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One common mistake many of us make is that we put ourselves in a box and then we never
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Maybe you're a woman in a particular time and place and women in that time and place
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behave in a particular way and you don't question that.
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You slip into that skin and then that skin is who you are.
#
Or if you're a creative person, you build an image of yourself as a certain kind of
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Maybe you're a writer of books in a time where writing a book is considered the ultimate
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intellectual achievement and you don't go in other directions.
#
Or maybe you're a filmmaker who only wants to make feature films and looks down on vlogs
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You may have a love of language and storytelling, but you tell yourself that only one form is
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for you and the rest don't matter.
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You get inside the box and the box closes in on you.
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Now I've done many episodes on the creator economy and I believe that more and more young
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creators are escaping the tyranny of form even while they embrace the possibilities
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of each form that they take up.
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And this is a damn good thing.
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Equally, even outside the creator economy, technology has connected us to the rest of
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the world and everywhere we can see different ways of living and new possibilities of who
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A few decades ago, we were largely prisoners of circumstance and location.
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My guest today has lived an unconventional life.
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Born in 1939, she never felt any pressure to slip into female stereotypes and her father
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even advised her to not bother to get married.
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As an artist, she was never bound down by any one form or any one language.
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She's been a novelist, a critic, a journalist, a playwright, a translator, a writer for cinema,
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a historian of theater, a memoirist and an essayist par excellence.
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And she's done these in both English and Marathi.
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She's a legend of Indian culture, but it's not just her work that blew me away, but the
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clarity of her thinking as you'll hear in this conversation.
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This is a special episode, savor it.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Shanta Gokhale and I just don't know how to describe her because as
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I pointed out a few moments ago, she's done it all.
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I'm good friends with her son, the columnist, Girish Shahane, and I took much longer to
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call Shanta to the show than I should have.
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Frankly, I was intimidated by the breadth of her work and I worried I may not be able
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But I finally did invite her and she was so kind that she agreed to chat with me over
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This episode is eight hours long, but my last two episodes to cross seven hours, episode
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303 and 309, which I'll link from the show notes, have been two of my most loved episodes.
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And like those episodes, I feel this one also is too short.
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My purpose with conversations like these is to create a kind of oral history, to try and
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capture glimpses of someone's life and the times they lived through.
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Shanta has lived a rich life and a sharp gaze has captured so much that is essential about
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As you listen to her, I'll also urge you to check out all her books.
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One Foot on the Ground is a fantastic and unflinching memoir.
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And she also has two other memoirs about her father and a mother on her website.
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I'll link them from the show notes.
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Jerry Pinto edited a great collection of her writing called The Engaged Observer.
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And you can read her novels, Rita Wellinker and Tyawarshi, also known as Crowfall, in
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both Marathi and English.
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She's written a magisterial history of Marathi theatre.
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She's translated books.
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There's a lot to dive into.
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But hey, you can start with this conversation.
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Before we begin though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
#
There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
#
New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
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ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
#
Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Shantyaji, welcome to the scene in The Unseen.
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So, you know, I've really enjoyed reading your books, as it were, especially your autobiography
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One Foot on the Ground and then so many of the columns that you've written.
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So there's actually tons to talk about.
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But I want to start by asking you to take me back to your childhood and tell me a bit
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And just for perspective, one of the things I realized when I was, you know, when I started
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this podcast and started doing it is that older people like us and, you know, I'm approaching
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So, you know, relative to our listenership, I'd, you know, I'm from a different generation
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often suffer from the curse of knowledge that we assume that our lived experience of the
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world is sort of a shared experience, a shared bedrock of knowledge.
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And then I have to harshly remind myself at times that 70% of the country is born after
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And many of the things I take for granted, what India used to be like, what our cities
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used to be like, what our culture used to be like, is something that they just don't
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And therefore, I think there's a lot of, I find a lot of value from listening to my guests
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talk about how they grew up, where they grew up, get a sense of those times.
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So I'd ask you to, you know, take us back to your childhood and where you were born
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But before I take that leap back, I'd like to say I'm in exactly the same boat as you
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say you are, because the changes in the last 10 years have been so rapid that, you know,
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I definitely feel I don't belong to this world anymore.
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So now back to childhood.
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Yeah, so you were born in a cottage hospital in the Hanu and one of the charming little
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bits of trivia in your memoir is that when you were born, you know, you had your hand
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to your forehead, deep in thought and, you know, and I think your mom remarked or someone
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remarked that she's going to be a philosopher, and then he just whacked you on the bottom
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and all the philosophy was gone.
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These are stories that you hear.
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And I think to some extent, things are added on when a story is told because you want to
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make the story interesting.
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So I got this story from my mother and she had been in labor for hours and this was a
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missionary hospital and Dr. Nikki, as her name was, was away in church and came back
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and mother was still laboring away.
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So she prayed and that's how, that's not how I was born, but that's when I was born.
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And this followed, Dr. Nikki said, ah, she's going to be a philosopher.
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Tell me a bit about, you know, before we even start talking about your childhood, I'm actually
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going to ask you to take me a little further back.
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On your website, you've written a wonderful memoir of your father, which I really enjoyed
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reading and I've shared the link widely with my writing students and others because I just
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And a memoir of your mother in Marathi, which alas, I do not have the skills to read, but
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there's a lot about your mother, both in that memoir about your dad and in One Foot on the
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Ground and I just find both of them incredibly fascinating people and I'd like to talk about
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With whom would you like to start?
