#
So, you've clicked play on this podcast, and you noticed that hey, this episode is
#
over five and a half hours long.
#
Why does it need to be so long?
#
People who discover this podcast for the first time often ask this question.
#
Though if they become regular listeners, they ask, why couldn't it have been longer?
#
I wrote a post about this subject and I'll link it from the show notes.
#
But let me talk about one aspect of it for now.
#
When I started this show, it was about ideas and analysis.
#
The name of this podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, was inspired by Frederic Bastia's
#
19th century essay, That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen.
#
The show, like the essay it was inspired from, was supposed to be about the unintended consequences
#
And over the last few years, the focus has shifted from ideas to people, from interviews
#
Initially, I'd get an expert on a subject and talk about the subject.
#
But those are dying a dozen on YouTube and other podcasts.
#
I gradually stepped back and began speaking about my guests' life and influences.
#
And in recent times, some of the longer episodes are oral histories, or you could even call
#
them assisted self-portraits.
#
When you speak to someone about their life over a span of decades, you not only understand
#
them better, but you also get glimpses of the changing world as it turns and burns.
#
I love that aspect of the show, being able to live someone's life as seen in flashback
#
Being able to unpeel layers of this complex world we live in.
#
And going by the love I get from all of you, it's clear that many, many people want that
#
kind of deep discursive conversation as well.
#
So if you're new to this and you start listening and think, hey, get to the point, well, there
#
I'll end this intro by saying thank you again to all the guests who've ever been on this
#
show and have trusted me enough to set aside their filters and open themselves up to me.
#
It's been a privilege and it's changed me as a person.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
My guest today is my old and dear friend, Nilanjana Roy.
#
I first met Nilanjana in my blogging days, maybe 18 or 19 years ago, when she was already
#
one of the most highly regarded book critics in the country.
#
And even in the world, as her fame grew through the interwebs, she wrote one of the longest
#
running book columns in the world.
#
I think it appeared in the business standard for over two decades.
#
She's now a columnist for the Financial Times.
#
She's edited various compilations.
#
She's written two fabulous books of fantasy called The Wildings and The Hundred Names
#
Her first literary novel for adults, Black River, is due out soon.
#
What can I tell you about her?
#
Well, one of the things that I admire about Nilanjana is what a good reader she is.
#
She reads with intention.
#
Her reading deepens her sense of self and informs how she looks at the world and writes
#
This is something I've always wanted to learn from her.
#
Some of this love for reading and books comes out through her superb collection of essays,
#
The Girl Who Ate Books.
#
I'll refer to that and quote from that during this conversation, where we spoke about reading,
#
yes, but also about feminism, family, freedom, and about these times we live in.
#
Before we get to it though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
The commercial is also about reading.
#
Use my code and subscribe to CTQ.
#
Do you want to read more?
#
I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
#
There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
#
But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
How do we know what to read?
#
How do we put the right incentives in place?
#
Well, I discovered one way.
#
A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
#
which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
#
New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
#
ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
#
Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
#
So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Niranjana, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
It's so good to be here.
#
Yeah, I've got to sort of instantly tell my listeners that we are recording in a studio
#
on a couple of AKG 414 mics, which are like twin mics, they look identical.
#
And you just named them Sleek and Slinky.
#
Yours is Sleek minus Slinky.
#
I felt in my mind, you know, since they're so much a part of the conversation, they should
#
They should have names.
#
So you're Micah Sleek, my Micah Slinky.
#
So I'm glad we're finally getting to do this because I think I've been sort of asking you
#
for a while and you've been busy writing your books.
#
But finally, here we are.
#
I have to apologize for that.
#
It's just been a couple of years.
#
The last three years, I think, has been pretty full on, both with the writing and then personal
#
And for a while, I don't think I was in a space where I wanted to speak as much as I
#
And your podcast was a great comfort in that time.
#
We have so few shows that actually give people a little time to, you know, sprawl.
#
Usually you have your eye on the clock with the conversation and you're thinking 20 minutes
#
for questions, 45 minutes so much.
#
And I'm going to try very hard not to go into interview mode.
#
The questions that I wanted to ask you were things like, you know, why did you decide
#
that we needed this sprawl of time, this slowness, this getting into things, spending a fair
#
amount of an afternoon or a morning or an evening with your guests?
#
I've enjoyed it as an listener.
#
In a very sleek way and a very slinky way you turn the tables on me.
#
But yeah, to get you warmed up, yeah, sure, since this is a conversation.
#
It sort of evolved that way in the sense that initially my sense was that, you know, people
#
have short attention spans, a 20 minute podcast is perfect, you've got to grab them in the
#
first few seconds, all of those things.
#
And I realized I was wrong for three reasons, which I've sort of spoken about and written
#
about so much in the past that it'll be a repetition for many of my listeners.
#
But the reasons being that one, people tend to listen when they are a captive audience.
#
So people will listen to podcasts or audio books when they are either commuting or working
#
out or doing errands like washing dishes and so on.
#
So you know, when you're watching a video on YouTube, you can just go to another tab
#
or change the window or turn your head and talk to someone who's standing there, pick
#
up a book from the table.
#
But if you're jogging, you're not going to start doing something else.
#
So one, you're a captive audience, two people listen at higher speeds, which is easy to
#
do because our normal speaking speed is between 150 to 200 words a minute.
#
I speak at about 160 because I'm a middle-aged man now, I'm a little slow.
#
But our brain can comprehend language at 500 words a minute.
#
So actually it's really easy to listen at higher speeds and the way to do it is people
#
might think, oh, it's squeaky and I'll miss nuances and all of that.
#
Actually you don't at all because your brain adjusts.
#
If you take it to 1.2, wait for it to normalize, take it to 1.5, so on and so forth.
#
Like I can listen to stuff between 2.5 to 3X and not lose any nuance, not lose any pauses,
#
any gaps because the brain just adjusts and processes them that way.
#
And the third important reason is that I think in modern times people crave depth.
#
And the thing is, it's not that there are two kinds of people in the world and the one
#
kind has short attention span, one kind doesn't.
#
I think everyone has a short attention span for a lot of the time.
#
So there might be times where I am constantly distracted and looking at my smartphone and
#
you can't really hold my attention, but there are also times where I want to sit down and
#
And media today, unfortunately, because there's a race to the bottom, it's a mile wide and
#
an inch deep as our mutual friend Prem Panicker says so eloquently.
#
And people get that and people crave depth and they value depth, which I've discovered
#
through the love I get from my listeners.
#
And I think it's in a sense, and this is a theme we'll surely talk about in your context
#
as well, but I think just shifting forms not just changes the work that you do, but it
#
also changes the person that you are.
#
It makes like, for me, I think I'm, and I was discussing this in an episode I recorded
#
yesterday with Pradeep magazine, it'll probably release after this.
#
But you know, and where I was talking about how it's made me less judgmental and more
#
open to listening to people and getting involved in their stories is like, you know, Stephen
#
Covey once said that we don't listen to understand, we listen to respond, which is a really bad
#
I mean, to have a good conversation, you have to kind of put your ego out of it and just
#
And I think doing this has taught me to do that.
#
And Pradeep in different ways also shared how the last 10 years have made him much less
#
judgmental, which reflects in this beautiful memoir that he's written called Not Just Cricket,
#
which is an episode that will come after this so people can hear that.
#
And I've been reflecting about this as well.
#
I've been doing a fair bit of sort of self reflection on how the work that you do can
#
change who you are and the work that you do is shaped so much by the form.
#
And you have also worked across different forms in your life, done different kinds of
#
reading, different kinds of writing.
#
So you know, although this was not something I planned specifically to ask, but what are
#
I'm picking up on some of the words that you've used because they're exactly what I wanted
#
It's that ache for depth.
#
It's not just a need for depth or a sense that we have that missing in our lives.
#
Somewhere the more frantic that we get, the more time we are spending on Twitter, social
#
It's not just social media, you know, to be honest, the world makes you feel like you
#
have to keep running to stand still.
#
And just to be in the swim and whether it's news or whether it's your lives, there's no
#
emphasis on pausing, you know, there's just, you're supposed to consume one experience
#
after the other, just the way that you consume the news.
#
And there's this constant frantic cry of next, next, next.
#
I've spent much to my surprise, I think, a lifetime of moving around a lot between jobs,
#
not settling to one kind of writing, one kind of job, but grounded fundamentally in reading
#
I don't think I intended that to happen.
#
But it's been, if you think about it this way in this ocean that's constantly tugging
#
you this way or that way, my reading in different languages, different bodies of work, different
#
kinds of things has been like a sheet anchor.
#
It's something that you can return to at any point of time in your life, no matter how
#
grievous the world around you is.
#
And your reading also challenges you at some point to seek a certain kind of depth.
#
You know, that libraries have long been used as parallel schools or colleges in the Depression.
#
American libraries became places where people taught themselves skills.
#
And they did that by reading 30 books on the subject.
#
And they found their subject basically by walking into this huge cathedral of books
#
practically and asking themselves a simple question, what am I curious about?
#
What am I interested in?
#
The other thing that you've touched about the fact that your work changes you, I get
#
asked so often about writing by people who see it as, who used to see it at least, as
#
a pathway to a certain kind of success or celebrity or stability.
#
And they really want to have written their books.
#
And each time I want to, I really want to beg them to sit down and enjoy the writing
#
itself, you know, to sit there quietly with the page and with whatever you're working
#
on and to discover yourself as a writer or discover yourself as a reader as well.
#
For me, what am I doing these days?
#
I've just finished a novel, Black River, which is probably the first novel I've written
#
for an entirely adult audience.
#
My two books before that, The Wildings and The Hundred Names of Darkness, could go either
#
My oldest reader was six years old and my oldest reader was 92 years old, a Spanish
#
biker, you know, who sent me pictures of himself with his two cats.
#
That is the joy of being a writer, actually, you never know who you're going to reach.
#
And if you're in a rush to get to some page three success or to get onto the TV shows
#
or to be invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival, as fun as all those things are,
#
that's not what the work is about, you know.
#
And I want to tell people to learn to take their time with whatever it is that they're
#
doing, whether it's with a book or with an author, the pleasure of immersion.
#
That's the word that we're looking for really, you know.
#
Immersion is difficult because everything else in our modern life mitigates against
#
It says that when you've reached a place, you need to rush to reach the other place.
#
If you've traveled to so many countries, you need to go somewhere else.
#
And yet it's only by standing still and holding on, whatever it is that I admire in my life,
#
whether it's specific writers, specific books, or whether it's the freedom struggle, you
#
I'm struck by how much Nehru, Gandhi, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Sarojini Naidu, Aruna Safani,
#
all of them, how much time they actually spent thinking about what went into a national movement
#
and trying to visualize independence.
#
Gloria Steinem, I'm jumping like crazy, so you'll have to call in me back at some point.
#
But Gloria Steinem says that one of the tasks ahead of us is how to imagine a new world.
#
And she doesn't say, you know, how to bring that new world into being.
#
That's a later task or whatever.
#
But truly, if you cannot imagine a better reality, a better life, then how are you going
#
And you're not going to be able to get to that point if you're constantly racing from
#
It's not just about slowing down, it's about what you're slowing down for, right?
#
So when you get back to your early experiences of reading, often we rush into what was your
#
But most people's early experiences of reading are actually of being told a story, you know,
#
of listening when you're very, very small, very young.
#
And that is the ultimate slowness because you're sitting there, you're quiet, but you're
#
You're taking in something and you're learning to imagine for the first time in your very,
#
very young life, this world that doesn't actually exist before your eyes.
#
I've looked at that and I think one of the big themes that I keep coming back to is why
#
in all these centuries do we keep reaching for story?
#
Why do we keep reaching for myths?
#
Why is it that pretty much from the dawn of humanity, one of the first things we do is
#
not just live in the world, but we reach for stories to try and explain what kind of world
#
You know, the oldest books and the oldest tales go back to the dawn of humanity itself.
#
And I find that incredibly moving and slightly surreal that we can sit here so many centuries
#
later and still fully understand and be moved by something like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which
#
was the first written epic, or we can relate to the Mahabharata and the Ramayan, whatever
#
your own epics are, we can relate to them as though they were written yesterday.
#
You know, it's that universal.
#
People just reach across the centuries all the time with writing.
#
So a number of things I want to kind of double click on and kind of go a little deeper.
#
And one of them comes from two of the things that you mentioned just now.
#
One is, of course, how that Therav has gone from our lives where we can just sit and think
#
about stuff and not just go from sensation to sensation and so on and so forth.
#
And the other is what you said about our freedom fighters having the time to sit and think
#
about stuff, Nehru writing all that he did in jail and such eloquent language without
#
a library available to him and so on and so forth.
#
One TIL moment I had about our modern times came from Jonathan Haidt when he said that
#
even though we have all of literature and all of knowledge available to us at the click
#
of a mouse, most of what we are consuming was produced in the last three days, right?
#
So we go from sensation to sensation to sensation to sensation and that quietitude is not there.
#
Like you know, when you and I were growing up, we had a lot of me time and we had a lot
#
of me time because there was no option.
#
There weren't so many things to do.
#
You know, we read a lot.
#
Because there were so few books available to us that we read everything we could kind
#
I mean, you and I were perhaps much more privileged and fortunate in this regard.
#
But for most people and so many of my guests of our vintage, you're just reading everything
#
indiscriminately that you can get hold of.
#
And you have the time to sit down and think.
#
And you know, like you said, like I once wrote a column about, you know, that old lament
#
about how did we have such great leaders in the 20s, 30s, 40s, even 50s.
#
And today the quality of politician is what it is.
#
And my theory about that was that was an economic theory, which is that it boils down to incentives
#
that are great freedom fighters, all the people you named.
#
You know, there was no power at the end of the line for them.
#
So they weren't lusting for power.
#
They were animated by higher principles.
#
And that calling attracted the kind of people who were animated by higher principles.
#
And that's why you got all the people that you did, your Nehru, your Ambedkar, your Sarojini
#
And today it's, you know, people are not attracted to politics for that reason, for higher principles.
#
They are attracted for the lust for power and money and so on.
#
But I think that the reason that, you know, if I were to add a second reason to that,
#
I think what you just said is a great reason that in an earlier generation you had the
#
scope for quiet reflection, even if you didn't have all the libraries of the world sort of
#
And it strikes me that today to be able to reflect in that way, it has to be an act of
#
will where an individual says, I want to put my smartphone away, I want to put the laptop
#
away, I want to sit and reflect.
#
Earlier it was almost default that you reflect a lot of the time because what else is there
#
But now we are just going from sensation to sensation, picking up our smartphones 20 times
#
an hour, you know, chasing the dopamine hit of the latest notification or Facebook like.
#
And for most people, therefore, you are just kind of trapped in this.
#
What are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
Have you found yourself fighting it yourself like I have, you know?
#
Have you found yourself fighting it yourself?
#
And is this something, therefore, that you would lament, like I think we would both agree
#
that it's almost miraculous and magical that so much knowledge is available to us at the
#
But this is a downside.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts?
#
I think we all are because we tend to put an Instagram filter on the past to some extent.
#
But when I look back at my childhood, the kind of childhoods that many of us had, it
#
seems impossibly idyllic because it was uncluttered.
#
I think there was extraordinary privilege for me, not just in terms of caste or majority
#
religion coming from a reasonably affluent background.
#
But there was extraordinary privilege for me in the incredible luck of being born into
#
a family where books, art, music and all of that were prized.
#
They were not collected.
#
They were just seen as these wondrous things that made your everyday duty bound ritualistic
#
life that much more not just enjoyable, but it reaching for whatever it was that you were
#
reaching for a ballet performance in Delhi, spik makke concerts, your own culture in Bengali,
#
It was understood that this added a layer of deep meaning to life.
#
And I think I was very fortunate to grow up in two households, one in Calcutta, one in
#
Delhi, where we were surrounded with books because people would rather collect them than
#
refurbish the furniture.
#
I took that for granted, but let me describe what a Delhi childhood was like at that time.
#
This was in a key part of the 1970s.
#
And mothers used to, by and large, it was a time when women were just starting to work
#
outside the home, so unfortunately, most of these were mothers.
#
And mothers used to turn their children out of the house after school like puppies, to
#
And used to roam fearlessly through many of your neighborhoods.
#
And this went across class, by the way.
#
This was true for small Mohalla neighborhoods in Model Town, and this was true for government
#
colonies like Chanakya Puri, where I grew up, or Lodi colony or whatever.
#
There'd be somebody sitting out on a charpai somewhere, and you'd wander around in and
#
out of each other's houses.
#
And so the part of it that was not bookish was balanced by a tremendous activity.
#
I climbed trees, I fell out of them, I climbed roofs, I fell off them.
#
This is, by the way, something of a running theme in my life.
#
And I think we thought nothing of running around a space that would have been easily
#
We knew every quadrangle, we dreamed of secret passages in Balam Airfield, which was nearby.
#
We knew which parts had jackalls and were to be avoided, and which parts were actually
#
a little more friendly.
#
And there was a sugarcane stand in that field that we all avoided because the cobras used
#
And we avoided it without fear.
#
The natural world, the bookish world, the outdoors world, they all flowed into and through
#
Even when television came in, which would have been roughly the end of the 70s, early
#
80s, programs were screened in the evening, and they were mind-numbingly boring to begin
#
Krishidarshan for the win.
#
You know, the golden age of television was a little further down the line when Buniyaad
#
and Hamlog and all that good stuff happened.
#
So we lived a very active life, not a passive life.
#
How do I struggle with this all the time?
#
I still find it difficult to avoid the stickiness of Twitter, but I think I've grown better
#
at just putting the phone off.
#
The phone is the biggest thing, you know, that anxiety of, I'll miss out if I don't
#
see a message right now.
#
And you have to train yourself to moving into a, it's fine, it's fine to respond to something
#
Nothing is that urgent really, you know, except for, okay, editorial deadlines or something
#
But even that, you can train yourself to just check in with the phone once or twice a day.
#
And that opens up space for you to check in on everything else.
#
You know, otherwise we spend, I think what we're pushing back against is something that
#
was also not true of the early web.
#
You know, you're enough of an 80s, 90s.
#
I mean, I think I just touched on what a childhood in the 1970s was like.
#
An Indian childhood was never fully idyllic.
#
But you know, things like the emergency, which happened when I was very, very young, 97,
#
98, suddenly it seemed to you that the walls were speaking in admonitory tones or because
#
children pick up hypocrisy very fast.
#
There were these bright breezy songs, you know, Kachra Hatao, which means remove the
#
And somewhere in there an uneasy prickle, which told you even as a child that something
#
else was supposed to be cleaned up and removed and you weren't very comfortable with what
#
You didn't know that it was people and their homes that were being removed.
#
So somewhere, you know, we always valorize our own words.
#
And I think in my memory, my birth goes hand in hand with the story of the Bangladesh war,
#
a time when Mrs. Gandhi was probably at the height of her popularity, seen as this strong
#
and immensely capable leader.
#
And it's something of a lesson to us that just five years later, she took India into
#
its first, not last, experiment with authoritarianism.
#
But as a child, you know, what you're processing all of this in as this duality of immense
#
security, which lasted right up to the Billa Ranga murder of those two, the brother and
#
sister, Geeta and Sanjay.
#
And we're so used now in a huge megalopolis, which is what Delhi has become and Bombay
#
has become, that we forget what a shock something like that sends out, you know, the ripples
#
of sadness and shared grief and collective mourning that happens when a city is a smaller,
#
In the 1970s, Delhi was still a collection of villages held together by a substrater
#
of government cordonies and, you know, vague optimism.
#
Again in memory, it's important to just keep looking back and looking back further because
#
nostalgia is always cut through with its opposite, right?
#
So 1947, which was India's independence, was remembered by the generation after that
#
in story and in memory.
#
It was a living memory, but so was partition, you know.
#
And early on, I think one thing we learned about living in this country, we knew that
#
because of the years of the British Empire, the rule of the British Empire, we knew that
#
we didn't live in the first world.
#
We lived in the third world.
#
We knew that empirically speaking, we lived in a very poor country that was struggling
#
to fill its treasuries again.
#
And I think for my generation, some of the respect for the leaders we had right after
#
independence comes from that space.
#
It's not so much what we think of today, you know, worship of a particular political party
#
or allegiance, the tribal thing.
#
It is more a genuine respect and wonder for the fact that India bucked what everybody
#
expected of the country.
#
Foreign correspondents expected India to fall apart in five years and then 10 years and
#
And you know, it seemed every decade that somebody was ringing the doom in.
#
The 1980s, again, Indira Gandhi's assassination, the trouble in Punjab, all of that, the riots
#
and deadly, everything is something that you live through.
#
You know, you feel it on your skin.
#
And through that, what happens is that books become a way of understanding the far past,
#
recent history, and also a comfort and a refuge.
#
I know I've traveled very far from where we expected to be, but you know, maybe we keep
#
circling back to this whole thing of reading.
#
And I just want to take a moment to say something that surprised me when I studied, as in not
#
studied, but just read about the freedom struggle, was how many of our leaders from Maulana Azad
#
to Ramanu Har Lohia to the ones we've just named, set a great store by reading and building
#
And once I sat down for a column I was writing for the Business Standard, which is the first
#
place that opened its doors to me and gave me the space to be a columnist at the then
#
you know, ridiculously young age of 22, 23, they really made me into a journalist.
#
But one of the columns I did for them was about the libraries of the leaders of the
#
And you start going through those books, you know, 3000 of them, 4000 of them, Gandhi's
#
collection, Nehru's collection, and you start to see that they use books to really read
#
their way into the whole question of what is freedom?
#
And what is our independent country going to be?
#
And it's so fascinating that they reached all the way across, you know, Gandhi read
#
American early vegetarians for inspiration, along with stories about the Europe Reformation
#
And then they circled back to their own country, their own language, and come up with an extremely
#
particular, very Indian approach to democracy.
#
None of that is accidental, you know.
#
I don't think there was a point of time at which they valorized reading in their own
#
minds or they said this is a good thing to do or were self-conscious about it.
#
It's just that I find it so touching that the two things that they did all through the
#
years of the freedom struggle from the 1900s onwards, they wrote letters furiously.
#
You know, our sense of the past really has to change.
#
We think that we're so cool with our Twitter updates and our blog posts and everything.
#
But if you start to look at those gigantic volumes of correspondence, you realize that
#
even on his silent days, Gandhi spent so much time, you know, composing these swift emails,
#
these notes to himself.
#
He spent a life in writing.
#
Saroji Naidu moving between the poems and the speeches where her auditory, which today
#
seems to us to be a little flowery and a little overblown.
#
For that time, though, it was deep with emotion, you know, and she could hold audiences in
#
the palm of her hand as such.
#
And you see that before they were leaders, who were they?
#
This is a question I keep going back to with everything, before we were authors, before
#
we identified ourselves as whatever, what was it that we were moving towards?
#
And you see those early whispers of self-respect, of challenging the history that you've been
#
given and saying that, no, you know, the British did not make us a whole and a collective and
#
The land and the history of the land does not fully make us Indians because we did not
#
think of ourselves as Indians before that.
#
But here we are at this moment in time and we can literally imagine ourselves into being.
#
I think it's remarkable that the Constitution, which is a written document after all, you
#
know, everywhere after a while, when I saw the freedom struggle slightly differently,
#
I started to see it as a thing that was held together not just by protests as important
#
as they were and by actions, but by breath and speech and writing and imagining.
#
You really have to imagine a country into being, you know, that's the other side of
#
Okay, I've gotten my soapbox long enough, I need to shut up and give you a chance to.
#
Like Joan Didion once said, I don't know what I think until I write it down.
#
And when you speak of, you know, all the letters these people wrote and a lot of it is online,
#
like the hundred volumes of Gandhi's collected writings online and they're just fascinating.
#
One little collection that I especially love is his correspondence with Tagore where they're
#
writing to each other all the time, disagreeing, but so full of love for each other, you know,
#
so different from the discourse today.
#
And Amit, have we lost that?
#
I don't mean you to lose the thread, but just in parenthesis, have we lost that the ability
#
to disagree over even a long period of time, even passionately, but to disagree without
#
hating each other, without putting each other down and coming back to what you said, continuing
#
that ability to listen.
#
Anyway, I'm just putting that on the table.
#
But my short answer is yes, but I'll come back to that and we'll explore it.
#
And let me, let me, you know, you can disagree with me and we'll still be friends.
#
But yeah, but my thread was that, and this is again, something I spoke of, I think with
#
Amitav Kumar in my episode with him and with again, our mutual friend Chandrahant Chaudhary,
#
though that's not released yet.
#
But the thought actually came to me when Chandrahant once wrote me an email.
#
I sent him an email inviting him to the show and he sent me this long, charming reply,
#
which was like a letter of yore, you know, when you'd sit down and you'd write three
#
page letters, two page letters, you know, with memories.
#
And you remember we were in Pune and we had Somerset, that place and all of that.
#
And that got me to thinking about correspondence that when I was younger, before the internet,
#
I would also write letters.
#
You know, I have also written letters to my parents talking about, you know, talking at
#
length about anything at all, but talking at length, which is the whole point.
#
And this goes back to the question I asked earlier about how form can shape the content,
#
can shape the person, because when you're writing a letter, you are giving yourself
#
in to a certain kind of reflection, to a certain kind of thought.
#
Today, we are an age where everything is a two line email or it's an, you know, you're
#
sending an emoji by WhatsApp and everything is crisp and everything is instrumental and
#
it's very rare that we are doing that kind of considered communication with each other.
#
And the act of writing a letter to someone is not just an act of sitting and having to
#
flesh out your thoughts.
#
Again, going back to Didion, I don't know what I think until I write it down.
#
So the act of fleshing out your thoughts and therefore discovering what you think in a
#
sense and discovering yourself.
#
But it is also the act of giving respect to another person.
#
You know, giving that time that you're sitting down and you're writing a letter to someone
#
and that means that person is important.
#
And today you don't have that.
#
Even as a signaling device of someone's importance, you don't have that.
#
But more than that, you no longer have that space to kind of sit down and reflect.
#
Everything is so short, instrumental, crisp, and it's great that we can just reach out
#
to each other, you know, any time we want and all of that.
#
But you know, just not being nostalgic for a particular form of writing, but just in
#
terms of the larger meta question of does it then change us as a society?
#
Because a form has changed, because we no longer have those moments of quiet and reflection
#
and because we are no longer making those kinds of mental efforts and because the rhythms
#
of our life are much more much choppier and much quicker.
#
I see where you're going with this.
#
And it's not just the time to sit down and think and reflect, because you can write letters
#
at high speed as well, but it's more like the kind of speed that's expected.
#
In Twitter exchanges, you have to address something now.
#
And in that moment of a controversy exploding, the urgency is sharp and immediate, but by
#
tomorrow everyone's forgotten.
#
So one of the biggest problems we have is that we live in a state of perpetual amnesia,
#
And when you have that as an affliction for society, you are no longer in touch with your
#
own psyche, your own self, right?
#
With letters, I'm going to answer this a little discursively, but I still have letters that
#
I wrote to my school friends years ago.
#
And sometimes those contain years and years of correspondence.
#
And then you can mark the moment when emails arrived, because suddenly the letters stop.
#
Our first emails, this was when you had stuff like Hotmail and Lycos around.
#
Our first emails for the first few years are really long.
#
We're trying to go back to letters in a sense, because that's what we are familiar with.
#
And I noticed this years later when I was printing out my Lycos mailbox before dispatching
#
that account, unconsciously we were all from India writing to inland letter form length.
#
If I don't know whether this generation would remember that, but unconsciously your mind
#
was trained to three landscapes.
#
You were trained to write the postcard.
#
You were trained to write inland letter forms.
#
And you were trained to write the free flowing letter for which you would buy onion skin
#
paper, you know, and you'd dwell on your envelopes.
#
And it was very important also to go to the post office and say, sir, sir, if Gandhi ji
#
ki stamp mat dena, dosra stamp dena, Asiat games ki stamp hai aapke paas.
#
You know, you wanted the stamps to be as fancy as the letters were.
#
We used to covet the bird stamps and all of that.
#
So there were so many parts to the letter.
#
It wasn't just writing it.
#
It was wait for the ink to dry, tear up this draft because you have said too much from
#
your heart, you know, to a boyfriend or something of the sort and put it back in and then put
#
it into the envelope, put the stamp down, then all the secret little hearts and flowers
#
that the women used to write to each other.
#
You know, so all of that taizi, all of that ritual and everything goes away at some point.
#
We find ways to bring it back, but I remember some years ago when my friend Margaret Mas
#
Karienhaus, who was an incredible writer and poet in Goa, when she died, it was a sad thing
#
to have only WhatsApp messages to archive.
#
You know, because we met in person, the WhatsApp messages became, they served a different purpose
#
They became like little pointers, WhatsApped each other about this on this day.
#
And then suddenly a memory of a conversation would open up.
#
But they really know more than memorial aids, you know, thumbnails.
#
They don't have the satisfaction that accompanies letter writing.
#
But right now, if you ask this generation, take some time out, you might get people to
#
Who is going to sit down and do the full chain?
#
You know, that business of you set aside some time every week to write letters.
#
You go on holiday and you write a letter.
#
That also indicates a certain faith in, we have been talking about speed and the amnesia
#
and the other part of it, letters bespeak a kind of permanence and a faith in the record.
#
So somewhere unconsciously as our handwriting has gone, I think we have also, I wouldn't
#
call it a cause, but I would say it has gone hand in hand with this very modern lack of
#
faith in the historical record.
#
When everything is impermanent and everything dissolves and everything can be killed once
#
a particular social media platform shuts down, you can lose years and years of photographs
#
and notes if Facebook goes tomorrow, or you can lose 40,000 tweets written over 10 years
#
if Twitter goes tomorrow.
#
And somehow increasingly these interactions, I'm still on Twitter because that hook is
#
You know, what is that hook?
#
It's partly the fear of missing out.
#
It's partly, and this is the nice side of it, the desire to keep in touch with people
#
who are there, but partly and this is the dangerous side of it.
#
We all think we are immune and we are not.
#
It doesn't matter how smart you are, but social media, the way it is formulated in
#
present days is built to be sticky.
#
You know, I can spend five minutes on Twitter fine.
#
If I spend half an hour on Twitter, my day is gone.
#
And after a while, my moods, my emotions, those very intimate personal things have changed.
#
Instead, if you train yourself to back away and to use it, then you lose what we had when
#
we first found Twitter.
#
If you remember, Twitter was all about finding a new way of expressing yourself.
#
And that's also what the first generation web was about.
#
Hussein Deraqshan, who's the Iranian blogger who went through an incredible and very saddening
#
He was held in jail for many years.
#
And when he came out, among the many dislocations he faced was a real sense that the world itself
#
had changed because the net, as he knew it, the worldwide web had changed beyond recognition.
#
And he was one of the first people to write about the fact that when you had blogs, they
#
created a universe of islands that were linked.
#
But you weren't, you weren't content.
#
That makes a lot of sense.
#
And today, I think when everything is being massaged into content and brands and all of
#
that, and I'm absolutely not averse to the pursuit of success through writing or other
#
All I want to say is that there are deeper satisfactions.
#
You know, writing just isn't just about having a bestselling book out there.
