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One of the lessons we learn in life is that we should not invest in things but in experiences,
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knowledge and relationships.
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I've been thinking about one particular kind of relationship recently – friendship.
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What makes people friends?
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I was sitting the other day with a friend of mine who comes over about once a year and
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Friendship meant that you could sit with someone for a long time and neither of you felt the
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You were both, in that time, comfortable in your own skins and comfortable in that shared
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Another quality of friendship that I value is that you can be yourself with a friend.
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And this should apply for both people.
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I realized that with some friends, we could just say what we wanted to each other – no
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offense taken, no hidden narratives.
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But with others, I had the sense that they held back, that they weighed their words and
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actions, that they thought things about you that they wouldn't actually say to you.
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And sometimes they wouldn't even assume goodwill, which is a cardinal role of every
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conversation or relationship with me – that you assume the other person means well, unless
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you have concrete reason not to.
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I decided to try to be less and less with this kind of person.
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It takes away too much mental energy to be so calculating about friendships, to be getting
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meta about what another person may be thinking.
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Friendships are also different depending on gender.
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Men carry this burden of masculinity – you're not supposed to express your emotions.
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And sometimes, that may even stop you from expressing your feelings to yourself.
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Another question that strikes me about friendship is how it forms.
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Back in the days before the internet, you were restricted by geography to communities
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Today, we can form communities of choice.
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But can a friendship be virtual?
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Can you feel close to a person you've never met and you may not even know what they look
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I've had reason to think about that as well.
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I don't have answers to all these questions, but I do know that I should not take friendships
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for granted, as perhaps I used to once.
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The material things in our life, they are cold and only there to serve a purpose.
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The people we surround ourselves with, they make all this worthwhile.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is my old and dear friend, Chandrahars Chaudhary.
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We met as colleagues in the early 2000s at Crick and Faux.
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We were both early bloggers.
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He went on to a flourishing career as a literary critic and book reviewer.
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He wrote three novels, edited different anthologies and wrote a charming book of literary and
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personal essays called My Country is Literature.
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I'll link all of these from the show notes.
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We used to hang out a lot together in the autees, but I've come to like and respect
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him more and more as the years have gone by.
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With hash, as his friends call him, what you see is what you get.
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There is not a shred of artifice to him.
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He is always true to himself and to the moment he is in.
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He also engages deeply with the world, whether he is writing or cooking or reading.
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And maybe this begins by his engaging deeply with literature.
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He is one of the best readers I know.
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I feel I have a lot to learn from hash about reading and writing and literature, but the
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conversation you will now hear, I mean, I hope you'll hear it, covers a lot of other
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It gave me a lot to think about and I hope you enjoy it as well.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students and vibrant community interaction.
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs rupees 10,000 per GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash clear writing.
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That's india uncut dot com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Chandrasekhar, welcome to the scene on the unseen.
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So I was reading your excellent introductory essay in your book, My Country is Literature.
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And a lot of memories also came back because you've sort of written in that about your
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young years in Bombay as a young writer and working and we were colleagues at that time.
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And those were sort of early years for me as well.
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And maybe in a sense, finding ourselves as sort of people.
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And when we met outside, you told me something very interesting, like you mentioned how you
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met a mutual friend of ours from Crick and Four, Rahul Bhattacharya, recently in Calcutta.
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I thought of you back then when you were both in Crick and Four as young whippersnappers
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and it's difficult for me to make the mental adjustment where I now, now you're middle
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And you said something interesting.
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You said that, however, you know, you'll always think of me as someone in his early thirties
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because that's when you first met me and I will always think of you as a young whippersnapper
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and to meet old friends is therefore to be transported back to a different time and place
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and so on and so forth.
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So for someone who is more social than me and presumably has more friends than me, tell
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me a little bit about, you know, your view of friendships because I had a guest on the
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show, Abhinandan Sekri, who said something very interesting.
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He said after the age of 25, he's not made any friends.
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Everyone he knows is from before that.
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I find with me it's almost the other way around.
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And partly because of course, the internet and everything that happened exposed me to
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a whole bunch of new people.
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But also because I changed a lot and therefore anyone who would have been in my friend at
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20, God knows why that would have been the case for them.
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You know, I'm a totally different person.
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So what's your view of this?
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Well, I think it's a great question to start off on because I'm a late arrival on your
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But I'm not sure a lot of your guests have the same history that you and I have, isn't
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And that is something to remember and celebrate because as I recall, we met for the first
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time, although I'd read you before and perhaps you might have just heard of me, new arrival
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We met in the last week of June 2003, only about a five minute auto ride from where we're
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sitting right now in your studio.
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So in a sense, it's a full circle for us today after nearly 20 years.
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And I was 23 and so excited to be having my first job.
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And I think you had been around a while and had this kind of like star appeal for the
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younger writers because you were, I think you were there six years between us, you were
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And just as you're sitting across this table now, perhaps there was double the distance
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between us, but for some reason, fate, and there is such a thing as fate, I do believe
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now, at least like life seems to have taught me.
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So fate had put us in one line.
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And as I recall, at the time, you know, it was, it's a shock for anybody, any young person
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out of university to start to go to work and realize that whatever that that glamour that
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attached itself to that world from outside, you know, collapses very, very swiftly, especially
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when you find out having an afternoon nap is frowned on.
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But I think we used to, my default gesture in at work the two years I was there was to
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And as you used to keep saying to autodrivers when you used to go leftward ho jayiye, leftist
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So you turn right to me.
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You turn left and we would discuss some New Yorker piece or some essay, my passions, your
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passions, which have always been quite different, but we have enjoyed sharing them and sometimes
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facing off, you know, with opposition and enjoying that disputatiousness.
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And actually, yeah, this is also the time speaking of friendship.
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Maybe I'll say a few things about friendship in general before segueing back, which is
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that, I mean, first of all, to finish my point here, is there anything so consoling and fulfilling
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on sweet and life as old friendships rekindled or, you know, you don't have to say anything.
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I find lots of times when I see my friends now after the first thrill of chat for hours
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and hours, you lapse into a kind of companionable silence.
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You don't need to say a lot to each other.
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But it's enjoyable to inhabit the same space and, you know, just say a word or two or look
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at each other, things like that.
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And my dream is, you know, everybody has a dream.
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I would love to at some point in my life live in a street where all my friends lived in
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houses down the street.
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Although I know, you know, your friends, as you must also know, your friends are necessarily
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not friends of each other and they can cause conflict by sometimes, you know, so that way
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life always gives you one extra problem to solve every time you solve something.
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But I think in my life, as it's turned out, friendship is a very, very big place.
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And in the end, I think it is the defining category of human communication.
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Love is a very big thing.
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Friendship is also a kind of love.
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But since in our culture, the word love has sort of been, leans a bit towards either romantic
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love or the love for parents and for family.
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In the end, I think friendship is a more egalitarian and democratic ideal where you can be friends
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with anybody at half an hour.
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You know, some of the deepest chats of my life have been people I've never seen more
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And in that sense, I think it's so liberating to realize that you don't, friendship need
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not be a function of time.
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It just needs to be a function of energy and attitude and the wonderful serendipity of
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life, which I think as 20th century people born in the 60s and 70s, we've had the great
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fortune to enjoy ease of range and reach that perhaps our fathers or mothers perhaps having
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the same instincts would never have to live in much smaller social spheres.
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So I think in that sense, Bombay is very important to me as the very difficult learning ground
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of friendship because in my 20s, just like you, I was perhaps a bit more, much more introverted
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and I really struggled to make relationships other than the ones I relied on.
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And reflexively, when you want to see somebody, you'd go back to someone you already knew.
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But I thought I'd finish by reading a small passage from my new book, My Country's Literature,
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which actually has to do with you.
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And in a way, it's also what I owe you because, you know, like every young person, I firmly
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believe that every young person, whether man or woman, needs somebody a touch older to
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hold your hand a bit of the way because you really don't know.
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There's a thing about being young.
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You don't know what lies ahead of you.
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And I always remember it was very generous of you suddenly to give away one of your two
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very famous blogs at the time.
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You had India Uncut in the middle stage and you were away, I think, doing a cyclone perhaps
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in the tsunami in Chennai and you said, why don't you just post a few things while I'm
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And I really obviously took to it because every young writer thirsts for an audience
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and not having an audience and suddenly finding I had one, which is your audience.
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I suddenly realized what a great pleasure it was.
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And you could have always said, you know, now you start off on your own, but you gave
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me your house, so to speak, virtually.
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And this is my memory in my book, this little memoir.
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So there's one paragraph about this.
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The sudden mushrooming of a literary subculture in the early years of the 2000s, a subculture
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of personal web blogs, also provided an escape from constrictions of the formal book review
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and the mainstream media.
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I entered this realm under the benign supervision of one of the great influences of my life
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in my 20s, the Mumbai writer, Amit Verma, first encountered during my two years stint
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in the offices of Crick and Fo, where his desk was exactly across the aisle from mine.
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All day long, we exchanged snippets of conversation about cricket, American journalism, novels,
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Bombay and the meaning of freedom, both in the standard and this was a Verma pet cause
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in the libertarian sense of the word, while after 5pm, when restrictions were lifted,
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we tussled with bat and rubber ball in ferocious test matches down the very same corridor,
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thereby spending our day across the two axis of a sort of cross.
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My literary weblog, The Middle Stage, is actually a space that he had set up, created a readership
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for, and then generously conceded once I'd written a few guest posts for it.
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So I think this is the chance to say on your show, thank you.
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I mean, I know that many people can thank you for all sorts of things.
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No one can thank you for this.
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I mean, when I first read that, I have to confess I almost teared up because I would
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not have imagined I would be that anyone would describe me as an influence.
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You are being a little too self-debrogating.
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No, I mean, I should own your influence happily.
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I think back on myself at that time and I wonder how can those who are lost lead others?
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That's sort of what it feels like.
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But the cricket was of course, great fun.
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And we used to play with this little ball, which was halfway between plastic and a squeezy
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And I had mastered this particular sort of imparting forward and backward spin on it.
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And that forward spin would rush across at great pace.
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You are the only spin, spin, swing baller in the history of cricket.
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In the history of cricket and Rahul Dravid came once to our office, I bowled three balls
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The first one was a white, the next two he was bold.
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And then he said, then he called me Shoaib and refused to play anymore.
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And I was thinking Shoaib chucks.
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I'm not even, I'm not chucking.
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No, no, but you were of course, a far better player than me.
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And you've actually played at a decent level.
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You played for Trinity College, right?
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Yeah, it wasn't a decent level.
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It was a decent environment rather.
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There's nothing more pleasurable, although I haven't played for many years, than cricket
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English summer afternoon with the blue sky and white clouds above and the green grass
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And especially, I mean, this is where I realized the strange, the sound that a new ball makes
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in the air as you bowl it.
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Not too fast, clearly, in my case, where you can even listen to it going down, but it makes
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a little ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sound like a cricket.
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And then, you know, either it goes past the bat or it makes a much bigger sound as it
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gets sent off somewhere into the wilds.
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But yeah, it was such a big part of my life that I think in the end, like with so many
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things, when I renounced it, I did it completely.
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I left no doors open for it to sneak in anywhere.
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In your footnotes to this, where you mentioned me here, you said that you have described
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your time with me and other mutual friends like Sonia and Rahul and all that in an essay
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called The Drinking Companions of My Youth, which I Googled for fantically and did not
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And you have now told me it was made up.
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But while Googling for it, I actually came across a piece where you and I share a byline,
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which we wrote together, apparently on 26 October 2003 for Cricket 4.
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And it is a bizarre piece to co-write with someone because it's like really short and
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it's the title of the piece is Two Men Who Left Herd Man Alone.
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Yes, I think it's a bit of stats analysis we did together.
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I'm looking at it and I can't figure out which part could be yours, which part could be mine.
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I have zero memory of it.
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And the writing is a little callow, so it's probably me.
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I was even callower than you.
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Let us not compete for callowness now.
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Yeah, in our youth, let us not compete for callowness.
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No, the interesting thing about your essay is one thing that I found is whenever I've
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had old friends on the show who I've known before and really from blogging times, I find
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that I discover little aspects of them that I had never known.
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So I could be friends with someone for 15, 16 years and never understood this.
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And this essay, for example, gave me not just obviously more knowledge about all the things
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you did in the years when we weren't colleagues or whatever, but even gave me context for
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Because sure, you worked with me in Crick and Four, but I had no context of where it
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is in your life or the journey that you're on or what's happening and all of that.
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So in the spirit of finding out more about old friends, I'll ask you to kind of take
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Take me back to your childhood.
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Wherever you were born.
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What was your childhood like?
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Tell me a bit about that.
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Well, I mean, I'm trying to think of what is interesting about my biography.
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That is a better and rather than you could suffer the curse of knowledge here and you
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could think that things which feel banal and commonplace to you could be interesting to
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Well, let's put it this way.
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I think the most the as I look back on my life now at nearly 42, I think the most durable
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influences of my first 12 or 13 years, I think where my parents parents marriage and the
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circumstances in which they married, obviously, I didn't know until I was a bit older.
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But I remember a day when we moved to Orissa.
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I grew up in several small towns around India and my parents used to work in LIC.
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I remember one day they got posted back to Orissa, which is where my parents are from.
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And one day my mother said, come, let's go somewhere.
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And we got into a cycle rickshaw and we went somewhere and stopped outside her house.
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And two old people came toodling out, you know, like those dolls in a play.
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And I looked a little questioningly at my mother, who are these?
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And she said, this is my mommy and daddy.
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And the very fact that it had never occurred to me that your parents are parents showed
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what a gap there was in the very unusual in the India of the time between my parents and
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So I think my mother and father met at training school in LIC and decided to get married very
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much against my mother's parents wishes because she was a higher caste than my father was.
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Looking back now, I never asked him about it because he passed away when I was 22.
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But this must have been very upsetting for my father as a man who grew up in a village
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and really met his way up in the world and was the first person in his family to go to
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university, I think to be rejected without even being interviewed, so to speak, for the
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So they always had a very fractious relationship and really could never sort out the issues.
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You know, it was very looking back now, you know, at our confusions in our 20s, you think
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when you get married at that age and you have lost that layer above you, people to help
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you with your troubles.
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The chances are very, very low.
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So that was our environment at home as a result of which perhaps I became very bookish in
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That was my one source of consolation growing up.
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And my father was tremendously, I've written about him in my book for the first time, I
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He was a tremendously dynamic and inspiring figure who suddenly transplanted his dreams
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My son will be a writer.
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I don't think I can, but you know, I can groom this person.
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So I had books on tap, which is wonderful for a middle class family at that time.
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And my father was very proud of me.
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And he actually used to say to me, you should write every day.
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I mean, I started doing it, then you would say, now you can't let up.
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Now you've, I was almost like, you know, that what is called a pathway dependency in economics.
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I know you like economic concepts, so I've prepared two or three to throw in.
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I hope I understand what you mean when you use them.
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By age 12, I was in a pathway dependent state, you know, having done all the groundwork to
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become a writer under my father's careful supervision.
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And I think spiritually and in a way, romantically, I think the greatest love affair of my life
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began on June 28, 1989, when we arrived in Bombay for the first time.
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My parents had gotten transferred here.
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We moved to a small apartment in Borivali.
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And I think to live in, I've forgotten now exactly when you arrived in Bombay.
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It was sometime during the 90s, I'm sure.
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I think to live in Bombay during the 90s was to have an amazing kind of education in a
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certain kind of Indianness and a certain kind of life and a certain kind of urbanism and
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a certain kind of multiculturalism.
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And all those things are subconsciously, although it was a very fractious decade in Bombay,
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And perhaps you might say we have never completely gone past 1992 and the riots of 92.
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In some ways, we have become a more ghettoized city.
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Even so, for a young person, it was a tremendous education for whatever my parents could manage.
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And from then on, I've always had a special feeling for Bombay, because although I love
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Delhi as well, I've written an essay about both cities.
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When a city has claim over your childhood, no city of an adulthood can match it, because
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those feelings go past your ability to rationally analyze them at the time.
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So there was special charge and beauty that you will never get from the time you're adult.
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And in that way, even now I find I've been in Bombay the last week, all I want to do,
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I make plans to meet friends, but all I really want to do is take buses and trains randomly
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and look at buildings and pull up my memories through chance.
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So that, I think, is my childhood.
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And then I think I went to Xavier's, like perhaps you also?
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I went to Xavier's for a bit, where perhaps there was no distinction about that, except
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that I'm perhaps met the first really good writer of my life, one on one, not with my
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Because my father did intervene and he was very happy to come to Bombay because it felt
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like now there's access to all these Bombay writers, I've written about a few of them
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But I met Eunice D'Souza, who was a very interesting and intriguing presence at the time.
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She was like no teacher I'd met before.
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First of all, she was hugely sarcastic and always looked bored with you.
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So you almost had to work to impress her.
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And I didn't spend a lot of time under supervision, but I could see that there was something very
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And what was interesting about her seemed to come from literature.
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This was an interesting insight that you read books, I don't think I knew a lot of other
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literary people then, that you read books to also grow a certain secret kind of self
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that is not easily readable by the world.
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And I think this almost feels a good model for a teacher to follow.
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Do not give yourself away completely.
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Keep something in reserve to, not out of a deliberate strategy, but just because it should
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be hard work to realize all the things that are there, the doorways that can open.
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You cannot be an open book, so to speak.
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The pathologies you wrote about your father in that essay are, of course, very, you know,
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And in some ways, it reminded me of my own dad who died last year, who had a perhaps
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a more privileged path than your dad did.
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You speak about how, you know, your dad wanted you to rise.
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You write, I'll just quote that bit where you say about your father, quote, he wanted
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me to rise above our middle class life in the same proportion as he had risen into it.
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You know, you talk about how he gets you books, his great generosity with books and how he
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would go, you know, try to promote your early writing, go and meet different writers, ask
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them for advice and all of that.
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I was also struck by this interesting sentence where you wrote, quote, your father will always
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love you, but you must also earn his respect.
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And when you kind of shape yourself and you think about the things that you want in life,
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how much were they kind of shaped by that, shaped by that direction that your father
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was pushing you towards and the dream that he saw for you.
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And is that something, is that a thought that you go back to?
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Yes, you know, actually that line, your father will always love you, but you must earn his
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I mean, did you find yourself thinking when you read it, is it something that I was interpreting
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his attitude or was it something he said?
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It's not clear who says it.
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No, in the sense that you say it, that's what I thought in the passage.
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But you know, this actually, writing novels gives you a certain ability to use indirect
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You were using free indirect.
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It's actually something my father said to me, you know, and at the time it was something
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that made me think a lot.
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And what does this actually mean?
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You know, you're too naive to work out, but what does it mean that respect and so is something
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different from, does it mean there's two levels of relationship, I can achieve both or only
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And, you know, one never loses one's parents inheritance as Indians, who should know this
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better than us Indians.
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But that inheritance, I think that's why I wanted to write about him here, because his
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inheritance is very complicated and I spent my entire life unpicking the good bits from
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It was by no means uniformly benign or generous or, you know, there's always also an element
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of competition in it and of pressure, of control, as it is with many parents.
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And sadly, he didn't live long enough for us to be able to have a conversation about
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So, you know, these are mental conversations you have.
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And actually, I feel, you know, the older you grow, and especially if you work in art,
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you realize that dead are never really dead in so many ways.
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I mean, even this line can be interpreted in a hundred different ways.
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But you can actually make peace with somebody even afterwards, when it's a bit too late.
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And in that sense, I think, in the last few years, I found myself having very interesting
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conversations with my father in a sort of imaginative space where I don't feel there
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is that trauma or that difficulty anymore.
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And in that way, I think, what I really credit him for is being a tremendously interesting
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and dynamic man in a way that I actually find myself in a bizarre way resembling him more
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And it's so strange that you wait so long, your father wants you to be like him, but
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you're not going to let him have that gift easily.
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And in that way, you know, I think it actually leads me to the issue of whether masculinity
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is the same kind of burden or training or inheritance to bear as femininity is.
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Do women go through the same kinds of learning and conflicts with their mothers as men do
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I would perhaps say we need not equalize it to this extent, there could be very specific
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kinds of things that you only go through that is true for one gender.
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It did leave me with the problem, though, I think, both of having a very pressuring
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man in charge of me all of my childhood, and then him suddenly disappearing when I became
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an adult and leaving me completely lost about how to deal with all those things that you
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are then ready for, which would never be at the age of 12 or 13.
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And of course, one never knows this at the time, you can only look back and find these
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That's the whole thing about life that, you know, many of its truths appear only when
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the train has long left the station.
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And so then what is one supposed to do, one cannot make up for lost time, but you can
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build on it, relive it, take something away from it that you had lost sight of and give
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Perhaps seeing other people in the same place and realizing that now you have the key to
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open the doors of their difficulties, and then you should not stop, I think.
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One should perhaps even risk it, even one should risk being rejected by the other person
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saying you are coming on too strongly.
#
Perhaps to say, you know, let us, you know, this is something that I can help you with,
#
So in that way, the masculinity is also, you know, a tradition.
#
And I feel perhaps we, I mean, in the same way meeting you today, I feel there's so much
#
to talk about because now that we are older, there's so many more barriers that have disappeared
#
between us than that we don't need to, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, I
#
left cricket for after two years, but we stayed in touch a lot, we used to meet almost every
#
And also perhaps, you know, in a very good way, there was something competitive between
#
Your essay this week, your blog post this week, what readers used to comment on mine
#
as soon as we used to upset each other sometimes with the attitudes.
#
And I'm sure both of us suddenly thought hundreds of times, the truth is so clear, why doesn't
#
it get the whole point?
#
But there are many truths and there are some truths which you can see depending on where
#
So in that sense, I think this is the good thing about sort of entering the second half
#
of life or becoming a bit older, some things become much easier, maybe not physically,
#
but mentally and spiritually.
#
And one should take up those things.
#
Yeah, I mean, when we were having breakfast, you asked me, you know, in what ways had I
#
I mentioned that I'm such a different person.
#
And one way certainly is that I was much more competitive and I won't even say competitive,
#
maybe that sense of competitiveness came from a little bit of insecurity as well.
#
And it also came from perhaps wanting to be seen and not actually wanting to be, you want
#
to be seen as something that you aspire to be, but you're not that yet, if that kind
#
It's true for so many young people and it's a perfectly natural thing to be at that age.
#
It's true for all young people, I guess.
#
And we'll come back to masculinity later because I want to explore a lot there.
#
But before that, another sort of thought, which is that, you know, in my dad's last
#
year, I saw him become a very different person from what he had been.
#
And you mentioned, I think, in a couple of sentences about how your dad also towards
#
the end, he was more frail and he had changed a little bit.
#
And I think about those changes in my dad and I think that those changes in my dad didn't
#
even come because of self-reflection as they might come sometimes, but partly because of
#
physiology in the sense that his memory faded through his life.
#
So at the end, all he remembered were the edges, the childhood and at the end and everything
#
Once he asked me that, you know, to describe my growing up years to him because he didn't
#
remember me as a child, which is kind of violent.
#
And then when you spoke about how sort of still remember your father and of conversations
#
And I thought that even the memories that we have are really stories we are telling
#
We are taking little bits and pieces of what they were and what we remember.
#
And that's what we are constructing them as without the baggage of everything else
#
that we might want to forget.
#
And there is a lot of that too.
#
To what extent do you think this is true?
#
Because at one level, it's easy to do when you think of those who are not with us because
#
they are gone and you can shape them in any way you want.
#
And in another way, they are sort of still with us.
#
And therefore when we are with them, they are not just a person they are now in our
#
They are also everything that they have been all this time.
#
Yes, you say our memories of people who are gone are collages of moments that we take
#
which perhaps not necessarily that significant or things like that.
#
And of course they are significant to us.
#
So in that sense, they are as real as anything.
#
Well, first of all, how could it be any other way?
#
So in a sense, it's not I mean, for instance, recently I've found a new project.
#
When I go back to Orissa, I try to meet people who knew my father when he was in his 20s.
#
So they can give me something about him that I would never have known even because I wasn't
#
And they also tremendously, you know, obviously they are so full of details which you could
#
never I mean, my father was briefly a lecturer in a college and, you know, there's always
#
something very idiosyncratic about him.
#
And I remember my uncle, my mother's younger brother was briefly a student at that college.