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He was a wonderful person to be with.
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One gets close to one's parents, I did at any rate, around 12 or so because that's when
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I was reading seriously and this was a shared interest.
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So I read what he did and I wasn't forbidden from reading any book that I picked up.
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So he was a man in a hurry.
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He was a journalist and he had so much to think about and to write and to...
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So he would say to me, okay, tell me in two short lines what you liked about the book.
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So I think it got me into the habit of thinking concisely about things.
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And there was a lot of this kind of back and forth conversation we would...
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We had family dinners and so there was a lot of conversation and this was mainly with dad
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because otherwise rest of the day he was away at work, et cetera.
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And my time with my mother was when she was in the kitchen cooking and I would chat to
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her or she was a woman with many ambitions.
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So she would be rushing off to college and I'd be handing things out to her.
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She had to catch that particular train, et cetera.
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And she and I became friends in later life.
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My father unfortunately passed away rather early in life and he was just 56.
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And six years before that I was away from my education.
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So the years with him were basically between the age of 14 or 12 and 16.
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Those were years of a very fine and intense relationship building up between us basically
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through books and through travel.
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He and my mother were both ardent travelers and they had always traveled before we arrived
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and after we arrived and were of an age when we could go with them.
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We've done some amazing trips outside, trekking and down south to temples, all sorts of things.
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So those were times when he was relaxed and we could really share ideas and thoughts and
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I always got the feeling somewhere that I was being tested.
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I didn't know what the test was.
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I don't know whether I passed or failed, but it kind of pushed me to think.
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Thinking was extremely important and this was a result of the conversations I had with
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With him it was a relationship based on ideas and with my mother the ideas were there, but
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it was common sense, her observations about life, her feelings, her past with her family,
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She was a great storyteller.
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My father didn't tell stories, I mean, when I wrote that memoir of his, I was very sorry
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that I started it so late because a number of his close friends had passed on and I didn't
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know where to look for material on him, intimate personal material, just a few stories that
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I had growing up and the rest, luckily he being a writer, a journalist and my mother
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having been this great preserver of things, I had this bulging file full of cuttings from
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the time he started in Patna to his times of India days.
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So to the extent that you understand a person through his or her writing, I understood where
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he was, where he stood and the kind of negotiation that he had to do even back then, we talk
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about it now, but even then it was a British owned newspaper.
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So you had to tiptoe around certain things and I knew where he was tiptoeing because
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at home it was full blast, full idiots, stuff like that and so it was very interesting for
#
me to see this, my father negotiating between his beliefs and what he had to do as a professional
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journalist and my mother negotiating between her aspirations and what she had to do as
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a homemaker and I think both of them didn't show signs of struggle, but I do think that
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I realised though I was having a very easy life, that life wasn't easy, that it was all
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about sticking to what you believed in despite everything and yet being able to get on with
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people, both of them had so many friends of so many varieties and ideologies and looking
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back it amazes me because now it's this or that and it can't be anything in between,
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but my two distant cousins of my mother's would come over and they were called Ram and
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Laxman and they were Hindu Mahasabha members and absolute no two ways about it and my father
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was left leaning with Marxist sympathies and they had fantastic conversations together
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and there was much laughter, much teasing and it was something that I took for granted
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that this is how things are and suddenly you were faced with the rest of the world where
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things weren't quite that way, so that was a kind of home atmosphere that I grew up in
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and my mother insisting, her huge insistence was that whatever your circumstances right
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now, you never know what they will be in the future and you have to be tough, so she would
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sometimes make us sleep on a chattai, sometimes on a bed, sometimes with lights on, sometimes
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with lights off, get used to it and I think we got used to it because later on in London
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I lived a very sparse life and didn't feel it at all, so it was a lovely, lovely childhood.
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When I was lots to double click on and I'll first double click on a little further on
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your dad, one of the things that struck me while reading your memoir of his is that he
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was in multiple ways, he was almost born 60 years before his time and one way of course
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is that in the holidays you speak about how you guys are taking photographs of each other
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and just really engaging with what's around you and I thought that okay in this Instagram
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generation he would have been putting up reels all the time and it would have been great,
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but the other way which truly blew my mind and in which he was ahead of his time was
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his clarity about what his values were and his expression of that clarity, for example
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early on you speak about how when he realized as a child what the caste system was, he decided
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to rebel against it, now he could not change his name, but he changed other markers, so
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instead of his dhoti he wore pajamas and instead of keeping a bald head he had long hair.
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So he had long hair and pajamas which was an act of rebellion almost against what the
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background was and this brought me to mind like I did a recent episode with the Dalit
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scholar Chandrabhan Prasad and Chandrabhan Ji was always wears a suit, he always wears
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a suit because for him that's his act of transcending the location he was born into, he only speaks
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in English officially, so at the break before the recording we are chatting away in Hindi,
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but interview only English for really well articulated reasons and even in terms of clothes
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like Dalits weren't supposed to wear dhoti's up to their feet, so he would point that out
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and he in fact told me about how sort of that when he saw the elders in his family becoming
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fat and getting diabetes he was proud because diabetes was not a thing Dalits got.
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So it's a very different way of sort of suddenly you see things differently and it strikes
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me that in so many of the things that you know your father did write down from his clothes
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which his family objected to and you also speak about how you know when he was in Belgaum
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for his vacation the whole family had sat down to lunch and his dad you know whipped
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open a newspaper cutting and it was a letter to the editor written by your dad basically
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sort of supporting inter-caste marriage and your father kicked him out of the house and
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when one just sees these facts in isolation it seems okay here's an extraordinary man
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but for you he's a father right, so that's the role that he's in.