#
Or having the great career or whatever.
#
If you really want to write, a lot of writers started off telling stories or being part
#
of the weave of having stories told to them.
#
In my case, it was my mother who became a lawyer at the age of 39.
#
But before that, you know, she used to do these incredible bedtime stories where she'd
#
look at whatever the pattern was on our curtains or whatever shadows there were on the wall
#
and make up things about that.
#
And you don't even realize you don't use the formal words, my imagination is being trained.
#
But what you learn is double at this point.
#
You learn that you are absolutely free to use your imagination in whichever way you
#
And you also learn that even adults, you know, even parents, even these people who have so
#
much power over you have wonderful secret lives.
#
So right from the start, what you start to learn is the importance of having this private
#
self, this individual self.
#
And if I may say so, this wildly creative self, I live in fear that creativity will
#
become another one of those buzzwords, you know.
#
But the truth is, I think something we've been talking about for years and years among
#
ourselves or whatever is with privilege, without privilege.
#
How do you live lives that are more fully creative?
#
And I don't mean just formally creative.
#
I don't mean that you have to be a writer in the sense that you have to publish books.
#
Or you have to be an artist in the sense of you have to have a painting exhibition.
#
I'm not talking about the outcome or the productivity, but I'm saying a life of consumption, which
#
is what we increasingly have been driven towards.
#
Consumption not just in terms of buying things that you then show off, but in terms of your
#
most intimate moments are held out for display or that your identity is as a clever consumer
#
If you shift that paradigm just a little bit, and Amit, by the way, you really have to stop
#
me when I start going down segues or whatever.
#
I love these segues and I will never stop you.
#
I think right from the start, I've been asking myself, even from early childhood, what does
#
it mean to be truly creative?
#
Because to me, that is the life that humans derive the most, not even pleasure, not even
#
benefit from, but that's where we are at our best.
#
We are creative animals.
#
And what you were saying earlier about letters and history, the connection, reminds me of
#
this Aga Shahid Ali quote, which you've quoted in your book as well.
#
My memory gets in the way of your history and that sort of feels so apt.
#
And again, the point you made about Twitter is that for five minutes is okay, for half
#
an hour it destroys your day.
#
And that's literally what it does because it changes the rhythm of your brain, because
#
the rhythm of your brain is doing hop, skip, step, jump, duck, duck, duck, duck is going
#
like that instead of being in a quieter place.
#
So you might want to, you know, do two hours of focused work on whatever it is.
#
But if you put your brain in that quick rhythm where you're skipping from one thing to the
#
other, then it becomes difficult, you know, it's probably better to begin the day by meditation
#
or something, but except that I don't do meditation, I do Twitter, which is a problem.
#
My next question is about a subject that, you know, I spoke about with my guest last
#
week and I've been thinking about it a lot and it relates to a few things that you've
#
I read this wonderful book called Wanting by Luke Burgess and, you know, Burgess is
#
sort of a disciple, an intellectual disciple of Rene Girard, the philosopher.
#
And Girard was once a few decades ago asked, he's a philosopher, but he was asked to teach
#
a course on literature and he needed the money.
#
So he said, okay, I'll do it.
#
And he read through whatever he thought was a reading list and the books he wanted to
#
And he discovered that the one thing they all had in common, and he was probably being
#
simplistic here, I'm not sure I agree, but it's still a profound point.
#
He felt that the one thing all the characters had in common was that they wanted something
#
not because they intrinsically wanted that thing, but because somebody else wanted it.
#
And he coined the term mimetic desire, mimicking, of course, you know, coming from imitation,
#
the idea being that you want something not because it's intrinsic to you, but somebody
#
And you know, it could be a yuppie wanting to buy the latest Mercedes or it could be
#
a young person wanting to get married and settle down because hey, that's what everyone
#
does and that's what is expected.
#
So you're like, I want that too, but you don't ever examine it or think about it deeply.
#
And the framework that I got from Burgess's book, which I find really useful, is of thick
#
and thin desires, where thick desires are intrinsic to you.
#
You know, they are deep, they are what you really desire, they come from within you,
#
And when we talk of thick and thin, obviously it's understood that all the creature necessities
#
like, you know, food, shelter, all that is not in this.
#
But otherwise you have thick desires for the things that you really, really want.
#
And you have thin desires, which are things that you want because of different factors
#
Maybe somebody else wants it, maybe it'll get you the approval of others, so on and
#
And the problem is that thin desires can often be intense.
#
So the thing that you want the most right now, you know, is probably not the thing that
#
you really want the most that comes from inside.
#
You may want it very badly.
#
For example, the quest for validation, which can lead so many people to do the things they
#
We'll talk about that also.
#
Or when you speak about writers, you know, you spoke about how some writers are, you
#
know, more in love with the idea of being writers.
#
I want to get something published, I want to be nominated for an award, rather than
#
loving the act of writing itself, which is on the printed page.
#
And I imagine loving the act of writing itself, you know, would be a thick desire because
#
it can only really come from within where you enjoy what you're creating and the stories
#
that you're telling, whereas wanting to be a writer could be a sort of a thin desire.
#
And this has caused me to sort of reflect on why do I want the things that I want?
#
You know, what are my thick and thin desires in a sense?
#
And I'd encourage all listeners to also kind of think about this in their own context.
#
But in your context, then, looking back, what would you say would be your thick desires?
#
And what would you say would be the things that you wanted, but now you feel bad that
#
you wanted them, that you should not have wanted those kind of directions you went down
#
I think I love the way you come at questions because you're asking us, by and large, during
#
the podcast to tap into something that is deeper than just the automatic list of the
#
10 books that influenced you or what made you want to be a writer or whatever.
#
And I think my deepest desires were for a combination of privacy and experience and
#
immersion, particularly into the world of stories.
#
One of the thick desires that I didn't act on for many years because I was terrified
#
of actually making it happen was writing.
#
I came to writing very late.
#
I don't mean that I came to writing late, actually, I've been writing for a living
#
from the time I was about 19 or 20.
#
I think I wrote my first book review when I was 15 years old or something of the sort,
#
obnoxious in that sense, we Bengalis.
#
But I was working at the business standard by the time I was 19 years old, 1920.
#
And I was with them for about 15 years or so.
#
I didn't really know how to want a career.
#
A lot of people ask me for advice on their writing career and I am blank about that.
#
I knew that I was curious about many, many things.
#
I think one of my deepest desires was just to both experience the world in every form.
#
So I was a travel writer, I was a food writer.
#
For a while I was on the gender beat with the New York Times.
#
And I see that as just an urge to, in this human lifetime, in this human form, reach
#
out for as much of the world as possible.
#
That was far more important to me than material wealth status and all of that, which just
#
as well I chose writing as a profession in that sense.
#
I will say in parenthesis that while writing hasn't made me ridiculously wealthy, it's
#
surprising that it doesn't make you that poor either.
#
It's possible to make a living doing something that you love, which is one of the first things
#
that we believe is not true.
#
A thick desire again, just solitary exploration.
#
As a young girl in Delhi, I think I'm militated against the fact that at a certain hour of
#
the evening, the city becomes a men's city and you can't walk safely as a woman.
#
And I was very diffident but also insistent that I should walk everywhere, that I should.
#
You only see a city or know a city really, whether it's London or Delhi or Calcutta
#
or Bombay, it's only on foot that you really get the pulse of it, the beat of it, the sense
#
of it outside of your own neighbourhoods, right?
#
Another question, I think for me, being in movement, creating, not for a prize and not
#
for a book contract, but just the work, ultimately it keeps coming back in the writing to me
#
I like people to be able to read through whatever I'm writing very swiftly.
#
But I also like the work that goes into making that read a swift read.
#
I like them to walk away whether I'm writing about cats or humans with the feeling that
#
they have been in a real world and a world that is maybe a little more intense and more
#
real than the world that surrounds you.
#
Again, I have a habit of seguing and travelling very far from the question that you asked.
#
But I was very fortunate when I was in my 20s in my first job, again at the business
#
standard and then later as a young editor at Penguin, to meet a lot of writers and artists
#
in deadly at a time before success had, in that sense, touched and transformed both the
#
art world and the literary world.
#
Hussain at that point of time had his own right painting studio.
#
He was already becoming the big financial success that he was.
#
But for most other painters, there wasn't that much money on the table per se.
#
That didn't lead to a life of great purity.
#
It just meant that there was a freedom in the way that they were writing.
#
There were a handful of galleries that were exhibiting their work.
#
And so it was for writers, you know, for Amitav Ghosh sitting in a Barsati in defence colony
#
writing his first books and shaving off half his hair as incentive to keep him indoors
#
writing and not outdoors distracted.
#
Or for Shaheed, Agha Shaheed Adi, you know, coming out with his poems in which he puts
#
pain and love and a sense of foreboding because I think Shaheed was one of those people who
#
saw many, many years ago the future to which Kashmir was inexorably moving.
#
I don't think he had any defences against the truth.
#
But with all of these writers, I spent a lot of my time in writer's studios, you know,
#
in Garhi village with meeting ceramic artists like Joy Michael and Gina Franklin Gupta and
#
a huge suite of people.
#
And every now and then business standard would push me out and make me interview fashion
#
designers, which is how I came to accidentally dance in Milind Suman's direction when I was
#
still wearing a khadi kurta from Khadi Gramudiyog Bhavan.
#
It was an early fashion show where Rohit Bal was just and Tarun Tehanyani were just about
#
And there was so much snobbery and deadly, you know, the initial reaction to this generation
#
of fashion geniuses from Rohit Bal and Tarun Tehanyani to Reena Dhaka and the rest was,
#
hai, unki beta toh darzi ban gaya, you know, that boy has gone and become a tailor.
#
And then, of course, liberalization happened, India hit the stratosphere, but this was just
#
He did the first few fashion shows with the proper catwalk and a ramp and stuff.
#
And I was sent off to cover this and I bought a dress specifically for this.
#
I remember this because at that time, Delhi didn't have much in the way of places where
#
you could buy fancy clothes.
#
And I went off and bought a dress, which in retrospect was a horror.
#
I remember very little about it, except that I'm sure there were frills involved and puffed
#
sleeves or padded, no, padded sleeves.
#
The eighties bow woman, padded sleeve, which had lasted into the early nineties.
#
Let's draw a merciful vein over this memory, but I wasn't able to get back home from the
#
So I went off to this fashion show in what I was wearing, which happened to be a gadi
#
kurta, which is not what you wear to a fashion show then or now.
#
But bless them, they were very warm and inviting and suddenly the music starts up and I'm on
#
I mean, I was at the side of the catwalk, but the catwalk was basically a red carpet
#
And the music was contagious.
#
It was a less formal time and all of us started dancing and I turn around and there's this
#
sweet guy with a lot of muscles who's quite good looking and he dances a little bit in
#
You know, he's a good dancer.
#
He has the beat, whatever.
#
And then I asked somebody, who's he?
#
And they say, Minin Soman.
#
He's a supermodel already at that time.
#
One little brush with fame.
#
Delhi in that time was a lot of fun though, but it was fun also because it was informal.
#
It was the kind of place where the writer Alan Seeley used to play guitar at this little
#
place called The Cellar, which was one of the two or three places that you could go
#
The first discos had started up, Gung Ru and my kind of place.
#
And I guess we led this kind of double life.
#
You know, we were not, most of us didn't have much pocket money.
#
You didn't have the chance to really work at jobs and stuff.
#
But if you could afford the entrance fee for Gung Ru, then you could dance the night away.
#
Discos didn't shut down till about six in the morning, if ever, you know, so you'd finish
#
that and go to the clariges.
#
And everybody, there'd be about eight people sitting there, ordering one pot of coffee
#
and bless their hearts.
#
They were kind about that.
#
But getting back to the writers and the artists in their studio, I think the three things
#
I learned from them is the work itself is often messy and the opposite of joyful.
#
And you will be cursing as you do your first drafts or your early sketches or whatever.
#
But there is a joy to the work itself.
#
Everybody and some of the writers were drunks by their second profession.
#
You know, a lot of the artists were happening into a range of other vices and pursuits and
#
parties and this, that and the other.
#
But the one thing that they all did was they showed up.
#
If you were serious about being a writer or an artist, you owed it to yourself and to
#
the work more than anything else.
#
Not to the craft, you know, not to your vocation or reputation or yes, but to the work itself.
#
To just show up day after day.
#
And the third thing was take some joy in what you're making.
#
You know, don't try to write like somebody else.
#
Vikram Seth didn't get to write a suitable boy by trying to imitate a Steinbeck or somebody
#
If you see what I mean.
#
Arundhati Roy didn't find her voice by trying to be somebody other than she was.
#
I think that was the biggest thing that I started to pick up as well.
#
That generation was not focused on success very much.
#
The next generation has learned how to negotiate the world of celebrity television and what
#
to do on a Litfest stage and all of that.
#
And I think when all of that is fun, it's sometimes the part of Litfest that is great
#
is really getting to meet readers for me.
#
And the other part of it, it's wise to think of it as dress up, you know, you get to play
#
dress up and go out, but maybe not take it too seriously.
#
I think over the course of a lifetime, I've also seen how a lot of writers can stop writing
#
after having done some great work.
#
This one I don't want to name, but you know, whose books have got weaker and weaker as
#
their public life has become more and more important.
#
And you sense at some point that the writer lives in the shadow of the books and that
#
the public appearances, this whole thing about speaking in public and being important and
#
even the good stuff of supporting this cause or that cause.
#
The truth of it is that most of writing doesn't even happen on the page.
#
It happens in a pact of silence.
#
And unless you give the, I think this is something we've been moving towards from the start of
#
It's a question of where do you find rich ground?
#
And it is true that many of us come to these places from a lot of privilege, but I will
#
also say that wealth and comfort are not the pathways to writing.
#
I mean, just a simple observation that many people have made before me.
#
If that was true, then the rich would be writers, right?
#
And the rich aren't really.
#
And the reason that they aren't is because actually writing, actually creating something
#
and then having the patience to go back and revise, we all fall in love with the first
#
things that tumble out of our mouths and all of that.
#
The fact is that most bits of writing are not much good unless there's some revision
#
And I find that either the craft comes in before, a lot of people do the outlining and
#
the plotting and all of that, even if they're just holding it in their magnificent heads,
#
But it's very rare for writing not to have craft, even at the popular end of the scale
#
and popular is not to be sneered at.
#
But someone like Stephen King, someone like Daniel Steele, someone like Chetan Bhagat,
#
they work really hard at the craft of getting people to continue to read and identify and
#
All these years, anyway, I should again hand it back to you because I'm about to...
#
No, no, it's also fascinating.
#
There are so many strands I want to kind of pull at till they unravel completely and the
#
padded shoulder dissolves.
#
Can you elaborate a bit on what you said about most of writing not happening on the page?
#
I think so much happens, particularly with a novel, but this is true also of short stories
#
and possibly every form of writing except for the poem.
#
Poems can happen to you as a lot of poets report the experience of feeling the poem
#
more or less take you by your collar and just run through you and all you have to do is
#
to write it down and then continue to revise or whatever.
#
In every other form of writing, inspiration is important, essential, all of that.
#
But if you've been working in the field of writing, whether you're doing screenplays
#
or whatever, you know actually that idea generation is the least of it.
#
In between books, I struggle for a while because I have no lack of ideas.
#
I have an idea a minute.
#
These exercise books filled with ideas for short stories ranging from the reasonable
#
to the, hmm, this might work.
#
But you only have so much time, right?
#
And the imagination is the thing that we tend to skip over when we're talking about writing.
#
A lot of discussions, particularly American influenced discussions, go immediately to
#
craft, to style, to plot, to voice, all of that.
#
Those are not unimportant.
#
But I think, you know, what you're doing with your course as well is treating people
#
to the idea of the practice itself.
#
And what is that practice?
#
It is just a way of turning on the headlights of the imagination and turning on that terrain
#
and that old classic question, where do ideas come from?
#
Neil Gaiman used to say, there's a little shop down the road and, you know, a man across
#
the counter hands me my ideas every morning in a nice paper bag or something to that extent.
#
The truth is, we don't know.
#
Elizabeth Gilbert, again, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, she's talked about the surreal
#
but very real and very commonplace experience of having an idea for a book that you haven't
#
worked on and you let it go and four years later somebody else comes up with that book
#
And the first time it happens, it's eerie.
#
It's not plagiarism, but it feels like a theft from your unconscious until you realize that
#
you're in spooky territory out here.
#
You are part of the collective unconscious.
#
Of course, there's a possibility that maybe the idea wasn't that precious after all.
#
Some years back when I was just about starting out on the notes that became Black River and
#
I knew I wanted to do a thriller, I knew I wanted it set in Delhi, I knew that it wasn't
#
going to be about people like me and so it would require some research.
#
I knew that the river played a large part in it and I knew that it was about heartbreak
#
and grief and I knew nothing else.
#
And this idea skated around my head, why don't you write about Sheherazade instead, you know,
#
bring her into our contemporary times and what would she be now with the weight of everything
#
that she's experienced and gone through?
#
She becomes this man's bride after seeing so many women killed, you know, literally
#
a bed of blood and then she ends up married to this murderer, you know, for the rest of
#
She wins her life back, but the price of that seems pretty high.
#
Maybe she's a drug addict.
#
And I never wrote that story because the truth of it is that Sheherazade's, I do believe
#
that we should be free to write with no limits on the imagination, but I bump up against
#
the difficulty of translating Sheherazade into my times.
#
There's just too much about her background, her Middle Eastern life that I would not know
#
or be comfortable with.
#
Many years later, I read a book by another writer, a beautifully done book, where there's
#
Sheherazade in modern times and she's an addict of sorts.
#
And I don't think anyone stealing from anyone else suggests that that realm is mysterious,
#
but it's accessible to all if you train yourself and if you train the muscles of the imagination,
#
which are as real, if you like, as the muscles of a runner.
#
So that's part of what happens off the page is learning to quieten down because nothing
#
Even the writers who go out, you know, in the middle of the hurdy-burdy of life, the
#
bars of Paris, the slums of Bombay, the permit rooms and all of that, at some point you're
#
going to have to come back to quietness.
#
That's where it all starts.
#
That's the fertile ground.
#
At least you're going to have to quiet down enough to hear the voices of the people that
#
you're writing about, right?
#
And then comes the shaping, you know.
#
That can happen off the page in a very technical sense, as in you might be doing your notes
#
and outlines and all the crafty things that you do, but I think some of that really happens
#
when you're living in the classic two worlds.
#
You're walking around, you're talking to your partner and your friends, you're going shopping
#
and all of that, but part of you really, at that point of time, truly is living somewhere
#
You know, that's one reason why I find short stories, which I don't know how to write,
#
but which I'm trying to learn how to write, a little easier because you can't quite pop
#
It's just as intense, but you don't have to spend years in that world, right?
#
When I say most of the writing happens off the page, there's another thing as well, which
#
is simply that everything you were before you turned to writing is also what you're
#
bringing to the table, right?
#
A lot of people want to be writers really young and I find myself not wanting to be
#
discouraging, but just wanting to say, would you like to go and live a little?
#
The MFA by itself is a fine thing, but try not to build a life, maybe that's MFA and
#
writing residencies and those slightly enclosed worlds, if that makes sense.
#
That makes a lot of sense and that's something I found about myself when I was young also,
#
that I wanted to write, but I didn't have enough lived experience to be able to write
#
meaningfully about anything.
#
And then you went off and became a poker Marvin.
#
And all of that and then I came back and now I have the lived experience, but I don't have
#
the discipline perhaps.
#
You know, it's ironic, one of the four webinars for my writing courses about process and discipline
#
and all of that and I feel so embarrassed because I'm just, all of them must be, all
#
my participants must be sniggering as I listen to this, but that I myself haven't been able
#
to put so much of that into practice, though I place a certain stress on it because partly
#
because I know that that is the important thing that you actually have to, you know,
#
sit down and get the writing done and build those processes because ideas like you said
#
are just a dime a dozen, but you know, learning how to tell the stories and telling them and
#
that kind of also matters.
#
You know, another thread from what you mentioned earlier and that I want to kind of tug at,
#
I don't, this is not a good metaphor, not tugging at threads, is something that you've
#
sort of written in your book again about when you were young about the thrill of discovery.
#
When you're describing yourself as a kid, you are always going up to strangers apparently
#
jumping on their knees and demanding that they tell you a story and this gets very irritating
#
after the point, but then you write, quote, I must have been three when I realized that
#
books contain stories, the way tins contain biscuits.
#
And from the time that I made that connection, my mind was not at peace.
#
So much of childhood is a balancing act between the first indelible rush of astonishment and
#
discovery and the inevitable grappling with frustration.
#
When he was three, my young nephew named the shiny thing in the sky a star, using the word
#
importantly, and I could see the satisfaction in his eyes, the glory of naming everything
#
in the world for the very first time ever as a no human being had done this before him
#
and no one would do this again.
#
Those first thrills of discovery are fierce and unforgettable.
#
And of course, your first discovery of frustration was that you couldn't reach out and read these
#
And you've described so beautifully about how you first kind of read and you open, pull
#
this book down, you opened it and the letters were black ants.
#
And then suddenly some of those black ants made sense to you.
#
And the first words that you remember reading therefore are, quote, slowly, silently now
#
the moon walks a night in her tender shoon.
#
I think some of us never forget that first moment of magic.
#
When you make the connection and whatever the thing is, for some people it's cricket,
#
for some people it's music, picking up their first guitar, we're sitting here in a space
#
And for me, it was not writing.
#
It was just understanding that all of that bewildering, you know, hieroglyphics, the
#
things that didn't make sense, were things that are deeply, deeply coveted.
#
And I love that so much that I famously ate a page of the book.
#
You ate it, which is why your book is called The Good One Who Ate Books, because you thought
#
to yourself, if this reads so nice, how well would it taste?
#
And it didn't taste that great, but it was very satisfying.
#
So my question from here is, there's a sort of twofold question.
#
And one of them is this, that you have this introduction, therefore, into the world of
#
the imagination and storytelling.
#
And that's incredibly important.
#
Like reading is, I take reading so seriously, because we have our one life to live.
#
But through books, you can live the lives of so many others, you know, by getting inside
#
their heads and sort of experiencing everything that they do.
#
And some people read and some people don't.
#
Like I'd written a column, a political column, but it was about reading a few years back
#
based on a story that a friend of Narendra Modi told me about him.
#
And her story really was that she used to work with him in the Yachties in Gujarat.
#
And she was at a gathering at his house, a gathering of friends, a personal gathering,
#
And at one point, Mr. Modi started telling this story about how his mother had fever
#
one day and she was ill and she was feeling very, very hot.
#
And he went to turn on the fan and there was no electricity.
#
And as he told the story, he started crying, right?
#
And my friend's point was that Modi is an experiential leader in the sense that he understands
#
the world only through experience.
#
So therefore, he has felt viscerally what electricity can mean.
#
So when he is chief minister of Gujarat, he's saying power to every village and he genuinely
#
Or he has walked on roads and he understands the importance.
#
So he says build roads, right?
#
But there are some things that you cannot experience like the lives of others or like
#
maybe counterintuitive economic concepts like spontaneous order, the positive someness of
#
things and so on and so forth.
#
And when you're running a country and you cannot experience, you know, all this knowledge
#
is close to you, it becomes an issue.
#
Now, the thing is, he was not born to privilege.
#
So it is understandable that he wasn't a reader and that he didn't have, you know, books around
#
But what one would then expect is that either you, you know, begin reading whenever you
#
can because, you know, you form your picture of the world by joining dots.
#
Where do you get those dots?
#
It's mainly from reading, honestly.
#
So that's the importance of reading.
#
And even if that was not the case, then rely on experts who can cover the areas that you
#
So one, I felt that reading is incredibly important for this reason and those who shut
#
themselves off to it are hobbling themselves and crippling themselves in a way.
#
You know, they are not allowing the best version of themselves to ever arise.
#
In fact, they're guaranteeing that a very suboptimal version of themselves is who they
#
will be all their lives.
#
And the other dimension across which this runs goes back to that question of thick desires
#
That the reason, you know, you and I have the thick desires that we do is partly to
#
do with because we have read so much, because our interior lives are richer for that.
#
They have all these layers to them and a lot of it comes from reading or a life of the
#
And many people in this desperately poor country and most of it is still desperately poor don't
#
have that privilege that they can read books or they have access to books and all of that.
#
And they are shut off from this.
#
And I wonder how that affects, you know, those things like what people even want, what people
#
even desire and all of that.
#
So I'm rambling a little bit, but just thinking aloud about reading, because if I say that,
#
you know, it sounds extremely snobbish and elitist to say that readers are a particular
#
kind of people and non-readers are other kind of people and, you know, but is this something
#
that you think about that you and I have had the good fortune to have been readers to whatever
#
I've read much less than you, of course.
#
But a lot of people don't read and this has implications, not just for those people themselves,
#
but also for our society, for our culture, for our democracy, for everything.
#
Okay, I'm going to, I think we're getting to the core of what a reading life or a non-reading
#
So I'm going to deal with this in sections.
#
One is the points you raised about Mr. Modi, I'm not at all sure, by the way, that he's
#
He certainly is a writer and he's written poems for a very long period of time.
#
He's articulate and I think I remember from his time as Gujarat CM, along with the rest
#
of his legacy and the history of the riots and the engineering of those riots.
#
But one of the things that happened in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots when his rehabilitation
#
was in progress was people saying, but you know, he does read, he reads reports, he reads
#
this, that and the other.
#
What we're speaking about here is something slightly different, which is the mistaking
#
of deep emotion for empathy.
#
Just because a leader, any leader can feel with intensity and truthfulness, perhaps on
#
a certain subject to feel very deeply about the plight of one section of people, does
#
not mean that he or she has the empathy to extend their imagination towards the good
#
will and the well-being of everybody else in the country, particularly people who are
#
not like them or people who are identified as the other, the enemy, the necessary person,
#
community against whom you pit a certain thing.
#
We don't teach political empathy and though we talk a lot about be kind, be caring, one
#
of the reasons why writers like George Saunders or why Barack Obama to a certain extent in
#
his American presidency prized something like reaching out and compassion is because all
#
of these skills, they interconnected and not the same, compassion, empathy, kindness.
#
These are not easy things to practice, particularly in leadership.
#
The second thing that you've touched on, again, with regard to Mr. Modi, why doesn't he then
#
pull in people who do read and who are experts on the economy or areas where the Indian project
#
has palpably run into trouble?
#
If you had experts on demonetization, for example, you could have spared the country
#
He did consult experts and they told him not to do it, Raghuram Rajan famously.
#
But then, you know, that intolerance of an opinion that comes from people who are not
#
exactly like you or who have not had your background in the RSS, that's a parallel problem.
#
That is a political issue.
#
Let's get back to reading, per se.
#
I think often the claims that we make for reading are very, very large because we see
#
But as a lifelong reader, I've sometimes asked myself, aside from the sheer delight of it,
#
what use is this, per se?
#
Everything that you say about reading, I'm just being devil's advocate out here.
#
You can learn as much from YouTube videos, okay?
#
Or you can learn from podcasts.
#
You don't have to be a reader in order to learn skills, okay?
#
What we found in books is, to be honest about it, deep and abiding delight.
#
And we've also found an infinitude, you know, of possibilities.
#
You know how many books I wrote a column about this for the FT, which is how I know these
#
figures, I'm not just, you know, making them up.
#
But the maximum number of books that most readers are going to be able to read in a
#
And that's if they are obsessive readers who read more than about 80 books a year.
#
And I remember when I came across that number, I had a moment of pure panic that I never
#
feel this about humans, I never feel like how am I going to go through life not making
#
all the friends I possibly could make, you know?
#
But I do feel it about books that hunger, and what I prize about books particularly
#
is that they're one of the clearest, not the only, but they're one of the clearest
#
windows we have to connecting with past minds.
#
Everything else that you can learn from, whether we just mentioned, you know, YouTube videos,
#
podcasts, sound, basically, and film, all of that is in by and large in the present.
#
So reading is the one thing that is so out of time.
#
Music is one of the others, dance is one of the others, art, yes.
#
But as an instrument for learning, reading is out of time and reading challenges you
#
perpetually because it keeps inviting you to inhabit other points of view, not just
#
As important as that listening is, it doesn't always come with identification.
#
When you're reading a book, particularly a physical book, I have nothing against reading
#
audiobooks, but there is a caveat to that if you're reading in a distracted space, you're
#
not going to be able to retain that much of the book.
#
And with an audiobook or with a Kindle, your reading experience is often incredibly enjoyable,
#
but there's a spatial problem, a geographical problem, if you like.
#
I find that with reading on the Kindle or in audiobooks, I never know where I am in
#
Whereas the physical book, you're moving through it and you can tell whether you're
#
at the beginning, the middle or the end, and that has an impact on the way you remember
#
certain things from the book.
#
I do think that we overestimate the virtue of reading and maybe underestimate the fact
#
that most of us are readers because it is sheer delight, sometimes challenging, sometimes
#
I just spent some time reading memoirs by a woman, Savitri Devi, who was part of the
#
right wing, had a book blurb by Savarkar, and believed firmly, not just in the virtue
#
of the Nazis, but she believed that Hitler was alive, that Jews and other people should
#
And there was something cold blooded about reading that.
#
And I think for a while after that, I found myself, as with Mein Kampf, unable to read
#
for a short while, actually read for a short while, because you're encountering thoughts
#
of pure evil and inhumanity, let's put it that way.
#
That's why I label it as evil as such.
#
The third thing that you asked about, the inequality in reading in this country.
#
We've always had public libraries, but not on a grand scale, not like America.
#
What we've had is the one-room library.
#
That's how my father, who grew up in the town of Kattak in Orissa, he and his brothers
#
had a book hunger, ignited in them in part by the fact that there were very few book
#
shops, and that their access to books was so limited, in a way.
#
As an adult, I found that though my mother's family was surrounded by books growing up
#
in Calcutta and all of that, it was my father who bought books.
#
To the point where he sometimes drove my mother mad by taking the grocery money and coming
#
back instead of with dal and rice and stuff like that.
#
He'd come back with figs and chocolates and time-life encyclopedias and a host of everything
#
from Shaurachandra to Tolkien to Toni Morrison to Garcia Marquez.
#
In fact, a lot of my reading habits were influenced by him because he didn't believe in denying
#
any of his children access to books.
#
He believed that if you picked up a book, it was up to you to decide whether it was
#
And that was one of the biggest freedoms that reading gave me.
#
There was no censorship to reading.
#
In everything else, particularly when you live in a country like India, which has been
#
working towards defining itself as a democracy, but has never been as radically individualistic
#
a society as America or parts of Europe and never defined itself by the freedoms of the
#
Even if in its most politically free periods, I don't think the freedom of the individual
#
Books are one space where you can be whatever.
#
You can reach for whatever.
#
You can be challenged, outraged, disgusted.
#
You can hate what you're reading.
#
You can love what you're reading.
#
You can identify with it or not, but it is a completely free space.
#
Instead of that, what we had was first the radio revolution, then we had TV, and then
#
we had today's social media revolution, which is to some extent also engineered for heat
#
or for very, very intense, short, compelling stories of a certain kind.