#
And he said, I don't remember anything of your father except that he's come to class
#
and read film magazines.
#
This is such a great, imagine the audacity as a recently appointed lecturer to come and
#
be reading film for a class telling the students, you know, he's only a bit older than them.
#
So in that sense, you know, I'm actually enjoying the task of finding out, you know, there's
#
so many things that you will come to know.
#
For instance, we never had a chat about politics.
#
In the 90s were very fraught decade politically.
#
I can't really say although I'm thinking a lot whether you'd be a Congress voter, a
#
BJP voter today or in 2002 or 2004, I cannot reclaim or even imagine persuasively some
#
of his choices and ideas.
#
But you know, it's just a metaphor for finding things out about life as well.
#
You know, the past is always much murkier and much more complicated than the stories
#
your parents have told you.
#
And they've left you with this bag and you've got to go around filling it up with pebbles
#
on the on the on the on the shore.
#
No, speaking of the past, you know, so I was cleaning up my dad's things, gave away most
#
of his books, just kept a few, gave away most of them and but I kept some old diaries that
#
There's one of those diaries, which is really interesting because it indicates that at some
#
point in his life, I don't know when he wanted to write as well.
#
And there are ideas for stories in there and all of that.
#
And they're very hesitant.
#
They're also kind of callous, so I'm assuming that he must have written them when he was
#
in his 20s or when he was young and before kind of life got in the way.
#
But, you know, speaking of that bag of pebbles, I think maybe sometimes you just give it away
#
and kind of get on with it.
#
I'm struck by something I read just yesterday, I think, which which which is almost banal.
#
But it came across as interesting with this guy, I think, tweeted and I'm really sorry
#
but I've forgotten who, but if I find it, I'll put it in the show notes where and may
#
not even have been on Twitter, may have been some somewhere else.
#
But this guy was writing about how a friend of his asked him that how often are you going
#
to meet your parents in the rest of your life?
#
And he said, what kind of question is that?
#
And he said, how often do you go home?
#
And he said, I go home once a year.
#
So the guy said, oh, then they're in the 60s, right?
#
So on average, you'll meet them whatever 15, 16 times the rest of your life, which kind
#
of stunned him so much that he moved to live closer to them, which is an interesting thought
#
because all of us live under this sort of illusion that we will live forever.
#
And actually the things that are dear to us, we perhaps understand their dearness only
#
And not just in the context of parents, but anything else, yes.
#
We are granted what we have, yes, but also, as we well know, being too close to one's
#
parents also has problems of its own.
#
In that sense, I think I have a good relationship with my mother.
#
Like the story you said, we probably see each other more than once a year for sure and for
#
quite long periods of time.
#
But we have another project of her on which that she's my translator in Oriya now.
#
And she's actually doing a tremendous job.
#
And she's actually a full-fledged writer in her own right.
#
And I love reading what she's done with my work.
#
And sometimes tell her that you are better than me, this is, yeah, fascinating.
#
So let's go back to your early years after you shifted to Bombay across two levels.
#
One is what is the stuff that you're reading?
#
What is sort of your reading life shaping up to be?
#
Because you mentioned in your essay that you were a, quote, voracious, unsystematic, indiscriminating
#
And that's one thing that's happening.
#
And just to focus on that, like I remember that, you know, initially you just, when I
#
was a kid and I was reading, you just read everything, right?
#
Everything is a storybook.
#
And my sense that there was something more, that there was something called literature,
#
something that was worth spending one's time on came at the age of 10, when I picked up
#
this nice hardback edition of The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky about his time in Siberia.
#
Because the title sounded funky, right, House of the Dead, it'll be something interesting.
#
And then of course, got completely switched on to Dostoevsky, read everything by him and
#
all of that and that sort of thing.
#
This is really precautious.
#
I also read all of Shakespeare at the age of 10, though I now realize that, I now realize
#
that I was not reading it as literature, literature, it was affecting me in a different way.
#
But obviously, I didn't have any of the tools or the life experience to be able to make
#
as much out of it as I would, you know, when I reread it as an adult.
#
But what was that sort of journey for you into books and A, understanding what literature
#
could do and B, wanting at some point to write yourself?
#
Well, I'm afraid I cannot report anything of the order of Dostoevsky or Shakespeare.
#
It was books for children, perhaps a touch above my age, you know, when you're 10, you
#
read the books for 13, when you're 13, you read the books for 15 or whatever.
#
And then at some point, you know, you get totally caught up with whatever you get on
#
the pavement, book stalls, flora fountain, for which reason I retain this romantic attachment
#
for walking down those 200, 250 tiles of land.
#
And yes, I think it was very voracious, very unsystematic.
#
But it was thought and this bit I've kept throughout my life that, you know, life is
#
not worth anything if you're not reading constantly, which is something that many middle class
#
But I think my father really, I think my father was the only person who, if I said to him,
#
can I miss school today, dad, if I write a poem by the evening and sit at home, he'd
#
say, okay, that's a trade.
#
See you in the evening.
#
And you head off to work.
#
My mother would be tremendously upset, of course, denying the boy education, etc.
#
But that sense of unorthodoxy was what appealed to me about literature, that, you know, it's
#
Everybody studied and worked hard and whatever, but literature is not a system where the input
#
and outputs can be matched in this way.
#
It's much more provisional, improvised, unsystematic, hopeful, soulful.
#
And it makes you a bit of a dreamer.
#
And sometimes it makes you too bookish and not set up for dealing with the problems of
#
life because you kind of retreat at any...
#
For instance, I think for a lot of my life, I retreated from conflicts because I just
#
thought I can read a book and sort this out, you know, let me not actually fight with the
#
But it was, I think, a tremendous education.
#
And between that, Bombay and my family situation, which meant that there was a very high wall
#
between home and the world.
#
It was not just a door and a house.
#
It was much higher than that.
#
There was an invisible wall that meant people didn't come to see us.
#
We rarely went to see people.
#
Inside the house, there's always conflict and different kinds of wars.
#
So I think the only real source of reliable inspiration and pleasure was, one, my relationship
#
with my dad and two books and playing cricket in the evenings, all evening long.
#
So it's not a bad childhood to have at all, and Bombay on top of that.
#
So that's my memory and, you know, Bombay has changed a lot in the early 90s, you know,
#
when India was just liberalizing.
#
And I remember the day, I mean, I don't know if you were around, when McDonald's first
#
I remember, I was very much here.
#
The queue was 400-500 people long.
#
And I even remember the day I drank my first Coke in a thunderstorm opposite Mitibhai College
#
So you know, these things never leave you.
#
And Bombay is a great, great training school to become a writer.
#
I can't think there's any better place in the world.
#
I mean, I'm sure there must be.
#
You mean that in terms of stories that surround you?
#
Yes, the intensity of stories, the depth of people's feelings and passions and the amount
#
of things you have to hide or suppress or repress so that you can just get by in the
#
day for space, love, time, all these things.
#
And the different histories.
#
And you know, being a colonial city and having a certain kind of architecture, the sea, you
#
know, why is the favourite metaphor for the unconscious, the sea?
#
We actually have a sea, forget having the sea of the unconscious.
#
When you put it all together, it's fantastic.
#
You don't need to send writers to university, just get them to stay in Bombay for five years
#
at some age and they'll work it out by themselves.
#
Yeah, I think to use that sort of fashionable word these days, people who live in Bombay
#
You know, I guess if you don't want to write, that great opportunity is kind of something
#
And even the sea, like I've lived there more than 20-25 years, I've probably been to the
#
sea a handful of times.
#
Yeah, I've been to the sea much more when I go on vacation, you know, kind of right
#
By the way, when we were looking for flats to rent last year, before we took the place
#
where we are right now, we saw this beautiful flat along that Varsova road, huge flat,
#
and for a more affordable price than this, and the windows were right over the sea, right
#
You can just stand there and there's just sea outside, there's nothing else.
#
And eventually we didn't take it because sadly the other sea that I need in my life is reliable
#
And that was in this old building where the building society had made a deal with one
#
particular broadband supplier and that never ends well.
#
So a bit a tragedy for the building.
#
So there's a nice passage here where you talk about your time in college in Bombay, and
#
you say, quote, it was only at university that the relationship between literature and
#
literary study, the deep past of literature and the way it flowed into the present became
#
And the world of literary criticism and its possibilities opened up.
#
Here was a new stage in the reading life requiring the disenchantment in a technical sense of
#
And by the naive reader, you're of course referring to what Pamuk's formulation of someone
#
who just kind of read everything from Herman Hess to James Hadley Chase, as you describe
#
So tell me a bit about sort of this, you know, awakening is a dramatic word, but this sort
#
of shift where you begin to take books this seriously.
#
Yes, you know, a BA in English is a very complicated kind of education to have for many Indian
#
One could devote an entire anthology to the legacies of having such a degree.
#
I have one, by the way.
#
We have that in common, too.
#
And you would also know this thing, you know, in some way you become very literary, but
#
also a little too English English in your English, if you know what I mean.
#
And you feel you have these ideas and concepts and your models are invariably if you're studying
#
English literature in the old sense, which is mainly British and these days American
#
writers, then those are your models.
#
I mean, transplanting Dickens to Bombay, etc, etc, there's a way in which can be done.
#
But in the end, you're routing your sensibility through another culture and then all the way
#
You can't make that sort of journey and expect things to be very simple.
#
Plus, you know, many people I know, they decide to study English because they love reading,
#
but they find out on taking the degree that this is precisely what has become so complicated.
#
Reading is very complicated.
#
You have to analyze everything.
#
As you do so, the pleasure begins to leech out of the system.
#
And I'll grant you this much.
#
There's nothing like some kinds of literary critics to make sure that the pleasure disappears
#
because this is the crisis of English studies and one has never completely gotten itself
#
When you try to make it a formal discipline and especially to mimic the sciences and to
#
make it look like there's a certain language of literary criticism and a certain method,
#
in the end, literature does not allow for applying the same test over and over again.
#
Also, the critic is always in a kind of competition with the writer to determine whose sense of
#
the meaning of the work is stronger or better.
#
And that's not a victory.
#
You can win because when you do not know the ways in which creativity works, it's very
#
hard to analyze it on the reception side.
#
In that way, I think I'm a better literary critic because I also write novels and know
#
sometimes what a writer is trying to do in a certain passage, a sentence, a word or chapter
#
But I mean, all these things are in the sea of literary criticism.
#
And again, you find a boat that somehow navigates those waters and you sail in it and remain
#
And that was another journey that took me a long, long time to work on it.
#
I cannot write academic literary criticism, but there's some things in there that actually
#
The idea of the narrator, for instance, I think is very valuable.
#
Usually when many people read a novel, they say they're the characters and then the characters
#
are saying something and the writer's point of view above them is that.
#
It's not necessarily always the writer's point of view.
#
The writer makes up a point of view for the book.
#
So it's not exactly the writer, it's an unnamed figure whose voice is controlling the writing
#
So when you give that a formal name, the narrator, it clarifies many things about how power relations
#
You know, who takes charge of whose voice, who organizes the materials, very, very valuable.
#
And to me, you know, it's very helpful in working on how to write novels.
#
But I found myself then thinking I cannot stay on in literary study, I have to use this
#
in some way to become a writer and that's going to take another few years.
#
So in the meantime, what do I do?
#
And that's when I came back to Bombay and that's when we met, I realized I cannot stay
#
on in the university because that is going to take me another completely in a different
#
And I want to live in the space between writing about books and writing books.
#
And that's how it turned up.
#
You know, the point that you mentioned about the joy of the book going, yes, you have a
#
lovely passage about that as well, where you write, quote, I could go only so far in aligning
#
myself with the values of those newly prominent readers, brackets, my critics who broke down
#
a text, almost like a doctor studying a blood sample or interrogating it in the light of
#
one or other kind of literary theory.
#
Often it seemed to me they took an object of delight and clothed it from top to toe
#
in interpretation, so purific drone.
#
To be sure, there were those critics who added a glow to a pathway into the writer's work.
#
But more often than not, they rescinded down as if dealing with an excitable dog, as if
#
literature for them was only a stop on the road and the purpose of literary criticism
#
explicitly to disarm enchantment.
#
And I want to ask sort of a broader question here, which is about literature as it is studied
#
and taught within academia and literature itself.
#
Like I remember when I was in college, a good friend of mine decided that he would go abroad
#
and he got admission to study and he got admission into a place teaching film studies.
#
And he was very passionate about cinema.
#
So I said, great, you're going abroad to study film studies.
#
This means you're going to be a filmmaker next.
#
And he laughed and said, no, no, no, I'm never going to make anything.
#
And I kind of wondered, then what's the point, you know, what are you even doing?
#
And similarly, the impression many people have about literature as it is taught in academia
#
and elsewhere, a lot of which seeps into criticism as well, is that there is, you know, a writer
#
writes a novel or whatever, whatever she writes with a totally different intent and purpose
#
in mind and to kind of look at it like you would look at a blood sample and to, you know,
#
look at it through the prism of this literary theory or that literary theory, maybe evaluate
#
it on the basis of whether its politics is or is not desirable.
#
You know, I think that can kind of become a trap.
#
And this is true, I think, in some extent of academics of many other fields also, given
#
that, you know, literary criticism is really and you've, you know, spoke about different
#
categories of it, which we'll go into, but, you know, it's something that is taking from
#
One is a sea of academia, which is disconnected from the real world, and I mean it entirely
#
in a pejorative sense, and the other is a sea of life itself from which the work itself
#
So was this something that you thought about, what do you think about it now, was it complicated
#
Yes, I think about it all the time, even today.
#
But I think it was most productive in my 20s when I was actually trying to work out the
#
system based on these conflicts, perhaps a few notes on what you said, I think the comparison
#
between film studies and filmmaking that your friend stumbled upon, whether he did or didn't,
#
is not an exact analogy to literary criticism and writing.
#
Because in filmmaking, you study the art of making cinema, in film studies, you're still
#
using language to analyze cinema.
#
Literary criticism is the only kind of criticism where you use the same medium as what you
#
are analyzing, language.
#
So it is closer to the literary work than a film review would be to a film.
#
And also, a BA in English or English Studies is a fairly new development in the West from
#
which we've got it in India, a hundred, 120 years.
#
Before that, all literary critics were, in a sense, amateurs.
#
They wrote for the same pleasure of reading that you and I would have had.
#
And so there's actually an easy way past the last 100 years into Aristotle or anybody,
#
you know, there's amazing anthologies available now, ancient Chinese literary criticism, Indian
#
These are all people who wanted to classify, taxonomize, make all sorts of arcane, sometimes
#
But you know, Indian aesthetic theory, Rasa theory, is very, very vivid and absolutely
#
So I think the task for the writer is to go past your, you know, that first frontier where
#
many of the motivations and play at work are actually the imperatives of the university
#
system and the perpetuation of a certain kind of academic careerism, rather than an actual,
#
it's not to me, a lot of it doesn't seem motivated by the deepest love of literature of the kind
#
I know from the writers whom I love the best, whom I meet on a daily or weekly or yearly
#
So that is my gold standard for literary criticism.
#
I need to see that love or sometimes you can have literary criticism of very brilliant
#
and very detached mind.
#
You know, it's often destructive rather than constructive or analytical rather than creative.
#
But there's a certain kind of erudition that you cannot refuse.
#
So in that sense, I would not close my door to any possibility.
#
But you know, you have a sixth sense for what seems promising and what is not.
#
And in that sense, I think a lot of we are lucky that a lot of writers write brilliant
#
literary criticism and, you know, somebody like Mario Vargas Lausa or V.S. Pritchett
#
actually write a paragraph as beautiful in their literary criticism as they would do
#
in the novels and for them, it's just, you know, it's actually a free flow of thought
#
across the frontiers of their mind and they just move this way and that way.
#
And that, I think, is really nice.
#
There's another place where you've spoken about how, quote, the jobbing book reviewer
#
should take pause before he claims the status of either literary critic or essays and I
#
claim both in this book.
#
And about literary criticism, again, you've spoken of it, how a great bulk of literary
#
criticism today, quote, shows the rigor of a certain literary critical method or theory
#
of literature, even if it sometimes thereby recuses itself from the realm of the lay reader
#
or just as problematically jettisons questions of ascetic value in favor of social or political
#
questions or subsumes literary creation to theoretical superstructures, stop, quote.
#
But later when you speak about, you know, the highest form of literary criticism, you
#
write even higher on the scale, therefore, is a book review or work of literary criticism
#
that aspires to the status of an essay that is a distinctive combination of objective
#
and subjective perceptions written up in an unmistakably individual voice, possessing
#
and proposing nuances of thought, perception and style that enact the pleasures of thinking,
#
feeling and reasoning about art and seeking to recreate the drama of literary engagement
#
in a language that itself incarnates those qualities that make literature the most elevated
#
side of that universal human currency and connector language.
#
Then a book review can become all of these things, literary criticism, essay, literature,
#
So when you were first starting out at that point where you want to think about books
#
and write about books and all of that, what was sort of your early models?
#
Like today, today you can, you know, articulate it so beautifully and put it like this.
#
It sounds much nicer when you read it out.
#
I'm entirely persuaded by what you've just read.
#
You better be persuaded by it because you wrote it.
#
But today you can write it like that and today you have, you can, in retrospect, look at
#
all your models like, you know, Pritchett and so many others.
#
But when you're starting out, do you have any models?
#
What is your book review?
#
You actually have very good models because, and in this way, I'm grateful, at least for
#
the small time I spent in the West, you know, where I don't think I learned a huge amount
#
from my university degree, but buying the newspapers on the weekends, you could, you
#
know, at the time, The Guardian had an eight or 12 page book supplement.
#
And as I've written in this essay, you know, you suddenly found as you didn't, you still
#
don't in India anywhere, other than in a couple of specialist book review journals, you don't
#
find that a book review supplement in a newspaper, perhaps there was a Hindu literary review.
#
And somewhere I found lots of names, which are also the names of novelists, all writing
#
short essays or book reviews in a very sparky style, seven or eight hundred words.
#
In a way, it was a bit like the journalistic equivalent of the term essay or the weekly
#
essay I used to write as a student.
#
And I thought this is a very nice jump to make, a lateral, you know how they talk about
#
a lateral entry into the civil services, a lateral entry into literary criticism.
#
And this to me, you know, and also this is where I feel so disappointed sometimes when
#
newspapers, a newspaper is the perfect place to write about books.
#
There's no better place anywhere.
#
Even a book is not such a good place to meet a book as a newspaper is in some strange way,
#
because a newspaper can enact a fellowship of books.
#
You know, if a six page book review section can have all sorts of books about, you know,
#
imagine India, if you could set one up and get everyone to write with integrity and not
#
the problem of its own kind, you know, you would have the newest ideas.
#
What you have in a verbal realm with the seen and the unseen, you know, in a literary realm,
#
you would have people parsing ideas about politics, society, culture, history, you know,
#
a very deep exploration of a small subject, a very broad exploration of a large subject,
#
all these things next to each other.
#
Even if you, as I did, you know, read it week after week, after a year or two suddenly realize,
#
you know, your mind is much more flexible.
#
You can run up and down the channels of thought and you also have an opinion to contribute.
#
You know, that is the main problem that young students, you know, I hope there will be some
#
young, you know, that young students in literature, this is the problem they feel the anxiety
#
of those who appear to know what they're saying.
#
The pressure from those voices is so great that you say, how can I ever hope to match
#
I don't have an opinion, my opinion is just a combination of other people's opinions linked
#
up in some very, you know, in a way that I think will please the person who's correcting
#
That is the usual like term essay or exam paper in a BA.
#
But once you go past that, and when you see all these voices, I think I suddenly want,
#
I had this goal, I want to see myself on those pages.
#
I don't want anything else right now.
#
I want, you know, like somebody turning the page to like the fellowship of those writers
#
to be on the same page as them.
#
And that was my only limited goal of my 20s.
#
I want to be on the book review pages of the good newspapers of the world and to earn my
#
spurs that someone doesn't know me can read a paragraph or two and say, okay, whether
#
or not this chap will ever be a writer, he knows there is that love of literature that
#
And obviously, as I said, the middle stage was also a great practicing ground for that
#
because I would double, triple my audience and actually have a space where people would
#
come to read just my book reviews, not just a book review where they would find me.
#
And there's a role for serendipity there, right?
#
Because I think of the role of serendipity in my life, and obviously you and I are sitting
#
across the table because serendipity brought us together in a way, right?
#
Otherwise we may have vaguely known of each other and never actually been friends.
#
And you know, you speak of the serendipity in your life where, you know, 2002, you're
#
a lit student in Cambridge and you're about to eventually come back home to do whatever
#
and you're terrified of what life in India will be like.
#
And then you come across this interesting, was it classified or was it an ad or?
#
It was an ad on a student notice board.
#
So tell me a bit about that.
#
What had light bulbs going off in your head because of that?
#
You know, at some point you are so desperate in life.
#
And in that sense, I agree that a literary humanities education doesn't prepare you
#
for the sudden brutality and cruelty of life in the outside world.
#
But even so, I think finding your feet.
#
I look back on those years actually with some degree of affection and pride because it was
#
interesting to work out, you know, like I say, at some point, you have to work out how
#
to become a small entrepreneur in literature, write a few book reviews a month somewhere,
#
the other patch together living, try to become a writer on your own.
#
In the meantime, meet your friends and not such a bad way to live on balance, a bit hard
#
in Bombay sometimes with money, but and yeah, so little bits of good luck.
#
And I was already writing a few book reviews, but when I saw this notice and there was hard
#
cash being promised right there, I kind of felt this is for now.
#
It was an ad asking for book reviews and saying there's a hundred pound payment for reviews
#
And like I said, I never found out where they got published in the early years of the internet.
#
This was also possible that, you know, many newspapers didn't have what was very strange
#
that you had to write two versions of the same review.
#
Again, great practice for writing, editing, cutting, revising.
#
And one was 3000 words and one was a thousand words, you know, 3000 word review is today's
#
But sitting down and writing these enormous pieces actually, you know, was great discipline
#
And most importantly, it was something that I was doing, you know, your motives are always
#
a combination of wanting to do the work and the financial, both are very important.
#
But to make money from doing what you at the time, I don't think I was capable of much
#
else except perhaps a touch of cricket journalism, which I also then took up.
#
But staying on its home ground and making money from literature was a very thrilling
#
Small amounts though they were.
#
And I think I kept that up for a long time.
#
And what was the best thing was, which I still love about book reviewing, that you have,
#
it's like meeting a person every week, a new person, usually at their best.
#
You know, if you think of how long it takes to write a book, usually every writer would
#
say a book is who I am, but at the best level that I am, not just random, not just sentences
#
like mine where, you know, pause, run off in some direction.
#
It's all polished, well written, well thought revised.
#
And to live at that level of language week by week is a very good education and it's
#
a good way to live as well.
#
You know, you realize words have to be taken seriously.
#
Those people who do have a certain kind of wealth and riches, once you live at that level,
#
you set yourself higher standards and you meet different kinds of styles.
#
You know, you realize some writers write a hundred word sentence, one after the other.
#
Some others have very staccato style and in making notes to, somebody recently asked me
#
at a literary festival, you know, give me two tips.
#
I also want to write book reviews, but I'm struggling to do it.
#
Give me a tip for how to write one.
#
I said, you know, I can't, there's not a formula, but if you are struggling to write one, do
#
something, make notes as you read of all the sentence that you like.
#
And then before you start to write, look at the back of your book where you've scrolled
#
all these sentences, pick one out, copy it out.
#
That is the opening line of your book review.
#
The very fact that it struck you as essential or interesting shows that there's something
#
in there, whether stylistically or content wise that gets to the center of the book.
#
Then start to explain, don't say, now I'm going to explain why I chose the sentence,
#
but in actually start doing that, you know, saying in so and so's book, these words show
#
that something is happening, et cetera.
#
And you go on from there and from then on, you'll find the words flowing, just run down
#
You know, the biggest problem that the blank page is solved, use the writer to solve your
#
problem and then add something to the writer's voice.
#
But there are all these little things that you find out.
#
And like I said, you know, there's something, another reason why I have this romantic feeling
#
towards book reviewing is that for lots of people who do it with real passion, in a way
#
you're pouring the best of your writing into praising or occasionally cutting down or criticizing
#
somebody else's writing.
#
When I say at some point, you know, literary critic, there can be many definitions, but
#
one of them is basically a writer who uses his or her best sentences in the service of
#
And I think there's something generous in that.