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So how did you see him then because I imagine that later in time you know with the benefit
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of hindsight you would look back and you would be able to dissect each of these things and
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construct a different image but I think one mistake many of us make with regard to our
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parents is that at some point we get a fixed image of this which is often tied down to
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the role that they play being our father being a particular sort and then they are just stuck
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So tell me about you know how did you look at him then and how did that sort of appreciation
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of what he was how did that evolve over time tell me a bit.
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See that's not quite how it happened because we were living even then after I was 10, 12
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and became conscious of people around we were still living in the times which he had left
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behind and as I said he had friends from all walks of life all classes all castes and many
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of his friends spoke of him as an eccentric so we grew up with the idea that that was
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something else and when we visited our friends houses we saw the kinds of rules and regulations
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that they lived under which we didn't so we always knew that he was different my mother
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was different because her friends who would just drop in would always complain Indra Namba
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you're always busy and then she would say well I can hardly sit with my feet up waiting
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for you to come yes I like to keep busy.
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So she was also different and we grew up admiring this difference it wasn't as if we felt you
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are not like other parents and therefore we are different and it's not the way we want
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to be we were perfectly happy being different and our parents being different because we
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were getting to do a whole lot of things that my friends couldn't and now that you're asking
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me about this as late as when I was about 40-45 maybe I had gone to visit a friend of
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my father's a well-known screenplay writer Mr. G R Kamath who wrote all the scripts for
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all the Do things Do Bhai Do Cho Do whatever it was and he stopped halfway through our
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conversation and said I have to tell you this your father was a fool to send you to England
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and I'd grown up hearing this because you didn't send daughters to study abroad you
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sent boys sons daughters you saved up for the marriages dowries and stuff so this kind
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of difference was always impressed upon us by other people and so we knew who they were
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and they were people who changed over time they themselves were never rigid so I as we
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were learning from them gradually I know my mother was learning from me lots of things
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that my father used to ask me so it was a really give and take kind of relationship
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after a while so we never thought of them as fixed entities except for a few things
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like despite my father's liberalism he was in a few ways a puritan we played sports and
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we wore shorts and played sports but at any other time our dress had to be decent so to
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say and the other thing he never got rid of was he hated women who dolled up in jewelry
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so there was no gold and things in the house and we weren't supposed to and I don't know
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about my sister but I didn't mind it though there was a time when I wanted to doll up
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I didn't so much mind being denied these things so these were plus something like thread ceremonies
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which he wouldn't let us attend and he actually put his foot down but my mother would say
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sorry these are my relatives and this is happening I have to be there but he sat us down and
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explained to us when we were very young why he objected to thread ceremonies and how they
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were always gender specific unlike the Parsi thread ceremony and caste specific so those
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were values those were core values which stayed but otherwise you know I remember I persuaded
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him out of his the shirts colourless shirts that he used to wear and I got him some nice
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checked material and he would say to me on his way to office I guess you're going to
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decide what I'm to wear today and I would put out his shirt for him so it was that kind
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At one point you write in your book about him and I'll quote and this is about that
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point you made about how he didn't like women dolling up you write quote to father gold
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armaments were the equivalent of baubles a sign of primitivism face powder was prohibited
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it clogged the pores of the skin preventing sweat from flowing freely in adolescence when
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I became conscious of my looks and spent more time than father thought necessary before
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the dressing table mirror he draped it with a sheet when my school friend Rohini Padkar
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came over she asked in loud surprise gosh why do you cover your mirror with a sheet
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father's voice rode back from the veranda because we are half wits stop quote and you
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point out he actually used the Marathi word Gharav and I'm just thinking aloud here that
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it strikes me that this is not so much a kind of conservatism as it is a deep form of liberalism
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in the sense that you know it seems to play into another thing that you mentioned about
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your parents that even though once they had two daughters they did not try for a son they
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were happy with their two daughters you know they valued daughters and also they were not
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tied in by the stereotype of what a daughter must be which shows in the way that he sent
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you out to England for education and there's a very moving part where you quote him saying
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and these are his words don't expect us to go searching for a husband for you you are
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free to choose your own mate or whatever caste creed or religion he may be but when you do
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don't expect us to give you a lavish wedding I am putting all my money into your education
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you will find that of greater value than an extravagant social ceremony and gold ornaments
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right and the whole thing of covering the mirrors seems to me to be almost an identical
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impulse that my daughter is not you know that traditional thing that daughters must be beautiful
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and married off but no daughters must be knowledgeable and have that confidence yes that's an insight
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Amit which I'm just getting from you I hadn't thought of it that way but I think you're
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absolutely right that the the feminine stereotype of powder makeup and jewelry he didn't believe
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in true and yes thank you thank you for just giving so much food for thought in your wonderful
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books and I'm going to actually read them again you've written a lot about his journalistic
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career in great detail and perhaps we'll talk about that about the fights he took on matters
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of principles how he walked away from places because you know he didn't want to compromise
#
on his values and all of that and the picture that one gets gets is of someone who is passionate
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about his about the calling of journalism you know all the excerpts from his writings
#
are just you know so coherent and cogent and so clear-eyed and at the same time we get