#
What we didn't invest in as a country was the infrastructure that people take for granted
#
elsewhere, the infrastructure of libraries and bookshops and all of that.
#
Without that investment, it's not just being able to afford books.
#
I grew up in Calcutta in part, and it was a very democratic city where reading was concerned.
#
It wasn't a question of whether people could afford books.
#
They made space in their budgets at practically every level, except for the most abjectly
#
If you had any kind of income, you would be buying books and magazines, and they were
#
cheap and you had an equality, a kind of democracy as a reader.
#
You could be a guy on a bus sitting there reading a Murasaki translation, and you could
#
be sitting in your fancy Baliganj, a red brick bungalow reading Murasaki, and there'd be
#
no difference between the two of you.
#
You both had an equally valid opinion.
#
So I've often felt that we've not responded adequately to the book hunger of this country,
#
and that part of that is this emphasis not by you, but in a lot of ways, people train
#
people to read useful things, even if you're not reading textbooks, but what you read should
#
be informative in some way, or educational, or make you money, right?
#
And if there's a reading revolution I'd like to usher in in this country, it's not just
#
the whole thing of more bookshops and more places to read.
#
More bookshops, and let me say this, I believe our booksellers do a wonderful job, but I
#
would also like to see bookshops and libraries that are beautiful and set up in all kinds
#
of parts of the city, not just in the affluent side of the city, not just in malls.
#
They really should be much more accessible, one place where we fail.
#
I'd like to see books in the hands of everybody, because one of the things that I used to do
#
was to work on library recommendations for companies that stocked libraries around Good
#
Gow, and these were early versions of the community library that Myrtle Akoshi and Michael
#
and others run so well.
#
And these to sponsor specific schools.
#
And there was a point where you're stocking the library, but you're also giving out a
#
few of those NBT books, you know, the little very well made ones or Pratham's books, and
#
you're making sure that every child has two or three books.
#
And one of the kids, he was about five, six years old, just about in school.
#
He sits there and he just cuts off from all of us, and he's just sitting there with his
#
book and he's reading it, and he's on each page.
#
And slowly but surely he gets to the book.
#
And then he reads it again, and then very reluctantly he hands it back to the team member
#
who had given it to him.
#
And we said, no, no, this is your book, you know.
#
And he was like, okay, so he starts reading it again, and then he tries to hand it back.
#
And then somebody realized, said, no, this is your book to keep, not just in school,
#
And he was just very silent for a second, you know, he didn't say anything.
#
He asked several times, do I get to keep this, he said, yes.
#
After a while, I turned around and I see him standing there in the corridor, and he's hugging
#
And he was crying, because he said, no one's ever given him a book before.
#
You know, and that was how precious it was.
#
And I think from that time onwards, I don't work in the NGO sector.
#
But if there's one thing that you get passionate about, it's about donating books to libraries.
#
And I really respect the people who are working at community libraries, because it's not just
#
about handing the books out, and then walking away.
#
You have to help people find the books that they're going to love, you know.
#
And I think that whole thing, you know, the understanding that there's a dormant book
#
love in the country, that often doesn't come to light, because there's no way to feed that
#
The question I ask is really, what are we depriving people of?
#
Sometimes just casual pleasure, you know, just the pleasure of reading Surendar Pathak's
#
spy stories, or Ibn Asafi's, or Susi Dunya's stories, or something of the sort.
#
Sometimes it's somebody who might find practical advice in a book, or learn about something
#
that later becomes a career.
#
There's so many different levels at which books work, you know.
#
And I wish some of the money that's going into the current horse trading of politicians,
#
you know, the crores exchanging hands in order to double state governments, I wish some of
#
that was just put towards putting a book into people's hands.
#
It would make such a difference.
#
That's such a lovely story.
#
I'll respond to three of the, or rather, I'll respond to what you said with three points.
#
And the first one is like, you know, at one level, of course, it's true that you don't
#
need to rely on books alone for knowledge.
#
You have YouTube videos, you have podcasts, you have all of that.
#
But there is something books do give you, which none of the others do.
#
And again, this goes to, you know, books that are not instrumental, that if you want to
#
learn something, then you read the book and you get that knowledge from there.
#
But I think fiction gives you this deeper world of the imagination, which I feel that
#
sometimes we can take for granted even in ourselves.
#
It's like the seen and the unseen, right?
#
There is this story of, and I'll probably say it wrong, but it's a story about daddy
#
fish and baby fish are swimming in the water.
#
And uncle fish passes by and he asks daddy fish, how's the water today?
#
And daddy fish says, great.
#
And then uncle fish goes on.
#
And then baby fish turns to daddy fish and asks, what's water?
#
And I think we kind of take it for granted at that level.
#
And not just that, and I've realized this about myself and I realized that I have to
#
stop doing this, that I assume that if there is a certain bedrock of experiences that have
#
shaped me or certain cultural influences that I now take for granted, like water to me,
#
I assume that others share it as well.
#
But others are not, everybody is swimming in different water.
#
One of the reasons I like to go into the childhoods of people of my vintage or earlier in the
#
show so much is that 60 to 70% of our country is born after liberalization.
#
That shared experience is not there, of there being a waiting list if you want to buy a
#
phone of so few cars on the street, as it were, and all of those things.
#
And I think books give you an entry into all of these worlds and they're immersive, the
#
And that's not something that YouTube videos or even podcasts such as mine will necessarily
#
The other point, almost a counterpoint to this that I want to make is that I actually
#
tell people that listening to audio books is great because I think a mistake people
#
sometimes make is that they think it's an either or, that printed books and audio books
#
compete with each other.
#
But as I discussed earlier, the same use cases I mentioned for podcasts, they apply for audio
#
Not everyone has a privilege to sit down and take one hour every day when they're reading.
#
People live busy lives, people have other kinds of responsibilities and things to look
#
after, but there will always be times where they can do passive listening.
#
So again, my advice to people who do my course or people who might be listening to this is
#
that even if you don't have the time to sit down and read a physical book, it's okay to
#
listen because you're still getting that world of the imagination.
#
You're still listening to those sentences and listening to the language.
#
And through osmosis, a lot of it kind of sort of filters down.
#
And the third thing I agree with you on, and this is something that I sort of make it a
#
point to drive home again to people who do my course, is that when you're reading, read
#
indiscriminately, read everything.
#
You know, we've built this hierarchies of reading that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is cool,
#
Chetan Bhagat is not cool.
#
And that just makes me so angry because the point is that, you know, like you said, our
#
time in this world is limited in terms of what we can read, right?
#
You mentioned 5,000 books for most of us who are a certain age, just even less than that,
#
you know, and you want to spend that time reading things that you enjoy reading.
#
So for me, you know, my metric for whether I read something is one, if I'm enjoying it,
#
if I'm like, there's a thrilling story happening, you know, Jasu si duniya or whatever, then
#
that's a great reason to keep reading.
#
Or if you want a certain kind of knowledge in a book, but it's hard work, but you want
#
the knowledge, it'll bring value to your life.
#
That's a good reason to keep reading.
#
But a bad reason to keep reading is because people say, oh, this book is in the canon
#
or it's won so and so prize and you have that fear of missing out.
#
And then you kind of go through that and then the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
#
I've already read a hundred pages and all of that.
#
So there again, I couldn't agree with you more.
#
My advice to everyone would be that do not spend time reading books you don't enjoy reading.
#
Just read anything that you're, you know, having fun reading or that you feel adds value
#
You know, there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure when it comes to books.
#
And we'll go into a break now after which we'll come back and go take you back to your
#
childhood from when you were three years old.
#
But before that, you mentioned how your dad used to come back with all kinds of odd things
#
when he was sent shopping.
#
So before the break, I want to read out this lovely paragraph from your book where you
#
write quote, my mother, and this is after your father's come back from shopping.
#
Your mother's given him a list.
#
He's come back with things and you write quote, my mother inspected the dining table and found
#
chocolate cake, figs and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in paperback.
#
But where are the dals and the masalas?
#
My father would treat the query with surprise.
#
Only my mother could see that there were more important things in the world.
#
But what are we to have for dinner?
#
My mother with hurry lull nodding in ascent like a Greek chorus of doom would ask.
#
My father would point out with impeccable logic that he had technically come back with
#
The figs were of good quality and in those days frightfully expensive.
#
This was usually the point where my mother flew into a rage and stormed off to see what
#
what could be cobbled together from odds and ends.
#
But she was in a minority.
#
The rest of us were on my father's side, especially after I began reading Garcia Marquez.
#
The dal could always be watered.
#
It did no harm to anyone to eat khichri for a few days.
#
But Macondo and Fermina Diaz and the banana companies and shipwrecked sailors could not
#
So thank you for a lovely anecdote.
#
It's been, it's been so strange to have your words read back to you.
#
And then you realize that all right, they're not yours anymore, they're everyone else's.
#
And isn't that the beautiful thing about fiction, writing and reading?
#
At some point, whatever it is you're doing, you're just putting stories out there into
#
the world for everyone, you know, and that's what makes it magic.
#
And also what makes it magic is it's so relatable in different ways, where so many people can
#
look at this and remember their own parents and remember their own childhoods.
#
And you know, that's what kind of literature binding us all together.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of the break, we'll move
#
on to the toddler, Nilanjana.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April, 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, the art of clear writing
#
and online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students and vibrant community interaction
#
in the course itself through four webinars spread over four weekends.
#
I share all I know about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
#
So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with the remarkable Nilanjana Roy and we are both speaking through sleek
#
and sleek and slinky, sleek and slinky, sleek and slinky are our excellent microphones over
#
here and you know, I was going to go to your childhood, but we'll go to your childhood
#
I just want to say, I feel that if you're going to spend this much time in close quarters
#
with the mic, then you shouldn't name it.
#
You know, I said that before, but it's respectful.
#
It's just a nice thing to do.
#
And it would be even more respectful to let the mic name you like sleek and slinky might
#
be having some kind of private conversation now and they have perhaps named us already
#
and who knows what our names are.
#
So you know, before we get to your childhood, we was just chatting in the break and I want
#
to actually sort of continue our break conversation.
#
Earlier, when we were talking about letters, you sort of spoke about how there were these
#
three forms, these three landscapes where there is an inland letter, there is a postcard
#
and then there is a longer letter.
#
And one of the things that has sort of, that I've been thinking about of late when I think
#
about the creative economy, for example, is that many of the forms in the different arts
#
are results of physical limitations.
#
So for example, the printed book, the printed book, it's a physical object.
#
It can only be so big and it needs to be at least a certain thickness.
#
So therefore you have a ceiling in the floor for how long a novel should be or how long
#
You know, you have the convention of the three minute song coming because the first sort
#
of record that came out at the start of the 19th century could hold three minutes of music.
#
Then later the first long playing record could hold 40 minutes of music and that became the
#
convention for the album.
#
And your typical, your standard pop song is still kind of supposed to be 30 seconds.
#
And as, three minutes rather, Spotify now has a 30 second rule where they start paying
#
you after 30 seconds and people are adapting to that in interesting ways.
#
And as a creator in the nineties, we used to think in terms of these forms.
#
Like for me, in the hierarchy of literature or writing, the book was the ultimate thing
#
So you could write columns or you could write various things and a book was the end thing
#
And a book was like a hundred thousand words and you, an article could be 800 words and
#
And you had the same tyranny of form again because of physical limitations and so on
#
coming about in other, in the other arts.
#
For example, cinema, you know, where you had these conventions that a Bollywood film could
#
be three hours and a Hollywood film is 90 minutes and in television you have 23 minutes,
#
which basically you add commercials, it becomes half an hour.
#
And what has now happened is that those physical limitations have gone.
#
No longer do we have to submit to the tyranny of form.
#
And more and more artists are beginning to break out of this tyranny.
#
Like in the break, I was telling you about how sad I feel that in The Power Broker by
#
Cairo, you know, a full hundred, a book length portion on Jane Jacobs will just cut.
#
And Cairo is one of my favorite writers, Jane Jacobs is a hero of mine.
#
I would have loved to read that.
#
And unfortunately, you know, if it still exists, you know, they should kind of put it back.
#
But because of physical limitations, because of conventional notions by publishers that
#
this is how much a book should be and we can't go beyond it, it unfortunately had to be
#
And thankfully we live in times where that's no longer an issue.
#
But I feel that while creators are beginning to adapt to new forms or new platforms, the
#
mainstream or what remains of it still thinks in very conventional ways.
#
Like on this date of recording, we are recording this on the 23rd of June, I just looked at
#
I don't know when you put those tweets out, but you have a set of tweets about publishers
#
following trends and how sort of short sighted and wrong that is.
#
And I couldn't agree with you more.
#
And I think what the mainstream sort of does is that your mainstream, whether it is, you
#
know, a Hollywood studio commissioning films where they say, let's go with the franchise
#
or so and so film has worked, let's do five more exactly like it, show a distinct lack
#
Well, what is happening in the creator economy is really creators stretching out, trying
#
different things, trying whatever the hell they want.
#
Like five hour conversations on podcasts, which the mainstream would never accept.
#
I mean, I could never have sold this as a concept and then whatever works, works and
#
things that change are changing.
#
So just in terms of both of these questions, the dissipation of the mainstream, which has
#
kind of happened in media and which will inevitably, I think, happen in every domain, including
#
publishing in, you know, in the future of unknown unknowns.
#
So one, what do you feel about the dissipation of the mainstream?
#
And two, as an artist yourself, what do you think about, like, is this something that
#
you've thought about that forms can be so fluid and flexible and you don't need to think
#
in one particular way or put yourself in a particular box anymore?
#
Let's get to the uses of legacy publishing.
#
Legacy publishing works really well for a variety of forms per se, and it works well
#
because by and large those publishing houses are staffed by people who love reading.
#
That's been across the board, you know, most of the publishers have met.
#
In that universe, there's a wide amount of variety.
#
By and large, what we've seen in the UK, for example, is that independent publishers are
#
They're more willing to take risks.
#
They're less dependent on one of the curses of the industry, which is that because of
#
the way everything is packaged, you know, sometimes two years in advance, and you're
#
aiming your content at a series of bloggers or book loving sections, you know, book media.
#
That's going to be writing the summer book special of the year or whatever, you're very
#
dependent on what's called the strapline, which is a condensed form of the blurb.
#
And it takes some time to understand that some publishers are absolute genius because
#
their ability to predict and know their readers, not just the market, but their readership,
#
and see that this book that I'm publishing now, taking it on, massaging it into shape
#
for about two years or so, revisions, edits, all of that, that near incredible instinct
#
that a good editor has for how to take a book to where it should be, even though you only
#
have access to what the author's given you, you know, that's an incredible skill, doesn't
#
get talked about as much as translation and the skills involved out there.
#
But legacy publishing keeps pushing things into categories that benefit the marketing
#
Marketing is not a dirty word either, none of us writers would be alive without marketers.
#
But that means that things flow into very rigid categories, you know, so you belong
#
to fantasy or science fiction or self-help or whatever.
#
And I've been questioning the use of genre forever because I really don't think that's
#
the way we read or live honesty.
#
You know, to me, Tolkien years ago or Ursula K. Le Guin, she works as a genre writer and
#
she works as somebody who's got a stunning corpus of ideas.
#
Recently, one of my colleagues at the FT, Robert Shimsley, picked up on Terry Pratchett
#
and said that everybody who's an economist should read Pratchett for the way that he
#
talks about ideas like democracy and cities exploding in certain directions and all of
#
You know, there's a lot you could learn from him.
#
So it's our thinking that boxes the world into this.
#
Creators by instinct, have you noticed how many people are gravitating to the newsletter
#
as a kind of modern form of the blog?
#
Because there's something in us that craves, you know, the particular, the personal.
#
Out of the cluster of newsletters are coming in, a certain percentage of creators will
#
fall off when they realize that it's really hard to sustain that.
#
Some newsletters, I have to say much despite my own love for the form, I look at it and
#
I think I wish they were working in tandem with an editor because this is repetitive
#
or not too long, but you know, too familiar.
#
The materials may be being a little overworked and a good editor can make you see stuff that's
#
But where I itch sometimes to write my own newsletter, and you know, that's just one
#
of the many forms that can attract you, is in the absence of constraint.
#
So often when you have to massage a column into 750 words, there are gaps that a sensitive
#
They know that something has been left unsaid, okay?
#
Or sometimes you're doing the opposite.
#
I mean, I hope I never do that as a columnist, but it used to happen, you know, back in the
#
day to a lot of our other columnists at different papers, you could sense that they were stretching.
#
You know, the deadline had come up and they were taking a 350 word insight and pushing
#
that until it filled the full 800 words.
#
When you don't have that constraint, that freedom is something that's an extreme challenge
#
and requires a huge amount of technical skill actually to manage well.
#
But think about it this way, you have a world, two kinds of worlds that have been pushing
#
at us for a while saying, listen, legacy publishing is not everything that there could be.
#
One is the extremely sophisticated and layered world of fan fiction.
#
Most people in the public arena know fan fiction only as, oh, E.L.
#
James, you know, her book Fifty Shades of Grey came out of that.
#
But fan fiction is where it's an enormous playground and a serious, serious place.
#
For people who want to be writers and are not that concerned with marketing karna hai,
#
they're more into readership rather than sales, let's put it that way, and it's very satisfying
#
It's also something that frequently pushes back at whatever mainstream writers, even
#
celebrated people, even big names have made.
#
You know, I mean, a long time ago, Hogwarts fan fiction or Harry Potter fan fiction was
#
sitting there and punching very lightly in its own way at the areas where the book's
#
So they were saying, instead of saying in a column, the portrayal of goblins verges
#
They were creating their own fanfics where the goblins were the heroes of the story.
#
You know, and that is such a beautiful way to make a criticism by creating something
#
new and original yourself.
#
And the other part of it has been, I'm a little skeptical of the huge marketing passion for
#
this, but book talk, you know, where young teens and young adults have started to discover
#
their own books and push trends.
#
It seems to me that after a while, book talk is also like a lot of Instagram influencing,
#
becoming conformist and moving away from its slightly anarchic things.
#
So to answer your question a little more succinctly, let's say we have an opportunity and the way
#
that the internet goes, the way that the mainstream and the side stream, if you want to call it
#
that, goes is first we expand out into this territory of almost limitless possibility,
#
which is what the first wave of the internet was.
#
And then at some point we get coral back into safety and into our little corporate zones
#
and into the marketability of this, that and the other.
#
But one of the things in the few workshops that I've done, one of the things that I tried
#
to tell people who want to be writers for a lifetime is how would you write if you were
#
not going to make any money from this whatsoever or any fame, you know, then what?
#
What is it that you would do?
#
Your thick desire, your most deepest intent, you know, the writing that's going to wake
#
you up and bring you to life.
#
And that could be anything.
#
I'm genre indifferent, you know, I'm not quality indifferent within your genre, try at least
#
to learn what the basic rules are, not because rules are rules, but because you're striving
#
for a certain kind of clarity.
#
If you want to share a story, then don't leave it messy and bristling when you can do better,
#
do the best that you can within that.
#
But I've also learned a lot from the Hindi writing tradition, for example, of just letting
#
a story come to you and setting it down in that moment.
#
A lot of the women writers, particularly Hindi and Bengali, the ones that I know best outside
#
of English, taught themselves to write in very small segments of time, you know, so
#
there's no question of we set up and then we think about this and we do this and that
#
It's like, no, we get right to it.
#
In between cooking this, in between managing the household, in between doing our other
#
work, we learn to set down four paragraphs and make that sing, you know.
#
So I think what we are getting to is a very, very old truth.
#
The importance of form, something I was thinking about market forces.
#
You don't see that many playwrights in India.
#
In her generation, I can think of basically Ani Zaidi and maybe one or two others, and
#
I do see, can I come in with a small note of complaint?
#
And I'm exempting really good writers of recent novels.
#
They know who they are, I hope, you know, and some of them have done incredible work
#
from Shivani Sibyl to Lindsay Pereira to, you know, a host of others.
#
But if you're writing to the market, then you're not just in danger of losing an audience
#
or losing a chance, you're in danger of something much sadder, which is that you might never
#
find out the kind of writer that you really should be, right?
#
In recent years, it seems to me that the people who made their name in Indian English fiction
#
were all told at that time, there is no money in writing, there's no use being a writer.
#
Later, they became famous, you know, everyone from Salman Rushdie to Vikram Sethwa, Amitav
#
Ghosh, the entire universe, Kiran Desai, etc.
#
But at that time, they were told there is no reward in it, and they went ahead and wrote
#
what they wanted to anyway.
#
And I think there's a huge lesson out there.
#
I see a lot of literary fiction coming out, first phase, people are either trying to be
#
Chetan Bhagat, and in all these years, there's only been one person at the top of the mythological
#
fiction category of the popular fiction category.
#
There are very few imitators who really make it, you know, maybe because they're trying
#
Ankur Wariko, on the other hand, you know, who's coming in with very Indian self-help,
#
but something that's new and refreshing, then that's saying basically, we're going to turn
#
our back on politics, but if you want good habits and a successful life, and you want
#
to have fun along the way, here it is.
#
A lot of the young Indian historians, you know, from Anjan Manotra to Manu, to that
#
entire range of Iram Koti, etc., they're onto something because they're following something
#
that they are individually passionate about, right?
#
When you ride to the market, you lose that edge.
#
So coming back to your question, the field of possibility ahead of us, I think we're
#
all sensing that there's something out here beyond the mainstream.
#
And by the mainstream, I'm not saying just legacy publishers now, I'm saying also the
#
kind of media I've written for all my life.
#
I have a great respect for them and their traditions, the New York Times, Business Standard,
#
Financial Times, all the places that I've written for, you know, the BBC, etc.
#
They have a history and a tradition of respect for the process of fact checking, of shaping
#
a story a particular way.
#
And it's wonderful to be part of that repository.
#
But I think as an independent creator, if you have the guts and you have the honesty
#
It's one thing to say I want to write like Arundhati Roy.
#
What if you really want to write the Indian equivalent of Regency romances?
#
Are you never going to find out?
#
What if you want to create something that doesn't exist at this moment, you know, some
#
kind of a comic book or a historical steampunk mashup?
#
And you're not doing it just because you were trying so hard to be somebody else or to do
#
what the market rewards.
#
You know, ultimately, it just keeps coming back to this.
#
I know that there is also a practical side to everyone's writing life or writing career.
#
But don't follow the practical side of things to the point where you miss out on the true
#
joy of being either a writer or a reader.
#
Something that you were saying just a moment back about audio books.
#
And I was thinking about how I grew bored at some point of time about this debate between
#
the Kindle and reading books.
#
I take the Kindle, my Kindle everywhere when I'm traveling because it's the easiest way
#
to take along half a library.
#
And I notice I read differently on the Kindle, you know, what I was saying about being out
#
of space and time is compensated for by the fact that I love reading poetry on the Kindle.
#
There's something about that screen and an individual poem that really makes it sing.
#
I hate reading long involved novels in e-book form, but that's just me.
#
I prefer to read them either as printouts or as books, but I love the Kindle for short
#
And instinctively, I seem to read a lot more in the way of popular nonfiction on the Kindle.
#
So, you know, that's just another example of the way a platform has changed me.
#
With audio books, there's no escaping it.
#
I do notice that I retain less in terms of, you know, remembering the exact order in which
#
arguments have been made in a book if I listen to the audio book version, but there is a
#
compensating factor, sometimes the characterisation, particularly if the narrator of the audio
#
I get the characterisation better.
#
I give up a little bit of my independence as the reader to imagine the voices and the
#
landscape the way I want to.
#
In that sense, an audio book narrator is also, you know, like a translator, a co-creator,
#
And sometimes you can just settle back into that creation and have it sing to you.
#
I think a lot of people in India do use audio books more practically.
#
So, you know, when you start to move into all of this, you start to see that where you
#
expected things to be linear, they aren't.
#
All of these forms of storytelling and receiving stories, there's no one above the other.
#
There is really a democracy out there in terms of, you know, if you prefer paper books, that's
#
But, you know, for every, I do love the smell of paper myself, but sometimes every so often
#
because I live in Delhi, right?
#
And it's hot and humid simultaneously in summer.
#
And the smell of secondhand paper books can bring to mind a not very clean bathroom.
#
I'm not as romantic about the smell of paper as other people are.
#
I just think it changes depending on place and time and stuff like that.
#
Not as a long, long digression, but getting serious for a second.
#
I think the more we try to write what already has been written, of course, when you start
#
off as a writer, sometimes you're imitating.
#
The first three things I tried to write came out sounding like the writers I love the most,
#
I was trying to write serious social commentary like Mahashweta Devi, the great Bengali writer
#
who spent a lot of her life, you know, really listening to her friends who were part of
#
tribal India and coming up with a completely different consciousness.
#
But she had a fierce political way of writing that is probably not me and I would be wise
#
The first novel I wrote, which is thankfully dead, buried and disappeared in one of our
#
many house moves, was like a terrible, terrible mashup between Garcia Marquez and Nair Masood.
#
It was so derivative and all of that.
#
And I don't mind actually confessing that because I think we learn how to write again
#
by imitating and we imitate who we want to be until we figure out who we are ourselves.
#
What writing gives you is the freedom not just to imagine different things, but really
#
to step into very, very distinct worlds and to be different people.
#
In your lifetime, you're not going to get that many chances unless you're an actor or
#
You don't get that many chances to be completely different from who you are.
#
And that's part of writing that is most thrilling to me in terms of possibilities.
#
So again, coming back to the whole thing of form, it's not just that you're removing
#
You're also unconsciously challenging people instead of Twitter, that scroll down thing
#
or Facebook, that wall.
#
What can you do with the space of a screen?
#
And I've seen so many writers, particularly the poets always seem to be the most inventive
#
of the lot, but you know, use that, suddenly realize that on a screen you've got a left
#
It's on a page less populated, but on a screen you can dance out there.
#
You can do things out there.
#
You can bring in images.
#
You can build something around that.
#
You know, there's, there's really no limit.
#
You can dance with Milan Soman on a screen out there, a bunch of responses, but one,
#
I really, you know, like that question.
#
What would you write if no one was to read you?
#
It sort of reminds me of the quote, that character is what you do when no one's looking.
#
And you know, one of the pieces of advice I give creators, both those who do my writing
#
course and my podcasting course, like I remember the first time I taught my podcasting course,
#
which I teach about twice a year, someone asked about, you know, where are the gaps
#
in the market or what should I aim for or do you have any suggestions?
#
And I was like, that is completely the wrong way to think that, you know, one, if there
#
are any quote unquote gaps in the quote unquote market, many others are going to discover
#
But that's the wrong way to think.
#
You know, if there are like 7 billion people on this planet and there are more than a million
#
podcasts out there, the only thing that makes you unique is you, because only you are you.
#
So the most important quality for creators who succeed is that they are authentic to
#
And that totally speaks to your point about don't think about the market quote unquote
#
or what people may want to read or what people may want to listen to or whatever.
#
You've just got to figure out what you want to do and kind of go for that.
#
Eventually it will work out and I'll circle back to this.
#
But first I'll make a point about, I'll share a thought about blogs and newsletters.
#
First of all, for all my listeners who may not have been active during the first, the
#
first internet, the early internet as it were, there was this, around the time I started
#
blogging at India Uncut, there was also an excellent blog written by someone called Kitap
#
Rana, written by someone called Hari Babu.
#
And there was much mystery over who is this Hari Babu, who is this sort of mysterious
#
person who is writing so well about literature and became almost a cult figure.
#
And it turned out later that Hari Babu was Niranjana Roy herself.
#
And I mean, there was another pseudonymous blog, Putu the Cat, which was Samit Basu.
#
So these are the two famous sort of pseudonymous blogs, which people really love reading and
#
speculating on, and it turned out that you were Hari Babu.
#
And what I loved about blogs in that time, like you mentioned, is that it freed you from
#
You didn't have to do 800 words, you could do 30 words, you know, and those were the
#
days before microblogging, you could just put a link to something with a one sentence
#
comment and that was it.
#
Or you could do a thousand words if you wanted, there's simply no limitation.
#
You were freed also from the tyranny of the news cycle, for example.
#
Otherwise, if you're proposing an op-ed or an opinion piece, it has to be something topical.
#
And you also kind of put in volume in the sense that you wrote a lot, like I wrote,
#
you know, five posts a day on average, I did some 8,000 posts in the five years that it
#
And one, I wasn't self-conscious because my job was in mainstream journalism.
#
And for me, this was like a release, it's just a blog who's going to read it.
#
So you know, that's how you start and then you lose that self-consciousness and you're
#
just doing what you're doing.
#
And it worked for that reason.
#
However, when people ask me today where they should write, should they do a blog?
#
I always say, no, I say they should do a newsletter.
#
And the reason is that I think destination websites are pretty much done.
#
Very few people are typing out URLs or like indiancut.com or haribabu.com or whatever
#
it was, and actually going to a destination website.
#
People are clicking on links on social media and so on and so forth.
#
And what a newsletter does is that you read an interesting piece by say, Nilanjana Roy,
#
you immediately subscribe and instantly you are forever getting, you know, everything
#
that Nilanjana Roy writes right into your inbox.
#
It comes into your inbox, you click it, it's there.
#
And what that means for a creator like you is that you are building a community of people
#
who like your writing, which earlier you could not do.
#
This is one of the great things about the creator economy.
#
Like in, you write something in 1995 in Business Standard or Times of India or Indian Express
#
or wherever, someone reads that piece, thinks, ah, this is nice.
#
And then they forget about it a week later and it's gone.
#
But here you're collecting a community of your fans.
#
And what newsletters allow you to do is a couple of things.
#
One is the other great quality.
#
You know, if authenticity to yourself is a fundamental quality for a creator to have,
#
a fundamental quality of the relationship between a creator and the audience is a certain
#
intimacy, right, which is really underrated because, for example, one of the finest compliments
#
I've got for the podcast was someone heard my episode with Abhinandan Sekri and said
#
that I felt so much like I'm sitting on a sofa listening to two friends talking that
#
at one point I interrupted before realizing that what the fuck, I'm listening to a podcast,
#
But that intimacy is incredible and what that intimacy does, and that intimacy happens
#
because you're authentic to yourself.
#
You're not projecting, you're not bullshitting, you're just who you are.
#
And there is that intimacy, your, what you've written has gone directly to someone's inbox
#
or is in their ears because they're kind of listening to it.
#
And what it does is, and I'm thinking aloud here, so I don't know if I'm coining this
#
or someone has simultaneously done it, but I think I'd make a difference between thick
#
engagement and thin engagement.
#
And what that intimacy leads to is a kind of thick engagement where you feel intertwined
#
with the concerns or the art of the person that you're listening to or reading or whatever.
#
And there then the absolute numbers don't matter so much.
#
Like I would give far more value to a hundred thousand listeners for an episode of my podcast
#
than say 20 million views on a YouTube video because in the YouTube video your average
#
time of listening might be 15, 20 seconds, your engagement is much lower.
#
But here the engagement for the lower number of, in terms of absolute numbers, your engagement
#
These people really, really care.
#
And newsletters allow you to build an audience of people who really care about your work.