#
Even now when I find my book reviewed by somebody where there's an actual passion or a real
#
engagement involved, I really feel very grateful and all writers feel grateful for that level
#
Even if perhaps the reviewer says the book was a bit disappointing, you'll take that
#
over a flat good review any day, I think.
#
Yeah, we're actually recording this on April 12th, so this will, this episode might even
#
come out in June because I'm banked so much in advance, but the episode I released yesterday
#
was with someone I realized now is a good friend of yours, Shruti Kapila.
#
And I was just thinking of like the one sentence from her book, which really stood out for
#
And I don't know if she would accept that it is central to her book or whatever, but
#
it stood out for me was quote, Hindutva is a theory of violence in search of its history.
#
Tremendous, tremendous.
#
That's a tremendous, tremendous.
#
It's a very good line, a very good line to pick up.
#
And you realize even in prose works of great depth, detail and density, you make little
#
leaps from single sentence springs, such as this one.
#
And then you can expand and embroider and articulate your theory.
#
But you still, in that sense, literature is so, so sly and artful in the way it works.
#
The deepest things happen in two or three seconds.
#
And then again, you go on that slow, slow path.
#
And there's another beautiful passage I'll read out and is resonant with me for different
#
This passage and one reason is resonant with me is that so many of us today take the internet
#
Even computers for granted.
#
Like earlier in your essay, you talk about how you were so happy to have a refurbished
#
laptop as it were, where you could sit in your room and have to write.
#
And even I remember my, you know, in the late nineties, how desperately I wanted a computer
#
of my own and what a big deal it was.
#
And yes, we take it all for granted.
#
But speaking of the internet, I'll just read this passage out where once you started reviewing
#
and you were at Cambridge, you write, quote, I found I love to browse the archives of the
#
book review pages of the New York Times by typing in the names of writers who had floated
#
into my consciousness, Tolstoy, Henry Green, Constantine Cavafy, Gabriel Mestral, and reading
#
everything that had been published about them over the decades.
#
And then everything I could find by the writers who had written something interesting about
#
Everything was something in itself and a link to something else, stop quote.
#
And I find this delightful because it's like there is this sea of knowledge and associations
#
And then by choosing to write, you are jumping into that sea yourself.
#
So how much of your reviewing craft as it were, like I would imagine that someone learning
#
to review, say in 1992 as opposed to 2002 would become completely different because
#
in 1992 your references would be so limited.
#
Your sense of what is possible, what is permissible would be so small.
#
But over here, suddenly everything is open to you.
#
So how did you approach it?
#
Who were sort of your models?
#
Did you have an ethic of writing book reviews that these are the things I will do and these
#
are the things I won't do just in terms of approach?
#
Well, my initial models were all entirely Western only because there was a space in
#
Western literary culture for this sort of work to happen, much more so than in India.
#
Bizarrely enough, once I came back to India and started work here, obviously I found many
#
very good Indian literary critics or reviewers who had till then had somehow, if your parents
#
bought one newspaper and you lived in Bombay, you would never end up knowing these names.
#
At the time, there wasn't that connection, Arshia Sattar, Niranjana Roy, Shama Futehali,
#
Meenakshi Mukherjee, all the range of first rate literary writers whom I came to later.
#
At the time, it was mainly the good newspapers of the world, The Washington Post, where I
#
published my first proper book review and when that cheque came, I'll never forget the
#
And it was only because of your laptop that you could, even in England, it was hard to
#
get an American newspaper, but you could.
#
So in that sense, yes, for people of our generation, there's two loves you can never forget.
#
The first girl you fell in love with and the first laptop you ever.
#
I still have it, I can't bear to give it away.
#
In some old cupboard of mine and that sense of freedom also comes from, you know, in that
#
sense, it's good to have what is called a naive youth because when you start suddenly
#
climbing up the mountain of literature, it is so exciting that you can't even bear to
#
sleep because next morning you get up and start the climb again and there's always a
#
new challenge in front of you and every day your language improves, your vocabulary improves,
#
your sense of detail improves.
#
So you can, like with everything else, you know, repetition is the mother of skill and
#
you get better by, I think I used to make, in my 20s, I used to be so upset by reading
#
a bad book, including a bad book by a good writer and every writer has a right to write
#
You know, it's not possible always to keep up even quality.
#
I get so upset at having wasted three or four days that I would write a very sarcastic,
#
Sometimes I would not want to do that anymore, but equally, I think it was, you know, one
#
should not lose that pugilistic sense of saying, you know, this is not worth someone's time
#
and I'll detail in a hundred, with a hundred reasons why it's not.
#
So there's some reviews like that in my book as well.
#
I cut a few others out thinking I don't want to keep these animities by consecrating them
#
into print because it is upsetting as a writer, you know, to have somebody say bad things
#
about your book, but it has to be done sometimes and everyone should also have this experience
#
just so that you know what it's like on each side.
#
So after that, you know, it's all determined, like the book review is the ultimate improvisational
#
Somebody says 800 words, somebody says 400 words, somebody says 1200 words, what points
#
you will pick up, what argument you'll make, all depends on what day of the week it is,
#
how much time you had to think about it.
#
But over the years, you know, for a while I was the weekly book critic of Lounge.
#
I used to write 50, 60, 70, I think 2007 was 70 book reviews a year.
#
It was like a mini factory.
#
Every four days, send one out, the next one comes in at the same time updating my blog.
#
No one took me so long to write my first novel, but it was very exciting morning till night,
#
the life in literature, this way or that way, somebody else's book, your book, somebody
#
else's book reviews, your book reviews, little bits of talking, drinking at your place in
#
Just to make sure one actually saw a human face.
#
But otherwise it was just the face of a page for so long.
#
Before we get back to the biographical part of it, which I do want to, you know, go down
#
step by step, but before that a couple of questions.
#
Now I'll read out another passage from your book where at one point you write, a book
#
is only one text, but it is many books.
#
It is a different book for each of its readers.
#
My Anna Karenina is not your Anna Karenina, your Arzi the Dwarf is not the Arzi the Dwarf
#
When we think of a favorite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters
#
who touched our hearts, the texture of the sentences.
#
We recall our own circumstances when we read it, where we bought it and for how much, what
#
kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the text began to intermingle with scenes
#
from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation, allowed us to make our peace
#
with some great discord.
#
This is the second life of the book.
#
This life is our life, stop quote, and therefore you could argue that there are as many, that
#
each book has as many versions as there are readers.
#
And now is this an impediment or an opportunity for someone who is reviewing a book?
#
Because on the one hand, it may feel like an impediment because the only notion of the
#
book that you can possibly capture is defined by your limitations in your life.
#
But on the other hand, it can be an opportunity because you can make your reading of the book
#
that much richer by pouring the personal into it as well.
#
This is something I discussed with our mutual friend Jai Arjun Singh when we did an episode
#
One of the things that I really liked about his film blogging was that once he found his
#
voice, it was imbued with the personal, it was not just about a cinema, but what he feels
#
about that, what it makes him feel and all of that, which I think made the whole experience
#
So we can approach this both as a feature or a bug, but is this something you've thought
#
Because it ends up being endlessly discussed in literature and also, it raises its head
#
You could say if all readings are that were subjective, every reader has his own version
#
What is the difference between a book review and Amazon reviews of three or four lines
#
or whatever, a starred review or whatever?
#
So my way of breaking this question down is that, of course, everyone's opinion is somewhat
#
subjective and you can bring many kinds of readings to a book.
#
Some of them necessarily a result of your own past or what you can see in a book.
#
Even so, a very deep subjectivity is a kind of objectivity, in my view.
#
Somebody who really wrestles with the book and pick out all sorts of things from it and
#
just because you bring yourself to the book doesn't mean that that book is also not released
#
to its greatest self by you.
#
The two can really meet and both sides are giving something very deeply of themselves
#
and that is the encounter that you record and you don't always have to make it dramatic
#
there for saying, you know, this moved me or whatever.
#
Just the writing itself will show how much you invested of your heart, your mind, your
#
soul into it and there are certain technical aspects of literary criticism, like no matter
#
your anachronism can be different from mine, but you might not want be able to say a lot
#
about it other than you liked it or you like some character, whereas another kind of reader
#
would follow the, for instance, the changing meanings of a certain word, let us say love,
#
in Anna's mind as Tolstoy shows it across the face of the book and, you know, be able
#
to develop arguments, perhaps not only about the book itself, but linking that book to
#
general ideas of love in Russian culture, in world literature.
#
So there's infinite pathways you can create and the more you read, the more adept you
#
become at making links.
#
That's why in the later sections of my book, I begin to write essays about two writers
#
and three writers, not just one writer, showing how you can raise your game up.
#
So sometimes some comparisons become very fruitful, you know, a Russian writer with
#
an Oriya novelist, they would have never met each other.
#
But if there's a similar note in their work, how, what is the differences in the way they
#
approach it and are they both, can the reading of both be improved by being set in conversation
#
with one another, as it were, you know, jugalbandi is a very classic feature of Indian art and
#
I really appreciate that we have such a deep artistic tradition that can be applied to
#
literary criticism as well.
#
Bring people together and see what they say.
#
And the comparisons reveal things about each other that a single analysis won't.
#
And in that sense, I really believe, you know, there are better readings, every reader has
#
his own book, version of the book, but there are better readers and there are less good
#
And there's nothing to feel ashamed of.
#
There are many readers I meet on a daily basis who I know are superior readers to me.
#
That doesn't mean that, you know, like I still rate myself as a reader and a writer, but
#
I know there's some things they can do that I can't do, I would like at some point to
#
slowly move upwards till perhaps at the age of 80, I'll write the perfect essay.
#
And then one can head off to the next library wherever that is.
#
Let's take a digression on reading then, you know, and the question that is how does one
#
read a book and the most primal way of reading a book is you read it for the story.
#
This happened, that happened next, and you're kind of just reading it like that.
#
And later on, you begin to find other ways of reading a book and some of it, of course,
#
is enhanced by the criticism that you read.
#
For example, I remember reading Madame Bovary as a child and then coming across, you know,
#
James Wood's excellent essay on it where he speaks about the book and speaks about the
#
use of the free indirect voice and then reading Madame Bovary again.
#
And it's like an education.
#
It's like everything has been stripped away.
#
You understand so much, not just about a particular book, but about craft and language and everything.
#
And it's, you know, and that kind of happens.
#
So now, you know, when and this is something my writing students also ask me sometimes
#
that how should I read?
#
And now one aspect of reading is, of course, intentionality where you can perhaps say something
#
concrete that read it in this way.
#
But the other aspect is that how you read is also a function of how much you have read
#
before and how much of that you're bringing into something that you have read.
#
So, you know, do you have any thoughts on this, especially because in a sense, every
#
reviewer or literary essayist like yourself must carry two readers.
#
And one reader, I suppose, is someone who is just reading a book for the enjoyment of
#
it, with any other thoughts being pure asides.
#
But another mode of reading that you, of course, do is where you're thinking deeper, where
#
you're making all of these connections, where you're reading Proust and you're saying, ah,
#
Love's God did this here and so and so, or the writer did this there and you're making
#
those connections and that.
#
So is it so that there are those two modes of reading with some kind of continuing between
#
And if you had to advise people on how to read, you know, what would you what would
#
Well, they may have been two modes at a certain point of time when you're starting out for
#
I don't read everything.
#
You know, on the Internet, you know, when you're reading pieces that have deliberately not
#
been written to do anything other than instruct or explain something, you don't need to attach
#
that deeper, though even their style is very important, I find.
#
But otherwise, when you're reading something that has been set up as a kind of machine
#
to one can use other words, but a kind of machine for releasing verbal pleasure, you
#
know, you have to look at the controls and the writer has himself or herself given some
#
cues with punctuation structure, all these things that you have to unpack and relive
#
the book inside your head.
#
And for that, you know, you have to give your best self to it.
#
And when the book is good, you must be good.
#
I mean, don't distract yourself with other stuff.
#
Read 10, 15 pages at a time, not a few sentences here.
#
Give a certain hour of the day to reading, preferably the first hour of the day, if you
#
can manage it and you're not rushed to go somewhere.
#
These are my advices for young readers or writers.
#
Give the best of yourself to a book, because the very definition of book is somebody giving
#
the best of themselves.
#
So if you both we approach the situation in the same spirit, that's when you can unlock
#
whatever you know, just as in life, you are as a body, you are what you eat as a reader,
#
you are what you read and you have to learn to read well.
#
But of course, it's frustrating at the beginning because it's such a long tradition to absorb.
#
So I would say, if you want to be a novelist, you must read 15 novels naively, perhaps not
#
picking up everything about them before the path becomes easier.
#
But that much time you must struggle.
#
So it's helpful to read a novel every week, get it out of the way in a year or two, and
#
then start to slow down and pay attention.
#
Read the Great Indian Canon, in a way, my book is also a little snapshot of all the
#
things that could be, everyone's canon will be different because we are such a big country.
#
But at the very least, we must read Indian books, books in translation, books from all
#
other every other continent, it's possible to do that now.
#
Put it all together in your own map.
#
And you speak of reading the Great Indian books and the Great Indian Canon and all that.
#
And I had another question about this, because you're training in literature, in whether
#
you did your BA in Xavier's and then you went to Cambridge and whatever, would have been
#
kind of from a Western perspective.
#
And this brings across a problem, like in one of your essays, you've quoted Fakim Mohan
#
Senapati's book Six Acres and a Third, and you've written that, ask a new babu his grandfather's
#
father's name and he will hem and haw the narrator chirps, but the names of the ancestors
#
of England Charles III will let in the role of his son, which is kind of true.
#
You quote a boy Tonkin, where Tonkin in an essay on Nagi Mefos's chirotelogy at one
#
point talks about how the book's quote, enact a dialogue between Egyptian ways of seeing
#
and European ways of knowing, which struck me as really interesting phrases.
#
And then in another essay, you refer to how, you know, Ramanujan's famous essay of 1990,
#
which was titled, Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?
#
And you spoke about how quote, and these are your words, in the closing years of the 19th
#
century, the Oriya writer Fakim Mohan Senapati appears to have asked himself that question
#
Is there an Indian way of writing a novel?
#
This gets me to thinking about what happens when you bring a prism of looking at literature
#
that is a Western prism, shaped by Western literature with its values and mores and all
#
And you bring it and you're looking at Indian literature like that.
#
Like I did in a wonderful episode with Sarah Rai, Munshi Premchand's granddaughter, a really
#
And I asked this in the context of Premchand, because one, there is no denying that Premchand
#
is a heck of a writer, but there's also no denying that if you look at his work through
#
a Western prism, it'll be very easy to pick flaws with it.
#
But are they really flaws or is it the prism that we are looking through?
#
So since you seem to sort of combine the art of literary criticism with also this deep
#
abiding affection for Indian books or books by Indian authors in the different languages,
#
what are your thoughts on this?
#
The very fact that I'm so touched to see that you pulled out three different points and
#
very far distant points of my book to make piece together one question itself showing
#
that this is the sort of reading for which I have the highest regard, even if it's the
#
reading of my own book, I'm very happy.
#
It's lovely that the question can be enunciated in these kinds of detail.
#
And yes, I think that is the problem or the interesting question, the puzzle, as there
#
should be puzzles in writing the puzzle for the Indian novelists today.
#
How do you write Indian novels in English?
#
Many people have answered that before me.
#
And what sort of inheritance you bring to bear, I'm going to read one.
#
Although it looks like this example of Premchand, a lot of early Indian novels are very derivative
#
of Western forms because there's that pressure of imitation of their authority saying this
#
is how it should be done.
#
You do it, just change the names of the characters and the situations, but it's got to be written
#
A little passage from my country's literature, the novel literary history tells us had its
#
beginnings in the birth of modernity in the West.
#
In societies like India and Egypt, Brazil and Korea, it was a transplant.
#
But wherever the novel went, it merged with that world's indigenous storytelling traditions
#
and reappeared with a new face and form, a new way of being.
#
It was the literary version of the traveler who makes himself at home, anywhere he or
#
And this, I think, is the wonderful thing about novels.
#
And this is what Boyd Tonkin is also in that wonderful book of his, finally arriving at.
#
So using the classic Western form of the novel in writing novels about your own society is
#
an intermediate stage, a necessary intermediate stage in any novel's journey into a culture.
#
And slowly, slowly, those paraphernalia begin to fall away.
#
The scaffolding begins to fall away.
#
And inside a new work, a building is going on.
#
And obviously, some geniuses arrived at those answers much earlier than the others.
#
So that's why I think Indian literature is always being renewed, even by the past, not
#
just by the future, because in translation, new books come into view that have been lost
#
Senapati's novel, only in 2006, when I read it when I was 26, I suddenly realized this
#
could be another way of working.
#
Not now, perhaps in the future, where the novel is told not in the first person or in
#
the third person, but in the first person plural, we.
#
The voice speaking, the narrator seems like a plural voice, which is very rarely seen
#
But it's so successfully brought off that you realize this is almost like the voice
#
of the village chorus or the panchayat kind of speaking.
#
And he just doesn't say it.
#
But that's what you understand.
#
Novels have to have lots of secrets in them.
#
And in that sense, I think the novel, you know, in the last 30, 40 years, when you put
#
together all the Indian, the different novels from all the languages in India, each of which
#
has a kind of slightly separate or different novelistic pathway and tradition.
#
You realize that we are actually the center of the of the novel in the world.
#
We ourselves perhaps don't know it.
#
And we can't also find all the novels in other languages.
#
But from above, if one were to be the novel as a concept suddenly embodied in a bird or
#
a cloud and looking from above, drifting over the world, you'd stop over India and say,
#
This is where the most interesting stuff is going on.
#
And then, you know, you realize also every novel must have generational, you know, people
#
speak in different ways from generation to generation.
#
Even the Bombay of today, I don't think when we were growing up, people used to say the
#
word chapter for a particular kind of eccentric character or a chapter that the way they say
#
now on the year, it's always renewing itself.
#
Language is always renewing itself in living speech.
#
And since the novelist's work is to record living speech, even perhaps not necessarily
#
through a direct direct transposition, you know, if I were to write Bombay or Hindi in
#
my English novels, it would look odd, a patchwork, but I can find an English to sort of replicate
#
those rhythms or I can find other strategies.
#
And in a way, the novel is like life in that there's no formulas at all.
#
For every book you have to just like with life, you have to invent your solutions for
#
that piece of material.
#
And after a while, you learn to trust yourself and let go of the precedence and say it doesn't
#
And sometimes you may make things confusing to your readers because in the end, you know,
#
there's this basic tension between novels and capitalism.
#
They are sold in a capitalistic world, but capitalism prizes reliability, repeatability.
#
What is promised is what is delivered.
#
The classic things that good brands do well.
#
The very raison d'etre of novels is to always surprise you and to sell you short and take
#
you somewhere else, even if it means having all these quotes on the top.
#
You know, this is a cross between Paulo Coelho, Dan Brown, etc, etc.
#
And this is where I think the good novels are so wonderful.
#
You never know what is going to happen in the next page.
#
You might know what's going to happen in the story.
#
The story is revealed to you even in the synopsis.
#
But moment by moment, the situations that emerge and as a writer, it is so exciting
#
to write once you are in it, you know, it's very frustrating till the time you can't get
#
the hang even of your own book.
#
But I think the greatest highs of my life have been this five, six, seven month periods
#
when I knew I don't have to work to think what I'm going to write tomorrow.
#
The past, the momentum of the past three, four years will immediately.
#
It's almost like you're in communion with the secret spirit of the novel.
#
Not that you have some special, you know, past or anything like that.
#
It's just that you've done the groundwork and you've done the reading.
#
And then for a few months, you will have this amazing dance with an abstract idea that you
#
see playing itself out inside your own mind.
#
And that, I think, separate from reading novels, this is the pleasure of writing them that
#
you feel you cannot get it.
#
Perhaps you can get it a little bit from falling in love with the person or rummaging through
#
But you can use those for novels as well.
#
So a novel, deep memories of falling in love, put it in a novel and you've got it all together.
#
So I want to ask a question about expectations and conventions and whether we are imprisoned
#
by them in the sense that you've written for you, write a review for the Washington Post.
#
And then for the longest time, you came back to India and you were a weekly reviewer for
#
Mint and we'll talk about that as well, where you were being paid a pittance, which I only
#
found out while reading your essay.
#
And then you go on to, at the same time, you're writing reviews for a whole bunch of foreign
#
Now, I would imagine that there's a certain expectation of what a review is.
#
It is not even as much their expectation as just an understanding that is there because
#
you have spent all this time reading all the reviews that come there, reading all the literary
#
essays that are published and saying, oh, this is how it is and this is how I structure
#
And these are the kinds of things I write about and draw connections from.
#
And therefore, in a sense, that is a convention that you've set for yourself, which you're
#
not necessarily, you don't have to follow any of them on your blog, but that's a convention
#
when you're writing those reviews.
#
Similarly, when you're writing a novel, there are conventions of how you kind of go about
#
And there'll be conventions in the West and you'll find that people in India have done
#
various other things like this novel with the V editor, right?
#
Like I understand that every constraint is also liberating in the sense that once you
#
know where the parameters are, you just go for it and you can do whatever within that.
#
But at the same time, do you then start thinking as the years go by about how I can break out
#
of this convention like in an unrelated field, perhaps I had the journalist, I was about
#
to say data journalist, but I don't want to typecast her.
#
The journalist Rukmini S here, sitting exactly where you're sitting and we recorded an episode
#
and she was complaining about this structure that's almost become a cliche for data journalism,
#
that you start with a human story.
#
So you want to humanize the data and then you get into the data.
#
And she's like that one, it's a cliche and two, it can also be misleading because you
#
can pick any damn story for any damn whatever.
#
So is this something you've thought about over the years?
#
Because one of the sort of perks of being forced to read as widely as you are, is that
#
you are then also forced to reconsider all these parameters that have been set by others
#
What are your thoughts on this?
#
Yes, you know, I've been very lucky that, you know, as soon as my first book came out,
#
I was able to live a life where sometimes my book walked ahead of me and people knew
#
me because of my book rather than knowing me as me, suddenly my access to novels remained
#
the same, my access to novelists went up by like a thousand percent, much more than that
#
even, you know, suddenly you could speak to somebody as an equal and other people looked
#
Once you've written one novel, a good novel, you're a novelist for life, I mean, you don't
#
need to write and you want to write more, but nobody can take that badge away from you.
#
And in that sense, you know, I had the very exciting thing of sometimes I'll go in residencies
#
or meet people on a festival or run into them somewhere.
#
And in two or three hours, you could go over the entire history of novels as you knew it
#
and as they knew it and compare your ideas and you could use them as springboards to
#
For instance, I think till I wrote my first novel, I was still a fairly traditional novelist.
#
I don't think I then grew as a novelist so much by reading novels as by talking about
#
novels with other novelists who were so far ahead of me in their understanding of what
#
to do with story and how to arrange them that those conversations were what I live for.
#
And in particular, I remember my Israeli writer friend, probably just my closest friend in
#
literature even today, Ofir Tushai Gafla, who probably one of the most creative human
#
beings I ever met, you know, the classic model of a writer, you know, he lives to write.
#
I had the very good fortune of spending almost three uninterrupted months in his daily company
#
Imagine the end of it, you know, I almost forgot who I was, you're so much in the influence
#
But as the years have passed by, I've managed to, you know, again, return to some of the
#
ideas and we meet every two years anyway and catch up and talk again, talk about books.
#
And you can even talk about the same book that you loved and take different things away
#
from it, you know, high grade conversation between two people who work in the same form.
#
And about breaking conventions, you know, in the end, when you take the idea of the
#
novel that I just explained, it should surprise, it should do something new.
#
To its logical conclusion, every novel should be written in a way that no other novel can
#
But you know, that is not possible.
#
It's also an absurd world where the reader would have to learn the ropes every time over.
#
Imagine putting that pressure on readers.
#
So it's got to be some mix of sticking to the form and making little nicks and cuts
#
or changes so that you show that you're also criticizing the form the way it was.
#
Your innovations don't have to happen on a major structural scale.
#
They can merely happen, you know, I know this friend of mine, Saskia Jain, who in writing
#
dialogue often ends sentences with the word HHM.