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a picture of someone who perhaps with age or perhaps he was always like this you know
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you'll be able to elaborate is also becoming you know the family is becoming bigger and
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bigger in a scheme of things like with many men the family is something that happens to
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them but they are doing whatever else they are doing and everything else is incidental
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and here this is not the case like after you finish your school he wants you to go to England
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and at that point he leaves a job for reasons of principle which you point out and but he
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wants to send to send you guys to England and when your mother protests and says she's
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only 16 how can she go he said he says you also go and when she says but what about her
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14 year old sister he says take her with you so the three of you are off to England and
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there is this lovely there are these lovely lines where you write your ship is called
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SS Arcadia and you write quote the SS Arcadia was a huge or inspiring white hulk up on the
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deck we lost all sense of reality down below stood father a small lonely figure a devoted
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family man sending his wife and daughters off to a country he had never visited himself
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but for whose education system he had the deepest admiration mother was concentrating
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on swallowing her tears as she looked down at father he said he used to be reluctant
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to let me go even to Dahanu for a few days and now see where he's sending us the ship
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moved away father grew smaller and smaller till we could see him no more stop quote right
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and this is such a moving lovely picture and you know tell me about how you saw him sort
#
of change over the years you know because many men become one thing and then they never
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change through their lives and they are just that and here it seems that this is a thoughtful
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man but also given to self-reflection and and just through his actions you know we get
#
glimpses so you know yeah you know whatever his he had problems with himself he knew himself
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to be short-tempered person he knew that his opinions often got him into trouble and I
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think I've quoted one of his friends who said about my mother about them as a couple
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that he is a horse that's going galloping widely and without the reins that she puts
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on him he would go you know berserk so my mother absorbed a lot of that kind of anger
#
and rage I know that I used to argue with her and I'd say that this is unfair I mean
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he shouldn't have lost his cool this way with you of all people and why didn't you say something
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and she would always say you know he will cool down by himself and I will find the time
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to tell him that what he said was unfair I am not going to take it lying down but there
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is a time and a place and I will find it you don't why and I would say to him you're a
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huge feminist where we are concerned but where I is concerned you're not so he would laugh
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at that he would understand exactly what I was getting at because while we weren't cast
#
in stereotypical roles to some extent because the family becomes part of any marriage at
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all she had to take on stereotypical role so he knew that he hadn't protected her from
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that so he knew where what I meant and he had a lovely laugh which we recognized as
#
his recognition of what we were saying and it is always charming when we saw it because
#
at other times you talked about his passion for me and image an enduring image of him
#
is pacing the veranda before he left for work and he would be thinking possibly about the
#
edit that he had to write and there were times when you could see that repressed anger and
#
frustration he would go red in the face he wasn't fair skinned as such but his skin would
#
take a red tint and we knew he was inside of him furious and when he died that young
#
my mother did say this is all that repressed fury which has taken him. There's an anecdote
#
you give of his anger that one day your mother comes back from somewhere and she's been out
#
shopping and he sees a parcel in her hand and she opens it and there's a lamp shade
#
inside and he's really angry that she's bought something so frivolous even though as you
#
point out your mother was so careful about what she did with the household money and
#
he came up with this memorable line we want light in this house not shades and I thought
#
my god what literally parents who has fights like this you know this is not yeah and it
#
only cost 25 rupees of course back then 25 was something but yeah and it lasted forever
#
and he was perfectly happy with it afterwards yeah the next morning you say she said don't
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worry I'll handle him at night and the next morning she kind of puts a shade yeah I'll
#
come back to your father later but I want to talk about your mom because I just thought
#
even though I didn't read the Marathi memoir of hers but whatever I could read of her through
#
the other writing she was also remarkable and I'm just thinking aloud here but it strikes
#
me that men who were remarkable in those times what is remarkable about them can often be
#
seen in the in their biography in the things that they do the women who are remarkable
#
it's unseen right it's it's unseen because you know they're not public and a lot of the
#
things that they do the negotiations and the compromises are private known to nobody forgotten
#
and I just like one of course my favorite three sentences of your writing are you know
#
about your mother and and these are delightful sentences I mean they dig they just contain
#
a universe and I'll read these out we knew about the tiger cub her rice mill manufacturing
#
Gandhian father once brought home from the jungle he died of pneumonia after a servant
#
decided to soap and bathe it to make it spanking clean meanwhile it had acquired a taste for
#
Alfonso mangoes you factor universe into this and this is genius but tell me a bit more
#
about what you could gather about your mother's childhood because it's tough in the sense
#
that you know she has to drop out of school in the fifth standard because her father is
#
gone and had a whole bunch of kids who have to be looked after and one after the other
#
the kids are popping out and she's got to look after them so I think fifth standard
#
she drops out and she kind of does that and you would imagine that this would sort of
#
domesticate a woman where they just get adjusted to okay this is a role house family you know
#
you move on from parental home to looking after husband and kids but your mother was
#
a different kind of person your mother you spoke about how once in her childhood she
#
amused all her uncles your uncles her brothers because she jumped into the well to learn
#
swimming so she was one feisty woman and and my really favorite anecdote in all of this
#
is how she decides to find a mate for herself right yes yes yes yes it is incredible it
#
is and it the story as I said my father never told stories but she related this story and
#
even as we heard it in you know the 1940s it seemed way ahead of where we were so okay
#
first of all she had a very good relationship with her father father used to be extremely
#
busy but he recognized in her that spirit which he admired and he she became his right
#
hand in the business she would keep all his accounts so she became important to him in
#
that sense and I think I have said here or in the other memoir about her that perhaps
#
it was a touch of selfishness that he wasn't thinking of her future of her marriage and
#
the others of course were all aunts and busy with their own children so she decided she
#
was 25 at that time which was I mean well past marriageable age as such and she decided
#
okay I have to do this for myself and so she started reading the marriage columns in Marathi
#
magazines and she came across this notice this ad put in by a young man who seemed to
#
have no particular that none of those typical cast and looks kind of demands he was looking
#
for a free woman a woman with character and caste noba so because her father had brought
#
them up to not believe in caste and they had been ostracized by the Brahmins of Dhan because
#
they allowed a scheduled caste people to fill water at the well so they had been so she
#
were brought up in that kind of so she thought okay this could be the man I'm looking for
#
and she answered that ad and he on his part having been kicked out of the house and really
#
not having a caring family had realized that he has to do fend for himself also so he responded
#
to her letter and I believe it was quite a correspondence before they decided that yes
#
we could go ahead with this and she did feel in a way inferior to him because he was as
#
they called people double MA he had two MA degrees and she was just fourth pass so she
#
used to quote this line from her the letter that she wrote and that you are the sun and
#
I'm but a glover and so and she went on to say but then and then she used that lovely
#
Marathi proverb which translated says that well it's actually a pipe dream and if the
#
pipe doesn't play we'll just break it but it's a carrot.