#
And the final important point here is, and I'll lead to a question on this with you because
#
it's something that I can't, I've been thinking about and don't have an answer to, but the
#
final important point is that a newsletter allows you, as a blog did, to put in volume.
#
In the sense it allows you to put in a lot of work, like the five posts I did during
#
India Uncut, during when my blog was active, for example.
#
And to me this is important because how does a creator become good?
#
A creator becomes good by doing something again and again and again and again and again
#
And a danger for creators is if you care too much about validation, initially your numbers
#
Initially when you do something you will suck at it, like I sucked at blogging or I sucked
#
at podcasting when I began.
#
You do it again and again, you become better.
#
Now initially you will never have numbers.
#
So if you care about validation, you will simply not, you know, you'll stop at some
#
point and therefore you won't iterate enough to actually become good at it.
#
Which is why it's that question to circle back to it.
#
What would you write if no one was reading is incredibly important.
#
That's what you should write because initially no one will be reading.
#
And then because you write that again and again and again, you get good at it and you
#
build that audience organically.
#
And so the value of putting in volume, which is a term poker players use, get a large sample
#
size player, a lot of hands.
#
So I don't know if others use this terminology, but the value of putting in volume is that
#
in a sense quantity does lead to quality.
#
One you do something again and again, you become better to you grow your audience organically
#
by doing something again and again and constant exposure.
#
And my question is that where this kind of breaks down or the context in which I can't
#
figure out how this works is the context of novels and literature.
#
Because a novelist, for example, will write one book for eight years, they're not putting
#
They spend eight years, they write one book, they take a break.
#
The book goes out in the world and most of the time for most novelists, it just disappears.
#
It's like nothing happened.
#
And then you got to get back to the grind and you're not putting in volume in the same
#
sense that a blogger is or a newsletter writer is and all of that.
#
And this befuddles me a bit because I think if you are a storyteller, if you are a person
#
of the imagination, if you love writing, on the one hand, you might want to write novels
#
because that's the kind of sprawling work you want to do.
#
But on the other hand, it runs into this sort of problem.
#
And one question, of course, is that are there other things you could simultaneously do with
#
your creative faculties, whether you're doing a newsletter thing?
#
I think Substack is doing something with Salman Rushdie, but I haven't looked at it too closely,
#
but it feels a little gimmicky.
#
But should artists explore other forms like that and kind of work at it because there's
#
a danger also, I think, for someone who's a novelist to think inside a box and think
#
So you think inside the novel box and you don't go outside it.
#
And my final tangential point, I was talking to someone who works in marketing in the publishing
#
industry just a couple of days ago.
#
And the point that I made is sort of an idealistic point in one way, which is that a good product
#
And that's obviously necessary for something to work.
#
But also what I was trying to point to is that when, say, a book is released, I think
#
there can be the tendency to make a marketing plan and say, okay, we'll do this on Instagram,
#
we'll do this on Twitter, blah, blah, blah.
#
And you make those different YouTube videos.
#
And then you're just ticking boxes and it's kind of automatic and it has zero impact with
#
the world because it is shallow and because therefore you have thin engagement, to use
#
Whereas if authors and artists sort of thought of everything they do, not as marketing, but
#
as a kind of content on its own, then I think that there is, you know, that will create
#
thick engagement at whatever level it does.
#
So for example, if you've written a novel and one of your characters is simultaneously
#
writing a newsletter, even if it's a minor character, then I think that engagement goes
#
And even for the creator, you know, your juices are churning in different ways.
#
So I mean, again, I have sort of digressed a bit and, you know, but this is sort of a
#
subject I think about a fair bit.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
Why do you write, you know?
#
I think in the 20th and 21st century, we've probably put more effort into the anxiety
#
What are we writing for?
#
If 80% of novels fail, then why should anyone be a novelist at all?
#
But I think right from the start of the human history of writing, and I wish you could see
#
what's in my mind right now, because I'm literally, you know, zooming back across the centuries
#
and seeing people fall in love with different forms.
#
They're falling in love with the epic.
#
They're falling in love with the Arabian Nights type nested boxes.
#
Except you're not literally zooming back through the centuries.
#
Not literally, but the imagination is a powerful thing.
#
You know, at different times, they think the fable is it.
#
The fable is where the smart money is, you know, at another stage, all the cool kids
#
want to be Chaucer, or they want to be Kali Das, or something of the sort, right?
#
Common to all of that is the thread of something so deep and so shallow simultaneously.
#
Why do you want to create?
#
What is the satisfaction of putting this world out there?
#
I've seen novelists at different levels.
#
Someone like Stephen King is 74 years old, almost 75, and has probably written almost
#
as many books as his age, you know, he's gone well past 70.
#
And so he puts the myth of, you know, a novel must take so much time and you must live in
#
the side, the hulk of the structure to rest.
#
I took a lot of time to write The Wildings, but that's because I'm very lazy.
#
And I got distracted by an infinity of things.
#
And I spent so much time on the world building, I didn't need to spend that kind of time,
#
but the truth is I loved it.
#
You know, there's a lot of stuff that didn't find its way into the book, like I found this
#
old chart where I'd done a cat's lifespan and a squirrel's lifespan and a bird's lifespan
#
and tried to figure out what their days would feel like to them.
#
There was the time that I decided that one had to see the world from the perspective
#
And I spent an infinite amount of time, not an infinite, a finite, but considerable amount
#
of time trying to figure out the difference between how bats process night and birds process
#
At the end of it, the bats have one paragraph in the book or something like that.
#
There's a great essay by Thomas Nagel, What is it like to be a bat?
#
Yeah, I read that one as well as part of my research.
#
Okay, but the reason I was doing that much research was partly just for the fun of it.
#
Partly because I really didn't know anything about world building at that time.
#
And I was giving myself my MFA privately in the whole world building thing.
#
And the third reason was procrastination.
#
As long as I was researching, I didn't have to get down to the book.
#
The thing is that novels, if you do them right, they live for a very, very long time.
#
Some of the novels that we have have lasted for well over 300 years or so.
#
The epics that we have, the myths that we have, the fables that we have are not literally,
#
but in effect, they are timeless.
#
They have been there in our minds and carried from one generation to the other.
#
Something you realize, why would you do this?
#
Why would you be a novelist?
#
When you're actually writing, you realize the thing that sounds so twee when you say
#
it, but it is absolutely, I assure you, 100% true.
#
Stories and ideas and storytelling has a peculiar life to it of its own.
#
When you try to start writing a novel, you're usually getting it wrong.
#
Everything feels dead on the page.
#
There's a moment where you enter the life of the book and you will not know, even when
#
the book comes out and the reviews come out and readers say nice things or whatever it
#
is, you will actually not know whether your book is alive or not for many years afterwards.
#
But that aliveness is indescribable.
#
It's the kind of feeling that you have of not the power of being a god, but let's say
#
the awe of being a god and bringing a world into full view and that you would spend years
#
It is so rewarding, it is one of the most beautiful things in the world because there's
#
no way you can shorten that timeline.
#
You might take just three months to write a novel, you might take four years, you might
#
take eight years, but the individual book, the individual tale, the aliveness that it
#
accrues over a period of time, whatever that process is, it can't be shortened.
#
Sometimes it's so intense that it feels as though you're possessed.
#
It feels as though the story is writing itself through you.
#
Sometimes you have to struggle to, one of my characters in Black River spent years just
#
saying sorry, you don't know enough about me.
#
You know, you're still viewing me as an interview subject.
#
And this was all wordless communication.
#
It's only when you can see from behind my eyes, that's not my phrase, I think that's
#
Michael Dundati's, but it's only when you can get to that point.
#
And the reason you're trying to get it right and you're trying to sand down edges and bring
#
it more and more to life is not for the perfect sentences or the beauty of an image.
#
All you're trying to do is to do some justice to this world that is of your creation, but
#
that is also coming from somewhere beyond your left shoulder, you know.
#
And to be part of that, whether it's a novel you're writing or whether it's one of Paula
#
Rizzo's incredible paintings, she just passed away some weeks ago, or whether it's a dance
#
performance where your act of creation is in that moment on the stage and then you have
#
to go back and repeat it the next day or something of the sort.
#
You see what I'm saying?
#
There's something about the process of creation itself, so long as you don't get pompous and
#
But I can tell you something, that process is when you feel most alive, you know.
#
And there are other ways in which to feel alive on earth, you know, for some people
#
it's sex, food, money, power, for some people it's adrenaline and thrills.
#
But I can tell you something, this thrill goes beyond everything else.
#
You can channel it into 50 different directions, getting down from those, you know, high, high
#
mountaintops into the practical side of life.
#
There's absolutely no reason why an author can't do or be both.
#
And we keep talking about engagement, audience, all of that, but the word that you used, intimacy,
#
In this rushing world that has changed so much from the time that, you know, I'm a little
#
older than you, but our childhoods overlapped.
#
And I think we look at this world saying that it's a world of infinite resource, but very
#
So what you're trying to do as a writer, whether it's with a newsletter or a novel, is also
#
to reconnect and to get people hopefully to re-see.
#
The other reason, we didn't realize this, I don't think I ever thought about the, you
#
know, internal emotional journey of blogging or something of the sort.
#
When I was Hari Babu, I picked his name out of Kipling and decided to, you know, rescue
#
the Babu from the clutches of the Raj and turn him to good account.
#
But hiding behind a pseudonym also freed me up.
#
It freed up a voice I didn't know I had.
#
And maybe it was an embryo, you know, early stirring towards becoming a novelist, even
#
though I couldn't at that time admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer.
#
There was something important I wanted to say about that.
#
About the blogs, I think what we didn't realize we were doing at that stage was that we, through
#
our attention, we were getting to understand our territory, right?
#
As a writer, as a sports person, whatever it is that you decide that you're going to
#
do, the thing that people have in common who really achieve something great with their
#
lives, and I'm not saying in terms of success, that's great, but I'm saying in terms of
#
creating something of lasting worth or of lasting joy, forget about the word, you know,
#
is their ability to filter out distraction.
#
And what a blog does did then and what a newsletter does now is just allow you within that space
#
of easy armchair sitting back intimacy to say, this is what I really find fascinating.
#
Why can you not do it in any other way?
#
Because even as we're talking, we're generating, I think, a million ideas, everything that
#
I'm like, okay, you know, why don't I think of this, the new creator economy moves in
#
But the new creator ecology is, to me, almost as fascinating, if not more fascinating than
#
But I'm looking at these things and I'm thinking we're going back to very, very old fashioned
#
emotions, emotional needs, psychic needs, if you like.
#
What is this craving for, Amit?
#
You know, this craving is for depth, intimacy, curiosity, attention, the training of that
#
attention, discovery, satisfaction, sharing.
#
Isn't that what we're talking about?
#
In that, the journey of a creator in whatever form.
#
What's the difference between creator economy and creator ecology, by the way, in the ways
#
that you sort of use it?
#
Again, it's something that I'm visualizing as I speak.
#
When I think of the creator economy, I think of the nuts and bolts of it.
#
You know, how do you not just a simple thing of how do you monetize a newsletter, but in
#
other ways as well, you know, how do you fuel this?
#
It's very easy for anyone who's lived any kind of life to write maybe four newsletters.
#
But part of your economy would be how do you keep generating the interest and the ideas?
#
What is it that your ground is?
#
What is it that you want to share with people?
#
And the economy is also the economy of attention, the economy of money, et cetera.
#
And that there's an entire infrastructure that goes along with it.
#
When I think of the creator ecology, I'm back where we started with the blogs and stuff,
#
which is what was the environment like?
#
First world blogging was much more populated and much more present than our world blogging.
#
And yet we could make our presence felt.
#
It was still a fair landscape.
#
It was not, you know, our voices were not drowned out.
#
There was also a lot of language blogging, you know, which woke up a need in me to read
#
I don't write in Hindi and Bangla.
#
My Hindi is still, unfortunately, my spoken Hindi is very, very Bengali inflected, but
#
I would not give up the pleasure that I've had from reading in Hindi, Bengali and English
#
simultaneously all these years, you know.
#
And language blogging was a lot like that.
#
When I look at the creative ecology, I look at people unconsciously moving outside of
#
the grasp, the stickiness of Insta, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, you know, those are great
#
But at some point, I keep waiting for the MySpace kind of thing, where the owners of
#
those spaces, which is some giant corporation, will fold them up or change them to the point
#
where they are no longer, you know, as it is Twitter for anyone who has a right wing
#
You know, in the early days, it used to be a safe space for us or for Americans or for
#
Hong Kong liberals, and now it's not.
#
And as a result, you're already censoring yourself or already being careful about what
#
you see, is this going to get me into trouble?
#
It's not a free space anymore, if that makes sense.
#
With Facebook, the problem is slightly different.
#
It's gone from being the pleasure of sharing your status updates and generating discussion
#
on your page to being a very cluttered space.
#
And frankly, a very elderly space as well, you know, you don't have young people out
#
TikTok is great fun, but it's also very quick, quick, quick, you know, with Instagram.
#
It takes me to many places.
#
Art and design Instagram is fascinating.
#
But if you notice, you never go backwards with these spaces.
#
You never stop and you never reverse gear.
#
You're always in an endless present or screwing future, yeah.
#
And one thing you're trying to do with this new creator ecology is to create something
#
that is an evolution from the blogs.
#
The way I see it is a kind of linkage.
#
You know, I see again the web part of the World Wide Web, if that makes sense, and intermeshing
#
rather than a separate silos.
#
The promise yet again of a hierarchy-less world, which will eventually become hierarchical
#
and then evolve out and be replaced with something else.
#
But when I think of the ecology, I actually think of intertwining wires, creepers, whatever
#
I think of something living and breathing.
#
Already among writer newsletters, which is the narrow area that I follow, because people
#
are reading each other's newsletters on creativity and craft and all of that.
#
What's happening seems much less like independent nodes and more like a conversation and interchange
#
Like the roots of trees in a forest.
#
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about.
#
No, I agree with all of this, except that I think of economy in a slightly different
#
way, but perhaps an umbrella term is a creator ecosystem, which sounds very, you know, jargony
#
and corporate-like and defined.
#
But I would include all of this in that as well, because I don't think the creator economy
#
is just about the big platforms like Instagram or whatever.
#
It's not about this conversation you and I are having or even other things that may
#
not necessarily have an audience, but we are creators, we do what we do.
#
And so it's all of that.
#
I mean, to me, an economy is really a web of voluntary interactions and it just goes
#
into all kinds of directions.
#
And again, and those wondering that what are they talking about roots of trees in forests?
#
I'd recommend this lovely book by Peter Walgreens called The Hidden Life of Trees, which is
#
such a lovely book, isn't it?
#
I like a lot of the new writing that's coming up around trees around the earth and, you
#
know, where we are pausing in this moment.
#
And Ed Yong's just out with an incredible book about the inner lives, the emotional
#
Yeah, I saw the cover, but I didn't, I haven't read it yet.
#
I'm just, just started on that.
#
But I was looking at all of this and I was thinking, you know, there's a lot of debates
#
coming up against with nature writing, but people saying, okay, wonder is all very well,
#
but more than wonder, you know, maybe we're finally taking our place in the world.
#
We're finally seeing ourselves not just as a human species, but as a human species embedded
#
in something very real.
#
And again, the world that we are talking about, books, internet spaces, these are landscapes
#
of their own, if that makes sense.
#
I sense that we haven't yet fully explored the tension between the new world and the
#
old world way of doing things.
#
I've been so, one way or the other, connected with the old landscape, right?
#
Which is legacy publishers, legacy media.
#
What's changed with them after a while is that you no longer have the expectation of
#
working with the same editor over a long period of time, or that you no longer can rely on
#
You know, what happened even with legacy media was a lot of organizations expanding, opening
#
up their tents and then crashing dramatically five years down the line.
#
I think there are very, very few places that continue to stay standing as institutions.
#
We are losing that entire sense.
#
With the new world, I'm a cynic after so many years of being online.
#
And I look at the possibilities, but I also wonder how long it will take for us to mess
#
On the other hand, you can't be that cynical.
#
There's a point of time at which you have to look at what this enables.
#
And I have, both you and Roshan Abbas and a lot of other people are saying that the
#
next five, six, 10 years is likely to be a really, really interesting time for anybody
#
who's willing to take individual responsibility for their lives and stuff.
#
And something about the way newsletters work remind me again of something from the Hindi
#
writing world, Yatanjali Shree and a lot of writers, they will just automatically have
#
their addresses, their own home addresses printed on the back or front flap of the book.
#
Because the assumption is that if you write a book, you want readers to get in touch with
#
And I was just asking myself, when did we lose that in the English language world?
#
You know, or did we never have that, was our concept of writing always somebody quietly
#
there in their individual silo or castle, unapproachable, accepted festivals or something
#
You know, it's a difference.
#
It's not just a small thing, if you know what I mean.
#
This is the more time I spend in writing and reading, the more I realize, and I'm not saying
#
this as a humble brag, it's not about reading so much.
#
But you realize with the shock that with every choice you're making with your reading, there's
#
so much else that you're not going to know.
#
So if I'm reading a lot of literary fiction set in the present, then I'm not going to
#
be reading that many classics from the past.
#
If I'm reading thrillers, and if I'm reading a lot of books on the environment, then the
#
amount of time I have to spend reading food books has gone down.
#
You know, and I still, I've lived half a century, and sometimes I still feel like I'm still
#
20 reaching out for the world and saying, you know, just give me more, there is so much
#
I don't know, those different parts of your life, there's the part that wants to create,
#
there's the part that wants to sit back and listen to other people or to read their work
#
or to experience their creations.
#
And there's the part that's just like, my God, you know, there's so much to explore.
#
Despite, I mean, I know we get depressed at the headlines and all of that.
#
But I think something that's been continuous through all these decades, and I'm just looking
#
back at it and thinking, you know, childhood was books coming out of the family cupboards
#
And adolescence was a lot of traveling and the 20s, there was the whole wide world of
#
the internet coming at you, you know, this new frontier to explore.
#
And my God, I just hope none of us ever loses our sense of wonder.
#
Behind all of these questions and all of that, you know, whatever you want to do with reading
#
or writing, I think, I mean, of course, you write sometimes to witness terrible things
#
But I think all of this is just a journey into keeping your curiosity alive and trying
#
to find ways never to let that go in the pursuit of this goal or that goal or must have, you
#
know, bungalow car, etc.
#
Those are all very valid goals, nice things to do.
#
But I cannot imagine living a life without curiosity, without wonder, without exploration.
#
And this is what I have to keep reminding myself because I don't think, I think it's
#
a daily choice in the sense that I don't think that you can tell yourself that I'm going
#
to live a life of more curiosity and wonder or whatever and then boom, the direction changes
#
No, I think every day you have to remind yourself to be mindful, remind yourself not to take
#
stuff for granted, to notice the things that you've sort of normalized.
#
In my case, to notice the many ways in which you're so incredibly lucky for doing what
#
you do or living the kind of life you live and I think it's important to have that sense
#
of like Jesus Christ, I'm so lucky, right?
#
Despite which I'm known as an excessively pessimistic person because of course the country
#
is going to hell and we're all going to die soon, but soon in geological terms.
#
But I'll say one thing, I don't even know if it's a counterpoint, but perhaps I'm addressing
#
a worry that you have is that you mentioned about how something new will emerge and we'll
#
find a way to mess it up.
#
And I think this time we won't mess it up because I think the direction that worry is
#
going in is that there is a culture and that culture becomes staid and mainstream and whatever
#
and then a counterculture emerges and the counterculture is really cool, but then it
#
gets co-opted and it gets messed up and then you have another counterculture and it's a
#
But I don't think that's what's happening here.
#
I think what's happening here is this fundamental permanent shift towards decentralization in
#
every way, right, in the sense that just to take the media as an example, there was a
#
mainstream in the 1990s, you had a broad consensus on the truth, the means of production were
#
not open to creators, creators couldn't connect with their audiences, creators couldn't monetize
#
their audiences directly, they had to go via the platforms who would sell eyeballs, get
#
advertising and a small chunk of that would reach creators.
#
And I think all that has changed and it's changed for good in the sense that I now have
#
the means of production in my hand, I can write something and publish it today, I can
#
put out this podcast today as I will, you know, this is I own this, this is not for
#
any platform, it's available everywhere and it's free, right.
#
I can make anything in the audio visual form that I want to and put it on YouTube or whatever
#
and I think that is not going to change, the means of production are with you forever,
#
the means of distribution are accessible to you forever, there might be I think worries
#
that will get addressed with times that some video creators may feel that they are too
#
dependent on the algorithms of the big platforms like YouTube or whatever and they might have
#
to cater to that to get noticed, but many creators don't even give a damn about that,
#
they're just putting their work out and they're getting their audiences.
#
So in that sense, I don't think we'll mess it up, I think yes, there will be a percentage
#
of creators who are doing cutting edge work today and who are being disruptive, who might
#
be co-opted and who might become part of that mainstream game, but overall, we're not going
#
to mess it up because unless a human species dies out, which will happen eventually given
#
the law of extremely large numbers is inevitable, but apart from that, I think that this is
#
an irrevocable change and that's why it fills creators like me and Roshan and many of the
#
creators I've spoken to on my podcast with incredible optimism about at least this, that
#
they can't take this away.
#
I'm going to hold my skepticism in check.
#
I would like to believe, I guess, okay, what I'm skeptical about is not that this revolution
#
I see it happening and I think it's well overdue.
#
It was what part of the early promise of the net was about, it's just that at that time
#
we didn't have all the tools and all of that, I guess my two concerns after having been
#
an early, the web will be used for good evangelist and it's wonderful to connect people and on
#
Twitter all we're going to do is flood relief and reach out to each other and get books
#
to libraries and all that good stuff.
#
I think I have a healthy respect now for the speed of darkness as well.
#
So unconsciously when we say creators, we're thinking of what we consider not even moral.
#
I'm not even going there, but what we consider benevolent, beneficial creativity.
#
And I guess I'm looking at AI and where that's headed and how that is going to mess up a
#
certain amount of this.
#
And I'm a little nervous about where these tools could go in the hands of well organized
#
We've seen just little flickers of that, right, in the power of certain kinds of propaganda
#
There was a fabulous Twitter thread, Twitter, the source of good as well as evil, by a Russian
#
journalist writing about how before this moment happened, before Putin's war, for decades
#
and decades Russian publishing has been overrun by these small books that are jingoistic and
#
have the worst of nationalistic, both the demonizing and the hero making.
#
So I guess that's what I'm getting at.
#
The power of something like this to be used to create dark or grim alternate realities
#
is also something that I would keep a little unsnipy.
#
I share your pessimism about politics and this is really in the realm of politics, the
#
industry of hate and so on and so forth.
#
And it's no doubt true that there is authoritarianism and polarization and all of those things are
#
happening and the technology plays a huge part in that.
#
So I'm not disputing that, but just in the narrow context of the creator economy, I think
#
the cat's out of the bag.
#
And I think that, you know, you can't mainstream all of it again.
#
You're not going to ever reach the situation where someone like me can't put out the kind
#
of work I want to put out, you know.
#
I think I'm in the space and creators everywhere are in that space where they can do the kind
#
of work they want and get it out there.
#
And that little thing you can't turn back.
#
You see, that's not a little thing.
#
You know, there I'm in agreement and the other thing that has also become earlier, the argument
#
used to be that if you're an independent creator, somebody who's with a legacy publisher is
#
somehow better than you because they've had access to the best editors in the business
#
And that has also changed.
#
If you really want to teach yourself how to be edited properly, you can organize those
#
You can take a workshop, you can practice a craft on your own, or you can hire an editor.
#
Or you can do the art of clear writing by Amit Parma and that will also help.
#
But I see, what I like about this scenario is that it's also coming up at a time when
#
you have this youth explosion in India.
#
And of course, when you have so many people out there clustering around, that energy can
#
either be turned to really, really vicious purposes, towards common and hate and towards
#
mobs and all of that, which is what we've seen happening out here.
#
But there is a better pathway.
#
And that's what you're seeing.
#
This is a generation that's already used to a certain amount of independence.
#
And that, as great as liberalization was for India, that boom in businesses, and that sudden
#
explosion of cities like Delhi into huge meganopolis, if you consider that a good thing.
#
What I remember about liberalization in the 1990s most was, again, an explosion of wild
#
For a while, it felt like Delhi was an exceptionally welcoming city for anyone who had a multitude
#
of, I mean, one of a multitude of dreams.
#
Not just the writing dream, but if you wanted to be a graphic designer, if you wanted to
#
be an artist, this was the place to be young and starving in a bursati in Rajputnagar.
#
I came to Delhi in 94 after college and after a few months turned my butt and ran back all
#
I wouldn't necessarily say it was such a welcoming city.
#
But no, because I just found that at that time, and it's probably not true today, but
#
at that time Bombay was the only cosmopolitan city in India in the sense it could, I just
#
felt at home in Bombay from day one, which was not the case in Delhi.
#
No, Delhi is always a rough ride right at the start.
#
But in the same time period, there were a lot of other people who went through the turbulent
#
rapids and then found their feet in the city.
#
It was a nourishing place.
#
I'm not so sure that it's as nourishing these days.
#
There's a sense of that creative energy at least having fallen apart a little bit in
#
the business side of the city being strong, the building side of the city being strong.
#
But there isn't as much of a glamour attached to wanting to be an artist or whatever.
#
It's become a lot more conformist in both Bombay and Delhi in some ways.
#
I can't speak about Delhi, obviously, because I don't live here and I don't have that kind
#
of knowledge, but I think that there would be many Delis.
#
And perhaps there's a little bit of a selection, there might be a little bit of a selection
#
bias in what you're saying in the sense that you could be thinking of your circles and
#
the kind of people that you know and what's happening there.
#
Because even in Bombay, I have to warn myself about making easy generalizations about Bombay
#
because there are so many sort of niches and undergrounds and vibrant communities of creative
#
people who are all over the place, who I didn't know till a while back.
#
But then suddenly you see them and you realize this is also there.
#
So you know, so I'm very about, I mean, I'm not saying you're doing that, but I'm just
#
wary about generalizations because what I do see in the creator economy is that there
#
is just tremendous energy.
#
And I've the greatest tragedy of all for me, what has really went where politics hurt the
#
creator economy was TikTok being banned.
#
And I rant and rave about this because...
#
That's actually one of the things I was coming to, you know, it's not that I see, I don't
#
see a lack of creative potential in Delhi, let's put it that way.
#
But compared to, and liberalization had its own, you know, ups and downs or whatever.
#
I will just say that the 2000s seemed to be more welcoming to the younger generation.
#
Now that energy is there, I see fewer outlets though, you know, and that always puts upon
#
a generation the burden of going out and making their own spaces.
#
So I would say that everything out there is poised and set up to thrive.
#
Politically speaking, it's not just a question of, you know, which party is in charge, but
#
I think in general, it hasn't been a priority out here to make your cities into great creative
#
And again, I'm not talking about things like, you know, museums and stuff like that.
#
It's just that with the ebb and flow of the city, there was a point at which even the
#
outside spaces seem to have something to them, you know, a little welcomingness.
#
In order to create and to be a thriving creative community, you also have to be open to making
#
And I find that happening much more online than offline.
#
Again, you know, we're walking back into these arguments are large and gigantic, but I think
#
what both of us are seeing, what I see from the world of legacy publishing and legacy
#
media is a certain level of fatigue.
#
You know, certain institutions, including some of the ones where I work and where my
#
work comes out as professional and as thorough and as ever, and bless them for being around.
#
But increasingly you sense that legacy publishing and legacy media, which used to be take up
#
the entire space is now one corner of that space, right?
#
I'll think carefully about your words and process them with time.
#
But I'm reminded of our beloved Prime Minister, dear leader, Modi ji, who was once asked about
#
or do you remember there was this famous gathering of children to ask him questions in an auditorium.
#
And one of them, I think, asked him about climate change.
#
And he was trying to say ki dekhye, mausam nahi badla hai, hum badle hai.
#
So anyway, from talking about legacy publishing, let's talk about legacy person, which is let's
#
kind of talk about your childhood now and you know, where were you born and what were
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
I was born in Kolkata and part of the mythology because one doesn't remember one's own birth
#
in the early few months.
#
But in my mind, I think all of that is fused with memories of Bangladesh coming into being.
#
And the earliest memories I have are by and large of very happy things, you know, books,
#
houses that were built practically of books, running around and playing in gardens.
#
And because both my parents and my grandmother in Kolkata were exceptionally hospitable people,
#
there was, we were used to a house that where the doors were open, where there was always
#
an extra space at the table and where people were welcome to come and just crash.
#
And in retrospect, I think it gave me tremendous exposure to a life outside of just the family.
#
Otherwise, we get caught up very strongly in our own family histories and all of that.
#
And another thing I didn't realize was we mentioned earlier that I felt lucky to belong
#
to a family where so many people were readers.
#
But of my grandmothers, one of them was a woman who had studied Sanskrit and loved reading
#
So you were introduced right from the start to the idea that reading could be wide and
#
eclectic and didn't have to be either solemn or frivolous all the time.
#
There was a huge spectrum, a kind of keyboard in between.
#
And my father's mother, Takuma, used to write poems in Bengali.
#
And that brought in a certain, you know, comfort with moving between languages as easily as
#
you move between the rooms of a household.
#
And I think a large part of my childhood was, we discussed this as well.
#
It would be so alien to this time.
#
None of our childhoods were.
#
There was the broad and very loose structure of a school.
#
And then you come back, you do a little homework.
#
But in the absence of TV and smartphones and all of that, we were thrown back on our own
#
So the games that we played also came out of one's imagination.
#
And I grew up partly in a government colony in Delhi, at a time when being a government
#
officer was not seen as so much as an emblem of power.
#
You know, it was a kind of time when a secretary to the government of India would drive his
#
car around the neighbourhood, picking up lowly deputy secretaries and very, very junior probationers
#
and ferry them all off.
#
And if he didn't do that, in fact, the lowly probationers would get on their cycles and
#
So being in the government was pretty humble.
#
In the India of that time, the 1970s and the 80s was both quieter and smaller.
#
It still rippled with a current of political tension all through.
#
But it was very much a nation making itself, with the memory of Gandhi, Ambedkar and all
#
of the heroes of the freedom movement very much alive.
#
That I think has changed over time.
#
Most of my childhood was spent, I think, just being extraordinarily lucky in every possible
#
We had a lot of adventures.
#
We were allowed as a family to accompany my father on his tours, so long as he paid for
#
us separately, which he was very punctilious about.
#
And as a result, my first sense of travel was not a tour, was not you go to a hill station.
#
It was literally of just going across the country and right from the start seeing that
#
I think part of my memory of India as an essentially kind and open country, though, also comes
#
Something that I found a little disconcerting on my first visit to Europe, where for all
#
the beauty of the place, you don't stop on the street and ask for directions and have
#
that immediately turned into a long and rambling conversation and an invitation to come home,
#
or at least to have a cup of tea together.
#
And for all that, we talk often of the direction that the country is going in today, our fears
#
for the future, our fears for democracy.
#
But when I look back at that time, it doesn't seem romanticized to see that there's an openness
#
that's also part of the Indian spirit.
#
And that is felt and experienced.
#
I don't want to romanticize villages and cities.