#
And the first time I thought, this is such a natural way of putting pauses and sounds
#
into speech, which it has never occurred to me, although you hear it all the time.
#
Novelists give you new eyes for how the world really works.
#
And in big and small ways, and I think in the end, the small ways of noticing are perhaps
#
the more valuable because the big ways, you know, the sociologists, the political scientists
#
also keep on bringing to you that level of knowledge creation is happening.
#
The way in which life changes through some small detail, you begin to think a new word
#
enters the culture from somewhere and the use of that word slowly transforms an entire
#
Those are the things that novels, you know, are very good at doing.
#
The flow of an idea or a person through time and the analysis of time itself.
#
And in that way, you know, novels can never run out of, you know, because even our sense
#
of what time means has changed so much in the last 20 years.
#
I find myself unable to keep up with the idea of how I still perhaps I cannot analyze what
#
has happened in the last 20 years in a novel at the level of experience of digital time
#
and what it means to, you know, keep on flipping between an Instagram post, a Facebook, then
#
I'm perhaps not even interested in that.
#
To me, since we are older, it's not as interesting as it might be to someone younger.
#
But so I think what finally one must remember that one is trying to break conventions, but
#
the whole point of writing novels is not to break conventions, still to tell interesting
#
But you realize that since conventions can also be an impediment in telling a story,
#
interestingly, you use them and sometimes you move them out of the way and you create
#
your own rules for the book, perhaps you abandon it right after the book.
#
And that actually respects the reader because you are saying to the reader, I don't completely
#
agree with the inheritance.
#
Here is my slight adaptation of life writing everything.
#
And that is why you should read this book.
#
A couple of questions and one again goes back to the ways in which we have changed and I
#
One is that often when we are young, the way we behave implicitly, we kind of see ourselves
#
as the central character of a play and everyone else is either just a character or a prop.
#
And you see this on social media all the time, where people are all the time trying to raise
#
their status by attacking others, by snarking on others, so on and so forth, a little realizing
#
that there are real people at the end of that and when people kind of do it to politicians
#
and all of that, I understand because you know our taxes are going and they're supposed
#
to govern as well and all of that you want to hold them accountable.
#
But I'll see random person attacking random other person with court tweets and all of
#
that and I'm thinking that it's not necessary just because you disagree with someone to
#
attack them personally.
#
And I think I've been guilty of that myself that even back in the old blogging days and
#
I would of course in my India Uncut days do like five posts a day and did 8,000 posts
#
And I remember that I would just give any comment on anybody and not give a shit because
#
it's like I am at the center of the universe and I'm passing judgment on people and all
#
And unfortunately, I think I did this to you also where once you had you had written a
#
review, I felt really bad about it later.
#
You had you had written a review, I think of Patrick French's book on Naipaul, right?
#
And I felt that you were judging it on the basis of what you wanted it to be rather than
#
what it was, which was what I think Martin Amis had a quote about that, if I remember
#
correctly, or somebody had a quote about that.
#
So I put that quote out there and I put a link to your this thing.
#
And later I realized that what a dick thing that was for me to do, right?
#
Like firstly, it's a dick thing for to do to anybody and to do a dick thing to one of
#
No, no, I should be so absurd.
#
So no, I'm just putting it out there because it's something that struck with me of, you
#
know, there are many little things that one regrets.
#
And the question that I'm going to ask you is that, is that something as a young reviewer?
#
Were you at any point also guilty of ignoring that in retrospect?
#
Because while you were writing about books for you, you were diving into this great sea
#
of knowledge and literature and you're contributing to the discourse.
#
But sometimes your words can be hurtful to an actual real human being.
#
They're not characters or props.
#
And famously, if I remember correctly, forgive me if I'm wrong, I believe Kiran Nagarkar
#
actually fell physically ill after a review you wrote of one of his books.
#
Did this really happen?
#
I'm sure it's found this apocryphal.
#
I think you only told me.
#
Somebody told me that you savaged one of his books in a review and he apparently was so
#
depressed by it and he actually fell ill.
#
He died many years later.
#
In the realm of black humor, this is a new genre of literary black humor.
#
This becomes especially more pertinent when you become a lit festival regular and you're
#
actually meeting all of these people all the time.
#
Well, I mean, there's so many things to say on a human and literary level about these
#
Of course, you know, first of all, I mean, between you and me, I think we always, as
#
I said, I enjoyed the disagreements and I do remember now to bring it up, checking the
#
blog comment section every two hours to see whether you'd reply, then I would have to
#
also jump in once more.
#
And so it was like a long day.
#
But I think between us, we always knew our disagreements and good faith and, you know,
#
like and upsetting each other is part of the game a little bit to also, you know, it brings
#
out something in each other.
#
And it's, I mean, it's a very masculine thing to do.
#
And you know, it's a bit of a, you know, we can enjoy that episode as something that,
#
you know, as part of our journey and and it was a substantive point.
#
As I remember now, I went into my library, pulled out five other literary biographies
#
and started quoting from this and that.
#
So, you know, it made me work harder.
#
With literary criticism, you know, in the end, I think writers must realize that, you
#
know, it's very easy to get a review wrong.
#
And of course, you know, many reviews also badly written and sometimes they are also
#
written, you know, with people who know each other.
#
So it's an imperfect and impure form filled with lots of human motivations and errors
#
that don't have to do with literature.
#
And you can end up mistaking one for the other and thinking, you know, this person didn't
#
like my book, he doesn't like me, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You know, and one is in the social world where you end up much more now than 15 years ago
#
where you end up meeting folk.
#
People should have a discipline to leave it at that and move on, both on the receiving
#
side and the giving side.
#
And I know it can be hard, but I think, you know, there's so many things that are harder
#
That's why I get stuck here.
#
I really think, I mean, when I meet some people who have written something negative about
#
my books, I try not to bring it up ever or to even let it affect, perhaps subconsciously
#
But I think one could have a perfectly pleasant relationship with if one were not to be able
#
Basically, it means that a bad review is war for the rest of your life.
#
I mean, this is no way to live.
#
Even literature says that what is the point of living like this?
#
If writing about books were to lead to this problem, you are left with a culture of empty
#
praise, which also sadly, I think we have far too much.
#
The business of blurbs, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So for all the problems and the people one may have hurt and the fact that one doesn't
#
realize there's an actual person, although, you know, people are hurt on a daily basis
#
Why should a reviewer be singled out as being especially hurtful?
#
You know, come on, to be honest, the thing is you spend five, six, seven years, whatever
#
it is, writing a book, and then you read a review where the person will never know the
#
book as well as you do.
#
So you feel wronged by it.
#
There is the criticism that you get for a book for where the reviewer doesn't agree
#
with what you have said or takes issue with your ideas.
#
And that I think no writer ever really feels deeply hurt by somebody disagreeing with the
#
viewpoint when there's the review that you must write when a book is very incompetently
#
written or is actually prejudiced or malicious in some way.
#
And there, I think one should reserve the strongest possible, you know, then it's a
#
rhetorical battle where there's actually something very damaging going on, you know, some kinds
#
of argument that are present in India right now.
#
People extend those arguments into book-length forms.
#
If one were to say, like, take off your gloves and do not punch hard in writing about these
#
pieces, even if it's from a different point of view, you have to accept that, you know,
#
this is a part of the world of debate and ideas and one should take, try to give everybody
#
I agree with you, I'm not talking about the normative end, I'm talking about the positive
#
side of things, the way things actually are.
#
You know, of course, everyone should, you know, not take reviews too hard and just get
#
They don't and that's how it is.
#
That's how it is in most places.
#
And there are some people also skulk past when I see them in certain rooms saying that.
#
But sometimes equally, we have become friends later, you know, five, ten years later.
#
And since we are in this moment, I will, like, supply the last ending to this Nagarka unfortunate
#
story because actually, I was thinking of him when I said, you know, like, you regret
#
writing a very cutting piece about a less good book by actually a very good writer.
#
You know, I think Cuckold is one of the greatest novels in the history of the Indian novel.
#
It's very unfortunate it came out the same year as The God of Small Things when they
#
were both equally good books.
#
And as a book about what the role music plays in human affairs, I don't think I've read
#
another Indian novel that so deeply gets the place of music in Indian life.
#
And unfortunately, that book didn't arrive, I was only 18 when suddenly a book pops up
#
and somebody says, will you review it and you start reading and you think it's very
#
badly written, you write it up, you never realize.
#
But four or five years ago, I was sitting at breakfast in a literary festival in Kolkata
#
and right next to me, I saw a tall, stooping, kurtaard figure, kurta pajama, Mr. Nagarka.
#
And all these years, somehow, I didn't know whether he actually knew me by face.
#
But whenever I saw him, I realized, you know, this is not, let's not, whatever.
#
But I walked, I changed my tables, I walked up to him, sat across the chair for a moment
#
and said, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Chandrahas and I remember many years
#
this happened and I heard you were very upset by it.
#
And he said, no, no, I wasn't.
#
And perhaps it was, I don't know what it was.
#
And I said, whatever it was, I want to say sorry, because I realized the ways in which
#
I might have got that wrong or you got it wrong and that misperception or misimpression
#
And I just want to make it clear, you know, I admire you as a very, very great Indian
#
It was just that book that I was writing about.
#
I wasn't writing about you as a writer, per se.
#
And very sportingly, he said, absolutely, you don't need to explain so much, I get what
#
you're saying completely.
#
And we had a, I mean, you didn't have a long conversation, but we shared a coffee across
#
And that's my last memory of him.
#
So, you know, while we're on the subject, I want to acknowledge the generosity and grace
#
of a very great writer.
#
Coming back to that earlier subject, you mentioned about masculinity, and one often wonders whether
#
this very great writer would have been as generous when he was, say, 25.
#
And chances are probably not, you know, you're maybe carrying that grudge a little bit.
#
So let's talk about that.
#
Because before we started this, when we were at breakfast, you mentioned about how it might
#
be harder to come to terms with yourself as a man than it is to come to terms with yourself
#
Which again struck me as one of those quotes.
#
If I read it in a book, I'd write it at the back and then I'd follow your hack and, you
#
know, start my review with it.
#
What do you mean by that?
#
Well, there are many contexts in which that statement can be interpreted.
#
But I think if I look at my life, I think I was saying in the context of my own life,
#
I found it much harder to work out how to be a man.
#
And perhaps every man in our time of shifting, very rapidly shifting gender relations has
#
It's harder to work out how to be a man than to be a human being.
#
Not only in this present day sense of revised gender, long overdue revision of gender norms,
#
but also historically, you know, men have always found it difficult to be men.
#
And you know, this dinner party conversation, what if women rule the world?
#
Would you have so many wars?
#
Would you have so much corruption?
#
Would there be so much competitiveness?
#
I don't know if the answer is yes or no.
#
There's certainly plenty of vicious women out there.
#
But I think we are not prepared by education to deal with certain aspects of our history,
#
our psychological makeup, or if we are, it is only to repeat the forms of the past.
#
There are many unseen spaces, we are not told what we learn about sex from books and not
#
from your mother or father.
#
To learn about it from your mother would be a different thing from learning about it from
#
Strange though the thought may seem, I cannot imagine discussing this with my parents.
#
And if your mother is listening to this, if there's anything you think, I don't know mommy,
#
come on, like I'm coming back home in three weeks, let's sit down and have a chat.
#
But in the main, I generally I found it's bizarre, you know, now, after my father passed
#
away, I found myself in a two-woman family, most of my 20s, my mother and my sister.
#
And since then, I've either lived alone or back to all women families.
#
Now I live with my wife, my daughter, and sometimes my mother-in-law also comes to stay
#
over, particularly because she wants to have a chat with me.
#
And strangely enough, I think back about my life and had almost no close male friends
#
in my 20s, other than you and a couple of others.
#
Now I would say bizarrely enough, my closest friends are all men.
#
And what is the hinge on which this entire switch has occurred?
#
Will it again change back to something else?
#
Like I think I would say that my main success socially in my last 10 years, I was always
#
interested in women and I always got along very well with them at many close women friends.
#
And I feel to whatever extent possible, I'm sure I have many misperceptions, biases, whatever,
#
but I get, I can sit down and have a heart to heart talk with a woman.
#
I found it much harder to set up this space with men and partly it was not my fault, partly
#
it was not the other side's fault.
#
And whose fault was this?
#
It's not really anyone's fault, but it is a problem to be solved.
#
And in this way, I feel happy.
#
So in the last eight or nine years, I find I can reach out to men, including a certain
#
The only person I can't still get across to is a certain kind of South Asian man who lets
#
you want to do, who lets you do all the work in reaching them.
#
So 99% of the work is yours and I will utter one or two words on this side and always make
#
sure that they keep you at bay.
#
I'm not interested in that sort of dialogue, but with almost everyone else, I think I've,
#
especially I think having not had a very deep male presence in my life in my 20s, I think
#
from about 30 onwards, I've really have a lot of father figures in my life, all the
#
way from five or six years older to me to 30, 40 years older to me, you know, all the
#
way from someone like a Pushpesh Pant to somebody who, you know, someone who might have met
#
only two or three years ago.
#
And in this way, I think as a continuum of masculinity, I feel we've learned a lot from
#
There are things I've learned from them.
#
I'm sure things I've given them.
#
And between us, we make a good team in different countries and continents, though we may be.
#
And whenever we get back together, there's more things to learn and we give each other
#
and we give outwards, i.e. we link up and we can create spaces for younger people like
#
So today, I feel, you know, we have not exactly solved, but we definitely made a dent in this
#
issue of men sort of not sharing a lot with each other.
#
When you go to another man with a problem, they make jokes about you.
#
And there's that locker room style conversation.
#
I don't know what it's like in sports teams, I'd be very interested to know in the Indian
#
cricket team, do they actually speak about girlfriends, sex, love, if someone is depressed
#
over a breakup, what sort of, you know, that would be a very interesting crucible of masculinity
#
where you're both very hyper masculine and you are trying to or you should be someone
#
But at least in Indian life, I think this therefore this notion of a gender above gender,
#
a space above gender, that even while you're fighting the gender wars and in the gender
#
things of time, I have a lot of sympathy for this idea that even in your deepest relationships,
#
I believe in love, you know, when you marry somebody, you obviously carry your biographies
#
as a man and woman and the conflicts and you know, who cooks, who does the labor, who picks
#
up the child or whatever.
#
But at some level, I think as a 21st century man, as a woman in any culture, aside with
#
the power and the politics, you must make the room to surrender and to forget who you
#
are and become a nameless human being, just a human being and forget that that inheritance
#
of masculinity and femininity and be two human beings on a common cause in life.
#
And that there I think is a real space for dialogue, even across gender and in marriage
#
and all these spaces, which have become a little hollowed out now because those norms
#
have at the same time, you know, when for many of us, marriage is something different
#
from what it was for our parents.
#
And some people just don't are not interested in the idea for very good reasons.
#
But that's why if we want to revitalize the idea of marriage as well, to my mind, as a
#
thinker, as a writer, this could be one way of doing it, that we are not married as man
#
and woman, or as men and women, we are married for some other reason to find how can we let
#
go of our masculinity and femininity in a space where there's some other energy at work.
#
And of course, there's a practical element to this in your life.
#
But even as an idea, these are the things that interest me.
#
And to close on this, I recently read a book that explained to me, you know, one of the
#
problems of talking about masculinity now is that these days is that feminist is an
#
Masculinist there's a block at every station because of the again, that is a separate word
#
with a separate history, and your conversation can be interrupted, or you actually have to
#
find male only spaces where you can talk, you know, man to man in a different sense.
#
But I have a lot of respect for the ideas of Robert Bly, you know, the American poet
#
and a very deep thinker on myth, Jungian psychology, fairy tale, religion, where does all mean
#
and what what these mean for modern life.
#
There's a book I recently found by Iron John, which I read with the greatest pleasure about
#
the idea that it's basically a retelling over and over again of this of a fairy tale from
#
the Grimm Brothers about a beast and a wild beast near a pond, and it being wounded in
#
some sense, I forget the exact story now.
#
But it's a metaphor for there being a beast inside you, whether as a man or as a human
#
being, I can only speak from my own experience.
#
And you can never tame the beast.
#
And if you domesticated too much, you actually lose the energy, that wildness, that animal
#
How do you can you channel its energy so that it actually makes something positive in your
#
life, that aggression, that spirit, that animal spirit, to turn it from something destructive
#
or volcanic into something that actually is nurturing, tender, giving.
#
I think this is a challenge that all of us must face in the second half of our lives
#
for you know, where can you take it and should you always be aware of it?
#
And can you by thinking about it, actually, you know, transform it for something you read
#
to something inside you and where can you go with it?
#
And I think there's many presidents in India for that if you take the last millennium,
#
the Sufi movement, the Bhakti movement, many movements to break down barriers are in some
#
way linked to this sort of breaking down a barrier within your own self with the other
#
And do you remember how the middle stage got named the middle stage?
#
When I started the middle stage, I based it on a quote by Theodore Dreiser, which I'll
#
read out for you, quote, our civilization is still in the middle stage, scarcely beast
#
in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct, scarcely human in that it is not yet wholly
#
And I often think that the great mark of civilization, the struggle of civilization, in a sense,
#
is that we are taking control of ourselves, like not, you know, not letting our hardwiring
#
control who we are, in a sense, you know, nurture fighting back against nature, not
#
even nurture, but sort of using culture to mitigate some of the bad aspects of a hardwiring
#
and a lot of a hardwiring is, of course, contradictory and so on and so forth.
#
And therefore, I wonder, like, you know, I've not thought of it in terms of masculinity
#
But one of the journeys that I've been forced to make and trying to make and I don't I don't
#
know if one can be completely successful is that journey where you're comfortable in
#
your own skin, where you can kind of reflect enough on yourself to realize why you do the
#
And then you can sort of come to terms with what you are and reconcile that with what
#
you want to be and find that kind of middle ground, as it were, or, you know, go closer
#
to that perfect version of yourself.
#
But I've never thought of it in masculine terms, obviously, looking back, as we were
#
earlier discussing a lot of the tendencies that we had in our youth, like that hyper
#
competitiveness or all of that is a masculine thing.
#
You know, and is that kind of what you meant as well?
#
I mean, obviously, what we're mitigating this notion of the masculine is not just the instinctive
#
ways in which we behave because of our hormones and so on, but also the dangerous social notions
#
of this is what men are and this is what women are and dealing with that as well.
#
And I think you transcend that for at least the people who know you to make another society
#
of people whom you know, where you go past these ideas.
#
But I was even struck by that quote about the middle stage, you know, in that quote
#
by Dreiser, not without reason.
#
He seems to end on the point where saying if we're all more guided by reason or mostly
#
guided by reason, we would be in a good place.
#
I tend to disagree with that, and I think it was like a kind of fantasy of the Enlightenment
#
and of the ways of political life in the last 200 years, again, for which contrary evidence
#
is emerging on every single day all around us, that reasonable people are somewhere somewhat
#
and rationality in the end always yields good results.
#
Since humanity is also fundamentally irrational, I would argue that the problem is somehow
#
to combine the rational and irrational into a package whereby neither of them destroys
#
the other and that each has a space of free expression.
#
Therefore your sport, your art, whatever, these all actually caters to the irrational.
#
When they are taken out into politics, family, they can be very destructive.
#
But in the end, I would finally say, and this is also the insight of Taoism and some kinds
#
of philosophy that are not about language, that there is some kinds of meaning that cannot
#
be articulated in language.
#
And the more you grow as a writer, you realize that this is true.
#
Some other kinds of thinkers know it.
#
And therefore, actually, you cannot reason your way out of problems even such as this
#
one as being comfortable in your own self.
#
You must have, and I think I most closely came in touch with this idea in the last seven
#
or eight years and now firmly believe in it, that we sudden break out spaces, moments,
#
relationships or encounters in your life where you take such a leap in those two or three
#
days or whatever that you can never return to who you used to be before.
#
There's always that you plus who you, what you experienced or what you knew.
#
And those transformative little encounters, those little jumps are actually, when combined
#
with the more reasoned and planned trajectory, that mix of rational and irrational in your
#
own self actually makes for a very pleasant space where you also surprise yourself because
#
there are ways in which you can surprise yourself.
#
And you have to then start plotting for ways in which you can surprise yourself, do something
#
I never was interested in agriculture, now I think about it almost every day, meet other
#
And that way, I think we're also very lucky, you know, we have a chance to travel and live
#
in different cultures, travel to different places.
#
Living for three or four months in Brazil, when I was 37 or 38, actually, you know, even
#
the fact I've come here today wearing shorts, which I never used to wear before in public
#
at the very least, I grew up like a good Indian man, never showed his legs.
#
Yeah, me too, maybe it's a vintage, I never show my legs outside the house.
#
Yes, I find the Brazilians something that all Indians should go to Brazil, there should
#
be some special diplomatic exchange where, you know, reduce the fares and make a subsidy
#
There should be like a soul pilgrimage to go to Brazil to learn the art of letting go
#
and of giving physicality.
#
It's not like there's no bad touch in Brazil as well there is, but I found that lots of
#
men and women on the street when they meet each other, they hug, poke, kiss, pinch, prod,
#
squeeze without the sense that you are transgressing someone's personal space across gender and
#
And as Indians, perhaps we are imprisoned in both these spaces.
#
And suddenly I found it very liberating and I almost like this since, you know, any Indian
#
can pass off as Brazilian, after a few days of this, you suddenly realize how pleasurable
#
it is and also the art of letting go and living in the moment, you know, we are brought up
#
always thinking of security, your flat, your EMI, your rent, your whatever, don't do this
#
beta, whatever, you know, in life as an adult, you have to unlearn so much of what you're
#
And this is very important.
#
And I think, again, this is where perhaps both you and I are more comfortable with ourselves,
#
that we part of being more relaxed about who you are is learning how to enjoy yourself
#
in the present moments of treating that present moment as a journey towards somebody else.
#
I don't want to become somebody else.
#
That will happen in its own time.
#
Back now, who I am, who I am today sitting across from you and the fact that we can channel
#
our shared histories and our personal histories together in this space, which has this energy,
#
the books of your library, whatever, you know, this room, this view, this Bombay, the city,
#
that is the best you will be for that moment in time.
#
So once you can let go of these things and stay where you are, temporarily speaking,
#
it's really very pleasant and what more can one say?
#
This is something I keep reminding myself of, like when I was young, my ideas of happiness
#
were tied up with goals.
#
I want to write this book, get this acclaimed, blah, blah, blah.
#
And I think as you grow older, you realize that those goals are irrelevant.
#
Maybe they won't happen.
#
Probably they won't happen.
#
But the important thing is that in the present moment, you're blessed with so much and just
#
sit back and enjoy that because there is sort of so much to enjoy in that.
#
By the way, about that whole Brazil-India exchange program thing that they are touchy-feely
#
and you want to send young Indian boys there, I ask you with folded hand emoji.
#
Kindly do not give these ideas to anybody in authority.
#
You know, especially Brazil will not be very happy about this.
#
Perhaps the young Indian boys will also learn that, you know, one can touch in a different
#
way, like to make somebody else feel comfortable as well.
#
Let's leave it for when we can actually take a shipment over.
#
Let's not be condescending to young Indian boys also.
#
There are many things about them that we might...
#
On that generous note, let's take a quick commercial break and we continue our conversation.
#
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 loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised 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.
#
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.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I am chatting with my good friend Chandrahar Chaudhary on his literary journey so far.
#
And let's get back to the chronological and the linear progression of your life.
#
So in Cambridge, you start writing reviews, you get the chance, you also write a review
#
for the Washington Post, you start reaching out to others.
#
And then you came back to India.
#
And what's the scene then?
#
What made you go for cricket journalism?
#
What made you join us at Cricket For?
#
And what was that period like?
#
Because there were a couple of sentences kind of talking about how office life didn't really
#
So tell me a little bit about what that period was like, because I have kind of been a witness
#
to it, but a witness to it from outside your skin.
#
So from inside your skin, tell us.
#
Well what can one say, you know, I think I should preface any comments of mine by saying
#
I probably was on the worst employees anybody could ever hire.
#
I might have looked superficially promising, but I just cannot, constitutionally, I cannot
#
really work for someone else until I feel I'm part of the team, a creative part of the
#
team, I have some investment in that.
#
So and especially when I was younger, I think I was, it was even harder for me.