#
The original as you've written is gajarachi pungi wajli tar wajli nahi tar torun kharli.
#
So that I have I feel that really must have appealed to my father and that kind of sealed
#
the marriage for them and then it was a very simple marriage and register done all the
#
rest of it but this she really ruled the fact that this bunch of letters was lost and they
#
would have been a delight to read but however eloquently she spoke of them they weren't
#
the letters and there was some storm and when I was writing my memoir of her I went to the
#
lengths to look up what that storm could have been I looked up I went to Google I went to
#
old histories all sorts of things but this storm occurring in that year and hitting the
#
west coast of Maharashtra hasn't been recorded.
#
So I don't know what it was but it took away a lot of paper it took away a lot of stuff
#
so she always wept over that.
#
So you know reading about it you know reading about that kind of romance and how everything
#
came together it seems like two really like-minded people are meeting in the sense they are both
#
progressive, anti-caste, free-minded and all of that but nevertheless you know the structure
#
of marriage is such a thing that ultimately men do what men do and women do what women
#
do and you have an incredible metaphor that describes this I don't even know if you meant
#
it as a metaphor but it's so powerful for me where you wrote this sentence quote, when
#
mother set up home in Patna she kept her masalas and cigarette tins and it seems to me to be
#
an incredible metaphor because here of course the cigarette tins are you know your father's
#
smoking habit which might even have contributed to his health later on but he had this smoking
#
habit and she would take those cigarette so she kept her masalas and cigarette tins which
#
seems to me to you know be so many marriages so many relationships.
#
Yeah true it was well I haven't used it metaphorically because when she told me about it it was to
#
show how you don't have to start with big things you're perfectly happy with masalas
#
and cigarette tins and you build up your life so that was the point that she was making
#
when she told us this and in her memoir I have written about a play which she translated
#
into Marathi which she it was a set text for her for the university course and she just
#
fell in love with it and I know exactly why because it was called The Never Never Nest
#
I forget the name of the author but it's about this old aunt who visits her nephew and sees
#
that the house is full of all the amenities and you know grand furniture he has a car
#
and she's trying to figure out how he with his salary can afford all this so she asks
#
him and these were the higher purchase dates which were just starting in Britain and he
#
says oh it's so simple we pay instalments and we get to use these things and she says
#
this city that I'm sitting on is any part of it yours so he says no we haven't paid
#
a single instalment she springs out of it and says I'm not going to be sitting here
#
and finally discovers that they totally own the steering wheel of the car and the aunt
#
says I'm going home I can't take this and she gives them a cheque and says make at least
#
one thing totally yours and when her nephew is dropping her off the wife runs to the maternity
#
hospital where she's pregnant where she's registered and she pays the doctor this cheque
#
and comes back saying at least our baby is going to be fully ours so the reason why my
#
mother would have translated this play and she was very keen to have it staged in the
#
women's club that she was a member of was that it fitted exactly her values don't live
#
beyond your means but don't complain about your means because it's happiness whether
#
you're here or there happiness you're making for yourself so yeah the cigarette tins were
#
the beginning of the accumulation which followed.
