or whatever and it's the same all across time or do you think it's a greater or
#
smaller worry now you know do you look at people and say oh okay there's no sort of
#
you know other rich interior life going on no I think people have you know I mean that there is a
#
larger people coming into the pool I mean I don't feel cynical about that at all because
#
I think from our times to now technology has facilitated a lot of things you know there's
#
whether really nearly you know something comes your way and see even a Netflix or a movie that
#
you watch or whatever you know pushes you into a different kind of stream and you know you don't
#
you're not robots not to sort of recognize that so you start you start living a different kind
#
of a thing and I think technology also facilitates a lot of other lives that you can lead so I'm not
#
very sure whether it's all for the good or for bad or whatever but then people I always have felt
#
lead several lives and you know I mean I mean I don't know if it was Graham Greene or somebody
#
else who said that you know I mean I mean I think Marquis who spoke about there are always there's
#
always a secret life that a person leads so I mean I think people lead different kinds of lives but
#
whether it whether it has a literary or a cultural kind of accent on it is a question to be asked
#
because what we are surrounded today is not just books books comes in different books have started
#
coming in different forms it could be OTT shows platforms and you know movies and podcasts and
#
radio and a lot of a lot of different things have suddenly started coming up you know I mean I
#
didn't even know that my son listened to so many interesting podcasts I took a lot of recommendations
#
from him you know I mean he was saying you're listening to the same boring stuff why don't you
#
why don't you listen to this thank you son for the same boring things so you know I mean I mean
#
then I realized that he listens to that because he wants to keep a certain kind of mental balance
#
when he is interacting with us so there are new things that they pick up and there are new things
#
out there which people consume in ways that we don't understand as yet or I am probably very
#
limiting and I mean I don't understand that as yet so but there are I mean there are lots of
#
interesting things happening you know below this surface and suddenly you may have a writer here
#
and a writer there and a filmmaker there and a documentary filmmaker there who may just want to
#
give up his mainstream profession and pursue that and and we see that a lot you know I mean
#
in in Bangalore and Karnataka especially where the software things sort of jades you so quickly
#
I at least know half a dozen people who have given up their software jobs and I I mean and
#
I've taken up either filmmaking or writing or in one case who's now a very controversial subject
#
has even become a historian so people find different avenues to sort of so I don't I'm
#
not very cynical about that I think from our earlier generation to now our generation to later
#
I think the whole thing is sort of opening up but what it how it sort of you know shapes you or
#
whether it's the same kind of inner life you know your understanding of inner life was also
#
very limited it was inner life always meant a very spiritual thing but now that spiritual thing
#
has a lot of other wings attached to it so it could it could mean you could acquire your spiritual
#
thing through some godman or and that godman puts you onto something else and something else and
#
something else and so it creates its own kind of world and cosmos and whatever so it's a very
#
complicated question that you asked and you thrown me out of gear I like what you said about you know
#
people have several lives so before I go to my last question I'll read out a poem I love which
#
kind of is on that theme and it's called harmony in the boudoir by Mark Strand after years of
#
marriage he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife that she will never know him
#
that for everything he says there is more that he does not say that behind each word he utters
#
there is another word and hundreds more behind that one all those unsaid words he says contain
#
his true self which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her so you see he says
#
kicking off his slippers I am more than what I have led you to believe I am oh you silly man
#
says his wife of course you are I find that just thinking of you having so many selves receding
#
into nothingness is very exciting that you barely exist as you are couldn't please me more how
#
lovely so my final question is that I'd love you to share with me and my listeners books music
#
films anything at all that you absolutely love so you know it could be something you read recently
#
it could be an old favorite you've always held close to your heart it could be any of these three
#
or all of these three this I mean that would I mean I get a little confused because a lot of
#
things that I like from a very early time for very personal reasons I've always loved to reread
#
off-human bondage by Somerset Maum I like the character there and I've identified myself with
#
that character many times in crisis and so that is from a very from from a real past and then
#
there's another book for very strange reasons you know I mean taught me how to think and taught me
#
how to look at explore an idea differently which was called the man's worldly goods by Leo Huberman
#
and Paul Sweezy it was a economic history of the world I mean of course they were marxist but of
#
course the fact that they were marxist was not important it was the narrative that they built
#
which later on a lot of non-fiction that was published in the west you know explored and you
#
have now a lot of good range of non-fiction writing which you read on specialist subjects
#
so this was one of the very early books which sort of you know caught on and and I read a
#
lot of good economic books after that I mean so that is that is something there and then