#
Part of the research that I did for Black River, among other things, just showed me
#
that almost all of our spaces are unselfconsciously segregated, either by class, often by community,
#
And that's what we grow up in.
#
That's the norm that we're used to.
#
But cutting against that, one of the good things about being part of a government colony
#
is that while in that era certainly caste was not porous.
#
I think the majority of people who were in government colonies at that time were probably
#
upper caste or at least privileged caste in some way or the other.
#
But it was a first introduction to the melting pot aspect of India.
#
And as much as we say, hey, listen, don't go back into nostalgic fantasies about the
#
secular past, I think we're using the wrong word out there.
#
There is an extraordinary diversity in this country.
#
And that was part of my memories from the get-go.
#
In Calcutta, it wasn't that we were just listening to Bengali and English.
#
There were also Marwari friends, there were friends from the Armenian, the very small
#
but extremely vibrant Armenian and Parsi communities.
#
English itself divided into several categories.
#
There was the beauty of Anglo-Indian English, which I think is a little close to the Bombay
#
variants and all of that.
#
And in Delhi, I remember being struck by the fact that there was no one Hindi.
#
We grew up to a certain extent assimilating newsreader, All India Radio, Hindi and Doordarshan
#
But the other stream was also coming off Bombay through Amitabh Bachchan's movies and Rajesh
#
And then there was the many, many Hindus that you'd pick up across the city.
#
Old Delhi had its own slightly courtly, a little Lucknowi, a little Allahabadi Hindi.
#
And the migrant Hindi of the streets was coming straight in from Bihar.
#
I could hear my own state, Bengal, also in the voices of people out there.
#
So you grow up accustomed, I think, to many tongues ringing in your ears.
#
I didn't have a very happy time in the first school that I was in, Loretto Convent.
#
I made a lot of friends, as is the Roy habit.
#
But it was a slightly austere, you know, you must go abide by the rules.
#
And Kiran Desai's got a little section in Inheritance of Loss about what it's like to
#
be a child suddenly realizing that some adults are cruel and they're cruel just because they
#
can be and they have that kind of power over you.
#
But my life really opened up when I went to Lamartaneer.
#
Can I just digress a second here to talk about how much we owe our first teachers, whether
#
they're at the workplace or whether they're in school.
#
So we had some extraordinary teachers.
#
There was Doitha Dutta, who became India's first mastermind.
#
And we were all very chuffed that, you know, a woman had picked up that quiz title.
#
Subsequently related to you by marriage as well.
#
Yes, my husband's cousin and Indra Sengupta, who taught us all about the constitution and
#
maybe some of my love for the constitution comes from those early lessons.
#
And Shumita Dey, who was our English teacher, brought The Grapes of Wrath, which was the
#
text that we were studying that year in class 11, alive in this classroom in Calcutta in
#
a way where suddenly there was a sense of connection, you know, Steinbeck's molten
#
anger over the kind of waste that was happening, the squeezing of the migrants into smaller
#
and smaller spaces, the relentlessness of keeping them on the road.
#
What does that remind you of?
#
What did we go through last year?
#
Those early lessons just brought home to me, we've talked so much about the joy of reading,
#
the joy of writing, the uses of it.
#
But something I want to say, literature is not an abstraction.
#
You know, it's not just a frill added to life.
#
It is often something that does more than just witness or document.
#
It is really a living thing in itself.
#
In Steinbeck's book, I was reading that at the same time that I was reading, I just about
#
started reading in Bengali again after years of absence.
#
And I was reading Vibhuti Bhushan's Paathir Panchayati and Tagore's Gora at the same time.
#
And it came to me that there's an unselfconscious political novel.
#
We think of the political novel today in very limited ways in India.
#
It's a novel that makes a statement.
#
It's a novel that's in effect, I don't want to diminish people's enthusiasm for writing
#
I don't want to be unkind.
#
But a novel is not an editorial, right?
#
It is much more than that.
#
What Tagore was doing, what Vibhuti was doing in his story of Upukh coming out of a very
#
poor village, and at that he had a Brahmin protagonist, but a Brahmin protagonist who
#
was encountering the city for the first time and trying to find his place in it and sometimes
#
dealing with an incredible loneliness of the soul and the spirit, and sometimes just riveted
#
to the promise of the city.
#
It's such a contemporary book in that sense.
#
And Tagore went straight into this question of identity with Gora.
#
I don't know whether you've read the novel.
#
It was a very popular Bengali serial at one time.
#
And Tagore just dealt with the dilemma of a man who believes that he is a nationalist,
#
that the country should be left to only a certain kind of persons.
#
And then he realizes that the secret of his birth makes him the outsider that he's always
#
been reeling against, in part.
#
I'm summarizing terribly, but he wasn't afraid to go into these big questions.
#
His novels are political statements in the sense that the word politics is intricately
#
involved with the life of the people, right?
#
And I think writers like Tagore, filmmakers like Shrutu Jitri, I'm speaking only of my
#
part of the country now, but I'm also thinking of Govind Nihalani, I'm thinking of the many
#
films that Om Puri acted in.
#
That was the water that we were swimming in, you see?
#
If it was intellectual, then I think it was unselfconsciously intellectual.
#
And those big ideas were also mass available in a way that I think has changed a little
#
I went straight from...
#
I went to Stephen's for English literature and I remember the only way that I could justify
#
that choice, because there wasn't going to be a job at the end of it, was just being
#
aware that I was happy because I was following my heart.
#
And then being a little dismayed because following my heart turned out to mean a lot of Dryden
#
and Chaucer, and at first I really struggled with that.
#
We were reading these texts in a vacuum.
#
Even though we had some incredibly gifted teachers, it took professors like Arjun Mahe
#
and Vaikya Sharma, who passed away in my third year out there, to draw the map of connections
#
and to let you know that Shakespeare was, in a sense, Kalidasa's blood brother.
#
That Chaucer sitting at his in, spinning his stories.
#
And you can make a parallel in a different way with Krishna Subdi collecting all of life
#
around her in Chandni Chowk.
#
And I'm not sure that any of the classical education did much for me, but a lot of my
#
Stephen's education happened actually on the lawns of Hindu college and wandering around
#
to other parts of Delhi University, witnessing in embryo a lot of the debates that would
#
The Mandal agitation happened in the final year of our college.
#
And I think a certain percentage of the university was automatically and self-righteously against
#
It took a lot for people to turn around and look at the composition of their own colleges
#
and say, aren't we all upper caste here?
#
And how did that happen?
#
And isn't there something that is owed to people who did not have everything that we
#
take so casually for granted?
#
Whether that is a physical thing like the presence of books in the house or access to
#
English or good education, or whether that is something a little more intangible or confidence,
#
the fact that your surname is its own passport or even if it doesn't open doors for you,
#
it doesn't close doors in your face.
#
And I don't think that was an easy reckoning for most people because we believe so strongly
#
in the myth of our own merit.
#
We believe that because we have worked hard, we do not see that other people not even allowed
#
to step into the zone where you can start working hard.
#
So all of that swirl was happening.
#
I joined the business standard rather than do a PhD.
#
The truth to tell, I was at MA for my JNU and I had this marvelous professor, Meenakshi
#
Mukherjee, who was a translator and a critic and a professor, very much one of those whose
#
engagement with writing came from an active immersion in literature as it is practiced.
#
And she kept an open, curious mind right to the end, had a rousing punch up with Vikram
#
Chandra on the subject of authenticity and what is an authentic Indian writer.
#
And even when she lost an argument or wasn't the wrong, I think it was the joy of getting
#
into the ring that stays with me.
#
And at some point, I think she gently pointed out to me that doing a PhD, which is the track
#
that I was on, also in parenthesis, we Indians are so much about life tracks, right?
#
You have to be doctor, lawyer, engineer, IAS.
#
And if you're a writer, then you're carefully stared towards BA in India, MA abroad and
#
And then she drew my attention to the content of what I was going to study.
#
And that was literary theory of the most high flown, there is the unkind, which I have to
#
admit that I was completely unsuited to.
#
And she said, why do you want to study further with English?
#
And I think for the first time in my life, I said, because I love the literature of it.
#
And I love the fact that most translation happens in English.
#
So it's not just English, it opens up all of the languages of the world to me.
#
And someday I want to write my own books.
#
And I think it was the first time I'd said that aloud and I was a little shocked by this
#
unseemly impractical ambition.
#
And she said, whatever else you do, don't do a PhD, go out and work for a bit, try your
#
hand at being a journalist or in publishing or something, get a practical sense of life.
#
But don't kill yourself by disappearing down the wonderful, but for me, perhaps not nourishing
#
fields of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Baba and the rest of it.
#
And so I tried out for every job that I could find, I briefly taught at nursery school as
#
I was a paralegal and I worked on the early version of Jurics, which is what became the
#
And I was absorbed in the different, we've talked about this, I think as friends once
#
or twice, but I was just fascinated by the thought that crime changes according to the
#
part of the country that you come from.
#
And in a sense, we conformist, in one part of the country, you have to push people down
#
wells in order to kill them.
#
And in the other, it's a little bit of a social solidism if you murder somebody using anything
#
else but a gandasa or an axe, you're not really supposed to pick up a country made pistol.
#
And Bengal was given to poisonings, for example, UP, parts of it favored the country made pistol,
#
which was very sporting because that had an equal chance of blowing up in the hand of
#
the would-be murderer and taking him down.
#
And there were places where you simply chop people into pieces, inevitably burying a body
#
in your own backyard, thereby giving the police a chance to put you behind bars.
#
But it all had the sense of being extremely ritualistic.
#
I was deeply fascinated and then for reasons known only to themselves, business standard
#
And I think that was such, I was so lucky in retrospect, not just because between people
#
like TN9 and Tony Joseph, Pratik Kanjina, Alkanika Dutta, some of my editors out there,
#
they were people who taught me skill, yes, and the craft of reporting and the whole thing
#
of go back and double check a source.
#
And Tony had done something invaluable, which is that the most articulate person in a room
#
is not necessarily the person who knows the most.
#
Sometimes it's a quiet people standing around whom you really need to interview.
#
Tony also taught me about multiple perspectives, never take anything for granted, just go back
#
and check and recheck and all of that.
#
And because I was obviously useless at the economics and finance side of things, and
#
I was never going to make a political journalist, I was put on the arts beat.
#
It seems extraordinary because we give so much space over to so many things.
#
But in those days, the art section was about a 10 page, 12 page section.
#
And about three of those pages were on the arts directly.
#
So my job was utterly delightful.
#
It was to go out and meet people in this new India of the then early 1990s who were teaching
#
themselves an idiom that was both Indian and international.
#
And the other part of the job, which I loved so much, was to go down to the publishing
#
houses, which were in those days all in a row in Daryaganj, in the middle of those crowded
#
Delhi streets with bazaars that had gone back to literally the 17th or 14th century around
#
them and pick up books that were suitable for review or extract.
#
I was in absolute heaven, but it was only later that I realized that I'd lucked into
#
an organization that also prized integrity.
#
These sound like such old fashioned things, don't they?
#
Like I said, legacy person.
#
But you have to stop me when I'm running on and on though.
#
I feel like having a conversation with you is like being a leaf on a river and you don't
#
know where you're going and the waves are coming from here and there and you're just
#
I'm the happiest leaf ever.
#
I'm going to repeat that, just stop me anytime that I start overflowing the banks or whatever.
#
But it was a great introduction to the city as well.
#
And if you want to know what Delhi was like at that time, this was the early nineties.
#
We were just beginning to feel the beat and the pulse of liberalization.
#
And most of that was felt in the dismantling of the License Raj that helped people back
#
I see a little bit of a parallel to that now.
#
We were talking about the creative economy earlier and some of the barriers in place,
#
whether it's a tax barrier or whether it's just the absence of resources that help somebody
#
who doesn't already have a network of power and influence to join in.
#
Some of those to see those come down at that time and to see the breath of a fresh energy.
#
Delhi is a city built around a cluster of small and ancient villages.
#
And in that time, Bina Ramani changed the landscape entirely by taking over the house
#
cows' village and setting up restaurants out there.
#
And of course, there was a lot of Delhi wallahs winging and eyeing over the cuteness of seeing
#
cows and buffaloes as they went off for expensive dinners facing the house cow snake.
#
But I think she actually started something that allowed us to knit our past and our hopeful
#
Delhi was a very anxious city.
#
If you look at it from a psychic point of view, I think it was always comparing itself
#
either to the slick sophistication of Bombay or it was hoping someday to be like a London
#
or New York, but aware that it was lagging behind.
#
And it takes some time to understand that you're sitting in a century, you're living
#
in a city that is literally built on the centuries.
#
When I walk around the city today, sometimes it seems populated with writers either living
#
or by the ghosts of writers.
#
Across the road, there's Aamir Khosrow.
#
Down the road from my house, there's Rahim Khan of the Dohas.
#
And in more contemporary terms, in Sujant Singh Park, there's Khushwant Singh.
#
Across the river, in Mayur Vihar, there's a score of young writers who cut their teeth
#
in places like Lajpat Nagar or Baharganj or whatever it is.
#
And when you live in a city like that, it's not about whether writing is doing well, which
#
seems to be sometimes the only question we're asking of writing, that anxiety of performance.
#
It's a city that just breeds stories under the roughness, under the aggression.
#
And the aggression is a serious thing.
#
I think I just jumped into that life.
#
Even as a newly married woman, my experience of the city was tremendous independence.
#
None of us could afford fancy houses and we all lived clustered in Varsatis or in the
#
first floor of a tumbling bungalow, you know, that kind of thing.
#
And we all ate khichdi towards the end of the month when the budget was running out.
#
And we were all incredibly happy.
#
And what we talked about was books and film and music.
#
And again, in our homes, what flowed was multiple languages, multiple ways of seeing.
#
At some point, the Hindi and the English worlds of the city became a little segregated.
#
The English book launches happened at fancy five-star hotels and we lost something that
#
used to be an organic connection between the Hindi, Urdu, English worlds, Punjabi as well.
#
These four languages used to move in and out of each other's knives.
#
I think when I started off as a young journalist, if you were on the arts beat, you were expected
#
It wasn't said, it wasn't stated upfront, but it was assumed that if you were Indian,
#
you would have at least one other language at your command.
#
And I don't want to lecture people at all because I am not truly, I write only in English.
#
I don't write in Bengali because I don't live in Calcutta and I feel very strongly that
#
it's best to write in a language that you're surrounded by.
#
I don't write in Hindi because there's a great love for that language, but I really don't
#
have the literary have to even attempt that.
#
But I think our lives are poorer for living in only one language when we have so much
#
choice and when we are surrounded by so much.
#
Ketanjali Sri said this recently with Tomb of Sand when she won the International Booker.
#
And her first thing was not a triumphalism about the language that she writes in, which
#
is Hindi, but just a reminder that we are lucky in a way that maybe we don't see so
#
We live in a country where there are a thousand streams of literatures, languages, some big,
#
some limited to just a hundred speakers or so.
#
But you know, being aware of that stream or living only in English is also not the best
#
So many strands to pick up on, or should I say many tributaries to go down on as you've
#
kind of made your path.
#
So here's the first of them.
#
You know, when one of the subjects that I think about more and more is how are we shaped?
#
How are we shaped as people in all the ways that we are shaped?
#
And when I look back on myself as a young man, I realized that the young me 25 years
#
ago was shaped in many ways that I now realize in hindsight by, for example, by just my home,
#
I think I, from my mother, I got a sense of social arrogance.
#
From my father, I got a sense of intellectual arrogance and I got good things from them
#
also like the love of reading and the respect for the arts and all of that.
#
You know, and obviously once you reflect on yourself and you become conscious of these
#
things, and you can begin to change and eliminate them.
#
But it's interesting to think, you know, how you became what you became.
#
And when I was reading your book, you had this part where you were talking about the
#
Bengali obsession for intellectualism, as it were.
#
You referred to an Amitav Ghosh essay where he wrote about the bong obsession with the
#
And there's a certain bongness certainly in my upbringing because my mother, of course,
#
was Bengali and my father was, although Punjabi born in Lahore, but basically from childhood
#
just grew up in Calcutta where he met my mother and all that.
#
So culturally completely Bengali and all of that.
#
And that set me to wondering that how much of these qualities, the sort of social arrogance,
#
which partly, of course, came from the privilege of being located where we were, and the intellectual
#
arrogance, how much of it perhaps was a partly Bengali heritage also?
#
It's really a hard question to answer and almost a rhetorical one.
#
But the question I pose to you is that when you look back at the way that you were shaped,
#
that what you became, you know, some of those connections are easy to draw.
#
You were, of course, surrounded by books, it was the culture of reading.
#
So of course you would become a reader, you know, that comes from there.
#
But what else, you know, what are the, like I often think that, you know, we use the term
#
earlier in the conversation, mimetic desire, and I think there can also be mimetic personalities,
#
that what we are is contingent on where we are located and so much around us.
#
And we don't realize to what extent that there is.
#
We think that we are autonomous in the way that we shape ourselves, that I can be what
#
But often it's not so simple.
#
You know, you earlier referred to how different crimes in different places in the country,
#
different kinds of crimes.
#
And that got me to thinking that in many ways, geography can be destiny as well, right?
#
How we are shaped is just a combination of all of these things.
#
So at one level, of course, there are the genes that you get.
#
But as Steven Pinker said, you know, nature gives you knobs, nurture turns them.
#
And so beyond what you are born as, you have all these influences around you.
#
So just looking back on yourself, what do you think are those sort of influences which
#
kind of shaped you, that in a parallel universe, if they were not there, you might be a completely
#
And then as a sort of a mirror image of that answer, what do you think is essential to
#
you, that even if you were born in a humble Tamil household or in Nigeria, that you would
#
But you know, so it's sort of a rambling river-like question itself.
#
It's a beautiful question.
#
It's a beautiful question because we're getting to something real rather than, you know, the
#
polite faces that we often put on in a formal conversation or an interview.
#
And I think I was aware early on that a lot of the Bengali sense of exceptionalism, some
#
of it was built on something that is really, really beautiful about Calcutta, Bangkura,
#
a large part of Bengal, which is the genuine appreciation for life in all its forms.
#
And for craft, not as a snobbish, you know, part of life or, you know, they worked so
#
hard on their dancing or their music or whatever, but as a beautiful thing to do with a human
#
life, you know, that stream is very gentle and sometimes subsumed by the fact that Bengal
#
often speaks as Parimal Bhattacharya reminds you in his book, his recent book, of Bengal
#
as though all of Calcutta is Bengal.
#
And that's absolutely not true.
#
And there's a deep anxiety among Bengalis, which I'm probably going to get a lot of hate
#
mail over this at some point, about being irrelevant, about being left out no longer
#
from the time that it stopped being the first city of empire.
#
That's off to a side, Bengal likes to think of itself as revolutionary, but just to digress
#
one of those famous digressions for a second, I put together a small collection from The
#
Modern Review, which was a publication that came out in 1907 and continued till 1950,
#
capturing the years of the freedom struggle.
#
And it was run by my husband's grandfather, Ramanand Babu, Ramanand Chatterjee.
#
And The Modern Review itself was an extremely eclectic magazine and it positioned itself
#
not as centrist, but as a magazine that would listen to the Congress, but not always fully
#
agree with them that had space for more than just that, you know, it was somewhere in between.
#
But it was not the only, it was a brilliant endeavor and it said, and all of that, but
#
it was only when I started to go into the history of little magazines that you realize
#
There isn't a region in India that hasn't had a strong intellectual, literary, cultural
#
The whole sense of Bengal as more than the rest does need to be laid to rest, you know.
#
I don't think I have much patience with that intellectual arrogance either.
#
With my own family, I think when you come across family pride, you start to ask yourself
#
after a while what that pride is in.
#
One of our family members, my great-granduncle, was somebody who took an active part in the
#
freedom struggle and was quite a well-known figure in the years immediately after independence.
#
But when that story was told to me, sometimes it seemed that what was important about him
#
was that he was important.
#
When I went into that story, what I found incredibly touching was that like most Indians,
#
he was just one generation out of a village.
#
He was brought up in fairly humble circumstances.
#
His family was neither affluent nor powerful, but they had a kind of integrity, a wholeness
#
to them that they passed on to him.
#
And in his relationship with the British before India was independence, he, like a lot of
#
the nationalists, we keep going back to them, he, like a lot of the nationalists, didn't
#
have an arrogance about him.
#
He just had a confidence.
#
And I've often looked back at that and thought to myself, where did they have the confidence
#
from when they were told all along, when everything surrounding them said that they were second-class
#
citizens, that Indians were inferior, or that the real version of this, you should be grateful
#
to the British for all that they have done, and you are not fit to govern your own country.
#
And then to assert your own selfhood, that's the part where I feel a kind of associated
#
I find it very difficult to feel ancestral pride per se though, because in that case
#
you're taking credit for somebody else's achievements.
#
What I prize about my heritage is not the cocoon part of it.
#
I prize the fact that there were people in my family for many generations who went where
#
their curiosity led them.
#
And I also prize the people who are willing to be ordinary, you know.
#
But there are parts of your family that you step away from as well, and I don't want to
#
be hurtful to anyone who's listening, but it did take a certain amount of reckoning
#
to say that maybe it's best to put aside a certain belief that we have made it on our
#
I think if you are born into certain things because of an accident of birth, and whatever
#
that is, that might be financial privilege, it is often in this country majoritarian privilege.
#
You have had it easier than others, and it takes away nothing from what you see as the
#
successes of your own life to just acknowledge that.
#
You don't have to, you know, cringe about it, but you do have to see that it was not
#
because of your efforts that you were born into a circumstance where you could, you know,
#
access a good education or whatever.
#
I think the one thing that was surprising about our lives though is because my grandfather
#
died the year I was born, my mother's father, I never knew him.
#
I only knew of him, he was a judge who loved the law.
#
I think we took it for granted that we were brought up by a matriarch, and it was only
#
years later when a cousin of mine pointed that out that I said, ah, okay, maybe one
#
of the reasons why I think that women should be in control is partly because of this.
#
I think my stubbornness, actually, more than anything else.
#
You know, the rest of it, if you peel away the privileges, would I have been a reader?
#
Would I have been a writer?
#
I really don't know, I really don't think so.
#
If I had been married off when I was 16 or 17 or deprived of education, maybe I would
#
have thought that that was the right part.
#
Where I find myself on the shakiest ground is actually with some of the principles that
#
I feel so deeply, you know, the belief in democracy, the love of a nation that is a
#
diverse nation that has space for everybody equally.
#
And I honestly cannot tell.
#
This is such a terrible confession to make, but it's a very honest confession.
#
If I had been brought up in a family that thought it was okay and natural to be bigoted,
#
to discriminate against whoever else, whoever else was not like you, non-Hindus, Muslims,
#
anyone else, really, there's a shifting slate always to that.
#
Women who read too much.
#
Would I have just imbibed that water?
#
Would I have not questioned it?
#
Something that the Samit Basu, who was again a Delhi writer, says, and I think it's in
#
The City Inside, oh, he said it in an interview, he pointed out that no matter how independent
#
and free we all think we are, it is surprising and illuminating that so many of us take on
#
the professions prescribed to us by our caste identities, you know.
#
So a certain kind of, it's not to do with Bengali-ness anymore.
#
But we instinctively gravitate to this person is an accountant or that person is a teacher,
#
not realizing that it is the ancient shadow of caste somehow making itself felt.
#
So maybe we have a little less agency out here.
#
The part of me that is completely my own aside from the stubbornness, I think no matter what,
#
I would have been creative.
#
And by creative I don't mean that shallowly, I mean that I think most humans are born into
#
a sense of play, which is the first foundation for creativity, a sense of questioning, which
#
may be rapidly shut down, but it's there.
#
And a sense of wonder, those three things, okay.
#
And I think there's something in me that just refuses to roll over and die no matter what
#
are the minor challenges I've gone through.
#
Whatever it is, I mean, in my childhood, for example, there was one person much, much older,
#
not my father or uncles or brothers, but somebody who was an older relative, who was extraordinarily
#
abusive when I was about eight, and the period from eight to 12 was darkened by that abuse.
#
And the shadow of that abuse also took me a long, long while to work through in my twenties
#
I don't mean this again to be over grateful, but at different times in my life, particularly
#
when I was a reporter on the gender beat, and I met a lot of women who were traumatized
#
for similar reasons or who were in either facing domestic violence or facing the big
#
me too, that we don't have the space for, which is the number of people who are abused
#
as agricultural laborers or as factory workers.
#
And there's a prohibition against seeking help.
#
And there is no availability of the resources that you need.
#
And I always had the choice to find the help that I needed and to use creative ways to
#
move through whatever experiences had been distressing, you see.
#
So here's my next question, which picks up from a couple of the things that you sort
#
of mentioned, including where we just ended.
#
There's this lovely passage about your Didi Ma in your book where you write, you could
#
trace a historical development of women's romances by studying the gradual shift from
#
outback love and doctor and nurse romances through the Greek millionaire and Italian
#
count phase up to the modern phenomenon of soft core erotica and doctor-doctor romances.
#
Didi Ma disapproved of the erotica on the Umberto Eco principle that porn got in the
#
way of a good story, but she liked the egalitarianism of doctors dating rather than doctors hitting
#
In his office and his bedroom, my uncle maintained an eclectic collection of paperbacks on subjects
#
as varied as Tibetan Buddhism, physics via the dancing Vuli masters, classical music
#
and jazz, and especially architecture, stop quote.
#
And what sort of struck me here was how their reading is kind of different, right?
#
And I was recently in Chandigarh, my dad had died last year, so we were clearing away his
#
house and just looking at the last remnants and seeing what we wanted and what we didn't
#
And I came across a lot of letters which I have kept from my mother to my father, none
#
the other way around but letters from my mom to my dad, all the way from the 1980s onwards.
#
And they were very interesting because one of the things I realized was that all through
#
their marriage, they were desperately lonely people, right?
#
And it was a sort of a, they were separately lonely and it was, the marriage was a kind
#
And in a sense, it was not something either of them could have helped in the sense, I
#
think my mother was sort of there, not out of choice, but that's just the way marriages
#
And my father's loneliness in a sense was self-inflicted, but what is self-inflicted
#
and what is not and how much agency do people have and how much are they slaves of the ways
#
in which they are shaped is all open to question.
#
And that sort of got me to thinking about, like for me, in an ideal marriage, your partner
#
has to be your best friend or at least a very close friend, right?
#
It's about that companionship is essential, but I realized that all through the decades
#
and all through human history until now, certainly in India, it's not been that way.
#
It's sort of been instrumental that they are playing roles and therefore in a sense, you
#
play those roles and there isn't sort of that friendship or that communication or whatever
#
and women are circumscribed to what those roles are.
#
I did an episode with Peggy Mohan who wrote that wonderful book about the evolution of
#
languages and there also there is an interesting sort of learning that also points to this
#
where she points out that when the Aryans first came to India, they were, whether you
#
call them migrants, invaders or whatever, it was men only, right?
#
Because all their travelers, migrants, whatever, they would be hordes of men and they would
#
marry local women, whether by force or not, we don't know, but whatever, they would marry
#
And Peggy's point was a point about language, but a point about much else, which is that
#
therefore the languages they spoke would be different languages, that the women of a family
#
would speak a particular kind of language and the men would speak a particular kind
#
And initially, of course, it would be because the languages are different, but then gradually
#
it kind of remained this way.
#
So a little child growing up, when a boy would be with the mother, he would learn a bit of
#
the mother's language, but then he would be in a men's world and he would learn the other
#
language while the girls would grow up and continue learning that kind of language.
#
And this also seems a powerful metaphor for a kind of separation that is sort of there.
#
And just sort of going back to what you said about your grandmother and how she's reading
#
a particular kind of books and your uncle is reading a different kind of book.
#
What you were picking up on there was actually something that was incredibly formative for
#
me, even though I didn't realize it.
#
In our schooling, we were often, not schooling, but in our colleges, certainly, we were often
#
taught that there's a difference between high and low literature.
#
And a lot of even Hindi literature or Bengali literature marks a little distinction, a little
#
snobbery thing, you know, that's cheap literature, that's bestsellers, in the same way that English
#
And because I had so much respect for my grandmother, not as my grandmother, but as a person, she
#
had an incredibly open mind, by which I mean that when she first encountered the concept
#
of LGBT relationships, rather than being shocked as many people in her generation were and
#
saying that's forbidden, she was extremely curious about this.
#
This was about 20 years before the laws changed in India.
#
And she asked me, she said, do you think that it is possible for you to fall in love with
#
And I said, I think if all of us were given those options, wouldn't we, you know?
#
She said, it was just off the table, but I'm seeing now that it's a broad table.
#
And if you put it back on, then anything is possible.
#
And she thought about it, went away, and then the next day, you know, doing her rounds at
#
Newmarket and doing a little bit of volunteer work and whatever it was that the women of
#
that time did, she comes back and she says, this whole thing about gender, again, this
#
is happening 20 years, 30 years before these debates.
#
How much of being a man or being a woman are we taught and how much of it is innate?
#
Some of it, I guess, is innate.
#
But isn't there a huge teaching that happens with just, you know, having to take off our
#
moustaches if we are women, she fixated on that, you know, or brush our moustaches out
#
if we are men, this whole thing about effeminate men and all of that.
#
And we were discussing the gender spectrum before there was a gender spectrum.
#
I'm not saying that she was a revolutionary or anything, but she was my friend, you know,
#
and what her being able to move so seamlessly between Sanskrit texts and the great classics
#
on one hand and the full, you know, Tagoreana and everything that we were steeped in and
#
then say, this is what I like reading.
#
I like reading these romances.
#
She read them almost like travel brochures because in an age when people didn't travel
#
that much, your mills and boons were the ones that took you off to Australia or whatever.
#
She had a sharp sense of race as well.
#
She did say that she felt that, you know, it was filled with these white protagonists
#
and then after a while in our minds, when we were reading them, we turned everyone of
#
different races into our own race unconsciously.
#
My uncle, my aunts, the fact that everybody was free to choose their own literature stands
#
to me as one of the greatest privileges of them all because over time I've met so many
#
writers, particularly some of the younger women writers who grew up in households either
#
where there wasn't a book available or where the reading was very sternly prescribed.
#
You know, you might have had your bookshelves filled with great literature, but you were
#
supposed to read only that and you were supposed to read it at particular times.
#
Aside from the fact that reading is expensive, as in people have to buy books and expensive
#
in terms of time, if you're a reader, one of the reasons why women have such a barrier
#
about reading even today in this country is because it automatically means that you have
#
And for women and men, I think there's a great suspicion, particularly for women, but also
#
for men, about this whole thing of having free time.
#
That means you're thinking thoughts in your head and experiencing things that are moving
#
far beyond the ambit that the family has set for you.
#
I think they taught me not to be a snob.
#
And over the years with my own reading, often this happens with when I became a writer and
#
I was interviewed as a writer, people would ask, and what are the books that shaped you?
#
And I'd mention some of my old favorites because you have to be, it's not fair to
#
wait this game by mentioning writers who make you look good.
#
You should be honest about your own reading at least, right?
#
So I'd mentioned the Garcia Marquez's and the Toni Morrison's or Rushdie or whoever,
#
because they were such great influences.