#
I did an episode last year with this year actually earlier this year with Mrinal Pandey
#
ji and she spoke about how when she was growing up in the 50s at one point she saw her mother
#
obsessing over getting the chapati just right for her dad and she complained to her mother
#
that in all other ways you're feminist why are you doing this why are you making a man
#
the center of her existence and obviously the question that then arises is that that's
#
a young girl's instinct without having the frames of feminism without having read feminist
#
books you still have that instinctive sense that something is wrong and it is not that
#
a person is bad that the father is bad person but that something is structurally wrong in
#
just the way the world is so tell me about yourself because one of the things that struck
#
me and that I was really jealous of is how clear-eyed you were about everything when
#
you were in from the time you were in school onwards you know I look back at my youth and
#
I was just a confused mess but you were just so clear about everything what you want to
#
do and so on but tell me about how you began to you know how did you eventually begin to
#
gather the frames to make sense of the world like I'm guessing some of the liberal secular
#
frames and all of that would have been just part of the family mahal the environment it's
#
at the dinner table you know you mentioned later in you know in 1970 how you read the
#
female eunuch by Jovian Greer and all that you know the second sex by Simone de Beauvoir
#
but apart from those apart from the formal thing and apart from what you've imbibed through
#
that basic osmosis how were you changing in the way that you viewed the world as you remember
#
it now yeah I ultimately it is experience is really where you become conscious of how
#
things are and this it's it's being able to look at different kinds of people and always
#
listening to their stories of their lives and their feelings about those lives so putting
#
all of that together gradually and without being conscious of it you begin to get actually
#
a sense of yourself a sense of where you stand vis-a-vis all these different currents that
#
are moving around you so a lot of for instance at university there are a lot of wonderful
#
fellow students who were extremely religious and I had two friends who genuinely felt I
#
was a lost soul and I didn't take it amiss that they wanted to save me because they they
#
genuinely fed for me and I realized that you're always thinking from within your belief system
#
and their belief system told me that I was standing in a dangerous place and because
#
they were so fond of him from of me I had to be brought around but gradually through
#
my discussions with them I became a firmer atheist than I had been my father was but
#
in our house this wasn't forced on us but if you admired someone and admired his or
#
her values then you gave serious thought also to this other part and as far as my mother
#
was concerned she never declared herself an atheist but I she wasn't a ritualist she never
#
went to temples we didn't have images of deities in the house but I know that there was in
#
her a streak of faith which was abstract which wasn't necessarily located in an idol as
#
such but and yet she was close enough in belief to my father's atheism because of this because
#
she wasn't ritualistic and we didn't hear any clashes between them about this so I grew
#
up generally thinking okay you know there's no God and my father is now 45 but he's lived
#
so many years without believing so what and do I feel a sense like a few of my friends
#
became very emotional at a certain age about God and there was a lot of talk about how
#
the light came to them or you know how a sense of something came etc and I know that I was
#
watching myself if three of my friends have three different stories of the same kind what
#
am I why am I not seeing any light or getting any special sense of anything and so gradually
#
through these discussions through my own experience of the world and basically of myself I realized
#
yes okay I'm an atheist and it's not something that I want to hammer home to anyone I'm really
#
not interested in converting anybody at all to my belief but I wish I could be left alone
#
which often I'm not I'm challenged to explain and sometimes I say I'm not challenging you
#
to explain I'm accepting you you accept me I do think I'm an okay person yeah so that
#
should be enough shouldn't it and then some people say you know actually you may not think
#
so but you are the most spiritual person we've met think so if you must it is nothing to
#
me but yeah so that was one framework definitely that gradually beginning at home but not being
#
forced into it which I did create over time and as you said through my reading of Jameen
#
Grier and Simone de Beauvoir suddenly it's strange when you are not brought up as a girl
#
a woman you you don't consciously think of yourself as that and so you say some people
#
are conservative and some are liberal that's about it but suddenly my eyes were opened
#
when I read this it started in the 60s while I was still in England a lot of discussions
#
etc and then actually reading these books and then understanding how this is part of
#
a system that is not individual choice that these things these roles are constructed I
#
didn't go on to read feminist theory after that I didn't think that I need to I am I
#
think in all things I am a little impatient with theory this is what I have discovered
#
over time because I find that theory stops you from thinking freely it binds you so I
#
didn't continue to read feminism but I had enough to go on for myself and to connect
#
with other women who didn't think I was a serious feminist because when my first novel
#
came out my heroine didn't bang the door and walk out of the house like Ipsen's Nora which
#
really was the thing to do feminists had to be rebellious and I wasn't that and my heroine
#
also learned through experience what it was to be a woman as I had done so I really believe
#
in experience teaching you about these things so again lots to double click on but the first
#
of those is I'll you know I'm also an atheist but when people say that oh atheism is just
#
another belief system you know I have to correct them and point out that atheism is actually
#
an absence of belief so you know it is no more a belief system than not collecting stamps
#
is a hobby it's that's kind of so I won't even call it is a framework but the absence
#
of a false framework yes you know where it fits in yeah I also want to sort of double
#
click on this bit about not having that much time for feminist theory besides the obvious
#
frames where you understand okay this is how society works these are the structures yeah
#
these are the problems because I think that you know I've had a bunch of feminists on
#
this show like you know Urvashi Bhutalia and Kavita Krishnan and Paramita Bohra and all
#
of that and what I admire about all of them is their engagement with the real world that
#
you don't want to be lost in some theoretical construct but you want to look at the real
#
world and without being judgmental you want to try to make it better one step at a time
#
and one common frustration sort of that some of them have expressed privately or otherwise
#
is that in today's age of social media you have a lot of performative signaling going
#
on where people who don't want to engage with the real world but they want to show her what
#
you say are will you know go on Twitter and they'll take stands and many of these stands