#
of course my all-time autobiography favorite is Bertrand Russell the three volumes in bantam
#
press paperback that I still preserve at home I read that and that I read that very early in
#
my teens and I was very absolutely shocked when he spoke about his sexual life and things like that
#
so so and then of course the chapter on mathematics and all that was intriguing and how could somebody
#
be so many things was some the first time that came before me was at that time and of course my
#
Kannada writers of course K.S. Narsimhaswamy was very personal to me when I was very romantic and
#
young and thought that every other girl that I meet may fall in love with me so he was he created
#
that kind of connubial bliss and the world that he constructed was so fantastic and his metaphors
#
and his images were even to this day you know I mean sort of they don't escape you so he was
#
there and then Gopal Krishna Adhika tried to rationalize a lot of things for me so he tried
#
to bring in history into his poetry he tried to bring in ideas into his poems and he sort of
#
ridiculed the idea of writing on love and family the way the other man was writing so that was
#
there and so so so there there is there is Narsimhaswamy there is Adhika and then of course
#
there is Kuvempu Kuvempu's prose you know I mean I don't like his poetry to be honest he's very
#
sort of you know I mean I mean I feel he's very artificial of course there are some great poems
#
too but then I love him for his prose and I love him for his novels so he was great and he was
#
he was he again you know I mean what what what fascinates me was he or Lankesh never left the
#
corner of their room but they imagined their world sitting in that corner. Karanth was not
#
like that Karanth always borrowed money to travel the world and wrote but these two guys I don't
#
know how it was possible you know I mean it's unthinkable that Lankesh could bring the world
#
to my feet and make it so interesting Kuvempu if you look at the range of his poems that I was
#
looking he's writing about some little development happening in Mexico at that time in the 50s 60s
#
and then that spirituality which was passed on as some kind of a moral you know thing beautiful
#
core that it built in me is his poetry I may not like but there is one poem that he writes about
#
the conscience and that has been some kind of a mantra for me when I thought I was not
#
theist or agnostic or whatever and I'm atheist I try to borrow that as my manifesto so so there is
#
his writings and of course when it comes to English Graham Greene is one of my but but before
#
Graham Greene I was a great fan of Joseph Conradoon nobody speaks of today and secret agent is you know
#
I mean very thrilling kind of thing about anarchy was always something that I've gone back to when
#
I have wanted to understand a lot of complex political problems so secret agent nostromo heart
#
of darkness so I mean he was later on condemned as someone who looked at things in a very racial
#
frame but then ideology can make everything look like a nonsense so I don't think we should really
#
worry about that but he has given me great joy and he was also very important for me because he
#
learned his English after he was he crossed his 30s you know he was a Polish guy who learned
#
English much later in life and wrote such splendid fresh prose so somebody told me this you know long
#
back they said if you have learned English after having read your mother tongue well you write your
#
English very differently so I always carried that with me and Joseph Conrad was a symbol of that
#
for me so of course Marquez and Borgias the Latin American writers these two stand out and then I
#
mean for me oh yeah the great writer was Balzac for me oh cousin cousin Pons and the other Flobey
#
Adam Bovary you know I mean I read it at an age when I wouldn't have understood it but you know
#
I mean I read it because there was adultery happening you know I mean you know you wanted
#
you wanted to explore that whole thing and then Madame Bovary was a great thing that
#
and then I still remember the I think was it a Paris Paris review interview or some other
#
interview where he's asked on his deathbed Flobey is asked who is Madame Bovary so he says Madame
#
Bovary say wah it's me so it's I mean things like that which sort of you know mean made you
#
a lot of European literature Victor Hugo again you know I mean somebody who taught me to sort
#
of look at poverty in a completely different thing I mean Dickens of course how can I forget
#
Dickens you know I mean Dickens was somebody who was an ideal for me for a very long time
#
and it gave me great comfort when I became a journalist that he was also sort of you know
#
doing a lot of these things and Orville Orville the first thing I read of Orville was not a novel
#
or animal form or anything it was the review that Orville wrote for my experiments with truth
#
what an incredible review Gandhi essay is fantastic the first paragraph of it
#
so that was there and Orville and so these are I mean lots of things that you read and off late
#
you know I mean I really enjoyed reading I mean this is a few months ago was what Michael Sandel's
#
tyranny of merit I thought there was a lot of argument that one could borrow to write
#
about India itself it was a great book then I read I mean the book that I really loved and I
#
wrote about also was Amartya Sen's book Amartya Sen's memoirs autobiography home and world because
#
that is the kind of the local and the universal that I always had imagined and it was just like
#
reading about my own childhood and my rooted cosmopolitan and you know the the astonishing
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thing between I mean that I read there and also read in Marquez's autobiography living to tell a
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tale is where Amartya Sen says that my English was not so good I'm not was not very confident
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about my English and he's in 10th class or something and Marquez says the biggest regret