#
Just like you, I think from the age of seven or eight onwards, I spent my entire day other
#
than books thinking about cricket, living, playing, dreaming all day long, and reading
#
Even you can combine cricket and literature.
#
And finally, bizarrely enough, this was the path that opened up to me when I graduated
#
Nowadays, young people know even when they're 12, what they want to do in their lives.
#
But I'd written a couple of cricket pieces doing an internship in wizarding in England.
#
And I think cricket for starting up or looking for some new people and Sambit Baal wrote
#
to me while I was still in England saying, do you want to come to Bombay and start work
#
I was so delighted to be offered a job and in cricket as well.
#
Not only was I very delighted, my friends at university, my Indian friends were 10 times
#
So they almost pressured me into taking up this offer because it can't be anything greater
#
than cricket is your work, whereas for us, they used to watch it on the side from the
#
investment banks or whatever.
#
So I came back and I was very happy and I couldn't wait to start work.
#
I think I even curtailed my vacation in England, I was so keen to enter that world of employment
#
and going to work and being part of the economy, etc.
#
And it was very exciting.
#
I remember very vividly the first time coming in and you go to office and you feel very
#
But in the end, as I think so many of us, it's strange how many writers emerged from
#
the three or four year period in Cricket 4's life.
#
To that extent, I think it was a great laboratory.
#
It set very high standards, Sambit held a very high line.
#
I remember every writer in Cricket 4, newly arriving, had to go through two or three bruising
#
In cricket, you went through with Courtney Walsh, Kurt Lee, Amroza Shoib, Akhtar.
#
In cricket writing, you went through Stephen Lynch.
#
You wrote a piece and suddenly there would come an email from England where he had taken,
#
micro-analyzed your grammar, syntax, punctuation, sentence structure, use of terminology hyphens,
#
And there were so many red marks.
#
It was the sort of literary criticism I never had when I was a student at university.
#
Those bits were enormously exciting and having pieces, writing them and having them come
#
They were all wonderful, but somewhere I think I realized cricket is not going to be my life.
#
And if it is not going to be, then what is the point of committing to a very long period?
#
It's merely an intermediate stage.
#
And I think very early on, I was thinking of how to get moving and perhaps the greatest,
#
you know, Robert Lyles says this and it is true, many things that are very dark in your
#
life when you experience them, actually a certain kind of gift in retrospect.
#
And I think the best thing that would have happened to me was my very serious girlfriend
#
at the time went to America to study and we broke up and it was very upsetting for me,
#
but freed of the need to earn a salary, to earn the respect of your partner's family.
#
And I always felt that I needed a family like that, given my troubles with my own family.
#
I had this emotional need for the security of somebody else's family.
#
Freed of that need, I suddenly decided I can't bear to go to work anymore also.
#
I can't bear to face the world.
#
You are turning away from people and society because you can't take it.
#
The good bit of that is you're turning away towards something productive, which is books
#
And as I recall in my memoir in my country's literature, you know, books have always meant
#
so many great things for me, so many spaces where, you know, it solved a problem in my
#
life until one day itself became a kind of problem.
#
And it is something to think about as you go through life.
#
So this was my journey.
#
And then I thought, you know, at the very least, if I stay at home, I patched together
#
a few book reviews, at least I'll have my control of my own life.
#
And I gave up my job and said my goodbyes, including to our test matches.
#
Who was the final score?
#
I think 53-49 to you, we must play at some other time.
#
I think in office cricket, you must have been ahead of me in terms of score, but the most
#
memorable dismissals would certainly have had me as a bowler.
#
So that term trend might have been of my superiority, but there was a certain stage when I could
#
not deal with that spin swing where I lost so many test matches that, you know, it was
#
that I could never claw back the entire, again, it proves my theory that when you make progress,
#
you must head on in fifth gear so that, you know, you can have enough capital for linear
#
I was, I was totally like Alan Donald plus Muthaya Madhli Tharan.
#
How do you, how do you deal with that?
#
You spoke about the role literature was playing in your life and I want to read out another
#
lovely passage by you where you write, having been formed by reading novels as much as the
#
contours of my own biography and the conflicts of the psyche, I have in middle age come to
#
see novels also as an unusual kind of wisdom literature, a place where a young person acutely
#
conscious of callowness and malformation may be exposed to the nuances of human nature,
#
real life, romantic love and history to the subtle workings of cause and effect and also
#
a sort of imaginative safe space where rage, violence, grief and trauma can be vicariously
#
and cathartically experienced and one's own psychic wounds healed.
#
I don't doubt that this was one of the main reasons for my attraction to novels in my
#
A novel can be a refuge for those who are thrown off by life for the action of understanding
#
what is going on in a text can serve as a sort of substitute for the challenges of action
#
in the world, stop code.
#
And you of course write, you know, this seems so dramatic, it's like you completely gave
#
up the real world and shut yourself in a room and read books, but that's not at all what
#
I mean, when you read this, do you find it answers something about your own experience
#
of reading novels or what they mean to you or you have a different relationship to novels
#
I think that is sort of a role and this will probably lead me to my next question before
#
we get back to biography, but I find that that role of how does one of the shaping of
#
the self in this case, you speak about reading novels as the shaping of the self and that's
#
played a little bit in the sense that every time you read a novel, you are experiencing
#
another life and another person's head and that can give you much greater insight into
#
your own blind spots and into the things that you do not see.
#
But to a certain extent, more of that has happened from doing different.
#
I mean, just from living in ways that one can't express, but also from doing different
#
Like I just think that doing five hour conversations has probably made me a better person because
#
I now try to listen more.
#
I am more interested in people's personal journeys as opposed to whether or not they
#
agree with me and all of that.
#
And I think those things also make a difference.
#
And I'll come to my next question with this because it's something that you would no doubt
#
have a lot to say about, which is that I have found that, and I wrote an essay on this a
#
while back also about how the form of something that you do can shape the content of what
#
you're forced to do with it and therefore shape you as a person.
#
Like just the example, like if instead of five hour interviews, I was doing five minute
#
interviews, they would be extremely shallow, you know, and that would force a certain kind
#
of work and that would force a different kind of person.
#
Whereas over here I am forced to listen, to reflect, to read much more deeply than I otherwise
#
would not just to read one book by the author if you're talking about a book, but read everything
#
he's written, for example, which happens very often.
#
And I think that's, so the form changed the work that I did and therefore that changed
#
And when I apply that to say what somebody like you would be doing, that when you would
#
have started off, there would have been a particular form in which you were supposed
#
Like there would be a standard template of how a review is written say in a foreign newspaper
#
when you write for an Indian newspaper also, there is a form that is at least at a very
#
basic surface level dictated by the number of words that you have to play with.
#
But then you start blogging and all that goes out of the window.
#
And somebody else, and maybe you should do this as well, might well have started talking
#
about books on a YouTube channel and that goes out of the window because those forms
#
You don't have to, you can just approach a book in very different ways, look at different
#
So do you feel that, you know, being able to play around with different forms changed
#
what you kind of came up with, how you thought about books, how you had to read them?
#
No, but I would say that the deepest thread of my adult life is the dialogue between reading
#
peoples, the writing of them, including also encompassing the way I see people.
#
But that long form between speak of and that structure actually is a structure that you
#
create in your own life when you set out to write a book and it's going to be three or
#
I've only written one book in less than four years in my life of my three or four, which
#
is Days of My China Dragon, even those I wrote at many points over a decade.
#
And that continuous dialogue of creating a certain structure, a tone, a voice, a life,
#
a set of words, an experience that flows in time is the, in a way, I think of writing
#
a novel as an extremely good way to live because you are forever ploughing a certain patch
#
of earth and making it deeper, learning the contours of the space.
#
And by the end of it, you don't just write novels, novels also write you back.
#
Your characters write you back.
#
They create you as you create them.
#
It is a continuous dialogue.
#
And so it's a very life transforming from novel to novel.
#
And thankfully in my life, I've always embarked on projects, which when I finished them, I
#
almost didn't recognize who I was, either so much time I delapsed or something had happened
#
I became a better writer.
#
No novel of mine resembles the other in terms of style.
#
So I now realize I have an ethic of writing, making a new style for every book.
#
The people I met or the things I had to answer to write those novels, for instance, the
#
exploration of tribal life and the history of Indian democracy in clouds, always took
#
me into new parts of India, which purely as a book reviewer, as a person living in Bombay,
#
I would never have gone and was forced to find answers or questions I had in my head
#
and answer them at length through people's accounts.
#
So it's a certain model of research, a certain model of study, a certain model of solitude,
#
a certain model of continuous practice, a certain model of revision, all being plotted
#
on one on top of the other till the time when something comes out on the other side, which
#
is very interesting to construct, and you have full freedom and power to do it by yourself.
#
No one is in a hurry to read you.
#
You have to almost like a scientist work out what method works for you.
#
When do you write best in the day?
#
Can you get high, for instance, with coffee, which is also something we discussed, could
#
you get high selectively at a certain moment of the day so that you're primed to write
#
for two hours and that's all you need?
#
From then you can come down the rest of the day in a very nice slope and get ready again
#
If you write every day, are you a better writer than when you write in large bursts in two
#
Once I can string together six or seven days, I really find it much easier to write after
#
It's the best place to be when you have three months of writing behind you.
#
You can write endlessly the rest of your life, which is why sometimes I tell myself the best
#
time to start a novel is the day after you finish a previous one, because you just know
#
And once you let those six months, eight months, one year elapse of waiting, when you start
#
out again, you are actually a beginner.
#
You're nothing more than a beginner.
#
Your experience is of no help.
#
There's that internal rhythm and that sense of confidence in language that in the end
#
And without that, that's grounding as a personality.
#
That's why I feel although I might have been socially very inept and wouldn't know how
#
to be in a relationship or be a very jealous or insecure boyfriend or a son who didn't
#
understand some things or a very typical kind of man, at the very least from these kinds
#
of things, I realized I need to apply this sort of method to life as well.
#
And there can be interesting results.
#
There are things that you don't see which require some deeper understanding.
#
And that way, you know, novels are bottomless.
#
And that's what I really like about the great novels.
#
I mean, you can read every page, every line, every chapter, it's written with some sort
#
of secret force that it's very hard to achieve long form in work.
#
You know, they're really, really solid books.
#
So tell me a bit more about your writing process.
#
But before that, I'm also intrigued by this thing that you said that some of the application
#
that you take to the act of writing can also help you in other ways in your life, being
#
a better son or boyfriend or whatever.
#
Yes, you know, I think the most difficult problem of being a human being separate from
#
being a writer, a human being body in space and time is that and it's a perfectly I've
#
lots of empathy for people in making mistakes for this reason.
#
When you see two people arguing on a street, even if you don't know them very well in
#
a room, you immediately feel like you can analyze the situation.
#
This person is making this mistake, that person is making that mistake.
#
You cannot analyze yourself from outside of yourself because you cannot see yourself in
#
The person making the mistakes and the person analyzing the mistakes are coming from the
#
And therefore, there's not the third.
#
That's why I really love Adam Smith and his idea of the impartial spectator and the fact
#
that you have to form a space somewhere within yourself to create a part of a personality
#
that is able to watch yourself from above and analyze yourself so that you don't always
#
end up coming to the conclusion that the other side is wrong because that's the most natural
#
My point of view is better than yours.
#
They also are, you realize, they also are thinking of you in exactly the same way as
#
you're thinking of them.
#
But your investment in the situation means that you cannot see that.
#
And being blind to that, no matter how much you try to do, until you say, what am I looking
#
What you say and how you come across are two very different things.
#
As you grow older, you realize that you are in control of how you come across.
#
If I were to look at a video of myself 20 years ago, I'm sure no such video exists.
#
There's such a gap between what you're trying to do and what you're doing that it's not
#
Nobody is going to be impressed by your message.
#
Your rhetorical power is not to any great end, and you are missing so much about yourself.
#
So in that way, the main thing here also is that, and this was very grateful not to have
#
There are endless hours, sometimes too many, to reflect on your mistakes and on how you're
#
And that spiritual aspect of reflection and meditation in a right early life, although
#
it may or may not help the work, it makes you, I think it's good for living.
#
It tells you that on a daily basis, you have to think about how you come across, what you're
#
doing and you advance in your retreat, day after day after day, into books, out of books,
#
into life, out of life.
#
And your time, that's why I really think as a young person, you should try, especially
#
if you're a young woman in India today, find a way to rent a space for yourself, a house
#
for yourself for a year or two, and leave behind your last name as your identity.
#
Be a first name and whatever you're growing into, cook for yourself, call people over,
#
make your own library and reflect on who you are and where you're going, and then go out
#
That is a different kind of education, very important.
#
So do you feel that helped you a lot?
#
Like, tell me a bit about that, than just living alone, cooking, calling friends.
#
I think the greatest day of my adult life was the day finally when I broke with the
#
Indian consensus that if you live in the same city as your parents, you live in the same
#
house as your parents, which I reflexively always accepted until there was so much conflict
#
over a particular relationship of mine, I realized that almost as a punishment, I decided
#
I have to leave and find my own house.
#
I left home, I landed up in Dadar, I walked around a bit, I went to a property dealer.
#
By evening, you know, this is a remarkable luck in Bombay, by evening I knew the place
#
where I wanted to live, a small one room apartment in a very run down building at Century Bazaar
#
Two weeks later, I packed up my things, I still had the luxury of being able to go back
#
to my mother's house, but I packed up my things and left for this place.
#
Within three days of my arriving there, I went down to this restaurant and met one of
#
the greatest influences of my life in my 20s, like you on my 30s, the way you were in my
#
20s, I met like the Amit Verma of my 30s, Rupesh Bhai, this restaurateur who used to
#
run an Udupi restaurant there and set me off on a completely different journey.
#
And a couple of years later, I left for Delhi, but again, I had a very nice house next door
#
to my old friends and these two houses in my life, one in Prabhadevi for two years and
#
one in Kalkaji, which I recently gave up, nine years, the longest I've ever lived anywhere,
#
I think were the two real universities of my life because I learned, I might have learned
#
to be a writer and a person in economy, a son in all these places, to be a complete
#
human being, I needed a house of my own, which when you realize this, you suddenly realize
#
what space means, what space means in terms of personal power and of growing it as both
#
as a space of interaction with people and as a space of private retreat.
#
A one-room apartment is what you need to be a writer in some way, where you can go back.
#
That's why so many writers are so attached to the studios and refuse to give it up.
#
And in that space, I learned how to cook, to invite people over, to meet people on my
#
own terms, to go back and heal from wounds and traumas or breakups, to just sleep all
#
day long, to stay at the people tree, to go for a run, to acquire memories.
#
And when I left that house, it really felt like leaving a person behind because, how
#
All the memories of the people who passed there are part of your memory of that house
#
And you will never in any house in the future, when will you have nine years in another room
#
And they're just part of that juncture in your life and it was a real training ground
#
to be, also to be an Indian, there's so many Indias that we don't know that you almost
#
have to create a little space where those Indias can come together.
#
Maybe some are still left out, but one must make a bigger India than the one which one
#
And if everyone does that, in the end, when we share our Indias, we construct something
#
that we can't do by ourselves.
#
And in this way, actually, that one room was my education for so many things.
#
And what was the process of writing your books like?
#
I totally empathize with what you say about writing as a way of self-discovery, like Joan
#
Didion memorably said, I don't know what I think until I write it down.
#
And I discussed this with Amitav Kumar also in the episode I did with him where writing
#
every day is such a good habit because you're deepening your sense of self.
#
I heard that and both of you had some very good thoughts on that.
#
I was struck by that point of his that writing shapes you.
#
And if you start in exactly the same space, so let's say an alternate universe is one
#
version of you writes every day and one person of you doesn't write every day.
#
In five years, I think you are different people.
#
So tell me a little bit about your writing process because it strikes me that when you're
#
a journalist, like when you're writing reviews or when I'm writing columns or whatever, you're
#
writing to a deadline, you force yourself to do it, you kind of get the job done.
#
But when you're writing a novel, it's a different kind of beast.
#
And what I particularly find hard in things that I try to do outside of, you know, deadline
#
based things is that I find that discipline hard to come by those process.
#
Like in my writing course, for example, out of the four webinars, one is just about process
#
because I feel that that's where I learned the greatest lessons in my life by failing
#
That it's not important to just have an intellectual understanding of writing and what you need
#
to do and the craft and all that, you actually need to kind of sit down and write and force
#
How was it for you when you wrote your novels?
#
Well, I think as children of the internet, you and me both, I mean, that is the main,
#
the internet is a great resource in the life of a writer and almost the most destructive
#
So again, like I was saying, with something that is good and bad size, you have to learn
#
to channel the good and either turn off the bad, tap off the bad or also use that in some
#
Between books, for instance, I get lazy and wake up in the morning, check my email on
#
my phone, what's on Facebook, likes, somebody's comments, et cetera, actually, it's a bad
#
But when I've written best in my life and even now when I write best is when I wake
#
up in the morning, I turn the internet off and I only look at email and everything else
#
I have the morning till myself to read and write in language that I control.
#
I don't even read the newspaper and I find suddenly make a giant space of freedom.
#
It feels like a huge, huge space in which you're just floating like a cloud across this giant
#
And in the beginning, it's a bit disorienting because one wants to turn away.
#
Okay, you don't know what's your next sentence.
#
Let's quickly check my email or whatever.
#
You've got to learn to train yourself to just live in that space and make it bigger and
#
You can, you know, like we are having very good coffee now, you can break for a coffee,
#
keep returning back to your desk and learn to enjoy and own your own power over the written
#
word and over language itself.
#
Don't let anybody else's language infect the place where it's almost like a temple where
#
you are raising up something that hopefully is permanent.
#
And then you don't get distracted very easily either.
#
And avoiding distractions and being focused is, I think, the main thing.
#
And if you have the same in luckily, I have, you know, I'm able to give the best of my
#
days to writing that I'm in on the most awake my mornings.
#
I never want that to be taken away from me.
#
And that I think is the ultimate freedom for me in my life.
#
When I wake up in the morning, no one is in control of my day between eight and lunch.
#
I can read, I can write, I can write in my notebook, I can work up some ideas, I can
#
go for a little walk, but I'm always inside the world of my book or whatever I'm writing
#
And I find, you know, when these four hours, four hours, four hours add up 25, 26 days
#
of the month, you cannot get to that place through any other means.
#
It only has to happen as a function of focus, time and pleasure in that pleasure.
#
You know, this is the paradoxical thing, but human nature, you can enjoy it so much.
#
But addiction to short term pleasures is so powerful that even when you know that your
#
long term pleasure is going to be very fulfilling, you're continually pulled away and you keep
#
on having to sort of like pull yourself back.
#
You have to learn this about human nature and sort of, again, push back against the
#
Yeah, I mean, one concept I'm struck by is that every action you take now is an investment
#
So if I sit down to write, I could say, okay, let me just play one game of online chess.
#
I'll play a game of Blitz and then I'll, and then you play Blitz for two hours and your
#
But what you have done is you made your future self stupider because in that, unless you
#
want to be a chess professional chess player, because in that time you could have been writing
#
or reading if that was part of an extended habit, your future self would have been that
#
But the opportunity cost of your playing online chess, Candy Crush, whatever the poison might
#
be is that you're hurting your future self.
#
Another question is that one thing I find about novelists is that novelists are the
#
kind of creators who are, in a sense, breaking what has become an important commandment of
#
the creator economy, as it were, in the sense that you've quoted Frank Kermode in an essay
#
writing about Shakespeare and you've quoted him as saying about Shakespeare, there is
#
a way of treating Shakespeare as a very good, but sometimes not so good poet, as sometimes,
#
if not always, clearly a writer of genius, as always indeed a writer, and to be considered
#
And you yourself described Shakespeare as possibly both majestic and fallible, right?
#
And it strikes me that one reason why Shakespeare is all of these things is that he is privileging
#
production over perfection, is that he's just writing, writing, writing, and good stuff
#
And the advice I always give to people and continue to give is that have a bias for action,
#
you know, wherever there is a trade-off between getting it right and getting it done, have
#
a bias for getting it done because the only way to achieve excellence is through constant
#
So write, write, write, write, write, which is almost a mantra of the creator economy
#
that just write, write, write, write, write, quantity is actually the way to quality in
#
And that's something that works in a lot of creative endeavor, but it also seems to me
#
at the same time, like a writer who previously come on the show had said, perfection is the
#
enemy of production, which I totally get.
#
But at the same time, when it comes to writing a novel, it almost feels like you're locking
#
yourself up for four years or five years or whatever.
#
And of course there are people like Simonon who would write a novel in a week, but otherwise
#
you're locking yourself up for a long period of time and you're following almost the opposite
#
ethic, where you're working and like our mutual friend, Sonia Faleiro, with whom we used to
#
hang out so much in the good old Bombay days, she wrote, I think four drafts, a beautiful
#
thing and they're all different from each other, which is incredible work ethic, which
#
I cannot imagine myself doing, but I can't imagine myself putting myself through that,
#
but incredible work ethic.
#
So how does one think about this?
#
Because as a reviewer, I think one of the things that would have made you a good reviewer
#
is that you're always writing reviews.
#
There's a year when you write 70 reviews.
#
You do so much of it that you just become naturally better at it.
#
But at the same time, when it comes to novel, it's almost as if it demands the opposite
#
I very lightly agree, in fact, I mostly disagree with the idea that one should keep creating.
#
Book reviews is part of the economy of literature.
#
Somebody has to, they come out on a regular day of the week, somebody has to write them,
#
the discipline is important.
#
So you cannot mess with that and say, you can always rewrite your book review as an
#
essay at much greater length, but it has to be done for a particular day.
#
So in that sense, that ethic of production on time in a reliable and predictable way
#
But the way to reconcile one kind of thought and the other that one should privilege perfection
#
is actually you can keep writing lots and lots of words, but why should there always
#
Why can't it be the same words?
#
And that's when you get to the idea of a draft, even the idea of an essay.
#
The reason why I really like writing essays, like one in two weeks, a 1200 word essay,
#
but having two weeks to write it, you write a draft on Monday.
#
If you had to send it by Monday evening, it would come out as a very, I'm sure to be decent
#
But when you rewrite it on Tuesday, then you rewrite it again on Wednesday and Thursday.
#
When you send it off on Friday, every word you have thought about a few times and you've
#
moved the sentences around.
#
At first you said what you wanted to say in the next draft, you began to polish a few
#
arguments on the third day because you're thinking about it subconsciously.
#
Some minute qualifications of the points you were trying to make began to occur to you
#
or a better version of what you're trying to say.
#
You're not even working anymore.
#
It's just now dropping down from the sky of your mind like raindrops.
#
So you're staying with something for as long as it needs to produce the best version of
#
And that I think is a rightly ideal that is nice, that you don't produce at maximum capacity.
#
It's not the Saudi Arabian oil barrels where more writing is perhaps even in a material
#
sense, more profit, spiritually and with regard to your relationship with your work.
#
And that way novels are very disciplining because what you're after is actually a language
#
that you will never use again in your life.
#
And to understand that language you created, to be shaped by what you already have done
#
and to work the next year in the light of the insights you have got, you cannot do it
#
And what you actually want is that deep immersion where you discover many things that you would
#
never have known on the first day of writing.
#
That's why so many novelists end up rewriting the first two, three chapters of their book
#
because it's trash, not just because it was the start of their work, they just didn't
#
know what the chapters themselves led them to learn further down the line.
#
So you rewrite your early work in the light of what you were able to do further down.
#
And once you do this and you realize what pleasure there is in it, you cannot return
#
or you can only return under pressure for other reasons, making money or etc.
#
In the end, you want to be left alone for that three or four, sometimes a bit faster,
#
that experience of doing something which later when you read it, you won't realize how you
#
You really can't really.
#
I don't mean this in a sense of awe at creation.
#
It's just that you got so involved with it.
#
I cannot write Arzee Rudolf again today, even if I know the story, because I cannot write
#
I could only write at the time in the light of what I knew.
#
Those were good decisions I made then.
#
And even the fact that I wasn't such a good writer, perhaps I had real flaws and I could
#
only write in certain ways, I could use my own constraints and limitations to create
#
more deeply in certain spheres.
#
Like you were saying, disciplines and constraints can be a way of unlocking some things.
#
In that sense, I think novels are good for writing.