#
But I'd also mentioned the pulp fiction, the really cheesy science fiction or the shady
#
Bengali detective fiction or those Hindi confessional stories that used to happen in women's magazines
#
about women's lives, all very dramatically punched up and et cetera.
#
And inevitably when the interview came out, only the books that made me look like a writer
#
person would be left in the text.
#
I mean, there was a, I'm sure that my interviewers didn't mean to do this deliberately, but it's
#
like unconsciously in our minds when we think of reading, we divide it into worthy and unworthy.
#
You are asking a more sensitive question though about intimate family relationships.
#
About the private history of families?
#
About really the different roles of men and women and how, and not different, but unequal
#
where the roles of women are incredibly circumscribed.
#
And what happens I think as kids is that we take for granted that the world around us
#
is the world as it is and the world as it should be and so on and so forth.
#
But I think at some point layers begin to peel off and you realize that no, this is
#
not how it should be and you begin to view the world differently.
#
Maybe over time you developed frames of seeing the world in a particular way.
#
So it's like a dual question almost, which is partly about, or let's just narrow it down
#
to one question, which is about how was your consciousness of all of this?
#
And over the years, how did your feminism thereby evolve?
#
Because I guess when I read my episode with Mrinal Pandey, she mentioned that when she
#
was 13 or something, she had an argument with her mother because she felt that her mother
#
was spending too much time obsessing over the meal she would cook for Mrinalji's dad.
#
And she was like, why are you doing this?
#
His food is not that important.
#
Why don't you, why are you so stressed all the time about the food?
#
And that's like a feminist instinct.
#
But at that point, as she said, she hadn't read about feminism.
#
She wouldn't have known the term.
#
She wouldn't have been able to put a frame to it.
#
So now in your sense, one, of course, you are brought up by a matriarch, as it were,
#
or have these role models around you whose lived experiences and experience perhaps to
#
some extent of not conforming to their roles and perhaps to some extent of making those
#
roles expand and fill out around them.
#
But we've spoken a lot about Nilanjana Roy, the reader.
#
But if we are to talk about Nilanjana Roy, the feminist, tell me a bit about that where
#
you know, how do you look at the lived feminism of people around you in many small ways the
#
fights that they fight and what were the frameworks that you then began to develop?
#
And did it not at some point in time, being in India and so on and so forth, leave you
#
with a profound sense of anger as well?
#
And if so, how did you deal with that anger?
#
My feminism did not come from the family.
#
In the family, there were many useful role models.
#
I realized later that the real gifts of the family, for example, was that they took love
#
even in the middle of heated arguments and quarrels and differences of opinion for granted.
#
There was an equality between my father who passed away last year and my mother in the
#
sense that they were both free to quarrel with each other when they disagreed.
#
And they were partners, they were companions.
#
My father wholeheartedly and his father, surprisingly, you know, my Thakudha, who was a manager for
#
Andrew Yould and Katak and then lived with my parents for some years and brought Bengali
#
and many other things into our lives, he was a very gentle man.
#
I grew used, I grew a little spoiled by the fact that I would not call the men in my family
#
feminists per se, but they were men who saw women as equals, you know, and that spoiled
#
me a little bit for the rest of the world.
#
It was often a shock in my early work to encounter men who were misogynists.
#
I had been causated and I had been fortunate also in school by and large not to come across
#
too much in the way of misogyny.
#
Where it showed for my mother was that she was part of the generation who were expected
#
So she became a lawyer at 39 and I think we were a little bit of family mythology around
#
Before that, she'd done various things.
#
She taught in nursery schools.
#
She was a fantastic mother in the sense that she used to just pick up whatever random friends
#
of ours and us were wandering around the neighborhood and take us off on adventures and excursions.
#
So one day we'd be swimming or we'd be going to the Kutum Minar and exploring things.
#
And my family was a family of women drivers.
#
Most of the men drove terribly and almost all of the women drove well.
#
And I remember one of my first feelings of deep independence was actually learning to
#
drive at probably an illegal age.
#
And my mother taught me and my grandmother refined that teaching.
#
My grandmother was also a crack driver.
#
And being a crack driver, being a decent shot, that kind of stuff was not feminism, but it
#
made you feel like you were holding your own in a world that you could already see was
#
Where it felt really unfair was at a very early age.
#
I felt circumscribed by all these rules about you can't go out on the road.
#
You have to take your brother with you.
#
Everything that was there for our safety, particularly in deadly.
#
In Calcutta, at least, I was reasonably free.
#
By evening, you had to come back in any Indian city, you know.
#
That was the unspoken rule for a young Indian woman.
#
The first time that I was pushed around and hurt or molested on a street, I think it comes
#
as a shock and then you realize that you have to defend yourself against it and in a sense
#
that molesting carries a little bit of egalitarianism against, you know, unless you're a cocooned
#
in an air-conditioned car all your life.
#
It's something that you're going to experience as a woman.
#
But from a very early age, I was sharply aware not of the territory of feminism.
#
You know, we were brought up with this myth of women and men were equal.
#
And even in my family, the women would bring the food out of the kitchen or if the staff
#
was doing that, the women would still be the ones hovering.
#
The men didn't feed everyone else at the table.
#
And those little subtle things are where you see that, you know, no matter how much you
#
progressed, there is still territory that's not as equal as it seems, if that makes sense.
#
The women were expected to hold down a career and come back and be perfect hostesses, be
#
You know, there was always an and.
#
The men didn't have an and.
#
They could just be one thing or the other and somebody would make sure that the shirts
#
It's in the body that you feel it.
#
I was such a I was a child who lived so deeply in my mind, you know, not just in the imagination,
#
but I think in a mind that I've talked to Manjula about this, Manjula Padmanabhan, who's
#
another of the Delhi writers whom I admire very much, Ursula K. Le Guin's talked about
#
the non gendered mind, the fact that when you're creating something, you're deeply immersed
#
Your mind has no gender at that time.
#
It's beyond gender, you know, and often living in an Indian city wherever you were felt like
#
being rudely and violently pushed back into your body.
#
That only enhanced when I became that sense became doubly enhanced when I was a reporter.
#
And I found myself sometimes to my absolute fury being dependent on the goodwill of photographers
#
for my safety or dependent on the concern of editors for my safety.
#
And as much as I was glad that they were caring, part of me really resented it, really resented
#
having to be dependent.
#
I experienced the difference between the genders in India first, not as a battle or as an ideology,
#
but as territory, you see.
#
So to me, even now, the city has a gendered geography everywhere that I go.
#
Even in the mountains, I walk fairly fearlessly all across.
#
I think, you know, part of writing a book is not the book itself.
#
It's what you discover on the way to writing a book, a lot of which you will discard.
#
I was diffident about writing a certain section in Black River, which has to do with the Yamuna
#
itself and the people who live on its banks.
#
And so to get over that diffidence, I walked the length of as much of the Yamuna as I could
#
to just learn it spatially.
#
Even if it's not for the book, you know, it might come out into just a chapter or a couple
#
You're doing that really for yourself.
#
You're learning a part of your city that you would not know anything about or a part of
#
your country or a part of your history that you would not know anything about otherwise.
#
And in that time, I've experienced aggressive acts in the Aravalis and the Yamuna maybe
#
three times on all those walks.
#
And each time has been unpleasant and mercifully, you know, not very serious.
#
But each time, my guides to whether a territory was safe or unsafe for the women.
#
So when you're walking around the Aravalis trying to learn, you know, part of that landscape,
#
the women will tell you, this is absolutely safe until 3 p.m.
#
But after 3 p.m., you know, the men come in and they'll sit there and just be careful.
#
And the first thing they'll say is, are you on your own?
#
And language is a protection.
#
If you come across as English speaking and from a very, very obviously, you know, privileged
#
background, if you're a wandering woman, then either you're mad, you know, like Laldi than
#
the Saints of old, or you're exceptionally privileged.
#
We carry that with us like a badge and it becomes your safety, that layer of privilege
#
Walking is stressful, but it became my way of pushing back.
#
I think, you know, we all have these quiet battles.
#
Meanwhile, the river of feminism that's flowed, I think I'm sometimes troubled by this.
#
We act as though the battles of the past are over and they are not.
#
Nobody talks about dowry debts today.
#
It's moved to a different corner of sexual violence.
#
You know, when I was a reporter at the New York Times, bear with me because these are
#
apparently disconnected, but they are actually lining up in a row.
#
When I was a reporter at the New York Times, we found ourselves, me and my editor, Jean
#
Moore, who was an absolute genius of an editor.
#
She had this way of not making your story hers, but of asking the right questions and
#
pushing you in the right direction and turning an opinion piece into more of a reported piece.
#
She wanted to make sure that what you were seeing was really the truth of the landscape
#
that you were looking at or the truth of people's lives.
#
She taught me to be respectful to the people whom we were talking to, whether they were
#
the victims of violence or whether they were women who were surrogate mothers or whether
#
they were homeless women on the streets.
#
We kept running into this story.
#
We kept trying to do other stories on gender and kept running into that first wave of mainstream
#
ritualized street violence.
#
And that was just a reflection of the dowry debts of an earlier time, that violence and
#
that belief that women are somehow inferior, that you can be killed if you don't bring
#
enough to a marriage or as happened with the more sophisticated evolution of dowry debts,
#
you could be killed if you had contributed as much as your family was able to contribute
#
and then it was time for the next bride to come in.
#
The street violence was coming in more or less as a reaction to a phenomenon of those
#
times, which was that women were moving more around, they were moving out of their houses,
#
they were migrating more, they were taking up jobs and this wave of violence was the
#
pushback and despite that women kept coming until the economy tightened.
#
The cultural and social politics also changed and one of the great tragedies of our time,
#
it's been reported but to my mind a little under reported given everything else that's
#
going on, is the fact that women have receded in every way from the economic space, from
#
public spaces as such, there's a movement backwards in that sense.
#
I think I realized very early on that my view as, often we name check privilege but I don't
#
mean to do that, I just mean that literally if you grew up as an upper caste Hindu woman,
#
then there are many things that you are simply not going to see.
#
So a lot of feminism for me, whether I was listening to Gloria Steinem or bell hooks
#
or Idrian Rich Abroad or whether I was reading or learning about the work of grassroots movements
#
out here in India from Chipko to the major caste movements to the major movements of
#
organized labor, those have been written and reported about but again they aren't mainstream
#
I think I took a step back from feminist activism myself.
#
My role has been much more the participant, the observer in all of these protests and
#
sometimes the speaker but I've never felt that, I've always felt that it's a good idea
#
to pass the mic to people who are actually there engaging with struggles on the ground
#
rather than to hand the mic to someone like me who's just witnessing or observing.
#
But the other thing that I learned was again from the women who are sometimes most deeply
#
engaged in this kind of struggle.
#
This was just before the December protests and end year of 2012 over the murder of Jyoti,
#
the young woman on the bus who was so brutally raped and then killed for the crime of just
#
being out to see a movie and being available and being there and being unprotected.
#
And before that for two years, there had been this running wave of protests all across the
#
rural parts of Haryana and Jind.
#
Those protests were grievous.
#
I cannot tell you how many tragedies were folded into, were laid behind those protests.
#
I met fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers whose lives had been devastated by the casual
#
murders or rapes or dismemberments of the women that they held dear.
#
And somehow despite that, every protest that you'd go to, somebody would bring out a drum,
#
somebody would be playing music, somebody would be singing protest songs.
#
And I remember the second time I joined in this, this was in Jind.
#
It must have showed on my face that I was surprised at this.
#
Where were the serious speeches?
#
Where was the one-minute silence?
#
And the women just looked at me and said, we're not protesting to be sad, we're protesting
#
for better lives, we're protesting in order to be happy.
#
And whatever else we can't claim, we can't claim equal rights, we can't claim the right
#
even to be safe in our own homes or out on the streets, but we can claim the right to
#
be happy in this moment.
#
And that was a very powerful learning for me.
#
I think most of my relationship with feminism has come from there.
#
And historically speaking, this is where being a reader comes in handy.
#
I think the idea that how most of the feminist victories have been won, women are equal,
#
what are they crying about now, in one way or the other that comes up, Me Too is where
#
our attention is focused at this time.
#
But it is certainly not the only battle around, from reproductive rights to the right to education,
#
whatever you wear or whatever community you come from, which has been such a big thing
#
in India right now, and in Afghanistan and places like that.
#
I think we forget how recent all of this is.
#
Just a few generations back, women in England, in Austin writes about this, did not have
#
the right to own property because they were property themselves.
#
That entire obsession with marriage that comes through in her books is basically coming through
#
because women had no life if they could not make a good marriage.
#
And that's where underlying all the humor and the lightness of it and the two inches
#
of ivory, it's not two inches of ivory, you're talking about the lives of generations of
#
women who were nothing and had nothing and could only become governesses or burdens on
#
their family if they did not find a man to say yes to them.
#
That was pretty recent.
#
I wrote this I think as a Facebook post, but I was reading Ram Mohan Roy and Raja Ram Mohan
#
Roy, the 18th century reformers letters the other day.
#
And I think for the first time it struck me, what we know of Raja Ram Mohan Roy is that
#
yes, he had the laws of sati changed.
#
It's when you start reading the letters that you realize how long that campaign ran and
#
how exhausting it was on him and his family, because he'd offended orthodox Hindus who
#
were arguing at that time with perfect logic for the right to keep burning women.
#
I looked at those records and some of the women in the Calcutta district who became
#
sathis not so long ago, this would have been less than, what, five generations, six generations?
#
That's how recent it is.
#
Some of them were 15 years old or 16 years old or 12.
#
And the oldest would have been in their seventies and eighties, you know, facing the pyre.
#
And what horrifies me is not, you know, more evidence of the fact that we can be barbaric,
#
What horrifies me is that we were willing for the longest time to intellectually justify
#
this and that, you know, the British get a lot of credit for changing the law, but they
#
change the law only after cautious, dipstick checks that there were enough Hindus who would
#
It's only been less than a generation since my own grandmother, my father's mother, her
#
first marriage, which she did not like, happened when she was very young.
#
She was just about, I think, something like 13 or 15.
#
And she extricated herself from that marriage, found an independent life somehow, and married
#
my grandfather many years later.
#
But all of these things are very close.
#
It's not even been a hundred years since women in India won the right to vote.
#
And we were pretty enlightened in our pre-independence debates about that.
#
But there was, even at that time, there was a strand of opinion that thought that women
#
should not really be bothered or troubled with this, you see.
#
So we forget that everything that we talk about in terms of equality, and this is not
#
just gender, but the entire post-World War II landscape of human rights are important.
#
We should not discriminate against each other.
#
We have had enough of the Holocaust.
#
All of this is very recent, and it flies in the face, I think, of centuries of human practice.
#
And it's wise to remember that when you're talking about feminism.
#
I have taken you down a whole different river this time.
#
It's such a learning experience listening to you.
#
So before I get to my follow-up question, I am reminded of a song, because since you
#
mentioned people in protests also sing and dance, you spoke about women in the 19th century
#
waiting and hoping someone says yes.
#
And there is this lovely poem by Lawrence Alma Tadema called, If No One Ever Marries
#
Me, which Natalie Merchant turned into this beautiful song, which I'll link from the
#
So I'll just read this out for the benefit of my listeners.
#
If No One Ever Marries Me, by Lawrence Alma Tadema, and despite the name, this is written
#
If no one ever marries me, and I don't see why they should, for nurse says I'm not pretty
#
and I'm seldom very good.
#
If no one ever marries me, I shan't mind very much.
#
I shall buy a squirrel in a cage and a little rabbit hutch.
#
I shall have a cottage near a wood and a pony on my own and a little lamb quite clean and
#
tame that I can take to town.
#
And when I'm getting really old, at 28 or nine, I shall buy a little orphan girl and
#
And this also sort of reminded me of Hemabati Sen, you know, who I, you know, first read
#
about in Kavitha Rao's excellent book on Lady Doctors.
#
And again, another sort of remarkable woman beginning with, you know, she was married,
#
I think at the age of nine, to a husband who was 40 something and he already had kids.
#
And during the day, she would play with his children and at night she'd be raped.
#
And when she was 11, he died and her in-laws died and her parents died.
#
So she's in this little village, I think it was in Silhet, she's in this little village
#
in Bengal, far from everything, 11 years old, no relatives, no one to take care of her,
#
And she goes from there to actually get an education and become a lady doctor and phenomenal
#
And then she writes a book and she keeps all her writings in a trunk, which is not opened
#
for 70 years, until 70 years after her death, and then it's published as her memoirs.
#
And I want to ask you therefore about the long arc, right?
#
One of the things that you mentioned is that in some ways today, women have gone backwards,
#
you know, and some of those we can see statistical indicators like women in the workforce, for
#
example, and I've had many episodes on that with the likes of Namita Bhandari and Shrena
#
But I've also spoken to people like Paramitavoh Raka, Vitakrishnan, Manjima Bhattacharya recently,
#
who had more optimism that in the longer arc, there was progress.
#
And you know, you can't ignore that, that there might be moments where it seems that
#
things are getting bad.
#
But if you just have to take a step back and not allow yourself to sort of get despondent
#
and you have to see that longer arc.
#
What's your sense about that longer arc?
#
And that's a short answer, but I don't think there is room for despair.
#
I think despair is energy sapping.
#
But aside from that, I think despair is built on false perception.
#
We are so in love with our own time, that we also like to think of our wars as extraordinary,
#
Oh, my God, World War Three is on the horizon.
#
Well, look at every century of human history, really, and I cannot remember a time that
#
We also lived through the extraordinary burst of hope that accompanied the falling of the
#
You know, we have this movement from progress to regression to finally, let's hope that
#
we keep moving forwards rather than backwards.
#
But if you want hope, it's there all through history.
#
Let's stay on gender for a second.
#
But women like Andal, women like Mirabai, women like Lal Deed, these were three women
#
who in different centuries chose to live their own lives as free as possible and chose to
#
define religion and faith in their own ways.
#
I still remember Lal Deed's, which is so beautifully translated by Ranjit Hoskote, you know, where
#
she says, I have gone into the forest and wrestled with the lion.
#
And there's this raw from her century, which was, she died in 1392, I think.
#
And from her century to mine, her saying, I have fought for what I have.
#
I have worked for the non-Nijani, in the rest of the Vaak, she says something.
#
She says, what there was in the books I've taken and what there wasn't in the books,
#
And then she says, I've gone into the forest and wrestled with the lions.
#
And basically she's saying, I own this territory.
#
I will be me, whether or not you allow me to be myself or not.
#
So when I look at the history of just narrowing it down to either India or America, which
#
is going through its own grievous, grievous moment of regression on many, many fronts,
#
but definitely on gender rights and the whole Black Lives Matter movement being followed
#
by the rise of white supremacy.
#
Do you see an absence of grit when you see Meena Kothwal at the Mooknayak, one of my
#
favourite media outlets, when you see the women of Khabar Nehriya moving by degrees
#
towards finding themselves in possession of a camera, taking the story firmly from the
#
hands of people who will interpret for them?
#
We are grassroots leaders, I see a vacuum at the political stage, but I don't think
#
a lot of token women up there, the Hindu right wing is brilliant at foregrounding women and
#
giving them rules to play within that project.
#
But I would venture to add rules to play without political agency of their own, without asking
#
themselves, is this really good for us?
#
You can do what you want to.
#
You can have a great deal of power, but if you dare to voice an opinion about women or
#
about communal disharmony that is different from what your group says, you will mercilessly
#
be cut out of your group.
#
Given that, I think we are going through a time of churn, a time of inevitable questioning.
#
We will fall further backwards because we are trying to decide on something really big.
#
Nations are so new, nations are so young, right?
#
It's an idea that's been introduced and that will need to be defended not once but over
#
With so many countries, I see the same question arising, don't you?
#
Which is, what is it that holds us together?
#
What should hold us together?
#
And the answers to that question are either going to be uniting, which is an extremely
#
If you think about it, it's a mental state of hand.
#
You're saying all of us by dint of geography and shared history are together, but not those
#
people across the border who share the same geography and at least part of the same history.
#
Or you're doing the simple thing of dividing people by saying, we are the only ones who
#
belong and the rest of them don't.
#
And that's a very clean story.
#
I see a lot of things in terms of narratives.
#
And I see that in the churn that we're going through at this time, don't you see that some
#
people are phoning back in search of an older, maybe more aggressive, but ultimately a safer
#
There's a king, he's an evil king, or she is an evil queen, they're tyrants.
#
If you're moving away from democracy back into an autocracy, and we've had so much written
#
about autocracies and the pull of strongmen and all of that, at least that's from India.
#
One of my fellow columnists at the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh, wrote recently that the
#
direction that he thinks that Europe might head in is not actually towards autocracies,
#
but he thinks that they're heading towards a time of anarchy.
#
And for many people not knowing the uncertainty of we are an imperfect, messy democracy, we're
#
trying to work out what the meaning of this democracy is in a time when you also have
#
technological and oligarchic pressures.
#
And we're trying to define ourselves in the middle of these enormous tectonic pressures.
#
You'll choose certainty over uncertainty, most of humankind would.
#
And just frightening, right?
#
So a couple of thoughts, and then my follow up question.
#
And one thought is that what you asked about that common question that reverberates that
#
what can bring us together, how can we unite and all of that.
#
I think what's happening in modern times is that there is a trend that goes in two different
#
directions and I don't know which will prevail.
#
And one has to do with a crumbling away of the mainstream, but this time in the context
#
of nation states that I think more and more nation states with their hard boundaries that
#
prevent people from reaching across and so forth are becoming irrelevant and the reason
#
is technology because technology is allowing us to, one, it's empowering individuals in
#
a way that politics has failed to do in many different contexts.
#
And it's helping people reach out and make geography irrelevant.
#
And in that sense, what will unite us?
#
I think there's a role that technology can play with the natural liberalism that it brings
#
about, but the opposite is also true, which is that technology and we'll talk about social
#
media afterwards, but how technology can always also divide us and polarize us and so on and
#
And when you speak about people falling back and becoming more regressive, I think of the
#
constant struggle of humankind, the ongoing struggle of humankind as a struggle of human
#
beings against our own programming.
#
All animals in a sense have a source code inside them, they're programmed to be a certain
#
And human beings are the only species which is also programmed to reflect on that programming
#
and to mitigate it and to fight against it.
#
And we are, of course, programmed in contradictory ways as well.
#
We are programmed to be tribal, but at a different level, we are also programmed to be altruistic.
#
And we can reflect upon our programming and therefore we can mitigate it and fight it
#
and let the better angels of our natures, as Steven Pinker eloquently puts it, emerge
#
And I think that that's sort of a constant battle and it might seem that because of technological
#
trends and because of what's happening around us, the way the worst angels, the worst demons
#
of our natures, as it were, can sort of be amplified by our technology as well.
#
And that's sort of the negative side of it and we'll kind of come back to it.
#
But these were my two musings.
#
But my follow up question is this, that in an episode I did recently with Shruti Kapila,
#
she spoke about how she would be very keen on seeing whether the women of India can be
#
You were talking about women in politics being mainly tokenistic and the natural question
#
can arise as it has for Shruti that why don't women just see, just look at their own interests
#
But I also did an episode with Rukmini as the data journalist, the journalist rather,
#
and she pointed out that all her studies and all the data that she's looked at showed that
#
Women actually vote because of a multiplicity of factors and thinking of themselves as women
#
and fighting back against their inequities is not something that drives their voting
#
And one reason for that, of course, could be that all parties are equally misogynistic
#
But I think a deeper reason is that a lot of women also you will find rail against feminism,
#
you know, which is so completely bizarre.
#
They're happy playing in the name of tradition at, you know, reinforcing the subsidiary roles
#
And my question here is, is that you've referred earlier to how one of the things that you
#
loved about our society, that you love about our society and that I do as well is that
#
we are so open and so tolerant and all of that.
#
I remember I had a conversation with the politician JP Narayan and I was talking about how illiberal
#
And of course that, you know, you look at gender, you look at caste, you look at so
#
many things and we're deeply illiberal and he pointed out that if you, without denying
#
it, that if you look at it from another lens, we're deeply liberal, that there is, we are
#
a very assimilative society.
#
If you look at our food, our clothing, our culture, so much is really assimilative and
#
tolerant and all of that.
#
Now what I've been struggling to grasp is that today we are in a place where our society
#
is unquestionably divided, where there is bigotry and sexism and all of that is widespread.
#
And my sense and the great book by Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press and I had an episode
#
with him seems to bear it out.
#
My sense is we were always like this.
#
This is not something new.
#
These aspects of our society have not been shaped by a hateful politics, but it is the
#
Our hateful politics is supplies springing up in response to demand and that our society
#
has also always been like this.
#
So how would, looking back at the span of all these years where you've grown up and
#
you've worked and you've written and you've thought about this country and you've engaged
#
with our politics in whatever way, what do you feel about this larger question that was
#
our society always like this?
#
And in a sense, is it now that politics has caught up with society and what are your sort
#
I'm trying to see where I stand between hope and despair because the truth is it's not
#
just the rise to power of a particular person or a particular party or that the Hindu right
#
I think what grieves us most is our own selves, isn't that it?
#
It's our neighbors turning this way, that way, for whatever reasons.
#
And I've never wanted to live anywhere outside the country.
#
I'm speaking personally and perhaps very selfishly at this moment.
#
I've never had a desire to have a life abroad, to visit abroad, to spend time there, yes.
#
The world is a big place and we are all citizens of the world as well.
#
I don't think I've ever been as heartbroken by what is happening in this country as I
#
And as time goes by, as the political opposition fails and fails again, as our social fabric
#
seems to crumble under the enormous pressure, let me say, put on it by a constant wave of
#
tech-enabled propaganda and hatred.
#
We've seen, I've been tracking that hatred for a while and I've seen it move from being
#
little bubbles on Facebook, which is bad enough and corrosive enough, to being casual and
#
mainstream and on your television sets and it is unreasonable not to expect human beings
#
not to be changed by what they're consuming, okay.
#
Ravish Kumar has said this, other people have said this, at this point we are consuming
#
poison and make no mistake, that has changed us, it is going to change us if we harden
#
If we continue to think that it is alright to condone extreme violence, extreme dispossession
#
of any one of us, the moment that you turn around as a country and you say, you can be
#
killed, you know, it's, we used to have this running joke among a certain percentage of
#
us journalists about the abyss, I'd just about stopped writing op-eds at that stage and gone
#
back to a job that allowed me to read books instead, as it happened.
#
But all of the op-eds about India, written in India and outside India, used to have that
#
damn abyss around, right, ki haan, we are on the edge of the abyss, we have descended
#
into the abyss and I'm like, you know, at one point are you going to see that we are
#
deep inside this morass and that what we are racing towards is clinically a place that
#
no country, no nation, no people wants to go towards.
#
You know, it's very hard to turn away from that violence.
#
But because I read, I also remember reading accounts of first the horror, you know, the
#
helplessness that people felt when the inevitable violence of partition happened.
#
And this was a country that had just been born where you barely had a government.
#
The British had just left, you know, without leaving much in place to stem this violence.
#
And after it stopped, the question on people's minds were, are we even a country?
#
Is there anything that holds us together?
#
I will say this, you know, it's not a question of set aside Modi this, Modi that, the Hindu
#
Rashtra, you've had enough people who know deeply, who have studied the subject talk
#
But if your country does not hold together, then sooner or later, you're just going to
#
break into smaller and smaller pieces.
#
Somebody will demand a homeland of their own, somebody will say, all right, now that we
#
finished saying that they don't belong, they don't belong either.
#
And sometimes when I look at the map of India, it seems that it is smoldering, that there
#
You have to get back to what holds you together.
#
And it's been a long time since we focused on that.
#
For a while after independence, I think what held us together was a combination of necessity
#
and humanity and all those slightly cheesy, hum ek hai, anek hai, you know, unity and
#
diversity ads and all of that.
#
They were cheesy, but they had a function.
#
There was a functionality to it.
#
And that was to remind us that simply we couldn't afford hate.
#
We didn't have to love each other.
#
A lot of this living side by side with each other, these agreements that we hammer out,
#
even in America, even in England or Europe, it's only in the big cities that you have
#
assimilation, integration, you know, all of these things, they cut against our deepest
#
tribal instincts, right?
#
And still, and still we abide, and still we fight back, and still we try to find a way
#
to say that this shouldn't happen and maybe we should be together and still there is courage,
#
an enormous amount of courage.
#
So if you ask me where there's hope, the hope for me lies in the fact that many people
#
That there is a quiet bravery, whether it's in protests such as the farmers' protest
#
or the citizens' protest.
#
It's easy to mock people who are standing up and reading out the preamble.
#
But if you've been there on a cold winter night in Delhi or out in Lucknow or somewhere,
#
and you've heard the fervour and the faith in people's voices, you know that somewhere
#
there's a contrary ripple that is reaching back to that time and saying, what if, what
#
if we could imagine ourselves back into existence again?
#
I don't think any country skips that, Amit.
#
You know, that question of who we are and Europe is facing it in its own way, you know.
#
If Europe lets go of nationhood, then what is it but a collection of warring empires
#
without colonies, you see?
#
What is America if it lets go of its original declarations?
#
So again, here we are back at the imagination.
#
You have to imagine yourself into a people, you have to imagine this whole project of
#
unity, diversity, living together, secularism.
#
It isn't as easy as just saying it.
#
One thing that forged people together after the freedom struggle was if you read Manohar
#
Malgaonkar and if you read Mulkraj Adhan and other writers from that period, Kamladas,
#
etc., Kanthapura, Raja Rao's great book.
#
You see that it wasn't this cartoon story of the whole country coming together to fight
#
Among the Indians, there were many who rested their faith in the princely states that were
#
taken apart after independence.
#
There were many who were also perfectly happy to let the British be, you know, the emperors
#
Take care, what is wrong, we are Aibahadurs, you know, we are benefiting from the system,
#
they are not so bad, etc.
#
You had to imagine independence for yourself and any country that can do that has a shot
#
at imagining its way back to safety from where we are heading.
#
The only thing is that once you have a certain kind of conflict, break out.
#
Once you open the doors to all the things that we are fearing, whether it's some people
#
fear civil war, some people fear another genocide, some people just fear a time of vast persecution,
#
endless persecution that's normalized and where all you have to ask of the other people
#
in this project is to look away.
#
You know, you assure them immunity and you say look away and that's all that is required.
#
So you know, I'll make a brief anti-national aside and then ask the follow-up question
#
to the follow-up question, going further and further down tributaries and branching to
#
God knows where and the aside is that what you mentioned about the country breaking up
#
and all of that, sometimes I wonder if it would have been better if we weren't one
#
united country but if we were many countries, like I did an episode on the great VP Menon
#
with Narayan Ibasu and one of the sort of things I realized while reading up on Menon
#
and Siddharth Patel and what they did was that what Patel and Menon did in bringing
#
this great country politically together between the years 47 to 50 was like an act of fast
#
What the British did over centuries, these guys did in a few months, a lot of it through
#
violence and coercion and of course I believe the end doesn't justify the means and a lot
#
of it through promises that were later broken and it seems to be in many ways a profoundly
#
immoral act but leave that aside, it is what it is and both of us love this country for
#
what it is and so on and so forth.