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he has won the Nobel Prize mind you both of them have won the Nobel Prize and Marquez Marquez
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in his living to tell a tale says the regret that I still have to this day is that I never spoke
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English well or I can't speak English well so I mean what is it that made me wonder what is it
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that this language what is this language which extracts regrets from even the most accomplished
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so this language is there is something else in this language it's very pernicious so I started
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looking at English a little more suspiciously because you know if it has that kind of a hold
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and sway on even the most accomplished then that's that I thought it was not correct
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so of course Amartya Sen and I read I greatly enjoyed reading Girendra Jha's book on Gandhi's
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assassin and not so much for to understand the ideological construct but for the side stories
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in it the lovers that these people had his previous books are really good if you've read
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ascetic games and the one he co-wrote with extraordinarily talented writer and I really
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enjoyed that and of course for my book I mean I had to read a lot of biographies and
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autobiographies and all that but that was part of to sort of see and measure how I mean for my own
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book or quote or look at cross-reference or whatever but I haven't liked a lot of political
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biographies that have been written now not that I have written a great one but I'm not really
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because you know I feel that there is a complete they don't get into the emotional side of the
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person the politician the politician is always looked at through the framework of power and
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achievement and government and state and things like that but they forget that they are often
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people who are as vulnerable as you and I are and power does not eliminate anything I mean I see the
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insecurity of Devagoda even at 89 today when he speaks about something or the other so I mean I
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can feel that you know I mean why is he I feel why is he panicking about this it's such a small
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thing but then then I realized that he's a human being you know I mean yes yes you know I mean he
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has to react like you and me so those things you know I mean but then there I again that was a
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great book which is I really enjoyed on the political side was the team of rivals of course
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it was not read recently but Doris Kearns Goodwin she was remarkable fantastic absolutely marvelous
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I have been trying to read Louis Bunuel in his memoirs again and Louis Althusser I don't know
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for some strange reason I started started picking up on reading it and so that I keep going back to
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a lot of these things I actually went back to a book of interviews by Oriana Fallaci interviewing
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history it's fascinating because this lady I mean of course there is she was accused of making up
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a few quotes here and there but who cares it's I mean it's actually written so well same thing
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about Kapuskinski you know I mean rise at Kapuskinski shadows in the sun yeah I mean imperial
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shadows in the sun Shah of Shahs I mean amazing thing I recently I think Salman Rushdie wrote a
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small little note on his Kapuskinski and his relationship in the thing that he does on that
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new platform whatever it is called and I subscribe and I just get his posts and he had written about
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Kapuskinski and an immensely talented writer you know forget the fudging bit if he if at all he's
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that is a separate that is a separate issue but the prose itself and the thing itself was so
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appealing so this is about writing you know but then lots more actually but then Canada of course
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lots more but when it comes to music you know I mean I have become a slightly eclectic listener
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now because of my children again you know they listen to a lot of other things and they make me
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listen and but I I'm I'm wedded to committed deeply committed to listening to Mansoor Manlikarjun
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Mansoor whom I had the great opportunity to accompany him to the local bank in Darwad holding
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his hand when he when my father went to see him so I mean Mansoor because he's very soothing and I've