#
will be strident like you've pointed out you know you you translated Lakshmi Bhai Tilak's
#
wonderful book Smriti Chitre and you pointed out in the introduction to that and I'll in
#
fact read your words out where you say quote feminists have had a problem with Lakshmi
#
Bhai Tilak's endurance of her husband's ill-treatment of her viewed in the framework of women's
#
rights as we see them today she should have filed for divorce on innumerable counts but
#
it is not just that such an act was unheard of in those times a thought of permanent separation
#
from her husband did not once enter her mind because quite simply Narayan Vaman Tilak and
#
Lakshmi Bhai Tilak loved and respected each other stop quote and you know and it's true
#
that a lot of some feminists today obviously not all but some feminists today would you
#
know pass judgment and it's all black and white and oh she was you know what a non-feminist
#
thing to do to stay with that terrible man but the real world is complex and I'm wondering
#
if the best way to deal with this complexity is not necessarily through columns and non-fiction
#
writing but through art through plays through theatre through novels and so on because there
#
you can embrace all these complexities and go deep into all of these without telling
#
Yeah it is true because with Smriti Chitre I have had people saying in fact just about
#
two days ago a young woman said but but but he was so horrible and how could she stand
#
it etc and I was explaining to her that you can't impose today's values on someone who
#
lived 80 years ago and it is given to us that we can look back historically you know what
#
society was like and you know to what extent this woman stuck her neck out and that in
#
itself spoke of her spirit why do we want to put her into this kind of a box of feminist
#
thinking and feminist action when the world itself wasn't born back then and the winds
#
were already blowing there was a huge reformist movement in Maharashtra and playwrights as
#
you say quite rightly things are better done through art playwrights had put women at the
#
centre of their plays and to talk of issues like this but in our case the issues were
#
so basic that you can't really get to the nuances that today's feminists are or no I
#
won't say today's feminists are not nuanced the kinds of young women that you're talking
#
about no there's no nuance there at all but of our generation we have that perspective
#
and we know how bad things were and it is within that frame that we have to see Lakshmaitra
#
so yeah this was a discussion I had just two days ago and another thought comes to mind
#
I was at a literary festival and some young women were planning a panel on some feminist
#
issues and I was asked if I would be part of the panel and I said look I don't want
#
to be on a stage fighting it out with other feminists I have come to feel that maybe we
#
are not on the same page so perhaps you know you shouldn't be asking me at all so one of
#
the young women said don't you want all men to be locked up in prison I said no I love
#
men I have the most amazing male friends they have problems I have problems I understand
#
where they are coming from because gender construct doesn't only apply to women it
#
applies to men also when I was in Glaxo for instance I used to do the internal public's
#
house magazine and I was interviewing people on you know all their home life basically
#
and one of the factory workers talked to me very openly about how he loved cooking and
#
how useless his wife was so how perfectly matched we are she hates the kitchen I love
#
it and the next day he came up and said please don't carry that because I said why it's
#
so refreshing he said that's not how my colleagues will see it I will be told that I am a Bailia
#
Bailia is a pansy so of course I respected his wishes and knocked that part out but so
#
he is also bound and fettered by how men are constructed and so I said to this young woman
#
no I don't want them to be in prison at all I want them to be free and thinking and growing
#
up and you know so and I think I should clarify for the listeners and I think I can say this
#
on your behalf also is that neither of us is saying that all young feminists today are
#
you know like this some are you know I know a lot of young women who are doing great work
#
out there young women and men who are doing great work out there no but you were talking
#
about women on twitter on twitter yeah those are the ones I am referring to those are the
#
ones I am absolutely yeah and I'll come back to that but you know that that point you made
#
about you know not necessarily hating men also like you know the great writer bell hooks
#
also writes about the need to have empathy for men also because in a sense they are also
#
victims of patriarchy I did an episode with Nikhil Taneja recently one of my most popular
#
and favorite episodes you know seven and a half hours long I'll link it from the show
#
notes where again we spoke just about that that patriarchy of course is terrible and
#
oppressive for women in a very obvious way but it is also oppressive for men in a less
#
obvious way in that we are trapped in roles that you know don't allow us to talk to each
#
other freely you don't allow us to cry in public for example and trapped in ways that
#
made that worker that you were speaking of say that please don't carry that my other
#
men will call me whatever it is which is so tragic while we are speaking of today's discourse
#
I also want to ask you about another aspect of it and this is something that you brought
#
up earlier that you're that in your household you could have your liberal father speak to
#
people who were of a different belief and they could be friends you know one of your
#
close friends Satyamev Dubey had you know RSS sympathies and so on and you know some
#
of that and I wonder if it's possible today like there's a lovely sort of letter that
#
you reproduce from your father's friend M.V. Matthew to your dad you know which is in 1966
#
after your dad has retired and moved to his farm and he says my dear G.G.G. Gopal Gunda
#
Gokleda was his name my dear G.G.G. as I was saying it won't work parliamentary democracy
#
in your present set up are a waste and a luxury and then he goes on about justice rule of
#
law concern to the governed all of that and at the end he asks how are the onions growing
#
you know and I love it this is so beautiful because this is what is friendship for me
#
friendship is not all the other stuff for me friendship is how are your onions growing
#
yes exactly you know and I worry sometimes that we lose this that it almost seems that
#
in modern times especially for those on social media you're being pushed to be judgmental
#
of your friends you know at another point you have this lovely essay on Vijay Tendulkar
#
where you know you write about him about the importance he gave to violence in his plays
#
and you write quote seeing it as an integral part of the human makeup he treated even his
#
most violent characters with a degree of compassion that is rare in our moralistic culture stop
#
quote and that phrase our moralistic culture struck out for me so with the span of all
#
this passing time like you know do you feel that it has it has changed in this way or
#
do you think that only like I notice it when I'm on social media but I honestly don't
#
notice it otherwise when I'm actually meeting people sitting in their living rooms you know
#
we all disagree you know I'm close friends with your son Giresh as you know and we disagree
#
on so many things but that doesn't affect our affection so do you feel that there has
#
been the shift away or?