#
But that's just a thought I sometimes have that maybe if we were many different countries
#
or different nations, governance would be much better because the point is governance
#
gets better the more local it is and we have too much of a sort of a centralized system
#
and that kind of works against it, why not just have a whole bunch of states competing
#
with each other to govern better and to attract people and to attract capital and so on and
#
so forth because we have nowhere near the federalized kind of system that we should
#
though having articulated this aside, when you mentioned partition, you mentioned the
#
inevitable violence of partition and that word inevitable strikes me and I think it's
#
an apt term and I think I would apply it to where we are today and say that this was inevitable
#
because my sense is that one, our society was always like this but why is it so bad
#
today, why is it amplified so much and I turned to this concept I picked up from Timur Kuran's
#
1999 book Public Lives, Private Truths where he came up with the concept of preference
#
falsification and he gave the example of the Soviet Union, till the last years of the Soviet
#
Union nobody in that place spoke against the state because they thought they were the only
#
ones who felt that way, who felt that anger and therefore they hid their preference, that
#
was preference falsification and the example Kuran gave was look at one point there was
#
something called a preference cascade where people realized that hey they are not the
#
only ones, everybody feels like them and then eventually it seems like it happened almost
#
overnight but people didn't change their minds overnight, they could just express themselves
#
and I think in a negative sense a similar thing happened with social media where I think
#
our people within our society were fundamentally bigoted and sexist and casteist and all of
#
that but it wasn't, it was not something you could express in polite company, you felt
#
guilty about it, it was something you held within you and with social media you suddenly
#
realized that damn it everybody feels like me and then you become emboldened to express
#
yourself openly and you don't need like politicians stop dog whistling because they can just say
#
things directly, they don't need to dog whistle anymore so the hatred that we see around us
#
has found expression in modern times because of technology and social media but has not
#
been created in modern times, it was always there simmering beneath the surface and it
#
was bound to come out at some point and the other thing that you sort of mentioned where
#
you speak about imagining an India, the necessary to imagine an India, I think it was a grand
#
task done by well-meaning men with the best of intentions but I also think that it failed
#
because that imagination when it happened was done by a group of elites and the India
#
they were imagining was not the India they was and in trying to force fit the India of
#
their imagination into the real India they failed because they tried to go top down and
#
not bottom up like one you know trope that I keep revisiting on my shows is how if you
#
look at our constitution it was essentially a liberal constitution nowhere near as liberal
#
as I would like but relatively it was essentially a liberal constitution imposed on an illiberal
#
society and one you can ask a meta question about whether such an imposition can be liberal
#
itself but therefore it was bound to fail that Gandhi was right where he said that you
#
have to change society from within top-down interventions will fail and I think we see
#
you know the folly of that act of imagination today and I would say that if elites today
#
try to imagine a new India into being it is bound to fail in the same way and I don't
#
think it's a bad thing that elites are those kind of elites are no longer in power because
#
they were foolish and they failed and we didn't get anywhere with that what we need to do
#
is make society more liberal if that is possible and I believe it is possible but I believe
#
it's very difficult and we are not really moving towards that so far so just a bunch
#
of sort of thoughts on you know what we were speaking about so do you have something you'd
#
I was thinking about the inevitability of some things you know as this peculiar thing
#
called a nation when you don't even speak the same language we say we have a common
#
history but parts of the south parts of the northeast parts of the west have very very
#
distinct and individual histories I don't really agree with the fragmentation theory
#
I think in practice you'll find that it's a much less utopian and more messy thing.
#
You have Balkan violence is what you sort of mean.
#
Oh exactly quite aside from being anti-national but let me get back to a few things I don't
#
think that this country was imagined into being entirely by a handful of elites.
#
One of the things that one of our major national parties has forgotten actually is how broad
#
its origins were as a big tent and how diverse the group of people and politicians who gravitated
#
to the Congress in that time were.
#
I don't think that we should idolize anything whether that is the party presently in charge
#
or the Congress of Gandhi's time to see things through the lens of adulation and oh how fantastic
#
What the Congress really was was a mass movement and I'm stressing that mass to say that I
#
think where Gandhi and the other leaders extraordinary achievement was to carry a huge proportion
#
of the body politic along with them to rouse them to a fever of longing for this ideal
#
country set us in against that and we are not going to discuss ideas of India because
#
you know that's such an old and trash debate but there is the dream of the begampura you
#
know the ideal place where without caste without communal differences without religions there's
#
also a pattern and longing for that.
#
Now let's bring technology in.
#
Curiously enough one of the areas where I'm optimistic about is after seeing the damage
#
done across the globe by big tech and by the weaponization of tech as a tool to spread
#
very successfully narratives, feelings, attitudes, beliefs of hatred.
#
One of these questions that we keep asking ourselves oh will be always like this will
#
be always hateful and I think of that old you know it well you know that put this meditation
#
story about the two wolves you know you have two wolves one destructive one enormously
#
creative one benevolent one hostile.
#
There's four wolves I get what you're saying but you know benevolent creative one side
#
and hostile and destructive on the other right.
#
You wanted a wolf when you were a child but anyway that's an aside but yeah people's
#
have to read your book and learn about course I wanted a wolf who doesn't I don't want
#
a wolf but I find this very strange.
#
Anyway so to get back to these two wolves it's a simple question it's the one you
#
feed and we paid too much emphasis on are we like this are we like that do we have this
#
on our in our national character yeah where are people's attention being directed what
#
are they consuming and our belief you know in the fullness of a personality in independent
#
order of this is touching but deeply misplaced.
#
Every one of us in addition to having that unbreakable seed of a self inside is also
#
basically a component of a mixture of everything that we have consumed everything that we are
#
taking in and most seriously where we are directing our attention to.
#
So you know as dismayed as I've been by the consequences of this technologically driven
#
and enabled hate a simple example you know you've seen what Twitter is these days.
#
Imagine a Twitter where for just one day it is not possible to abuse Kashmiris, Muslims,
#
Bengalis, liberals, secular, for one day it's not there and you can see it I mean those
#
are our pet hates other people have different pet hates but for that one day discourse would
#
be that much freer people's blood pressure would not be that high the sensor being under
#
threat and being attacked would be much much lower in effect if you could cut that out
#
you would change the stream itself you would change where people were looking.
#
If your attention has been directed to hate it's not just because people love hating or
#
because we have this ancient enemy or whatever it's simply because hatred in the short run
#
is politically extremely lucrative right.
#
Run a riot or mini riot or a set of you know demolitions or destructions of people's homes
#
and you will win an election it's as simple as that if there wasn't a coordination between
#
the two people would not do it.
#
If for eight ten years the people who have been most who have been most concerned with
#
spreading propaganda most diligent about it most most engaged in this project and who
#
have also mastered the tools that were available to everybody right from the start of this
#
decade onwards then don't blame technology per se for being a purveyor of hate what it
#
shows you silently is that if you take the other projects as seriously and let me just
#
say this on mic so that we have this spread love what's your first reaction your first
#
reaction is what the hell yeah cynicism laughter you know what kind of message is that that's
#
what we think of love right we don't think of love or loving each other or being compassionate
#
or living together as good things we think of them as prissy things how do you change
#
that messaging people are smart here if you really want to change it you can but that
#
has to be not just a political project it has to be a social project is it possible
#
yes because in microcosms it did help us live by each other's sides uneasily imperfectly
#
but still try you know cities like Delhi and Bombay and Calcutta have honestly Calcutta
#
has a reputation for being eclectic but the same old divisions do operate there's a South
#
Calcutta and North Calcutta there's a South Bombay and this the rest of Bombay as well
#
I think we are imperfect in these projects but I think we've done enough of the movement
#
of people from villages to the city the places that taught me in Delhi that we could live
#
side by side I don't want to romanticize this but unfortunately this is actually a truth
#
it was not the new slums it was not the old grand residential colonies which fall very
#
easily back you know the RWAs and the gated colonies unconsciously they will fall back
#
into the habits of segregation and they will keep people out I see that the map of South
#
Delhi itself is changing to be far more you know majoritarian than it used to be and far
#
less assimilative but it was the in between places it was the Lajpat Nagar places which
#
are grudgingly but for money you know open to refugees from all across South Asia and
#
it was some of the slum clusters by and large not the new ones because the new ones almost
#
always divide in terms of you've come from here you hang out with people from where you've
#
come from the moment that they get a little older and a little more layered people have
#
to learn to live together and you know even if their version of living together is two
#
communities sitting with an edge and a border between them one thing that I'm hearing in
#
this time of hatred effective hatred is we used to celebrate but now we don't our roads
#
used to go past each other's house but now we don't you can despair or you can stop and
#
think wait a second for all these years we used to live together where did we done that
#
why aren't we paying more attention to that I think it's possible I just think that it
#
is such a gigantic project and it requires such a shift internally you know to our minds
#
one of the reasons why I say that we can't afford despair is not because okay we're part
#
of this great battle that we're going to win but if you anywhere in the world including
#
our country if you are despairing because the right wing is rising when you know one
#
thing we could learn from the right is that they've sat there without power in clusters
#
that have been very divided without much in the way of resources for well over 30 40 years
#
it's been I forget how many years but at least decades since Alice Monroe wrote an incredible
#
short story about you know other battles that they were having over Darwin okay many many
#
years later you have book bands in America taking hold it's taken that much time to get
#
to the place where you have power and you have agency as a member of the rising right
#
or if your hate politics become effective it takes 40 years of engineering 50 years
#
of engineering so I ask you is this the time to give up or is this the time to actually
#
start thinking about these things seriously if you're going to preach love then can you
#
find a way to do it that makes people not switch off the televisions immediately if
#
you're going to find a practical reason for why love should triumph make that argument
#
in literature in poetry but most of all in politics so I'll come up with an observation
#
I don't think we can afford despair so I'll come up with an observation that is bookended
#
by the thought of spreading love and first of all thank you for you know you brought
#
a smile to my face by mentioning Alice Monroe a writer I love so much my favorite living
#
writer by far and I'll in fact link my favorite short stories by her in the show notes because
#
why not everyone should read them she's amazing spreading love the interesting thing is that
#
I don't want to paint social media or Twitter is all bad because you know one of the things
#
I've realized is that there's a lot of joy to be had from Twitter if you curate your
#
feet properly that what you really have also on Twitter is you are all the time exposed
#
to the best minds in the world thinking aloud for your benefit which is pretty remarkable
#
enough you know and there's a small group of people for example who'll share poetry
#
you'll write about books and so on and so forth and I would call that spreading love
#
but that's not so dominant and that's really that's in a sense silent the trend that I
#
see what social media does is that the way it polarizes us really is that we go on social
#
media everybody wants to have a sense of community and tribe and all of that so people will typically
#
join ideological tribes at the extremes of the left and the right and then they want
#
to the incentives are obviously to raise their status within that tribe and the way to do
#
it is by attacking people on the other side never addressing arguments but just attacking
#
and snarking and so on and then attacking people on their own side for not being pure
#
enough and that tendency to swing towards the extremes because that's the only way
#
you can rise in status is something that you see in the real world and in our politics
#
as well like you know there was a time where political scientists use this term called
#
the median voter theorem where the idea was that if you just take the US as a simple example
#
for a moment because there are two large parties and that's it you know the two parties may
#
swing in whatever directions during the primaries but in the main election they would always
#
sort of swing towards a center it's all like the metaphor drawn for this is of ice cream
#
vendors at a beach let's say there's one ice cream vendor at a beach he can be anywhere
#
along it but if there are two the incentive is to be as close to the center as possible
#
those two vendors may start out at the edges but then the closer they get the more optimal
#
it is for them in terms of people walking by and eventually you'll have them right
#
next to each other neighboring ice cream vendors in the center of this pathway so what you
#
would typically have expected in the 2016 presidential elections in the US for example
#
would be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush because they were from different parties but they
#
were pretty much identical in their politics the differences are just surface but they
#
were really similar really mainstream beholden to the similar set of interest groups big
#
money interest groups and so on and so forth where it fell apart was in Trump because he
#
was just not part of the picture at all and politics swung to the extremes and just as
#
the right swung to the extremes and I don't even know if it's fair to call them the right
#
because Trump took the party in Republican Party in directions which had nothing to do
#
with the values of the Republican Party at all right he it was like blacks one like his
#
economics is just the opposite of Republican economics in his opposition to trade for example
#
very so much like Bernie Sanders but the point being that they swung to the extremes and
#
they're still swinging to the extremes today because that is how today you rise within
#
a party and an example of that would be that dharam sansad at the end of the last year
#
when you had this whole bunch of saints or godmen or whatever all in court marks giving
#
these incredibly insane dairy speeches calling for genocide and so on and my sense there
#
is that that's this drive towards extremism playing out because if you look at the incentives
#
of the leaders there you know it's it's a competition who can rouse the crowds more
#
who can stand out more and the only way to do that is not by preaching love but by swinging
#
towards the extreme so I think if it was one guy giving a speech alone it would not have
#
been so toxic but because you have all these people competing with each other there are
#
no limits all bets are off and as you know the political theorist Carl Schmitt famously
#
said perhaps a century ago that politics is all about the other you need an other in politics
#
you know spreading love does not win you votes spreading hate does so that's sort of just
#
how it is so I want to talk about this therefore also in the context of like if we dive back
#
to feminism for a moment right both Kavita Krishnan and Manjima Bhattacharya recently
#
spoke about how we have to see that there is a difference between feminism on the ground
#
people who are actually out there in the real world doing things making women's lives better
#
off as opposed to a lot of the toxic posturing that you see on social media from armchair
#
warriors and this is my articulation none of them use these words I'm saying this and
#
that's something that interests me because what I find in a lot of the woke politics
#
for example is a sense of identity as something immutable and you get a mirror image of this
#
on the right and I feel that that's incredibly disturbing because as you know I'm for me
#
the ultimate value is in individual rights in consent and autonomy you know no one should
#
be pinned down to an identity of birth and one that they did not choose and speaking
#
of identities can be useful as a tool of analysis but when you use it to pass judgment on people
#
and to shut people out of the discourse and so on and so forth I think that can kind of
#
get very toxic and when it comes to sort of that whole notion of spreading love like I
#
was reading bell hooks recently and was struck by how much she talks about compassion including
#
compassion for men including compassion for a father and so on it's a very nuanced kind
#
of view where you're seeing everyone as victims where you're trying to understand where they
#
come from but there is a certain strain not just of feminism but any ism that you express
#
online which has no space for this nuance which must push for the extremes which must
#
pass judgment in the world which must condemn and so on and so forth so being someone who's
#
used Twitter from its early days being someone who's had the lived experience of engaging
#
with feminism over these decades of you know even if you haven't at for some of this time
#
as you put it you haven't been an activist you've been a participant or whatever what
#
is your sense of what's kind of happening here because while I certainly call myself
#
a feminist and and I can't understand how anyone would not be one male or female you
#
know I speak with older feminists who find who find some of this what is happening on
#
social media sort of this quieting to the extent that Manjumma in fact said that these
#
days these days I don't even call myself a feminist because you know even though she
#
studied it and written on it and so on and so forth so what sort of your response to
#
Leard to begin with I'm not comfortable with the term woke politics though I understand
#
what you mean I think that's too broad an umbrella to encompass the many movements that
#
have also flourished on social media not just social justice warriors or whatever but movements
#
where your social media presence is an accurate mirror of your life and work offline you know
#
we're back at something that you talked about earlier which was authenticity and I think
#
what you are picking up on is inauthentic politics and the power of that inauthentic
#
politics Trump whom you started off by mentioning changed everything but a simple shift it didn't
#
matter what he was saying and it did sometimes it just that people could not take their eyes
#
off him a few voices early on said starve him of oxygen but people were unable to look
#
away with the Dharamsadnsads that you mentioned they're escalating but there's no percentage
#
to being I think there the problem is slightly different as with Trump it's that what you're
#
saying online can be amplified and used to create real danger real violence offline right
#
so your impact is far higher than your presence on social media but social media is a world
#
of shadows it's not a world of substance increasingly I find that I am disengaging this is again
#
a very personal response I stay on Twitter partly because there's the addictive hook
#
of it and you know my two addictions are basically caffeine and Twitter at this point and in
#
part two I tell myself weekly it's to stay informed but I find myself following the feeds
#
that are not thoughtless positivity which is a genre that just gets up my nose you know
#
that whole no no think good thoughts be bright and happy the good morning whatsapp forward
#
a philosophy of life I cannot be having time or space for that because often that's a plea
#
to you to disengage completely that's a plea to you to look away from the truth of what
#
is happening here and elsewhere.
#
Having said that I find myself drawn to feeds that are thoughtful immersed but not directly
#
about the topic of the day the trending political person of the day the controversy of the day
#
right and those feeds are run by people like Paul Holden Ripper by Maria Popova by Rana
#
Safi as well by Rabi Alamadin they feeds that give you a sense of what the whole spread
#
love thing can be it's so easy to mock that by the way I'm aware that I've opened myself
#
up to mockery but let me put it this way if somebody is shouting a toxic I don't even
#
want to say it on even though it's said so often hateful nationalist slogan into the
#
air demonizing part of our citizenry what prevents us from saying I think what prevents
#
us is a lack of belief in that and people sense insincerity one of the reasons why haters
#
on social media are powerful is because people sense that their hatred is authentic it is
#
coming from a true place right and that's very seductive instead of the hard work of
#
that not woke politics but that a certain kind of politics demands if you're a feminist
#
I think it's very uncomfortable believing in something deeply whether it's feminism
#
or free speech or equality for all because all a better environment whatever it is that
#
politics will start to change you right and you will start to question your choices and
#
sometimes you will be extremely uncomfortable with your own actions and that's the way it
#
should be you know a good politics a healthy politics should change us why do I have the
#
freedom movement so much at my forefront I think again because of direct political situations
#
were to thought experiment I have sometimes wondered about what would they have been like
#
on social media you know I can't imagine that but I can imagine that I can imagine
#
that in the volume of the persuasion the efforts at persuasion that were made not just by our
#
own independence movement but by practically any movement that I can think of whether it's
#
feminism Indian or otherwise has put a great deal of time and attention into what we would
#
call advocacy but what I would call the art of persuading people to sit down and listen
#
to you so if we can't articulate love just leave that thought to one side as we continue
#
with this identity I hate to say it if you're a Kashmiri Muslim at this point you don't
#
have the luxury of walking away from your identity as much as you might plead for your
#
individual self to be recognized if you're a Palestinian if you're somebody who is currently
#
experiencing tremendous oppression because of your identity you don't have the freedom
#
I think what I mean is identity being used as something against you when you're talking
#
about identity politics what you're picking up on is something that is also inauthentic
#
but it's that monetary streak in us that smugness that I am better than you let me show you
#
So what I mean is this like earlier in this conversation you've spoken about caste right
#
now what I mean about the toxicity of identity politics is someone then pointing a finger
#
at you and saying oh she's a privileged Savarna woman she has no right to talk about caste
#
and I have a problem with that I think we all have a right to talk about whatever we
#
want to talk about and whatever concerns us you know if I am for example concerned the
#
anti-Muslim hatred that is spreading through our country today I have a right to speak
#
about that as well I love my country I don't want to you know so it's sort of this kind
#
of thing where a label is put on you and then you are told you can do this or you can't
#
do this that this is not for you to speak about that you are Savarna or you are white
#
and shut shut the f up and what you really see in a lot of the extreme discourse in the
#
US and is that whiteness is being conflated with white supremacy almost it feels like
#
that in a lot of the discourse and to me going to that extreme just becomes a problem so
#
that's the sense I mean it in of course if you're Muslim today in India you can't escape
#
your identity of course if you're a woman in India you can't escape that you're a second
#
class citizen you know at the level of analysis of course I mean I'm totally with you but
#
when your identity is used against you then that is a problem the thing I have an issue
#
with you know so that that's sort of if you get where I'm coming from.
#
I know but I wouldn't comment this from a slightly different perspective I would ask
#
an additional question the person who's saying you should keep quiet because you are this
#
and not that are they coming from a space of pain in which case listen to them a little
#
bit and just see you know are they trying to what is the intention.
#
So I'll just add something to that that I understand that compassionate point that someone
#
is coming from a position of pain or justified angle.
#
That's not the only thing I wanted to see.
#
But also just sorry I'll just quickly in half a sentence finish this what I also see happening
#
in this politics is an embrace of victimhood you know where everybody wants to be a victim
#
in some way or the other so they can be offended by something someone said and then they can
#
pass judgment on that person for an identity of birth they did not choose or they can look
#
for gotcha moments and take you know and you know look at imagined sort of grievances and
#
that's something that I do have an issue with.
#
That's fine having an issue with it is not the problem I would say that there are two
#
things that are crucial out here.
#
The people who are hypothetically saying you don't have the right to speak which is what
#
this boils down to do they have the power to silence you.
#
The shaming cycles that happen on social media the controversies that boil up even within
#
publishing there was this I'm going to sidetrack just a bit but you know about the Kate Clanchy
#
Right so this became a huge thing she is a teacher with highly awarded memoir about teaching
#
in London's inner city schools and teaching children who are often refugees often from
#
very poor underprivileged backgrounds and she was taken to task two years after her
#
novel was awarded by three writers of colour who pointed out that some of her descriptions
#
of these children were borderline racist or fully racist or very very reductive at the
#
least you know they seem to lack compassion or they put these children into particular
#
In an ideal world there would have been room for both sides to talk to each other for Clanchy
#
to maybe listen and say okay let me have a chat with my publisher right and let me see
#
These are the changes I'm on board with these are the things I don't feel I should change.
#
From both sides this turned into a thing where the women who included you know writers like
#
Munisha Rajesh and Chimene Suniman and others were subjected to beracking and abuse Kate
#
Clanchy was demonised on the other side it ended up being it's still running through
#
cycles you know with people alternately seeing Clanchy as a monster or as a saviour figure
#
or monstering the women who called her out or you know elevating them to a level that
#
they may not have chosen for themselves and it's become profoundly unproductive okay.
#
It hasn't pushed the central issue further in fact the central issue has been lost in
#
Why am I picking this as an example instead of the many other you know juicy controversies
#
we could pile on to because I think we are all seeing a problem when discussion is shut
#
down or brought to a halt or goes into extremely thin territory extremely unproductive unprofitable
#
very arid territory non-creative territory okay.
#
I don't have a problem with shutting up if somebody says you as a savanna privileged
#
woman have had the mic for too long can you make space for someone else that's fair that's
#
absolutely fair and I would be not just accommodating I would think that yeah you know historically
#
speaking why not hand over but if somebody says that that's fair but the problem is when
#
you're condemned for being savanna which was not in your control there's no action
#
involved with it it's a pejorative yeah that's only a hurt feeling I don't care about that
#
so much you know that's something I see honesty as the other person's problem if they want
#
to put condemnation into something that I can't help they're coming at it from a position
#
of hurt pain anger or whatever that maybe I'll never understand and I try to hold space
#
for that but again I don't have much time for that because I don't think it moves either
#
of our positions forwards.
#
My question is often whether it's a book or whether it's something else it's focused
#
on outcome in literature a lot of this debate is framed as who do you have the right to
#
write about okay and instinctively I think I can see both sides I can see the argument
#
for saying write with some sensitivity but if you take the whole don't write people whom
#
you don't know think to its extreme we're all going to be writing monologues that take
#
place in our own heads and that are only about ourselves.
#
And JRR Tolkien wasn't a hobbit.
#
That's see that's a that's a lovely laugh line but it takes away from the real hurt
#
No no I get it completely I get it completely when you know clueless foreign writers write
#
about something that I know and a world that I've lived in and get it completely wrong
#
I feel angry and it's fair for me to express my literary criticism of what they have just
#
messed up and got wrong but everyone should nevertheless be free to write about whatever
#
I think what I resist and resist profoundly is because I have resented it from the right
#
this whole dictatorial thing about we are offended you can't write about this you can't
#
paint that you can't think this you know I would not stand for it personally on the left
#
or the liberal side of the world either but that's just me I don't want to make the rules
#
So what we're coming towards is do you really want to set down rules about these things
#
yeah when you're speaking about compassion you can't enforce compassion on somebody who
#
has been deprived of an opportunity to speak all their lives and maybe sometimes you know
#
just stand up and take your hurt feelings and it's okay you still have a way to speak
#
you are still going to continue to speak that's fine.
#
I think what you're noticing though is emblematic of a larger problem and that is that this
#
entire set of politics whatever you want to call them cancel culture is a term that the
#
right uses but this narrowing of argument down to the rituals surrounding a set of things
#
in the hope that this will somehow you know provide a greater space of justice the rituals
#
cannot replace the actual action for justice and I think that just because people and liberals
#
are on the left that does not make them less prone to being vengeful in the early days
#
of Twitter I look at the times when you know I've given into the temptation to be morally
#
superior or to tell somebody off and here's the truth it feels great in the moment afterwards
#
if you're at all reflective a day later you're thinking about that and you feel very small
#
telling somebody how they should live their lives or what they should think or whatever
#
getting down taking the slightly confused set of arguments back to strictly the literary
#
artistic creative world and off Twitter for a second I think it is problematic to say
#
literature should be free everybody should have the right to write everybody else that
#
just opens a door for somebody to write very hatefully and with a lack of respect or lack
#
of understanding which is worse you know about specific groups of people but the more we
#
get into rules and the more we get into policing the more we start to resemble the forces that
#
we hate and we have to watch out for that you have to be careful the second thing is
#
that this train Ed Luce who I keep quoting Financial Times columnist today and I'm sorry
#
it's just that I read a string of particularly you're also being tribal you're part of the
#
FD tribe I am being tribal and you know unconsciously so but it is an argument that struck me with
#
some force and he's been debating it back and forth but he says that part of America's
#
problem is that the left's concern and liberal concerns and democratic concerns cannot be
#
so narrow that they lose you know sight of what a wider politics is so in all this discussion
#
about you know who gets to speak where or Twitter policing or whatever it is aren't
#
we losing sight of the much much broader battles ahead in terms of justice and equality and
#
all of that aren't these at the end of the day aren't a lot of these very esoteric and
#
very narrow pursuits I don't mean that they are unimportant I just mean I don't mean to
#
trivialize them either but sometimes I just think that these things that you care so passionately
#
about on Instagram or Twitter or whatever can be very in-group concerns and if you're
#
focusing on that if you're focusing on you know the etiquette of how to respond to x
#
y or z or join in this particular cultural boycott or another is what you're doing enabling
#
the bigger picture or are you getting lost in a very small debate something that I think
#
we are both frustrated with because again we've discussed this as friends elsewhere
#
is the tendency of a certain kind of liberal line of argument to go into you know opposing
#
hate but saying oh but we did it also back in the day collapsing in a heap you know saying
#
that we don't have any moral ground and getting into a tangle of relatively minor points you're
#
leaving the main issue on the table unaddressed in this paroxysm of shame and guilt and you
#
know all of that so somewhere I think what we're looking for is as much as the right
#
is also lost across the world you remember a time when being conservative or being right
#
wing did not have to mean that you were associated with hate politics so as powerful as the surge
#
of hate is I would argue very strongly that the right has lost its compass completely
#
you know I know that's a very broad-based argument but I would argue that very strongly
#
for India America and parts of Europe for sure if you're defining yourself as a right
#
wing party in France with your anti-immigration policy and losing sight of everything else
#
that is supposed to go into being part of the traditional right then you no longer know
#
who you are if your identity as a right wing in America is built on we will hate these
#
minorities and cut off the rights of women then you've lost contact with your own heritage
#
right and India the I mean the same goes one thing I used to like a little bit not about
#
Nehruvian politics but about the general strain of mainstream politics out here is that there
#
were so many contradictory opinions coming at each other and in just the same way I don't
#
want to say this as a sweeping indictment but I think liberalism per se is struggling
#
to hold on to the threat of the story isn't it if we get sidetracked by relatively minor
#
relatively petty issues I think the one area where I'm in complete rather than occasionally
#
partial agreement with you is on the whole thing of if we're so busy cancelling each
#
other you know Gandhi had particular flaws this person cannot speak this person by the
#
standards of our time is bad you need to watch out with that you know the politics of purity
#
are dangerous on either side of the fence there is no such thing as pure territory we
#
live in not just in an imperfect time but we have to find a way to live with the imperfection
#
of ourselves we need fewer heroes we need few perfect people but we do need to be able
#
to make arguments with passion and belief and to hold space for each other yeah that's
#
what I keep saying that it's almost a cliche on my show channeling Whitman that people
#
contain multitudes which applies to Gandhi and Nehru and Ambedkar and Vajpayee and so
#
many others who we tend to see in black and white ways and I agree with everything you
#
said and I have exactly the same concerns and and of course I agree with what you said
#
about the right losing its compass the two things I'd add there is I'm not sure the
#
frames of left and right are even relevant anymore I was struggling as I was speaking
#
I was thinking this is not really how do we describe it no I mean the way I think listeners
#
will know exactly what you mean so that's fine what are the terms for this I mean the
#
frames that I would you know 20 years later if you ask me I would not want people to think
#
of the world in terms of frames are left or right which are meaningless and muddied but
#
across freedom and authoritarian across consent and coercion to me those are the frames that
#
for me consent is the ultimate value and coercion is really really bad you know and the right
#
and the left across the board seem to have no problem with coercion at all across many
#
margins and just as the right as you put it have lost their compass I think so as a left
#
I mean my my issue with the bigotry on both sides is that I am the bigotry on the right
#
doesn't worry me so much because I wear it on their sleeve it is what it is but the bigotry
#
on the left is dressed up in this sanctimony which you know is much harder to counter and
#
thankfully what you know we've both been referring to and all the posturing and all the noise
#
on the extremes is a vocal minority sorry most people aren't like that most people the
#
sense that I get are a silent majority and perhaps a chilling effect makes them more
#
silent than ever because anything they say can be can get them cancelled or can get an
#
online mob on them and I've had mobs from all sides come down on me so there is that
#
chilling effect at play but my hope there is that there is a silent majority and at
#
some point in time the toxic effect of the vocal minorities will not sort of matter so
#
much and on that note let's take a quick commercial break though I don't have a commercial but
#
I sense we might need a break and on the other side of that we'll continue with your personal
#
journey and perhaps talk about quieter subjects than than these depressing subjects which
#
we've been depressing but rousing.
#
Dressing but rousing indeed.
#
Long before I was a podcaster I was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first
#
heard of me because of my blog India Uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and
#
became somewhat popular at the time I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I
#
was shaped by it in many ways I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to
#
think about many different things because I wrote about many different things well that
#
phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now I
#
am doing it through a newsletter I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe it is free once you sign up each new installment that I write will land
#
up in your email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India
#
Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com thank you.