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I've been saying Joshi and Kumar Gandharva and all the Darwad singers I like but he is very special
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because he does not I don't know if it's the right word to use he does not pretend in his singing
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he's he does not sort of perform he gives himself he gives himself in so I mean I'm really taken in
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but and and then something that the rest of outside of Karnataka people may not be familiar
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is the singing of the Vachanas and again you know I mean it's it's marvelous and I listen to them
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very often again Basuraj Rajguru singing the Vachanas Basuraj Sidram Jambaldini another
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Hindustani great singing the Vachanas for me Vachanas singing has the potential of the Rabindra
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Sangeet you know which is an independent genre which has not been converted all these Lingayat
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leaders and politicians all of them seek power through the caste but then they have not harnessed
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their cultural treasures it's a it's a complaint that I have against them so I love to listen to
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that and I I love to listen to songs of bendre being sung by good people I recently for his
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birthday I compiled a twitter playlist and it was a I mean I enjoyed doing something like that
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so that's that's about it I mean I'm on to Netflix because I I my wife and I joke that this is the
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platform which has helped us keep our marriage going you know because that's the our that's our
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time you know when we watch shows and we just finished watching Outlander so I mean I think the
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sixth season is going to come and we are waiting curiously for that she's watching Nightfall and
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I have missed the initial episodes and she said you should watch so because we try to catch up
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with history and all that you know which we which we could not have read deeply we try to sort of
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understand the nuance of it through them lots of one interesting times you know interesting stuff
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that comes by us and then we consume and it becomes something else in your head and she did
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not like watching money haste or whatever so I watched the whole thing so so things like that
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lovely you've given me so much to discover and dig into so I must thank you for your patience
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especially since we were supposed to discuss your book five hours have passed we haven't even
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mentioned it or we've kind of mentioned it but next time I come to Bangalore I'll certainly do
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a thing with you for the book I'm very keen to know what you thought of it and what you know I
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can tell you I can tell I can tell you what I thought of it right now I loved it you know I
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was first intimidated by the length like just looking at kindle locations there are just you
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know I went to the epilogue and that was after 7000 locations or something and then I said okay
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this is going to be a long read but it was actually a really easy read and what I enjoyed
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about it is that point that you made that too many biographies will not get into the personal you
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don't get a sense of the flesh and blood person but in your case you really brought not just
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Devagada alive but many of the other characters around him like Urs and Ram Krishna Hegde and
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all of that and they're all kind of so I in the end I felt that the book was too short I would
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have liked to go deeper and so it's a lovely book already 600 pages and my publisher wouldn't agree
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yeah but these publishers because now these constraints should not be there honestly but
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we will we will talk about it at length when we next come thank you it's been a pleasure being
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on your show and I'm a fan of your show thank you thank you if you enjoyed listening to this
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episode check out the show notes dive into those rabbit holes do pick up Sugata's superb book
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furrows in a field I guess we'll discuss that in some future episode now you can follow Sugata
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at twitter at sugata raju you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past
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episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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