#
You completely abandon this idea, you descend from it from the very root that if I never
#
wrote a novel in my life, I don't think that many readers in Indian literature frankly
#
I would miss myself and I would miss my writing and I know that there are many things waiting
#
for me that I can only do by writing novels, including some understandings about how language
#
works or how human beings work.
#
So it's actually a way for me to go forward in my own life.
#
And afterwards, of course, it's nice to be read and I don't want to just write and not
#
publish, but my readership is frankly not such a big deal in my life and nor is my productivity
#
It's something a little more private than that.
#
I want to see a book that I can stand up on my shelf alongside the books that I admire
#
It should be able to like Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay's book standing next to my book
#
should be able to, if they're able to talk to each other when I'm away traveling, I think
#
that is, if they don't look down on one another, I think that is a sort of thing that would
#
Where do you think they fall short now?
#
Like, why can't your current books stand on the same bookshelf and have those conversations?
#
In that sense, actually, I mean, perhaps I'm overestimating myself, but I don't feel they
#
If they fall short, then I don't let them out.
#
You know, I've reworked some books of mine endlessly.
#
That's what cloud took six or seven years to write.
#
And I just was not pleased with what it was.
#
And somebody would say it looks fine enough.
#
And I would say no until I can read it for pleasure myself and even be surprised by my
#
And that's the model I followed.
#
And it has meant only three books in 15 years.
#
But they stand up on my shelf and I'm happy with them.
#
In my question earlier about, you know, that production perfection dilemma, I actually
#
I mean, I think both models are fine.
#
I think for a certain kind of creator, number one, you get to excellence by iterating constantly.
#
So you got to just keep the production on.
#
And number two, it takes a long time to build sort of an organic following for your work.
#
So if you are, for example, dependent on outside things like validation, you'll simply never
#
So you have to love what you're doing.
#
And then you have to just do it again and again.
#
And then eventually good things happen.
#
But for a novel, I understand why the immersive experience is more useful, where you kind
#
of don't do a quantitative analysis of, you know, John Grisham once said that to be
#
a successful writer, you have to have the work ethic of an accountant and I agree with
#
But at the same time, not in the sense that someone in the creator economy might key.
#
How many videos have I released this week?
#
And therein lies that other question of where does gratification lie?
#
Because for a create, like if you're making YouTube videos or you're writing newsletter
#
posts or you're even doing podcasts like this, you have that sense that if I keep doing it
#
again and again over a period of time, organically, growth will happen.
#
I have an episode out every week.
#
People will discover some episode or the other, they'll binge on whatever came before.
#
And that's organically how growth happens for creators in all kinds of fields.
#
But for a novelist, it was feel lonely that you write a book, you bring it out.
#
And initially, when you're young, you think your first book and all of that.
#
And then you kind of realize that nobody really gives a fuck.
#
You know, the trains that you watch, they are still going east to west, west to east.
#
Then there is the question of what has this novel done?
#
Is it then as much for this personal growth and gratification or whatever?
#
Is this something that kind of bothers you?
#
Because when you write your book reviews, and you really should start a newsletter,
#
because I think people like me especially would love to read something like that, even
#
if it's not formal essays or whatever, but just your thoughts on books or personal brief
#
writing, we'll talk about this after this episode, I must convince you.
#
But you know, stuff like that has a sort of an immediate impact in the world, which is
#
measurable and it's there and it's out there and you do it, you put it out, you move on
#
Is it harder with a novel?
#
Yes, but it is harder not because and I think many novelists feel this.
#
It's not our fault that it's harder because in the last 20 years, the center of the cultural
#
world has shifted dramatically away from language towards the moving image and towards other
#
forms of storytelling, including and the very good examples of this, what Facebook posts
#
and Instagram messages, which satisfies our need for story.
#
As Mario Vargas Losa very acutely put it, the human need for story is universal, but
#
the form in which you get our stories keeps changing.
#
And for 100, 150 years, novels held for literate and educated people, novels held the center
#
and we grew up in that culture and that no doubt that that's what influenced my desire
#
to write books like that.
#
One can accept that the world is changing so fast that you can, like with so many other
#
artisans, you begin in a trade, in five or 10 years, you are the marginal or have been
#
moved to one side and you can either change to adapt and do something else in storytelling,
#
write for film, et cetera, et cetera, or you can keep going thinking that I've always had
#
a journalistic life at 30, 40 pieces a year.
#
So that also allows me to focus on other things and have the gratification of readership in
#
different places, the Wall Street Journal, Indian newspaper, Mint, wherever it is, a
#
And in the end, the more you worry about the larger shape of the culture, the more you
#
I almost call it the tyranny of the audience, you know, in logon ko yeh chahiye, log aaj
#
kal yeh kar rahe hain, dekh rahe hain, isse liye mai usd disha mein jaunga.
#
And it's on the one hand is very pragmatic.
#
On the other hand, you kind of feel, you know, if you are wedded to an art form, what is
#
the chance that you will be able to start up in another thing?
#
You know, there's some things that come from deep knowledge or things that have been part
#
of your blood, you're thinking for 25, 30 years.
#
Can you just make the jump?
#
Perhaps you can, but you'll be a lower grade of worker in another, in a parallel art.
#
And somewhere I feel, you know, although in some other way, I'm drifting away from novels
#
I also want to write other kinds of nonfiction books now.
#
In the end, my heart and my, even if I don't write novels, I would still write nonfiction
#
books in a novelistic way.
#
And I might even say that rather than write a weekly newsletter and get more readers,
#
I would prefer to give those four hours to a conversation of the kind that we are having
#
now with someone I know, whom I want to know better.
#
And I would prefer to create and be created in tandem with human beings than to work at
#
the level of books and of people reading.
#
And you mentioned, you mentioned the phrase tyranny of the audience, but isn't that something
#
that novelists have always kind of stayed away from?
#
Like I understand it might be the, an imperative of a publisher or an editor to try and shape
#
your book in a particular way, but all successful novelists in a sense have kind of stayed away
#
from the tyranny of the audience and done what the hell they want and led the way.
#
Like if I see a problem in mainstream cinema today, and I think the mainstreams of course
#
are crumbling in every field, but if you look at mainstream cinema today, the truth is the
#
exciting work, a lot of the exciting work is really happening away from the big studios.
#
Like I think there's a lot of rich world cinema happening today, but if you look at the big
#
studios, it's just lack of imagination.
#
It is, oh, let us build a Marvel franchise and this franchise and that.
#
And that's always been a problem of the mainstream that what works yesterday, they'll try to
#
create something like it tomorrow.
#
Whereas the, the whole, you know, every good novelist will ignore what happened yesterday
#
and just go where they want to go.
#
And if it works, it works and so on and so forth.
#
So has the audience ever tyrannized you in that mental sense?
#
No, of course, I think it's a bit upsetting for me that I don't sell huge amounts of copies
#
and now, you know, I've gotten used to it.
#
And it's never tyrannized me, but I've realized that, you know, the novel is marginal in India
#
One, that we are not historically a novel reading culture.
#
So, you know, anyway, novels are minority pursuit in a culture, even in the West and
#
in India, many people, you know, the classic question at dinner party in Bombay, Delhi,
#
somewhere, somebody comes and asks you, so what do you do?
#
Oh, you write novels, fiction or nonfiction, a category mistake from the very beginning.
#
You know, people want stories, but they don't make this conceptual difference in their novel
#
You can write a novel about something that really happened to you.
#
You can write a book that you write about somebody else who's a real person could also
#
In their mind, there isn't this conceptual partition.
#
And it makes them a certain kind of reader, but obviously it makes them blind to the fact
#
that novels are a particular kind of literary artifact written with the greatest attention
#
Everything's under close control.
#
It's very carefully threaded out the way the episodes are structured.
#
So in the end, I think you have to accept your fate.
#
You know, you can't control your place in a larger and there's many accidents also,
#
you know, you could write a novel about something that suddenly everybody's reading and that's
#
lucky for some, unlucky for others, et cetera.
#
But in the main, I think, you know, I addressed this theme in an essay in this book, the Indian
#
novel as an agent of history.
#
Indian novels from the last hundred years, you know, were very, very progressive in many
#
things that were not happening in Indian society.
#
Indian novelists of the time began to enact stories about gender revolutions, political
#
revolutions, one step ahead of society because the novel gives you that room.
#
You can say things in a story that you can't do in real life.
#
But because not a lot of people read them, the capacity of some great Indian writers
#
as thinkers, as political thinkers, except that they worked in a novel form, meant that
#
nobody really knew what a Gopinath Mahanty said, a Bhivati Bhushan Bandhapatiya's model
#
of human relations adapted to the world of Indian democracy or Yashpal's idea of man
#
and woman in the New Indian Republic.
#
You know, all of these are thoughts that come out in novels like Jhuta Sacha or Pathir Panchali.
#
But they didn't have a huge traction and they don't have a common, that's why I feel Indian
#
newspapers and novels have, you know, broken up with each other.
#
So these ideas are not circulated and reviews are only about this character, like the book
#
is too slow, et cetera, et cetera.
#
There isn't that educated conversation about what novels bring in the realm of ideas through
#
A story is also a particular way of releasing an idea and sometimes a much more realistic
#
way of releasing an idea because you show it passing through the world of human beings
#
It's not an abstract idea as a political theory.
#
So you cannot counter the biases of the culture at all these levels.
#
Sure, I can write book reviews, I can write novels.
#
In my novels, there can be secrets.
#
But until a reader opens the book, you know, I go to give a talk at library sometimes.
#
Every book is there until the reader opens it and a certain kind of reader perhaps opens
#
When I wrote Days of my China Dragon, in the beginning, nobody read it.
#
These days, restaurateurs read it and write about it, saying this really reminded me of
#
my life behind the gala.
#
So you know, you never know what destiny a book has.
#
Many books become alive 20 or 25 years after they've been written.
#
So if you write enough books over 50 years, in the end, I think you've put in a solid
#
Every time you should live your life and enjoy your afternoon naps, drink your morning coffees.
#
You presented me with an amazing coffee this time, one of the best I've had this month.
#
So look, turn away from these conflicts is my for now my you know, like don't get too
#
caught up in this in middle age, you know, live for other things.
#
I live for my friends, my daughter, for football, a very big part of my life for for social
#
Once you finish a day's work, turn off the tap and forget all about it is my is my thinking.
#
Like a true novelist, you brought two contradictory thoughts together that of an afternoon nap
#
and a morning cup of coffee, because now have you had you had this coffee, how are you going
#
Somehow I sleep very well after morning cups of coffee, but if I drink coffee at six, I
#
Who knows what these mysteries mean?
#
Who knows what these mysteries are?
#
And I'm just kind of thinking aloud here that you know, I also read an episode with the
#
publisher VK Kartika a couple of years ago, episode I enjoyed a lot episode 150.
#
In fact, I think it was a memory and yeah, and and one of the things she said was that
#
people are not reading less.
#
People are pretty much reading as much as they ever were.
#
And I think that this whole notion of not enough people are reading is something that's
#
been there in every generation.
#
And I think what happens is that there's a small percentage of people in every generation
#
who read and the same percentage is reading even today.
#
So that is not lost, except that the rest of the people are also expressing themselves
#
So you imagine that more people are not actually reading books, but the number of readers is
#
And therefore, and in an Indian context, it could be said that, you know, like in an essay
#
Sarah wrote about her grandfather, Premchand, she mentioned how he went to some random event
#
somewhere where he was.
#
It was not a book event.
#
He just I forget the exact thing, but crowds had piled up to see him, you know, especially
#
Yes, people still care deeply about reading and that whole culture is still there.
#
So you know, even if it's always a small minority of people who read, it's kind of always been
#
So maybe that culture is there.
#
But you could also be right that English writing in India may not have an organic audience
#
Yes, and that audience itself may be drifting more towards nonfiction now than novels for
#
And so there can always be these micro trends under the broad trend.
#
When somebody says not enough people are reading, I take that in translation as meaning not
#
enough people are reading the sort of books that I think that should be read, which can
#
be real on or has both an element of genuine, has a substantive element to it, plus a kind
#
So since I am to also a great extent looking on a library, I know you like read novels
#
so highly, we kind of feel okay, but these are such beautiful, amazing books.
#
Why do more people read that rather than reading the latest, you know?
#
But yeah, I think we read more than we used to.
#
On your phone, you can read in a five minute space while waiting for the train.
#
You can read two, three articles.
#
Where did you do that before?
#
So we probably consume a lot more words.
#
But the best kind of words, the sentences that are written to be remembered, you know,
#
that level of writing that requires real focus and dedication to make the journey all the
#
It can't be something that randomly floats across your brain.
#
You want that encounter that well, who knows, we'll find out.
#
I think Jonathan Haight once made the great point that even though we have all of literature
#
and everything available to us at a keystroke, which, you know, when you and I were growing
#
up, we did, but even though we have all of that available at a keystroke now, most people
#
today are reading something that was produced in the last three days.
#
It's temporary and often it is short catering to the sort of the short attention span.
#
But I guess people who want to read sometimes even, they can't even act on the impulses
#
if they want to read because their brain's been colonized by this constant need for dopamine
#
that social media gives you and all of this gives you.
#
But in the end, let's not, perhaps there's some unfortunate aspects of this, but let's
#
not still forget that there's hundreds of thousands of very sophisticated readers out
#
They might not all read the same books, but when you line them up and line the libraries
#
up, it's a fantastic world.
#
Tell me something else.
#
Last year I was on the jury of this literature prize, the JCB literature prize, and reading
#
through the vast number of books that we went through, you know, all of us realized that
#
the quality of entries that were coming in were incredibly low.
#
We managed to get a good long list out.
#
I'm happy with all the books in the long list and the short list is great books, a privilege
#
to be able to read them as part of work.
#
But the quality was incredibly low and in some cases you wonder that what are these
#
publishing houses doing?
#
All the big name publishing houses came out with books which screamed no editor, no editor,
#
So what's the scene here?
#
Is that first of all, like, was it an outlier year or perhaps is my judgment, you know,
#
Because however much I read, I read selectively.
#
I read books I want to read, books I have heard about.
#
So I am in a sense reading the cream of the crop already just by selection bias to start
#
But how rich is our ecosystem, so to say?
#
I think from the combined perspective of a former book reviewer, still current in some
#
way, perhaps a lesser intensity and a novelist, I would say from my point of view, the average
#
Indian novel, especially in English, is incredibly banal.
#
The very good Indian novel is very, very good.
#
And so there is, it's not a ladder with like the rungs, you know, there's huge gaps between
#
And so in the end, you end up with lots of mediocre material and out of that, some really
#
And if you can imagine any literary culture, if you can find 10 novels in the year that
#
are really worth reading, you know, the standard for good novel is so high that in the end,
#
as I've written in many reviews of mine, most novels are bound to fail by the highest standards.
#
No matter how hard you work, how much time you put in, it doesn't quite cut it at the
#
level of, you know, think of a great, great novel, brilliance of language, intensity of
#
character, depth of understanding of human nature, ability to realize narrative effects,
#
to construct, to keep the tempo going, you know, to present reversals, to change point
#
It's not a small toolbox to have, you know, so in the end, many novelists end up with
#
two or three strengths that they kind of play to and the rest they try and cover up or move
#
You can also see people's weaknesses as you read and that's why they write, you know,
#
so a lot of Indian novels tend to be monologic rather than dialogic.
#
The characters don't talk a lot to one another.
#
The narrator explains lots of things above them and judges them in all sorts of ways
#
and makes interpretations about what sort of society they are, the satirical novel or
#
In the end, I feel very impatient with many of these forms because in the end, the writers
#
are so much more powerful than the characters, I feel they're not respecting the characters
#
There are depths to your own characters which you're not picking out because they're so
#
keen to explain who they are.
#
I prefer a lighter touch on novelistic material where there are some mysteries which you also
#
throw up your hands and say, like, I'm not going to explain this, this is just how people
#
are, this is how the reader must make up their minds.
#
So in the end, any judge, you would come up with these ideas and maybe there would be
#
I have my biases, everybody else would.
#
But I think your experience is broadly true and there's nothing too disturbing or disconcerting
#
If you can produce 10 good novels a year from across the languages, I'm only perhaps a little
#
worried that in the end, it doesn't seem to do a huge amount even for the sales of these
#
Somehow, there's the gap between the prize and the readership still remains, perhaps
#
the prize winning book might still have a lot more readers.
#
But there is a gap of interpretation explanation where there's not a middle space where novels
#
appear in the public world of Indian culture.
#
Like I said, again, the book review and the newspaper is the place where if somebody on
#
the op-ed page of a newspaper debated a novelist's vision of India, that would be a place where
#
the novel has escaped its normal categories to enter the mainstream.
#
For some reason, even newspaper editors are very not at all keen to put books on any place.
#
Even books pages now become more about interviews with writers than a consideration of the.
#
So you know, how can you in such a space present the deepest meanings that a very deep form
#
can become a cult of the cognoscenti and the connoisseur.
#
Those who really love it can talk about it day and night, but you can't find any trace
#
of it like a ghost in the culture.
#
And I think there's also a chicken and egg here that an editor of a newspaper might well
#
say that, hey, I can give three books pages, but there aren't enough good writers at that
#
And the other part of it is that if you don't have those pages to begin with, they can never
#
be good writers at that level because where's the ecosystem?
#
That's where I feel the certain newspapers and certain media houses have destroyed some
#
aspects of Indian culture.
#
And I almost feel when I come back to Bombay and I don't live here, I meet some people
#
who, actually, I wouldn't call them anything else, they are times of India mind.
#
The main preoccupations are cricket politics, Bollywood and the stock market.
#
And for them, there's nothing greater to art than that.
#
And what works in the market is what is art is and on classical music on Indian painting,
#
there'll be almost nothing to say.
#
They don't even think these are legitimate points of view, unless you're making money
#
from it when it does become legitimate.
#
Yeah, and I guess my earlier lament actually just falls into place with Sturgeon's Law,
#
which is Sturgeon's Law is 98% of everything is crap.
#
So that applies to everything, including books, except that I was forced to read.
#
Just to interrupt, in those 10 books that you would have picked, you would have found
#
a great internal diversity of thought, tone, manner.
#
And that I think that diversity in Indian novels is really something to you realize
#
there's so much granular detail that these people are picking up, which when it gets
#
into your mind, you see the world differently from then on.
#
I mean, some of it is stunning.
#
A couple of the really good books on the shortlist, which didn't happen to win because it was
#
a good shortlist, were actually rejected by many publishers before they got published.
#
And I was kind of shocked by that, because given the kind of crap they publish otherwise,
#
to think that two such good books would not just even be...
#
The sales or marketing team would have said, we can't sell this.
#
So that was perhaps the main reason why, you know, a lot of mediocre novels can still push
#
And in the end, it's a purely in some way an economic, you know, you can't blame the
#
publisher, they are putting capital into it.
#
You can't blame them, but you can't forgive them either.
#
I think what I find in all other fields is that because the mainstream is dying, because
#
it's getting dispersed, that artists no longer need to rely on these platforms or these intermediaries
#
to reach their audiences.
#
But that is not the case with novels.
#
And I wonder how it could possibly be the case with novels even, you know, because with
#
every other form, there is a constant dialogue happening between creators and audiences,
#
and they're discovering their niches.
#
And it's a process that takes a lot of time.
#
But a novel almost seems like, you know, as quaint as a test match.
#
It's such a difficult and persnickety personality, it won't even do the things that will help
#
itself to grow in the world.
#
So let's kind of get back to the chronological journey of your life as a reviewer.
#
But before that question about how did this dialogue between writing novels and reviewing
#
How did these influence each other?
#
Like I would imagine that if once you once you have reviewed many, many books, you read
#
them in a different way with a different kind of attention to craft and detail.
#
And that can influence the way you write.
#
And at the same time, when you write, you might then be aware of certain aspects of
#
actually what practitioners go through, which you might have missed as a reviewer had you
#
Yes, I think book reviews are a great training in becoming a writer, because, as I said,
#
if you're really going to take it seriously, you end up copying out a lot of sentences
#
to for use later and to select as a little garden of sentences from the book.
#
And when you copy out sentences, I always tell my writing students, I work so much faster
#
than the hand that when you read a sentence, you might take note of some things about it.
#
When you write it out so much more slowly, you suddenly realize if you aren't looking
#
at that page as you're copying it out, you put a comma in the wrong place or you you
#
miss out a couple of words, you realize actually there's an architecture of the sentence and
#
the construction that is not immediately perceptible that you only work out when you write it out
#
And that is very good training, because then you are writing, making somebody else's sentences
#
your own and also learning things about rhythm, pacing, pausing, what kinds of information
#
to put ahead and before how to load up a paragraph, an opening sentence, a closing sentence.
#
All these things become really palpable to you.
#
And when you do that, then it doesn't mean that you instantly become a better writer,
#
but you become a better reader of your own writing.
#
And once you can become a better reader of your own writing, it means that you're willing
#
to work harder to make it even a touch better.
#
People will say, this is perfectly publishable, you say, no, no, no, no, this, this, I can't
#
work out now, but give me a couple of days, I'll solve this problem and bring it back
#
And then you are really like, you know, what I really love about the world, you know, these
#
biographies of the Indian classical musicians of old, those who never made any money, lived
#
in poverty all their life, you would still go to the house and they are still working
#
on some, you know, thing for three hours every day, because that's just their life as it
#
In the end, I think an artist must also be a craftsman of that kind, you know, other
#
people may not notice, you have to have a private ideal perfection, if it doesn't sound
#
exactly right, keep on tinkering away till it pleases you, when you hear that sweet sound,
#
you'll know, now I can have my dinner or I can have my nap.
#
This was worth working for.
#
And that way, it's a good dialogue between, you know, writing is so, so big.
#
It's an incredible thing about books, every writer uses the same language, if you're writing
#
in English, the same resources, the same dictionary, the same vocabulary, the same stock of words,
#
but no writer sounds like one each other, even when you try to copy somebody, you end
#
up sounding a bit like yourself and perhaps a bit like them as well.
#
In the end, writing doesn't lie, you reveal who you are and actually your work is to put
#
more and more of your real self into, you construct a writing self at the beginning,
#
so you write from a narrower bit of yourself.
#
The older you grow, I find as a writer, the more and more you can put who you are, transpose
#
yourself onto the page and write with a full sense of your force, all the muscles of your
#
soul you put into a sentence.
#
And then it's pleasurable and sometimes it means you can write too fast, because you're
#
so confident of what you're doing, you still have to stop yourself from getting tricked
#
by your own confidence.
#
But all these aspects of creativity and craftsmanship, I think, even in words are, they make life
#
Yeah, and this mindfulness to detail this attention, like I'm reminded of, like one
#
of my favorite short stories is Alice Monroe's A Bear Came Over the Mountain, which first
#
came in the New Yorker.
#
I remember once looking at the version in the New Yorker and the version that came out
#
in the book that she did, and they are almost identical except for a punctuation mark in
#
the last paragraph, and you realize, and I don't remember whether it was a comma or what
#
it was, but reading those two versions, I suddenly realized that, yeah, man, whoever
#
the New Yorker editor was, he kind of screwed it up.
#
It's just such, have you read the story?
#
I haven't read the story, but I can completely understand what you're saying down to the
#
very magazine, because one of the problems of the very famous magazines is the editors
#
take over your style to align it with the magazine style, a great crime I find in writing.
#
And one of my problems was reading fiction in the New Yorker.
#
The stories read not too much like each other, not in the sense of the material, but in the
#
sense of the way they are written.
#
And therefore, Alice Monroe totally has my thumbs up for taking this out, this vicious
#
comma that, you know, takes you away from your own writing.
#
And it's such a minor thing, I don't think anyone except someone as anal as me would
#
It's dedication and love of literature in the sense that any small thing in, you know,
#
what is the difference between words in language, in life and words in literature?
#
In literature, ideally, you want every word to be meant and to be intended and to be in
#
So every single mark in literature is also meant.
#
So if it can be unmeant or better meant, that should also be part of your work.
#
So on this note, let me bring up this email exchange that you reproduced in your book
#
that you had with Robert McCrum, who was a famous book's editor at The Guardian, right?
#
And you sent him an email first, and the subject is modestly, because he had messed with the
#
And your email goes, Hi, Robert, modestly.
#
The whole point of the piece, I think, was that the book was modestly good.
#
With that word cut out of the last sentence, it felt as if I'd overpraised it.
#
So basically, you'd said the book was modestly good and this book was good.
#
And you were complaining that it felt like I overpraised it.