#
Welcome back again to the scene in the unseen because this was our umpteenth break and I
#
am chatting with my good friend Elanjana Roy on her life and her thoughts and there is
#
really so much to explore that we could go on for another 5 hours but we won't go on
#
for that long um one of the things that struck me when I read the girl who ate books and
#
I was sort of reading your back story as it were is how much you remember of your ancestors
#
right so you've got besides your parents you've got grandparents from every side you've got
#
grand uncles you've got older ancestors who are taking loans from Armenians and doing
#
this and doing that and there's just so much action all over and there is also a richness
#
of things in the sense uh you know I there's one paragraph which you may not uh you know
#
consider a big deal but I remember it where you write quote my thakurma bibobati devi
#
baba's mother was a writer in an unfussy way producing short stories in bengali with the
#
same practice flick of her wrist that she used to turn out roasted coconut treats and
#
puffed rice and jaggery moas she kept her writings uh in a black leaded tin trunk her
#
homemade sweets in an old lactogen tin both containers equally battered and utilitarian
#
and stop quote and that lactogen tin really speaks to me you know when I was in Chandigarh
#
recently we sold my father's house I was clearing out the stuff we chose to give most of it
#
away or get rid of it gave thousands of books to a local community library in Delhi I just
#
kept a few as artifacts in a sense because most of my reading is sort of on Kindle and
#
so on and it was difficult in the sense that I know that none of what I was choosing to
#
part with had any practical value at all and yet it is a texture of my growing up and my
#
childhood and all that and that made me think about whether it is a blessing or a curse
#
to have a past that has some kind of richness in it and my past does not have too much richness
#
in it it's just the parents beyond them I have no sentiments very few memories it's
#
not there but even this to sort of say that okay this part of my life is gone forever
#
and will live only in memory and and that was kind of tough and at one point you cherish
#
what you had and you lament the loss but at another point it also frees you from not having
#
the burden of that past from being just able to move forward and realize that most of it
#
in terms of the physical things that it was embodied in most of those things are not essential
#
to you at all you want to live an essential life like one of the things that my wife and
#
I were talking about as we went through this exercise is how we have too many things as
#
well which burden us down and hold us back and you want to sort of move to a more minimal
#
kind of life where you don't have so many things because things are not important and
#
of course technology has given us a luxury and the privilege to be able to do that because
#
we can keep all our thousands of books in digital copies and we can keep all our work
#
in a digital form upload it to the crowd we don't you know physical things aren't a big
#
deal anymore if my laptop starts working I'll get another one and that will have exactly
#
the same things on it as this one does but given that your sense of the past is so rich
#
given that your memories contain all of these things how do you view that coming to where
#
you are because and also in a related sense you know when you think of home what is your
#
sense of home like I had a recent episode with Max Rodenbeck where I asked him this
#
question and he grew up in Cairo and he said it's Cairo but it's not the Cairo that is
#
there today it's a Cairo of memory and therefore a Cairo of imagination because memory and
#
imagination are so closely linked together so what is your sense of this rich past you've
#
written about it so much you live in it still obviously because one must keep going back
#
to that but you know I don't even know if there's a question but I just sort of wanted
#
your impressions and your thoughts of this actually I'm surprised because with the girl
#
who ate books I think that's the only one of my books where I've gone even somewhat
#
autobiographical and because so much of that book is about my encounters you know it's
#
the business standard interviews that I did with so many writers there are standalone
#
essays that are about the history of Indian writing in English and that are very abstract
#
some of them are about early pioneers in writing and some of them are about the growth of history
#
I don't think I'd realized that I had written as much about my family as I did I'm going
#
back to why I did that and I don't think it was to boast or to show off I think I was
#
looking really for the literary heritage my grandmother's trunk one of the saddest cause
#
on my heart is that she lifelong was a published author she used to write poems and short stories
#
that at that time I didn't read and some of them were published in little magazines in
#
Bengali and all of that and after she died her trunk went to a member of the family who
#
is now also passed on and I was very I didn't want to ask just after her death for the stories
#
back and on of that but after about nine months ten months I said do you think I could take
#
copies of all her writings and she said oh yes of course you can where are they and I
#
said they were in the black trunk she said oh that trunk it was filled with rubbish papers
#
and they were moth eaten and I just threw them away there was nothing of value in there
#
and I don't think she meant any harm but it meant something to me I've always felt that
#
phantom side of you know not just my grandmother's personal writings disappearing but it touched
#
on a deep deep wound which was the lack of women's histories often when you look at collections
#
of writers except up to the modern day you know where it's changed a little bit the archives
#
are usually kept men of letters you know their notes their letters etc are all kept and maintained
#
and it's that much harder to put together the biography of India's women writers and
#
suddenly you know my tiny personal loss was moving into this much wider absence to some
#
extent with the rest of my family I think I was writing about them to try and fix something
#
in my mind that old question of where do you come from what stream some of it was gratitude
#
some of it was saying you know thank you to all of you who gave me books and reading or
#
allowed me to pester you for stories my uncle you know used to just sit there patiently
#
he was an architect and he used to sit there patiently with one or the other of us attached
#
to his leg like little limpets telling a story after story my mother my father was so generous
#
with his books and I feel that because so many people don't have that in their lives
#
it's more important for us I don't mean to be sonorous but I did feel the need to acknowledge
#
that in terms of where is home that used to be a little bit of a heartache because my
#
husband and I have never bought a home and we both come from the quintessential Calcutta
#
families where own homes either mired in legal trouble or have long since crumbled home for
#
me was maybe not so much the homes where I grew up in government circles or there was
#
a period when my father was posted to Calcutta and we shifted her houses and deadly 13 times
#
in the course of just a few years which was salutary you know it took me out of the cozy
#
and very very insulated cocoon of government life where by and large more than actual comfort
#
what you have is an absence of discomfort you see what I mean yeah and it was a wonderful
#
introduction to the city at the time I think it was a little bewildering for you know a
#
teenager to be shifting bus routes so often but when I went to Calcutta I spent about
#
four years or so as studying at La Martinier which was as open a school as I have said
#
as my former convent was a little on the close side and the house that my grandmother had
#
is again part of the vanished heritage of the city it was a wonderful old red brick
#
house you know built with one room sprawling into each other it was a fusion of styles
#
Indian and Bengali meeting British with a huge veranda that opened out onto a lawn and
#
turrets and things and books lining every room every room you know it was also a warm
#
and hospitable and convivial house and that was my strongest sense of home and it was
#
broken down more than 30 years ago and it's instructive to see how that absence has become
#
for some family members a real ache you know when a home is taken away and our home just
#
went in the normal course of things it wasn't bulldozed by a cruel administration but for
#
some people it's become a permanent ache an absence not just of a physical home but without
#
that you can get unmoored you can literally not know how to see where you come from you
#
know or what you belong to or what grew you up or shaped you in terms of shaping me as
#
a person I think my other home was always it sounds so tried to say this but it is so
#
true Amit it was in books you know that was because that was the one constant in parts
#
of my life both as a child and an adult where I was switching houses a lot you can make
#
your home in the books that you read and so there was never a point where I felt truly
#
unhoused and I just want to add that you know most of my movings around have not been particularly
#
traumatic it's not been like a partition or other refugee coming out or whatever but you
#
still feel that absence of a center okay over time the need for things has shifted I am
#
a sentimentalist and one of my great pleasures is not having you've seen the house it's
#
not particularly you know showoffy you know I don't think it's done to any style it's
#
basically a friendly conglomeration of cats and very old furniture and books all mingling
#
together and I don't think we've ever sat down and said should we design this better
#
you know even though I love walking into well-designed homes myself but I've just never got around
#
to doing that for myself the things that are precious to me are things like books that
#
are signed a poem from Shaheed a letter from Krishna Subti you know those things a painting
#
by a friend a photograph by a friend those are treasures you know an autograph from Toni
#
Morrison or Harold Pinter or Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie those are things I will treasure
#
for life because there's something about handwriting that really really speaks to me in terms of
#
other possessions every so often I give away a huge bunch of books to a local library and
#
I feel that much freer you know with furniture it's a blessing and a curse when it's family
#
furniture in a way you become the keeper of a family heritage whether you want to or not
#
and it's very difficult to let go of that if for no other reason than other people in
#
the family would mind if they came to your house and found those things not there which
#
is such an odd thing but anyway and it can be reassuring as well it can be a little part
#
of the past but increasingly I find that my pleasure in owning things in so far as that
#
was ever a part of my life that has disappeared you know the things that have given me the
#
greatest sense of challenge or curiosity in my life have been conversations and encounters
#
with people and in that I've been richer than most you know that is really that and also
#
something I just take for granted but that a lot of other writers struggle with because
#
a long time ago I chose not to have a formal job I work as a columnist I do other things
#
as well but I don't have to go check in to an office and I've always had huge amounts
#
of control over my time and we've been talking about privilege in so many different ways
#
through this conversation one of the greatest privileges you can have in this or any other
#
country as a woman is to have that control over your time and of course you know this
#
family duties even if you don't have children but those are compared to most women's lives
#
where you don't have the freedom to think about where you want to spend your time that
#
is huge let's just get back to this whole thing of possessions and how they define you
#
I think for a lot of people the first time that they move into a home of their own without
#
their family stuff is maybe the first time that they see themselves with some clarity
#
and I remember a friend of mine who was also a writer coming to my study for the first
#
time and seeing in tremendous disappointment oh but you know you you don't have a view
#
you look out over the backyard and a mango tree and I always thought that you would have
#
a room with a view and a fancy study and I said but you see the one room where I don't
#
need a view is actually the study because once you get in to the writing you don't notice
#
anything else and space you know we talk a lot about writing space and all of that I
#
think the journalist training I learned how to write anywhere I wrote the wildings and
#
the hundred names of darkness and part of the girl who ate books on the dining table
#
in our Jangpura house I wrote the rest of the girl who ate books in an empty house of
#
a friend's in Goa you know and I think that was one of my happiest writing experiences
#
in a strange way because the house being so it had some sticks of furniture but otherwise
#
it was just me and the monsoon and the book and I don't think it made the writing better
#
you know we keep hoping that miraculously space will turn you into a great writer and
#
no you know those essays are very much you can see something growing in them but they
#
are very much apprentice essays at the same time and I wrote Black River and edited a
#
lot of my anthologies in a kind of study which is also a laundry room and some of the fact
#
that it's those two spaces at the same time keeps it real do I aspire to have my own study
#
someday maybe in a theoretical way but in actual fact some years back I was lucky enough
#
to get a residency at Bellagio in Italy and we were given these incredible studies they
#
really look after you out there and it's a wonderful intellectual experience because
#
you're meeting other practitioners in different fields not just writers and every few evenings
#
is who somebody gives a talk about their work and it's like a college education it really
#
is but the first day I walk into the bedroom is beautiful enough and then I find that I've
#
been given a study that overlooks Lake Como and has perfectly appointed with the desk
#
here and the printer there and it's only your space and this peace and quiet and even
#
your lunch is going to be dropped outside your door and I sat down and I fell apart
#
and I couldn't write for the first day I just couldn't write there was something in
#
me that said how can I now create work in my haphazard way when the space demands serious
#
work you know how can I write a frivolous line how can I write a bad line and I'm joking
#
about it but it was a real problem I just sat there for a day totally stressed out looking
#
at this beautiful lake and saying I'm supposed to be a writer capital W out here and until
#
now I've been a writer small w which is what I'm comfortable with and it was only the next
#
day when I was said okay you know just get over yourself and write something and then
#
things were fine so I don't know about that formal study you know would it would I approach
#
it would I use it would I look at it with great satisfaction and arrange my books and
#
the books I love most around there and then never use it and just go back to a dining
#
table where do you create your work what enables you are you asking me I was just thinking
#
aloud and I was yes I am because you know you're a writer too and I was asking I guess
#
what you need I need silence more than anything else I can't write in a cafe but I can write
#
almost anywhere else I can write in a you know bus coming down from the hills if everyone's
#
sleeping I can write on a railway station because somehow that noise doesn't disturb
#
me that's a remarkable ability in my case the difficulty that I've had is something
#
that doesn't seem to have been a difficulty with you which is just being sort of able
#
to sit down and get the writing done and focus on the processes like I can when I am you
#
know when I have to and I'm so inclined right anywhere that's doable but in general I am
#
prey to distractions that is something that I keep fighting though I really can't complain
#
about having a study because I have now but you know a few years ago I asked myself the
#
question what is happiness for me what will make me happy and I came up with three things
#
and one of them was that I want a room full of books the second thing was I want that
#
room to be air-conditioned and the third thing was that I want to sit comfortably on a lazy
#
boy or such like in that room and read books and I had the books and I had the room and
#
I had the air conditioning and I ordered a lazy boy right away that same day and then
#
I said that okay I have no reason to complain I've got everything and where I currently
#
am in Mumbai is I've got a home studio come a writing room I've got a nice huge sit stand
#
desk from Ikea I've got a fantastic view from the 27th floor of a building I've really
#
got it all but I think finally the study you have to build is in your head where you have
#
to find that space in your head where you can actually sit down and write and free yourself
#
from distractions which is something that I struggle with but I'll you know I'll segue
#
from that brief self-indulgent digression brought about by your question and ask and
#
turn it on you and ask you what is your idea of happiness and how has it been redefined
#
because for me a fundamental shift was figuring out when I reached middle age that when we
#
are young we can make the mistake of focusing too much on goals that I want to achieve this
#
write this many books get this many awards be a writer with a capital A whereas the happiness
#
is in the small joys those goals can actually be toxic because they can give you anxiety
#
and stress and frustration and sadness but if you just revel in the small joys because
#
happiness is a choice it's not something that happens to you you can choose to be happy
#
and one way of choosing to be happy is by seeing the many ways in which you are fortunate
#
and you know just reveling in that and and that for me would perhaps mean now that I
#
think of it you said it so beautifully writer with a capital D W that could mean turning
#
from a writer with a capital W to turning with the small w writer right so how have
#
you sort of looked at your life like what did you want when you were younger what do
#
you want today with the passage of years like if you had to go back to the young Nilanjana
#
of 25 years ago and give her advice that would make her happier in her journey what would
#
I tell her to stop worrying about what other people thought and I would just tell her to
#
trust her instincts and to trust her talent for joy because that was one of the gifts
#
I always had I don't know why but it's been a great gift just as some people it runs hand
#
in hand with the tendency to some melancholy or obsession when the country is going to
#
a face like this but I think one of the things I realized over time was I was often retrospectively
#
happy you see it's now looking back I don't see a time ever in any decade that I remember
#
that I've read about when India was perfect but I do know empirically speaking that the
#
1990s and the 2000s for all the flaws of the country and for all the moments of you know
#
when one person or another was persecuted I do know that the air of the country was
#
freer and in that respect I look back and instead of choosing to be sad or dismayed
#
today I tell myself that we were very lucky to know what it's like to be in a reasonably
#
free country and to have that expectation from the people who are supposed to serve
#
us and who actually ruled us.
#
In terms of writing for years I think I lived a very stressed out life in my 20s and 30s
#
the 30s parts of it were difficult beyond measure I don't want to talk about all of
#
that but I was still dealing with the debris from the past.
#
On the surface of things I could tell myself that whatever sadness I was dealing with was
#
shared by many other people who were similar but the truth is I had suppressed some of
#
that pain for many years and when it came bursting out it came bursting out in ways
#
that were extremely destructive and it's funny how you come through that kind of despair
#
into a kind of honesty at some point you realise there's no point really being false to yourself
#
there's no point also sorrowing too much about a past that cannot be changed and you
#
take one step after another into we keep talking about healing but I think back into life into
#
a life that you had so briefly but emphatically abandoned and for me writing became easy when
#
I gave myself permission to feel.
#
For years I'd been held back by the fact that I had been such a reader and I used to
#
just start off a project and then stop thinking you know but Nadine Gautama but Alice Monroe
#
how can I ever write anything of that beauty but this but that and at some point I said
#
okay I don't care you know there's a story that's bursting out of me there are characters
#
walking around in my head there's this thing I can see and let me at least just get that
#
down to paper and when I did and I had a book I said I don't care if people love I don't
#
care if they don't love this let me just do it for the work and somehow that freed
#
something in me of course I don't mean that you just write any old thing down there's
#
a value to you know the whole thing of not just craft but trying to find your voice and
#
trying to be true to the story and messing it up and but at the same time trying to do
#
At some point you see what happened was now if I ask myself what I lack what's getting
#
in the way of happiness there's uncertainty there's sadness about the pathways that many
#
of my country people have chosen there's great fear for a lot of people I love who have already
#
been touched by the grimness of these times all right and none of that is in my power
#
to change except in very small ways through acts of tiny empathy or something of the sort
#
I'm not an activist I'm not a politician I have a powerful voice sometimes but these
#
days it's become such a game of hopscotch for everybody to figure out what they can say
#
and what they can't say and I find that even friends who used to be very outspoken and
#
very fearless have been ground down a little bit that's the unhappy side of things and
#
the greatest part of my unhappiness is just you know like a child you're saying again
#
I wish people were good to each other I wish people stopped fighting each other I wish
#
there was no war I wish this I wish that right the part where I draw an abiding amount of
#
happiness from is something that sounds cheesy but that I actually believe that everybody
#
should do I started a gratitude practice many years ago along with a little bit of meditation
#
the meditation practice which I continue is probably a failure I'm still the same person
#
I was I still have the same flaws I still have a temper you know it has not turned me
#
into a wonderfully spiritual Syrian person it has just deepened a few things for me and
#
the value of that has been inexpressible but I started first very self-consciously and
#
then with increasing gladness a gratitude practice and it taught me one of those old
#
truths you know it's like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz there's no place like home you're already
#
where you need to be you just need to click on the ruby snippers thrice and I think what
#
it taught me is there are things I could theoretically change I could ask for a home or a study or
#
this success or that success but there's never been a time in my life that I've been without
#
friends without love without books without joy without curiosity even in the saddest
#
most despairing moments there's been solidarity there's been a movement towards more integrity
#
and by integrity I don't mean just verbal lip service honesty I mean an integrity of
#
being you know where all the disparate parts of you start to come together and we start
#
to hopefully live and write for yourself I don't like being selfish but I do have a lot
#
of self-respect these days and to my surprise I find that my happiness is here my happiness
#
is right here in the middle of imperfection and chaos and all of that but I don't think
#
there has been a day when I haven't been aware and I don't mean in a smarmy way I just mean
#
that there hasn't been a day when I haven't been aware of the limitless possibilities
#
of life writing reading life creating just being around friends we are given so much
#
and it's helped me to pay attention to that it's helped me to just feel not you know a
#
writer capital W but just somebody who is part of this flow that we are only immersed
#
in whether we know it or not of just trying to you know just trying to spend our lives
#
not necessarily doing something grand or grandiose so you know filled with vast meaning but tiny
#
little things you know that taken together just make your life a little better and hopefully
#
appeal to others as well just that.
#
You know you mentioned not wanting to be selfish but I was just advising a friend of mine yesterday
#
on a situation that he's found himself in and I told him that when you want to be empathetic
#
you should always also remember to be empathetic towards yourself and not just empathetic towards
#
yourself at this current moment but also perhaps empathetic towards your future self and think
#
about how everything that you do today and every choice that you make today impacts your
#
future self as well so that's kind of just thinking aloud. A broader question again which
#
is also in a sense I guess a personal question but is also a broader question because it
#
will get you talking about the country in these times if we are all fish swimming in
#
water and not noticing the water that water also in India that water also is our linguistic
#
heritage in the sense of wonderful languages we are surrounded by like one of the ways
#
in which I think this is a great country to be a writer in is not just that we are surrounded
#
by so many stories that there is so much happening around us but also that we have access to
#
so many languages that by default all of us are sort of multilingual and you know that
#
has an importance you've written in your book about Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's experiments
#
with you know writing in English and so on and you've also mentioned earlier in this
#
conversation about the dilemmas over authenticity and the different languages and you mentioned
#
you don't write in Hindi because of Aukat. How deep a role does being able to read and
#
write and listen and talk in other languages play in even sort of what we write in English
#
for example because I would imagine that our imaginative life and all of that it's just
#
deeper and richer because we have access to so many worlds and languages are a big part
#
of that and as a corollary to that is it then a worry that there might at some point be
#
a certain homogenization happening in terms of the languages that we speak where if you
#
look at every language like you correctly I think mentioned earlier in this conversation
#
that if Hindi is a river there are hundreds of tributaries you didn't use these words
#
but I'm stuck with river and tributaries now and so on and so forth and there's a danger
#
then that and of course there was a political movement to go towards a particular kind of
#
Hindi where all you know the Shudh Hindi where Persian and Arabic and all those influences
#
has been stripped away and that movement can never succeed because people speak the way
#
they speak but in the same way that you know bananas were sort of homogenized like I had
#
an episode with our mutual friend Vikram doctor a long time ago on Indian food and he spoke
#
about the Cavendish banana that there is something called a Cavendish banana which India export
#
that you know it goes from India to the world and then out there it is mass produced and
#
it has these certain merits which are you know which work for it one of them being that
#
it stays well and so on and so forth and then it completely dominates a western landscape
#
and then they export it back here and now it is rapidly replacing all indigenous kind
#
of bananas and we have a diversity of bananas and somehow if you go to a supermarket today
#
the chances are that all you will find is a Cavendish banana unless you know which local
#
market to go to and where to look and all of that and I worry that there might be sort
#
of a similar thing happening to language in two ways one is that English has become such
#
a tremendous language of aspiration that people just gravitate towards that and there might
#
be local sort of local cultures which might be lost because of that and also within the
#
languages itself there seems to be a mainstreaming like a friend of mine who writes in a particular
#
dialect of Kannada was sharing his sort of situation with me where he said that my instinct
#
is to write in this Kannada which I grew up in speaking thinking and all that but the
#
point is that if I do this you forget the wider market but even within the Kannada audiences
#
he'll be a tiny nation may just die out because some dialects are dying some languages are
#
dying so you know given all the writing and the reading that you've done that you've
#
read so much in multiple languages as well which to my shame I haven't you know what
#
are what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
I was thinking of J.N. Devi's work professor J.N. Devi's work you know the great scholar
#
who's been spent a lifetime practically now championing defending tracking mapping the
#
many languages that we have that river keeps coming back from time to time so you think
#
of what happens to a river when it's dammed and when it loses its natural flow and starts
#
going stagnant that's what you do when you try to play power games with one language
#
or the other what I find fascinating about English it's been around only for three centuries
#
it is a little bit of a strangler fig you know as a language where English comes in
#
the language that I lost in between English Bengali and Hindi was my father's language
#
Uriya because you know somehow you're trying to keep all of those you need to speak Hindi
#
because you're in Delhi Bengali is the home you know it's just his home and English is
#
the language in which you conduct your life you see what I mean?
#
You can have two languages to dream in very few of us can dream in more than that so the
#
fear among a lot of people who watch Indian languages is that you also don't want a language
#
one of the big five or six Hindi Gujarati Bengali Tamil Madhyadam you don't want them
#
to drown out the others I don't think we realize or we keep coming back in this conversation
#
to what you value you know do you value becoming a best-selling writer or do you value the
#
work itself is that a tension between the two things or can you make that work on the
#
same page and with languages it's a automatic belief that bigger more speakers is better
#
it robs us of a lot of sweetness I remember when translators came to Hindi first there's
#
also a generational learning with translation right so the first translators of Hindi and
#
Bengali would translate archaic Bengali into archaic English and then we left with the
#
language that was dead on the page that had none of the life of English or none of the
#
life of Bengali either over time they've learned to dance you know translators like Arunava
#
Sinha and Bengali or you know a score of others Kanyan Raman etc. they sing there's a recent
#
translation of Alipura and Gitanjali Sri of course Daisy Rockwell where you can sense
#
these two languages in communication you know sort of overlapping dancing but very comfortable
#
with each other I think we often the hunger for us growing up as young aspirational parts
#
of this new modernizing India and modernity was a big thing the focus was on almost relentlessly
#
on you must learn French or Spanish or German or something like that in order to be a true
#
world citizen and who was saying if you come from the north or the east why don't you want
#
to learn Kannada or Telugu or Madhyanam or Tamil you know it took me years to understand
#
the kind of legacy that we have out here the projects about sanitization Vikram doctor
#
is wise with his story about the Cavendish banana because it's not that it can't happen
#
give these things enough time and enough political force and money behind them and one dominant
#
kind of Hindi can take over or one dominant kind of any other language English or whatever
#
but if you notice how much Indians have changed English first we came to it and we are writing
#
like the English many centuries ago but we are taking away their daffodils and putting
#
in our amaltas you know we are writing like the golden and the silver poets but somewhere
#
there's an Indian place setting at least moving in then a few more generations go by we start
#
getting comfortable with this alien tongue and then we start pushing it towards our forms
#
of writing a few more generations and a Rushni emerges before him there's a Jeevi Desani
#
these rivers of language are alive what we endanger off in this country is choking off
#
the tiny streams you see or even when Gitanjali Sri won the book international it was a big
#
moment but there was an immediate sense of this will benefit Hindi language books this
#
country has so many languages why shouldn't it benefit all of those and as far as the
#
West is concerned and I'm speaking directly of the market here not of the people of the
#
West I found it tragic that people either separate Indian writing in English from translations
#
that's not how I read that's not how anybody reads and you shouldn't feel ashamed about
#
not reading in your local language it's just I know everyone has a paucity of time and
#
it's hard enough to keep up with reading in one language it's just it's a pleasure to
#
discover that if you ever have the time for it at some point of time we don't like going
#
back to being learners but it is one of the greatest joys of your life I wish my Hindi
#
and Bengali was stronger and I could write in them with as much fluency as I read how
#
has reading in them changed me inexorably I don't really know whether I'm an Indian
#
English writer or I'm just an Indian writer or whether I'm just a writer floating around
#
in space but somewhere at the back of my English there are all the worlds of an Asapurna Devi
#
or Mahashweta Devi in Bangda I don't know how they influence me I just know that they're
#
there and I know that I can't imagine my I don't have to choose thankfully but I can't
#
imagine my writing without the poetry of Aghe and Akshay Mukul of course is going to be
#
doing that biography or I can't imagine it without the translations I read of Mantu short
#
stories or Ismat Jhukdai, Kuru Tune and Haider, Amrita Preetam there's a world out there
#
they're mine you know and I love being able to claim all of them from Girish Karnad to
#
all the writers I love they're mine I don't have to choose between those different heritages
#
they are yours and you should claim them but you should also share some of them so I'll
#
end with my last question I mean I could go on for another five hours but maybe some other
#
day but so my last question is that you know why don't you recommend for me and my listeners
#
you know books that have meant a lot to you that you just love like not in terms of some
#
objective merit or worthy books or whatever but just books that mean a lot to you that
#
make you smile that make you feel something and that you would like to share with me and
#
my readers and you feel that we absolutely must you know as soon as this episode ends
#
start reading them right away well that's such a lovely question and I'm gonna have
#
to stop at just a few but I would say if you're reading in the present ish you know if you
#
haven't yet it doesn't have to be books that have just come out is that anything at all
#
from your childhood you mentioned in your book you mentioned like the adventures of
#
Dennis and all those Russian books from the childhood you can go wherever I mean there
#
are so many books I've loved but I think the ones that stay with me all of Toni Morrison's
#
work Salman Rushdie two books in particular Harun and the Sea of Stories which was talismanic
#
for me in the period when India was suddenly you know growing constrained and you felt
#
that there was a Khatam Shuddh out there and somewhere you know his metaphor of that ocean
#
of Sea of Stories that's been very meaningful to me that you know that lovely fable about
#
the ocean can get choked it can even almost die but that hope that someday it will be
#
unpolluted and the streams of stories will run poetry Jeet has a brilliant anthology
#
out of a huge you know door stopper of an anthology out of English poetry Indian poetry
#
in English and I think it was Eunice together with Melanie Selgardo was that right who had
#
a huge anthology out of just Indian poetry in general I'm going to stay on poetry for
#
a while because I must recommend Priya Sarukhai Chhabra's Translations of Andal and Ranjith
#
Hoskothi's Translations of Lal Deed have I said Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Gochar yet
#
you haven't but that's one of my favorite books as well and what a translation all-time
#
favorites all-time favorites definitely that a book to read now I was thinking of it recently
#
but Kuruthunen Haider's Agadarya River Fire for sure I should stop now because I think
#
I'm recommending too much but there's no such thing as too much I just want to recommend
#
a book for every category that exists you see but if you love free speech if you love
#
thinking about societies and how they constructed Ursula K. Le Guin and three stories particularly
#
one was a classic the ones who walk away from Amidas about the price you will pay for the
#
perfect or not pay for the perfect society the left hand of darkness for sure in fact
#
most of her books I'm going to not you know recite the entire list Alice Mandu's short
#
stories I'm so glad that you like them too but they've been an education for me over
#
the years Girish Karnad's plays if you want to understand today's politics then again
#
I would recommend a great deal of Mahashweta Devi's extremely wide over including Mother
#
of 1084 you know in tribute to all the prisoners out here in our own time I am partial to there's
#
too many nonfiction writers so I'm just going to leave them to one side and with great apologies
#
or whatever but I would say if you really want a mix of a reading list for yourself
#
pick some poetry pick some plays chuck a few novels on that heap and pick any two histories
#
or books of nonfiction a book that I really want to recommend is by Eddie Ong you know
#
where he's writing about animals and their perception of the world I know that's coming
#
from left field and I just said no nonfiction and I'm breaking that rule but I like books
#
like that because they wake your mind up you know so I think we've yeah yeah we've gone
#
through and in your book you mentioned how much you liked what is perhaps my favorite
#
book of poetry from an Indian which is Jejuri by Arun Kolhatkar which is so dear to me so
#
astonishing also Agha Shaheed Ali's country without a post office absolutely yeah one
#
of his early classics I could go on forever but you know just maybe it's best to stop
#
and use these as starting points and let everyone do their own exploring among their bookshelves
#
but these are some of my favorites these are not all of the books that have impacted me
#
did I just use impacted in that book you used impacted it's shocking all my students are
#
saying but Amit says don't use words like these there you go I can't believe I did that
#
but let's say there are books that I've loved there's books that I've enjoyed and there
#
are books that have shaped me at different parts of my life and one last one you know
#
that's been enduring has been A.K.
#
Ramanuja his poems his essays I think sometimes when a writer's essays is banned you only
#
see them through that lens but A.K.
#
Ramanuja's translations of Sangam poets were among the first things that just made me realize
#
that the past is not yet over that it's still something that can speak to us directly across
#
the centuries and everything that he wrote about our common heritage of folk tales how
#
to read a myth how to understand it as part of our history but not so rigid you know not
#
so damaging something that is open and expansive I think I gravitate instinctively to those
#
Indian writers who made themselves at home in the world and so the last one one of my
#
old favorites Kabir of course you can either read his poems in the original or you can
#
read Arvind Krishna Mehrutra's radical re-translations and you know transmigrations of them but just
#
go for it either way I love Mehrutra's collection of Kabir's work and Heraclitus once said that
#
no one steps in the same river twice and what you're sort of reminding us with this is that
#
we all actually swim in the same river you know from the past to now and so on and so
#
forth so thank you so much for coming on the show I'm glad we finally made it happen I
#
know but thank you for letting me go on and on and I just hope I haven't tied your listeners
#
out they will let you know that you haven't okay thank you so much I mean this was a
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
#
also head on over to your nearest bookstore and pick up all of Nilanjana's books you can
#
follow Nilanjana on Twitter at Nilanjana Roy you can follow me at Amit Verma AMI-TV ARMA
#
you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot IN thank
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support
#
the production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot IN slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