#
Mr. McCrum's reply to you was, quote, No, with the word cut out, you made your point
#
well and not too pompously.
#
As published, it was a good review.
#
And I want to kind of dial down a little bit on that pompously bit, right?
#
Because what a book reviewer is essentially doing is standing in judgment, standing in
#
judgment over a book, a writer, an endeavor, and so on and so forth.
#
And you know, with a greater amount of self-reflection than I had back in the day, today, I'd feel
#
a little, I'd be very wary of that, of taking it too far, of the pompousness, as it were.
#
Is that a challenge that you have faced?
#
Like when you look back on your younger self, do you sometimes think that there was too
#
much certainty sometimes that you was, you know, that you might have gone overboard somewhere?
#
Well, trying to analyze myself and, you know, I could have a positive bias towards my past.
#
Even in this one instance, I put it on both as a sense of the comedy of the correspondence
#
of book reviewing, which nobody ever writes about, which is fun to read, you know, that
#
you can debate a single word, but also about, you know, this whole thing that, you know,
#
every single word matters and you can have a discussion about that.
#
But finally, I would even say what he would think of as pompously, I would reinterpret
#
You're too passionate sometimes.
#
You're so caught up with the book that you feel like when it's very good, you overpraise
#
it and when you don't like it, you almost find you're too strong in your judgment.
#
But actually what it speaks to deep down is a real love of, you think that books are so
#
important that they should not be taken lightly at all.
#
It doesn't matter whether it's modestly good or good.
#
It does matter, is how you think to yourself.
#
And obviously when you take that opinion out, an older person will gently put you in your
#
I thought it was quite graceful the way he did it.
#
He wasn't exactly saying that you're being pompous only that that word perhaps was, or
#
he might even have been saying, you know, Englishmen really love to, one of the things
#
about English prose is often, you know, many things are left unsaid.
#
He might even have been saying, you are not being pompous, but it comes across as being
#
Therefore, I'm helping you by taking out the one word in there that actually understates
#
your case for yourself.
#
I'm leaving the best of you on the page.
#
There could be all these, I've never, you know, riffing now.
#
But it was a good exchange and I was so grateful for these unknown.
#
Once in a while, I used to work out the money to go to England and actually in books, editors
#
so important in your life as a source of work.
#
You almost feel you have to make a courtesy call, just like we do it in India on Diwali.
#
Take something to show your face that they remember later when the book comes in, you
#
should remember you or she.
#
And I'm so grateful for these people, you know, because without those little bits of
#
help from here, there, the pleasure of seeing my work out and, you know, I could be very
#
poor earning 12, 15 thousand a month, but I know I'm being published in three continents
#
This is sweet enough for life in literature and really, you know, I feel very grateful
#
to these folk who God knows, you know, hundreds of people must have been writing to them.
#
So many reviews coming in.
#
Imagine the life of a book review editor.
#
In the 1990s, there used to be this magazine lasted for a lot longer, but I wrote for them
#
in the 1990s called Rock Street Journal.
#
I am, in fact, the only writer in the world to have written both for the Wall Street Journal
#
and the Rock Street Journal.
#
So a signal achievement.
#
So I remember at one point there was somewhere in the mid 90s, there was a Prince album which
#
I think it might have been Emancipation.
#
It was a big album, triple album or whatever.
#
So I wrote a five star review and I went into it in great detail.
#
And then there was the magazine had the custom of giving a star rating.
#
And when they published it, they published my review exactly as it was, but they put
#
three stars instead of five.
#
And I was like, this makes no sense because my words are going one way, you're going the
#
And the editor at the time, the late Amit Sehgal, fantastic guy, sadly died in a boating accident.
#
I think he said, no, no, we just felt that five is too much for an album like this.
#
You know, let's, let's come to sort of another interesting aspect because what is happening
#
is on the one hand, you have started freelancing for foreign newspapers as you're writing reviews
#
and they're paying $150, $180, $300, princely sums of money for young people like us at
#
And on the other hand, you also got this gig at Mint when you know Mint started, they had
#
books pages and Priya Ramani was an excellent editor there and she gave you a gig, but you
#
were getting only 15k a month for writing weekly reviews.
#
So it was a lot of money, perhaps not in an objective sense, but relative to payment at
#
the time, it was a lot of money for several reasons.
#
One, since you only got paid in India, 1500, 2000 to begin with was already an upgrade
#
Something double of that per piece.
#
So people would actually give you 1500, 2000 per piece.
#
And even now that's what you get for many Indian newspapers.
#
Those rates have not gone up.
#
And two, it was secure income because you knew that it would be 15,000 every month.
#
So at least you knew that, you know, you could count on it.
#
And three, it meant work every week.
#
So you didn't have to hustle all the time keeping on writing to folks.
#
So you saved on some labor.
#
And four, I felt at the time that some readers would notice you every week and begin to like
#
what you would do with your blog, you know, fall in tune with the idea that there's a
#
consistent sensibility interpreting all manner of books from biography to religion to, and
#
also it was an intellectual exercise for me.
#
So in all these ways, that was the wealth creation of that.
#
You know, I think life is about learning finally to see both learning how to make wealth and
#
also learning how to see wealth in many things which are not conventionally thought of as
#
And in this way, somehow I've always had a kind of sixth sense that this could be very
#
And three or four years of reviewing books every week was like my education, not in literature,
#
but in Indian literature.
#
And I really enjoyed the chance to read Indian novels, Indian economists, Indian biographers,
#
Indian writers and politics.
#
And when it was well done, these people later would write to me and we would become friends.
#
I would go meet them in different parts.
#
There was a window to the, I'd never strategize it that way, but we became, a conversation
#
was set up as a good book review, you can always do in the reader's mind as well.
#
A conversation between the book and the other books you've read in the past.
#
And in all these ways, it was fantastic.
#
And again, you know, like I say, I could go to the Mint office in Dadar every week and
#
not only get the book that I was supposed to review for the week, but all the other
#
books that were not going to get reviewed and would go to the Radhi.
#
I would say, okay, shall I take these and Priyad Sanjeev would say, it's a space cleared
#
I'd come back with 10, 15.
#
I felt so rich in my shoulder bag full of stuff that has just come out that I don't
#
So it was worth it in so many ways and, you know, when you are young, it's almost a mistake
#
to make too much money also.
#
It makes it too dependent on the things that money can bring for you.
#
The restaurants, the bars, the goods, the iPhones or whatever.
#
I have some of these now, but I didn't then and I think in the end, it was probably good
#
And there's a notable passage again from your book, which I'll read out, which is about
#
exactly this, where you write, these small sums, erratically forthcoming, did very little
#
for my worldly prospects, including my romantic ones.
#
Had they constituted my salary at a newspaper or magazine, I would have been greatly despondent
#
and resentful, but being the pearls of self-employment, they were worth much more than could be calculated
#
by a narrowly economistic measure.
#
They underwrote my freedom and independence, my sense of self-worth and vision, my mornings
#
wandering around on buses and trains, my afternoon naps.
#
They protected me as much from indulgence in bars and restaurants and other sites of
#
conspicuous consumption as they did from the horror, the deepest, most suspiriting note
#
of my life for the two years that I worked for a cricket magazine, of being a drudge in
#
an office, a servant of clock and contract.
#
And they allowed me to sleep soundly at night, often after a long stint of reading and to
#
wake up late in the morning.
#
Surely that was as much as one could reasonably ask from a trade and wage.
#
Between the age of 25 to 30, when most young people seek to rise swiftly in worldly posts
#
and station, I never submitted my CV anywhere, making almost a fetish of my independence.
#
I lived as frugally as possible, stop code.
#
And you know that conservative note that you strike here, that I was protected from indulgence
#
You couldn't have put it better in five or seven words, yes.
#
Almost seems to me like some kind of rationalization, like even if you didn't go to a bar with the
#
money, it would have been nice to have had money.
#
I couldn't have made that money though, that's the whole thing I couldn't have.
#
And I must also say I cheated a little bit because every now and then I was to drop by
#
at your house or Sonia's house and you have, like I said, that essay might not have actually
#
been written, but it can be written in two sentences, the drinking companions of my 20s,
#
just put Amit Dwarama, Sonia Fileru and leave the end on that note.
#
So I did enjoy myself a lot too.
#
Yeah, I'm not even much of a drinker, but I guess a drinking companion doesn't have
#
It just has to be a companion while you drink.
#
So this comes to mind in the context of, and again, I'm conflicted about this, that there
#
is this piece of advice that you believe in when you're young and which is often given
#
to young people that follow your passions, do not compromise.
#
But then I look around and as I grow older, I look around me and I find that most of the
#
people who actually did this in their 20s and 30s are fucked now.
#
They haven't gotten anywhere.
#
The cafes of Versova are filled with strugglers who didn't make it and they are filled with
#
resentment for all their peers who did their MBAs or whatever, have fancy jobs, fancy houses,
#
fancy cars, and they're kind of screwed and they're kind of nowhere.
#
So I get both sides of that, of why to live a fulfilling life, you need to live a fulfilling
#
life doing something you love that you wake up every morning and you look forward to doing.
#
But at the same time, you know, the money is also a factor in all of that.
#
Like at some point, and I have noted this down, but I can't find it in my notes.
#
You have a wonderful sentence about how, you know, once you decided not to care about money
#
and become a, give your life to books, money suddenly became the most important thing because
#
you have to put the next meal on the table or whatever.
#
Yes, I think I was, I used to write to book review editors in order of highest payment
#
to lowest payment, not in order of readership.
#
But that was my hierarchy.
#
You know, you're right.
#
And also sometimes you realize your passion and your ability can sometimes, especially
#
when you're young, you cannot read yourself so well.
#
You may think that you're going to be the greatest writer or singer ever.
#
You find two or three years later that, you know, life has taught you some cruel lessons
#
about where you actually stand and, you know, money is important.
#
And it also, like I said, gives you self-respect, agency, freedom, power in the world.
#
I think if one should be idealistic though, one should do it in one's 20s because you
#
can take more risks than with yourself and your personality can suffer the blows of rejection
#
and repression and you can bounce off that and then just move into some other place.
#
It's harder when you're older and then you also have to have the discipline also, you
#
know, to not become bitter as you grow older because everybody feels to a man that even
#
those who are very successful feel that we weren't as successful as we should have been.
#
If somebody prays and we know this culture in India today, they praise me, but they don't
#
praise me for the things that I really should be praised for.
#
So, you know, there's never any end to that road.
#
You've got to learn to make a peace with life and find pleasure and fulfillment in so many
#
You know, I think the art of writing novels is also the art of saying novels are not the
#
most important thing in life.
#
They can be very important for you, but beyond that, people and life is more important.
#
Even novels tell you that.
#
Even novels tell you that.
#
Tell me about sort of the media landscape in India when it comes to being open to the
#
kind of not just in terms of books pages, but even cultural writing and so on, because,
#
you know, in the early 90s, it seemed like there might be hope.
#
And I think, you know, Vinod Mehta started Indian Post and Independent and they had their
#
books pages and there was some action there and so on and so forth.
#
And even at the time Lounge started when Mint began and they started Lounge and there
#
was a lot of that cultural coverage.
#
But after that, you know, one doesn't see it these days.
#
And of course, I don't see it these days because I don't even get any physical newspapers,
#
but it's just not there.
#
And you were a books editor at Caravan for a while where you were commissioning short
#
stories, poetry, not commissioning, but publishing short stories and poetry and all of that.
#
And trying to, I suppose, bring about and build an ecosystem, bring about a culture
#
of stuff and all of that.
#
What was that experience like and how has your thinking evolved?
#
And do you think that the media somehow made a mistake there?
#
Because what the media will often do is that you will try to go as broad as possible and
#
not deep enough into any one thing.
#
But that is a mistake because the point is that if you go deep in a few places, there
#
are all these niches which in a country like India, even a niche can be big in absolute
#
numbers, which can be worthwhile to pursue further for its own sake, not everything need
#
So what's your sense of Indian media there?
#
Do you think there's an opportunity lost?
#
Do you think even today something like that could do well?
#
Big time, a big time opportunity lost because, you know, in the end, this is the whole thing
#
Do you compete by trying to become like something else or do you compete by finding a better
#
And especially, you know, when you just, if you are now able to take a walk down the street
#
today or just go to Andheri and take a train to Churchgate and come back in the evening
#
by randomly taking trains and buses, stopping at bars, cafes, the immense range of language
#
and thoughts you would hear just in a single day would make you think if you had never
#
read a newspaper in your life, you'd say from tomorrow, let's start a newspaper presenting
#
all possible points of view, where, you know, both the politician and the person you randomly,
#
you know, that way some Instagram handles are really wonderful, humans of Bombay, etc,
#
but anybody's language and perspective on life can be so great when you find it in a
#
And why couldn't you present a front page story, not about the latest revelation about
#
the economy or whatever, but just transcribing a union leader's speech in a protest march,
#
word for word, they read the speech on the page and that is your top with a nice photograph
#
So you get a sense of the clash of voices in your society.
#
There's so many, so many things you could do with a newspaper in the end, of course,
#
daily journalism is also a big grind and you have to do so many other imperatives.
#
Not having been in the business, I would hesitate to criticize because I would not understand
#
some of the constraints, especially the financial ones, which are huge.
#
But in the end, you could say that those in charge really are not classic newsmen or women
#
of the old school who love a well-written, well-produced, deep newspaper as an intellectual
#
You know, it can't perhaps be the same quality as a book, but it's a solid read from page
#
to page that when you finish it, you will say here's a thing that puts other people
#
in touch with society in a way that they couldn't without the newspaper.
#
Of which newspaper could you say that in India today in English?
#
Perhaps to a little extent, the Telegraph, I think it is quite well written, some bits
#
But in the end, it's all finally lowest common denominator, mostly run by like culture is
#
always Bollywood film stars or books that film stars write or writers that film stars
#
So the path of lowest resistance and immediately you think, is that what an education is for?
#
You know, the idea is like, surely we have greater resources than this too.
#
But in spaces like the Caravan, they became very niche then, although it's written to
#
even to this date, I think it's the best magazine to read in India on a monthly basis, you know,
#
that deep dive into profiles into long form stories is fantastic.
#
And I feel really, really proud of having worked for a little while, although right
#
on the edge and they've shut down that section itself, a sign of how difficult it is to keep
#
something like that going.
#
But for a while, it was a great project to be a part of and have the highest respect
#
for the people I worked for.
#
Many young writers in their late 20s, fresh from journalism degrees came in, learned their
#
ropes and now working elsewhere, as a training school, as a theatre for different kinds of
#
It was, you know, those profiles of Indian politicians in the Caravan, Arun Jetli, Modi,
#
you can still read them today as literature.
#
They deserve to be put together in a book like the Caravan Book of Profiles or whatever.
#
And that's the model of journalism I subscribe to as my motto, for journalism like that,
#
I'm willing to even give up my books and work every month, every week to be part of an ensemble.
#
If something like that could be put together, I would be very happy to join it because being
#
part of a team and working for a project bigger than yourself, in the end, there's few satisfactions
#
in life that are bigger than that.
#
But if it can't be done, then you retreat into your private space and make little interventions
#
here and there, working across media.
#
But I would definitely say, you know, where is the great Indian newspaper today?
#
We are a nation moving towards greatness.
#
Our stories are completely off the charts in terms of rapture, rigor, the new boundaries
#
There's not a space that records it all or that you can patch it together from looking
#
at Instagram videos, YouTube channels, meeting folk.
#
But it would be great if it was in print.
#
And even Caravan has declined a lot in recent times, but I completely get that sentiment.
#
You know, we live in interesting times and I wonder if this affects the way people view
#
For example, everything today in our discourse is really about narrative battles, right?
#
And history has, of course, been weaponized to that service.
#
But one thing that I find distressing and that's it's always, of course, been the case
#
that a lens of politics has sometimes been thrown upon towards art, towards literature,
#
cinema, to evaluate that.
#
But I find that happening more and more today.
#
Now the broader, like where art is looked upon almost as something functional, the way
#
Kashmir files is being praised, for example, and has become a part of, you know, what is
#
a pitched political battle where people aren't talking about, you know, looking at the film
#
just for its own merits.
#
But there is just so much baggage that the film carries, while my sense has always been
#
is that art and politics should just be separate, not just in the sense that you don't look
#
at art through the prism of politics, but that the artist should keep his politics out
#
of his art to a fair extent.
#
And you know, as I think, you know, Kundera once wrote in an essay that, you know, then
#
you run the risk of art becoming propaganda, as it were.
#
What's your sense of this?
#
Yes, there I don't agree because you do run the risk of it becoming propaganda.
#
It doesn't mean that it automatically lands up there.
#
And also you cannot divorce your politics from your art.
#
You know, it depends at what level do you translate your politics into your art?
#
In some Indian writers, I can see who also write in nonfiction.
#
And when they write novels, their novelistic writing voice is basically a transposition
#
of their nonfiction writing voice into the narrator of the books.
#
It's so dull because there could be something interesting in the story, but in the end,
#
the controlling figure is just the same from above.
#
So it's not enough of a jump.
#
But if, for instance, you believe as you know, that Indian society is very interesting because
#
of the mix of voices and that India deserves to be democratized more and more, every generation
#
must carry the work of deepening democracy at some level.
#
No matter what work you do, you must you must throw new voices into it.
#
That is your politics at some level.
#
If then your art emerges from there, where is it?
#
I don't see any problem with that.
#
There can also be a way of both of expressing and of limiting your politics when you know
#
what politics can do for art.
#
That's the responsibility to the artist not to take it too far, but also that is the motivating
#
force that makes you believe in human beings or that makes you angry saying these people
#
So I'm all for politics and art, but not in that sense of characters also becoming mouthpieces
#
Like I said, I wrote an essay in a novel, I want in novels to actually dramatize the
#
conflict between two points of view rather than state my own.
#
My truth can remain my truth, but not on the pages of my fiction, because that's the space
#
for a different kind of encounter.
#
It must be questioned by the opposite of whatever you're trying to say.
#
And then that encounter becomes interesting for readers.
#
In Clouds, I think what I've done well, and I like reading it, it's a conflict of opinions
#
between two Brahmanical old people and one young person who believes in the religion
#
And they both don't understand each other in chapter one, and by the end, they somewhat
#
At least they've asked each other some questions.
#
That for me was very, very interesting to do.
#
It's clear that the writer thinks very harshly of the older people, as some people are very,
#
But as the book progresses, you get to like them more and more, because in the end, there's
#
also something very unique about human beings.
#
They can be really terrible, but you spend a lot of time with them, you find things that
#
And in the end, we can put aside our differences and make cause on so many spheres with human
#
beings with whom we have been in conflict in our life, politically, socially, familiarly.
#
In the end, you kind of think, you know, we must focus on these bits about, especially
#
in our darkish time, we have to construct and align and link up in whatever way we can.
#
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
#
I mean, you know, our politics is baked into who we are, and who we are is baked into what
#
But as long as it's about people, and as long as it's not too overt and whatever, it's
#
I am, you know, so I was kind of going through the middle stage, and you have a section on
#
the right about popular pieces, and one of the ones linked there was actually, I think
#
what you told a lot also was your review of Rang De Basanti, where I'll read out this.
#
I'll read out these bits from it because I really enjoyed it.
#
And I will somehow make it lead to a question because otherwise, what could justify my reading
#
Amir Khan's latest foray into Indian history is without question a cinematic venture of
#
It left me completely stunned.
#
In almost two decades of watching Bollywood productions, I have never come across such
#
preposterous drivel as that served up in the second half of this film.
#
One reason for this, of course, is that Rang De Basanti takes itself so seriously.
#
And then later you say, what follows not only stretches the boundaries of logic, it also
#
sends out a dangerous and incendiary message, stop code.
#
And the message, of course, is that the end justifies a means that once you decide that
#
violence is justified, you can just carry out violence for any damn thing.
#
And this leads me to the question of, you know, when it comes to art and literature,
#
you know, it's perfectly obvious that you cannot judge a book on the basis of what you
#
feel about a particular character.
#
Books, literature, films have unpleasant characters who do unpleasant, stupid things.
#
And that's the whole thing.
#
You're placing a mirror on the human condition.
#
So you can't judge a film because of what a character or a book does.
#
And yet in this case, I agree with you completely.
#
But in the case of what was that film, Arjun Reddy, we showed that deeply misogynist guy,
#
which was made into some Hindi film also.
#
And in those films, the way these people are just portrayed as heroes, that this is how
#
And so in that sense, this is not art, art or literature, literature if one is to be
#
And we discussed pomposity earlier and Robert McCrum would probably not approve of this.
#
So the question there is that when do you draw the line?
#
Where do you draw the line and say that it's okay for Nabokov to write a book about a character
#
who's into young girls, even though in real life he would, of course, not approve of it
#
because it's a character in literature and you're shining a light on the human condition.
#
But somewhere else it becomes a problem because people are going to take this as a model and
#
you're kind of glorifying this kind of behavior.
#
It's interesting you bring that up because obviously I don't think I would write that
#
So I might even be disagreeing slightly with my past self.
#
But I'm interested to remember that I wrote this in the context of writing about a film
#
And there is that responsibility, you know, you can be much more provoking and damaging
#
in a mass medium than you can in something like a novel.
#
So it's built into the art form, you know, that you cannot, it's very rare that novels
#
can change and damage a culture in the same way that a badly made film can.
#
I mean, you walk around India today and in lots of small towns sometimes they give lectures
#
and stuff and lots of kids come along.
#
In the end, I feel like asking them a question, like before we leave a multiple choice question,
#
your personal style, your manner and your swagger, who does it lead to?
#
Is it Ranveer Singh, Salman Khan, Virat Kohli or name your choice, A, B, C, D. You know,
#
there are certain models of masculinity that films can project and even sometimes the bad
#
faith is that they pretend as if they're criticizing it, saying that by showing it we want to draw
#
It's all done in very bad faith, you can see.
#
And freedom of expression still means that they have to come out in a culture, there's
#
no way of prescribing them.
#
But at least one must push back in writing about them, saying this is a real power to
#
push back, set a narrative back or to disrupt a certain path of progress and present an
#
idea of, it's the glamour of cinema that the end is its biggest draw.
#
That figure on the screen is not six feet tall, he's 30, 40 feet tall and you know,
#
the camera angle is always from below, there's a certain mechanics of cinema that actually
#
works to make certain effects possible.
#
That's why it's amazing that India is so Bollywood obsessed yet you'll find half the time you
#
go to a dinner party somewhere, people will say, oh I saw Shah Rukh, he's so short in
#
real life, I could never believe, I just couldn't recognize him.
#
The same face but the height is three inches lower.
#
So that is the thing about cinema and also you know, Indian mass culture is dominated
#
by Bollywood as perhaps it should be or by cinema, we are, cinema caters to everybody
#
and there are many wonderful things about the shared experience of sitting in a big
#
screen with other Indians watching this.
#
But I agree, those artworks, the mass forms have greater responsibility and it's too
#
easy for them to get away with just pandering to a certain set ideal which also comes in
#
the way of like political and religious prejudices, you know, it's so easy to just turn them
#
back and say, well this is how society is, I also find the same problem with advertising
#
and it's too easy for all these things to say, we just represent what things are, I'm
#
sorry this is not a good enough answer.
#
Fair enough, I mean, but that's the exact argument that you're using by the way, is
#
the reason censorship exists in India.
#
So let's keep using the argument without letting censorship come in, can we leave it there
#
as a midway point perhaps is what I'm saying.
#
If films in India are treated as an instruction manual for life, then let's have a good instruction
#
manual is what you're saying.
#
But an artist would say that, hey, wait a minute, you are an ivory tower novelist where
#
you are not, you know, you have whatever characters you want in your books, but yeah, I totally
#
get what you're saying.
#
They're free to make the films they want, they're free to criticize it.
#
Let's say if they said that, then that's where the conversation stops, you have to either
#
they or you have to find some new point at which to engage again or you just leave each
#
other be and continue on, you need to disagree, yeah, you cannot.
#
And by this whole masculine role model thing, I remember I did an episode with Shrena Bhattacharya
#
in January, where she made the very interesting point, the episode is called the loneliness
#
And the interesting point she made was that while the role model for most men in terms
#
of how to behave is Salman Khan, the person women would want them to behave like Shahrukh
#
A very deep and insightful point, I think using popular culture to critique popular
#
culture is a certain art of its own and this is a very good book and just that one sentence
#
is so striking, immediately clarifies something, isn't it?
#
The gap between the expectations, if you're this side of gender or the other side.
#
Yeah, you're right in the sense that if you want to capture the essence of a larger point
#
that she makes through the book, that this captures it.
#
And this is such a deep disconnect in our culture, that what men want to be is so different
#
from what women want men to be.
#
Although I know at least two women who are very passionate Salman Khan fans and can't
#
But would they want the men in their lives to behave like that is another question.
#
They are single, you're right.
#
They haven't found someone as good as Salman to...
#
So as we get close to winding up because we should soon break for lunch as well, you've
#
got this passage in your book where you talk about how you change through your thirties,
#
where you write, quote, so long resistant to being drawn out as reticent and impassive
#
as a closed book, made nervous and even jealous by people more at ease with life than I.
#
I now took pleasure and even pride in reaching out to people.
#
I tried to leave people in no doubt that I love them, both by concrete action and exertion
#
and sometimes by discrete inaction, such as by never judging them on their reading.
#
How spiritually ennobling work when someone's favorite novel is The Alchemist, The Fountainhead
#
or One Night at the Call Center.
#
Tell me a bit about how you've changed because you know what's happened is we were friends
#
I think in essence, I see you as the same cheerful, optimistic person who's passionate
#
about books, but you obviously must have changed a lot in these years.
#
I even think perhaps one of the reasons where for four or five years we sort of drifted
#
away into our own spaces was we needed that to grow into our own selves.
#
And there's such a thing as, you know, a friendship which is too intense and we can rejoin our
#
conversation in life, catching up again on the different points on the road.
#
And at some level, I kind of felt, you know, my world was too narrow.
#
And I relied so much on my close friends that I never met any new ones.
#
And it was a problem and I needed to break out of it.
#
And what I was most frustrated by was that I could only make friends in my own class.
#
I mean, I even struggled to make deep friendships with people who are much richer than me.
#
So it was a problem on both sides.
#
And I think in this way, I was cured of this problem by the restaurant because after seeing
#
me come in day after day, I used to live about this restaurant, Prava Devi.
#
I wrote a book about the restaurant.
#
And when the waiters began to see me as their friend was the day I realized somehow without
#
even consciously wanting to, I've broken a barrier in my life.
#
And from then on, I've had very little trouble ever dealing.
#
Of course, there's still that hierarchy, but I find I have very little trouble dealing
#
with people in these asymmetrical power positions in India.
#
And somewhere I began to realize that in the end, your desire to write novels is actually
#
a sublimation of your desire, perhaps, I mean, Shruti Kapila was on your program the last
#
And she's a very deep student of psychoanalysis and there's a lot of that in a book as well.
#
Is that desire to write novels basically a sublimation of a desire to unite with everybody
#
You want to know what the world feels like from everybody's point of view.
#
What a cup of tea feels like to a cab driver, what a chocolate mousse or a bottle of Bollinger
#
feels like to Veer Sanghvi and to the industrialist or a kid drinking for the first time.
#
All these tastes, all these ideas, all these histories, all these interactions, all the
#
love affairs, you want to know what they write in letters, you're almost like an omnivorous.
#
Obviously, you're not going to get anywhere close to it.
#
But boiled down to something actionable in your life, it kind of means there's no time
#
to waste and you can't even sit in one place.
#
Of course, you can sit in one place to write, but the rest of the day, you've got to call
#
people, get around, bring them over, you go over, travel, meet, go to places you've never
#
seen and somewhere suddenly having cottoned on for good or bad on to this thought, I'm
#
still unable to let go of it and I feel excited every single day by this thing that you've
#
been given a great inheritance, not in the formulaic way in which you think about it.
#
I just find going out into India very exciting and for all the flaws of Indian people and
#
there's so many, we are still a very attractive people and the more you travel around the
#
world also, you come back to thinking there's some things about India, the hospitality,
#
the willingness to sit and talk, the ability to give time to people, I just feel you could
#
clear out two or three things about the Indian mindset, the problem in talking across gender,
#
some things about class and caste, we are on our way to really like a million flowers
#
For instance, I see an Indian love and I see young people holding hands.
#
I kind of feel tremendously pleased to see this transformation, I think when you and
#
I were 18, to hold hands on Indian street was an incendiary gesture, everybody would
#
Now in many Indian cities, they don't on the Delhi Metro, this street is normal, that's
#
a transformation to cherish and to, it's not come a moment too soon, thousands of years
#
have perhaps passed before it happened and all these things I feel, I know we are in
#
a time of like repression, hate, otherization, somewhere below it, I feel at a smaller level,
#
another few hundred million Indians, we are only in a minority because we are such a big
#
country, but we are moving towards a greater integration and towards a realization of the
#
ideals of the founding fathers and mothers of the Indian Republic on a scale much deeper
#
than they themselves with their limited lives could imagine and that is what progress means
#
and that is what democracy means and in that way, I think it's very exciting, sometimes
#
in lectures I say what is common between even our grandparents and you and I and we are
#
now middle-aged people, young people look at us as old perhaps and call us uncle, but
#
even you and I share with them this common frame, we are citizens of the first century
#
of Indian democracy, 1947, all the things we'll do now, if the world survives and democracy
#
survives we'll have consequent ripple effects for hundreds of years to come, the little
#
changes that we made in the light of our ideas of our time and that's an exciting space to
#
It gives you some agencies a desire to live, a desire to meet, to talk, to find out things
#
and in that way I feel very grateful, both for space, the gift of the right space and
#
I think to be born in India in the year 1980, 1973, 74, we saw socialism, we saw capitalism,
#
we saw whatever world we are living in now, globalism, internationalism, linked up to
#
one another, they're a wonderful frame to go up and down those lines, it's like Virat
#
to Churchgate or the harbour line or central line altogether, just keep travelling using
#
your memories, adding new things to them, it's enough and in that way I kind of feel,
#
I think if this is our closing thought, I would like to ask you a question in return,
#
I want you to be a surprise question and I want you to not think about it too much, just
#
give me a spot answer and if later you think it was the wrong answer and it was the opposite,
#
we can always go back to it later.
#
As I understand it, one of the deepest differences between you and me in terms of personal outlook
#
is that you are quite fiercely and consciously and deliberately and deeply an atheist and
#
you don't want the human frame to involve God and you think it's a complication and
#
that leads us into other directions, it is also damaging religions of this history and
#
I on the other hand kind of, older I grow, feel more and more like my Hindu faith or
#
my inheritance or the history of Hindu philosophy and in general the idea of religion is very
#
important to me and I would say, pressed to the point, I would say I am basically religious
#
and I cannot fall that I won't understand the problems of religion, I cannot disinherit
#
myself from my religious inheritance but if you can leave that difference aside and won't
#
you say that given your life and mine and where you have lived and the city view or
#
something too, how do I put it, in the end your religion and mine is Bombay, the way
#
we understood the city, what we saw in it, the things we know through it, the persons
#
we become through it, it has no code or whatever but you know it when you see it and that is
#
Okay, I'll give a two part answer, it's a lovely question and I'll no doubt think more
#
about this even after this recording but as you want an off the cuff answer, I can think
#
of a two part answer which the second part is two parts.
#
So now the first part is this that I am not a militant atheist in the sense that at one
#
point in time I would have argued that if someone believes in religion they are by definition
#
irrational and cannot be trusted because obviously there is no proof for God existing and all
#
Today I don't think that is the case in the sense that, today I don't think that is the
#
case because sure I mean and I'll link to an article I wrote about, an essay I wrote
#
about this where you know which makes a distinction that atheism is not a belief, it is an absence
#
Just as not collecting stamps is an absence of a hobby, it's not a hobby, you know no
#
one says my hobby is not collecting stamps but my sense is that I understand that human
#
beings are frail, that as you pointed out earlier that reason cannot solve all our problems,
#
human beings are frail and the truth is that we are going to die and life is meaningless
#
so how do you get by, right?
#
And the point is we all do choose our own delusions, somebody else's delusion may be
#
religion but I have no doubt have a delusion which I choose, perhaps it is a delusion that
#
my mortality is something I don't need to deal with right now and it will come later
#
but the very fact that I can sit here and have this conversation and all of that, we
#
all need crutches in a sense to get by so I understand that I am not even condescending
#
and saying that this is an inferior crutch, we are humans, we are frail, I get why religion
#
is there, I also get that many belief systems today which would not be called religions
#
which are maybe ideologies have qualities that are religion like and so in that sense
#
I am not militant in that sense.
#
Now as far as being a religious person is concerned, my sense is and this goes to what
#
you were saying just before this also, is that you are perhaps focusing on the positive
#
aspects of religion and of course there are positive aspects of religion like the sense
#
of community, different aspects of different festivals which bring us together and so on
#
and so forth and I get all of that and we need that in our lives, we can't be atomised,
#
in fact that's a critique some people often make of individualism that we can't be atomised
#
with human beings but the whole point is my argument always is that atomisation is a strawman,
#
the point is we should all be individual, free to engage with others, voluntary interaction
#
So I have no issue with anybody being religious per se but I have a massive problem with organised
#
religion, any organised religion and I think that so many of the ills that are in our nation
#
today like earlier you spoke about one or two minor things, they are not minor things
#
especially in the context of today you know things like class, caste, gender and especially
#
the anti-Muslim sentiment that is you know is tearing this country apart, it's not a
#
minor thing, it's a big deal, it's always been there in our society, similarly I think
#
the aspects that you like about our society, the fact that we almost without thinking about
#
it assimilate so much, we are like this delightful khichri of influences from everywhere and
#
You know and I think that is also something that predates the Indian Republic, you know
#
both of these predate the Indian Republic but the point is that right now it's hard
#
for me to be as optimistic as you because I see these negative things and feel so strongly
#
about them and I think that organised religion also has that problem that I just see so many
#
issues with it that I don't really want to elaborate upon but where do all these issues
#
The misogyny, the sexism, caste, you know all these come from organised religion.
#
But that's why I was slightly shifting the platform to something more sudden and more
#
about religion being Bombay.
#
Yes, our private religion something that you know like has this thought ever come to you
#
that everything in life you owe to a certain city or what you learnt here or that there
#
are some ways of being here that you feel that you know are fundamental to who you are
#
and that your life is a continuation on down that river?
#
I think that's a deep thought, I think Bombay can mean different things to different people
#
so if I sort of think of Bombay as meaning a certain ethic of life that you go your way,
#
I go mine, we don't bother each other and we trade freely, we live freely, all of that,
#
I can buy that but Bombay is a lot more than that.
#
I don't know if it's so much as Bombay but I think it's a little more cosmopolitan and
#
globalised like that, unfortunately I can't help it, my biggest influences are all sort
#
of western influences in a sense from the enlightenment and the thinkers I admire whether
#
it's Adam Smith who as you so rightly point out in your book is a lot more than just invisible
#
hand or you know Hayek and so on.
#
So I'm a mix of everything, of course there is a core that is Indian and there will be
#
a core that is Bombay but I don't know if it was you who introduced me to Constantine
#
Cavafy but he's got this great poem called The City and that speaks to the sentiment
#
which I have actually read out on this podcast before so can I ask you to read it out?
#
The City by Constantine Cavafy, you said I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
#
find another city better than this one, whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and
#
my heart lies buried like something dead, how long can I let my mind moulder in this
#
Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here where I've spent
#
so many years wasted them, destroyed them totally.
#
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore, the city will always pursue
#
you, you'll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in
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the same houses, you'll always end up in this city.
#
Don't hope for things elsewhere, there's no ship for you, there's no road, now that
#
you've wasted your life here in this small corner, you've destroyed it everywhere in
#
Yeah, it's a fantastic poem, I think I read it out in my episode with Sarah Rai and in
#
my episode with Amit Awa, you would have remembered, I asked him what is this Gangali?
#
In the sense, what is this notion of home?
#
And I think you indicated that your notion of home to a significant extent is Bombay.
#
Yes, between literature and Bombay, I think these are the two overriding, there could
#
be also literature in Bombay, Bombay in literature, etc., etc., you can keep on mixing them,
#
but I think these are the two main currents flowing through my life and they keep on mixing
#
Yeah, and in fact your book is called My Country is Literature, so you could also say my city
#
Look, a couple of last questions before we kind of end and it's actually two questions
#
but I think they lead to the same place.
#
One is what advice would you give to the young Chandrahas, maybe the Chandrahas in Cambridge
#
in 2002, who has just come across that ad for writing a review, what advice would you
#
Which feeds into a different way of phrasing, I think the same question.
#
What advice would you give to the young reader and writer today who is listening to this
#
and thinking of a life in literature?
#
Well, as for myself, I think it's always, it's strangely somewhat arrogant to try to
#
preach to your former self because only by learning what, by finding out, blundering
#
through what you did not know, do you arrive to who you are today.
#
You cannot return to your past and cut your own roots out.
#
You can obviously criticize some bits of us, as I've done in the introduction of my book,
#
saying I was almost too bookish and I treated literature like a crutch rather than a place
#
of release and a place of freedom as a place, as a way of engaging with the world.
#
So I don't think, strangely enough, I'm quite content with my past, you know, I don't think
#
I would change anything about my life.
#
Even the bad things that happened, I'm quite, you know, I kind of feel I've met my piece
#
with everything and even those who have left or disappeared, I kind of feel I can mentally
#
carry on the conversation.
#
So I have no advice to give other than, you know, perhaps let go a little bit.
#
I think I was too intense and didn't know how to enjoy myself and it was part of the
#
tension I grew up with living in a very insecure home.
#
And again, I have some empathy for that, you know, it took me a long years.
#
And when I, maybe that's why I'm making up a lost time.
#
Every day is a sorrow party these days in my life, much of the time, including today.
#
And for young people, you know, it's a different time to be a young writer today than it was
#
Things have changed a lot.
#
So precisely for that reason, when I hear a young person today saying I want to become
#
a writer, I have more respect for them.
#
It's so much more easy to want to become something else that if after all that you say books
#
are what means the most to you, it shows that you're serious.
#
It's much, much easier to learn to become a writer today than it was 20 years ago.
#
So that bit is good and I think young people also don't have the hangups, especially in
#
English about writing in English that people, our generation are just a touch above us,
#
they're about writing a certain way, trying to please certain people.
#
Every young Indian writer now writes their own English with complete confidence and it's
#
I like reading Indian books, even mediocre ones for this reason.
#
It's their own English.
#
It's not a pretend English.
#
And other than that, you know, we live in a fantastic, a country is a library and your
#
library also is a limitless library, you know, that what you see in a bookshop is only a
#
fraction of hang around in, you know, go to Fleur Fountain, Blossom's bookshop, old bookshops
#
everywhere, put together a library of the great books from the last 60, 70 years and
#
it'll give you an India over and above the India that you see in front of you.
#
When you join together these Indias of land and library, you'll suddenly have such a powerful
#
point of view on your own life that you will both live more interestingly and write better.
#
And the last bit is the technical side.
#
Now, you know, once you have a command of a language, no need to be in a great hurry
#
In the end, literature is what communicating, not what necessarily being right.
#
And you will get that 10, 15 years down the line.
#
Enjoy the ride till then and remember to take pleasure in every day and do a bit of work,
#
even if not at your desk every day.
#
Every day you must go forward in some way, even by reading and making some notes.
#
You don't have to write every day.
#
Go forward a little bit by little bit, just like with so many other things, you know,
#
in the end, you won't realize how far you've come by not noticing where you're going.
#
And also something I think that both of us have experienced in the young people that
#
boss the years pass very fast, the years pass very freaking fast, don't waste it on petty
#
I couldn't say the second that more, you know, when you're 25, it looks like life goes on
#
At 42, you realize you already feel you're running out of time for all the things you
#
want to do, all the people you want to see, all the things you could not say to people.
#
So that way literature is a life intensifying device, let's put it that way.
#
So within that, it has a certain code, which is that you don't waste time.
#
That's such a lovely way to put it, like intensifying device and on that note, see, I end all my
#
episodes asking my guests to recommend books, films, music that they love.
#
And especially in your case, that absolutely has to be the last demand I make of you.
#
Like what are your desert island books or films or music or what you just want the whole
#
So one quick stretch, I can read off the main influences of my life musically from the age
#
of 18 till the age of 42, I've had only one predominant influence, although I've had many
#
I like film soundtracks because I find the absence of words helps me compose in the mornings
#
and I like listening to music.
#
But from the time of 18, I've always been a fan of the Pakistani rock band Junoon and
#
And I keep listening to the same songs on loop year after year and finding new meanings
#
I find this way of interpreting the subcontinent and that Sufi philosophy and even the, I'm
#
even willing to defend the point that Salman Ahmad is one of the greatest rock guitarists
#
in history, just like some Indian novelists are not regarded, disregarded, so was he.
#
But every solo in there has some meaning for me and I really love this private archive,
#
you know, 25 year engagement with the repertoire and cinema wise, it's very variegated.
#
I like, in general, I like artworks which are optimistic, cheerful and full of the chaos
#
I have a definite bias towards comedy and a sense that life basically is a tragedy that
#
you must live as a comedy in order to make it bearable.
#
I think that is my root philosophy, you know, you never know when the next terribly painful
#
or traumatic thing will happen, but you kind of have to bolster yourself and make the day
#
cheerful and you know, verbal repartee is so energizing, so much fun.
#
I like comedies like that as well, you know, where it's just talk between people.
#
So in books, I think the main representative of the spirit in Indian literature is an almost
#
unread writer these days, Verrier Elwin.
#
I think his books and his studies of tribal India are enormously fascinating, as somebody
#
who only lived to be 62, he came to India in his 20s, came to be a priest, ended up
#
becoming more tribal than even the tribals and lived in small settlements going from
#
one place every two, three years.
#
That Tribal Life of Verrier Elwin is autobiography, to me, such an enormously amazing book about
#
being cheerful under a continuous stress, misery, pressure and material deprivation,
#
which are voluntarily taken up and finding beauty in the smallest things and in trees,
#
flowers, in human faces.
#
So to me, it's a great, great Indian book by somebody who is not Indian.
#
And in writing my favorite novelist or fiction writer of almost anywhere and someone I admire
#
deeply personally, and in an imaginary dinner party, there will be almost the first guest
#
on my list, along with a few others, you know, one mix of life and people from the past.
#
But Adam Smith would definitely be one again for someone who, like we know, has that cheerful
#
spirit while realizing that life is very difficult, that mix of toughness and good cheer is very
#
But in the end, I think Bivutibhushan Bandipadya is a combination of wisdom, naivete, wonder,
#
the beauty of nature, love of the different voices of society, that adder kind of feeling
#
of sitting down to gossip with everybody, putting yourself in the mind of many kinds
#
of characters, including children, notoriously hard to do for novelists who are adults, you
#
know, they make all sorts of things, but can't really get to it.
#
Bivutibhushan's children are really children, and his adults are really adults, and his
#
outlook on life is very, very poetic.
#
And that mix of a love of the created world of culture, i.e. the city, and behind that,
#
the long term world of nature, the forest.
#
Few Indian novelists balance a love of both these worlds in such an equal and exquisite
#
proportion as Bivutibhushan.
#
And you can't tell if you read a single book by Bivutibhushan, you can't tell sometimes
#
he looks like he's a city person.
#
And in some other stories, he looks like a village, a real initiate of rural life.
#
And to me, this is a complete perspective, you know, all kinds of points of view on life
#
you can find in his books.
#
And to me, that again, that idea of trying to merge with all of India, from the point
#
of view of the other party is to me most perfectly expressed in not as an explicit philosophy,
#
but in between the spaces of the stories in his work.
#
So in the end, you know, like a page or two of Bivutibhushan a day should be part of the
#
After that, maybe we won't have so many boundaries against each other.
#
Come on, there's another way of looking.
#
Come on, sit, let's have a charut or a cigarette or a cup of tea, we'll work it out.
#
And you know, you spoke about liking comedies more.
#
And I remember this old quote, I forget who it's by, where the quote goes, the world
#
is a tragedy to those who feel a comedy to those who think.
#
So I guess you have identified yourself as a thinker there.
#
Just in passing, who else would you invite to the dinner party?
#
Bivutibhushan is your chief guest sitting at the head of the table, there's Adam Smith,
#
Among women, I always loved Irene Nemirovsky, you know, not such a well known writer even
#
today, but I find that extremely fascinating, killed at the age of 39 in the Holocaust.
#
But again, the writer of some ferociously ruthless books, which are amazing in the intensity
#
of observation, great training to be a writer.
#
My favorite first sentence in the entire history of novels is from Sweet Frances.
#
It's only four words long.
#
You know, you open a novel, you think it's going to be some introduction to life.
#
It just says, hot thought the Parisians, somewhere in Paris, that's all you need to establish
#
your point of view, the setting, the locale, everything, and a communal consciousness of
#
There's not an individual that's being represented, hot, thought the Parisians, and you're on
#
The train has set off on its journey.
#
So I found myself so intrigued by some mysteries about her that I'd love to see her, especially,
#
and we must invite people like that who left life too early.
#
And I think, you know, you cannot live or be an Indian today, especially even in our
#
time without having both Gandhi and Nehru come over, even to debate among themselves
#
like they had in their time.
#
That way, even in Elvin's book, there's an amazing passage at the end where he talks
#
about the differences in philosophy in the thought of Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, where
#
each one of them did something that the other didn't.
#
And merely that trident of explication so amazing, you think just the fact that these
#
three lived in dialogue with each other was a much bigger thing than anything that they
#
And so we've covered literature, we've covered poetry, politics, somebody from food, or,
#
you know, some person from one's past will be different from you and for me.
#
And perhaps someone one also someone one hates or really dislikes in the hope that such an
#
evening will be the day when that now, especially, I think I would not have answered this question
#
like this till about a few years ago.
#
But now as a result, having grown older and also as a result of how we're living in India
#
today, this would be an important the shadow, the shadow, the other would be a part of whoever
#
Which hated person would you call?
#
I wouldn't say I actually hate somebody, but somebody whom you felt you saw doing something
#
that you couldn't forgive or that you felt that, you know, the arrogance, the brutality
#
such that you can't feel it would ever say something to them and treat them like a human
#
Even there sometimes, perhaps there could be some space where even they could change
#
and you could change or you could change together the way you cannot by yourself.
#
Some mysterious person, let's leave that out as a or some traumatic figure from your life,
#
you know, God knows that's enough, enough and more of those people who said something
#
to you, cut you off, destroyed something about maybe they couldn't help it or, you know,
#
who knows the full story.
#
That's the whole, the whole logic of the novel.
#
We never know the full story.
#
Maybe you could call Hitler and serve only non-veg because he was a vegetarian, right?
#
He seemed like a very non-veg sort of person.
#
People contain multitudes.
#
So Hitler was a vegetarian.
#
So call him serve only non-veg or call Ambedkar and seat him next to Gandhi and place him
#
such that every time Gandhi wants something, he has to ask Ambedkar to pass it to him.
#
Yes, alcohol would be served if you're a non-drinker.
#
I'm sorry to say that the host decides the rules of the party.
#
Have a drink for once, Gandhiji.
#
He was wild enough without it, but yeah, dude, Chandrahas, thank you so much for this great
#
I hope you actually have a dinner party.
#
We haven't done one for a long time.
#
And yeah, thanks so much.
#
I mean, The Seen and the Unseen is a great title.
#
And I must say in concluding, I don't know if anyone has talked about this wonderful
#
cup that you have for your...
#
You're holding an old piece of merchandise.
#
The flag of India, but actually it's cut up as a jigsaw puzzle.
#
As a metaphor for thinking about how to be an Indian, I think I've never seen an image
#
frankly as as as provoking and as deep as this.
#
I would love a cup like this to put right in front of my desk in.
#
Well, so I'll tell you one the next time we make any more of these.
#
This was a cover image of an old episode I did with Ram Guha.
#
So I'll link that from the show notes if people want to see the precise image.
#
It was an absolute pleasure.
#
Now, please clear away the furniture.
#
I've stored one ball from those days.
#
We've got to have a test match.
#
If you produce a ball, I'll call you a bluff.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode and who doesn't enjoy listening to Chandrahas,
#
head on over to the show notes, buy all his books, follow him on social media.
#
It doesn't actually seem to be on Twitter anymore, but you can follow me on Twitter
#
at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
#
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