#
I think yeah I see politically yes I feel that very strongly because a favorite niece
#
of mine with whom I could talk about anything under the sun and we did all the time but
#
I have realized that this we cannot talk about it's absolutely she goes red in the face and
#
she she see if you are not at all open to another point of view then you've lost that
#
middle ground and I with her because she's younger than me and I've seen her growing
#
up with her I've tried to understand very intelligent woman so I've tried to understand
#
where some of these rigid ideas come from and I keep saying to her it's not a fight
#
we have to understand each other because without that then we become two nations so to say
#
and I don't want to be in another nation from you so but it's happening less and less and
#
I really do believe that it's a political thing now suddenly it never was and you could
#
in a number of social issues you could differ and still be friends on a number of family
#
issues you could differ and still be friends for a few days I know in my mother's family
#
someone stopped talking with someone else and a month later they were attending each
#
other's whatever weddings and whatever it was and everything else forgotten people don't
#
forget anymore they hold on to grudges they they need to hold on to this kind of set of
#
political belief and very often I have thought that we we should be able to organize a platform
#
where everyone speaks openly not just to say this is what I believe but to say this is
#
where the belief comes from and if you understand that I think it will lead to at least respecting
#
the other opinion and not wanting to tear it down you need to know that but in my conversations
#
with this need for instance there's no no wish to lead you to to the source of these
#
ideas where does it come from where did that belief begin are you testing that belief against
#
anything at all is have you shifted at all I have shifted I know I've shifted I have
#
been fairly rigid but over these last eight years or so I have been thinking very deeply
#
about it's not these people it's not they it is us so why is this happening where is
#
it coming from and I really think partly it is a kind of hubris that is what I find questionable
#
that you want to be a Vishwa guru that you know if you have that kind of a dream in today's
#
world it means that you are consciously blinding yourself to ground realities can you and what
#
does Vishwa guru mean I'm dying to interview people with just this one question how do
#
you define Vishwa guru what exactly are we going to do and for a guru if we follow our
#
parampara the guru didn't go around saying I'm a guru word got around and people came
#
to him and said let us sit at your feet because we think you have something to give so let's
#
go back to our parampara it's not a western import at all but think about it and and you
#
know test yourself it's very hurtful that people aren't doing that and becoming so rigid
#
so yeah I don't see the possibility of a common platform where we will hope to understand
#
each other I read this lovely book a few years ago called the three languages of politics
#
by Arnold Kling and it's in the context of American politics but he makes her what I
#
feel was a very wise point there very essentially looks at the three ideological tribes in the
#
US you know the progressives conservatives and the libertarians and he says that they're
#
talking past each other all the time because the first principle from which they come is
#
different so you know your progressives will talk of equality conservatives will talk of
#
tradition libertarians will talk of freedom and all of them are cogent and all of them
#
are coherent and all of them are logically consistent but they're starting from a different
#
place and what's important is that you acknowledge the other person's priors and then you have
#
a conversation and I think that I mean I don't even view that as a problem or at least not
#
as an insurmountable problem because I think so far in our history humans have been able
#
to talk to humans and work things out that is a whole business of politics in fact that
#
you can negotiate and come to understandings and all of that but in today's harsh judgmental
#
moralistic polarized times is getting more and more difficult and my next question is
#
kind of speculating on why that might be and asking you to react to it that I think that
#
one reason we are getting more and more polarized and judgmental of each other and less accommodating
#
less tolerant is that we are withdrawing more and more away from concreteness into abstract
#
concepts right so you know I did an episode a long time back with Achal Malhotra who did
#
a book on partition and she mentioned how when she was doing research for that she was
#
in Pakistan at one point and she was sitting with a family who had had to suffer during
#
the partition and they were raging and ranting about Hindus are this Hindus are that and
#
then they suddenly see Achal sitting there and they say tum nahi beti tum toh bahut achiyo
#
you know and what's happened is they're raging in the abstract but they're appreciating
#
this person who is there in the concrete and my sense is that you know in the concrete
#
we can be accepting of each other if we open ourselves up to it but abstract notions like
#
nationalism, purity, culture all of this nonsense really gets in the way and while it would
#
seem that technology has made us more interconnected than before it has actually made us more atomized
#
than before because today you go to a cafe you will see four friends sitting together
#
lost in the world of their mobile phone and the abstractions of their mobile phone and
#
not looking at each other in the eye and talking.
#
No but I mean I believe in defining things strictly you said tradition for conservatives
#
so what is tradition and tradition by definition is a changing thing it cannot be just what
#
was and when was that which year are you fixing for tradition how far back do influences begin
#
and get passed down to you so once you start trying to define take equality define equality
#
so what do you mean by it and I have just translated a Marathi classic novel in which
#
caste is the central issue and a pundit who is working on his own Smriti is saying that
#
caste is a good thing because let's examine really what would happen with the kind of
#
caste-less society that you're talking about.
#
At the moment I see that within a caste the haves are doing something for the have-nots
#
because they can identify them and they can feel for them because there's a lot that they
#
share so there's a feeling of fellowship and they will do things for the have-nots open
#
it out to the whole world who do you feel for there's it's too wide a thing you can't
#
so if you're talking about brotherhood then that is a very abstract idea which put down
#
on the ground cannot work because human beings themselves each of us has only so much space
#
in our hearts so to say for feeling as you said just now you recognize a person that's
#
sitting across from you and that is reality that's the concrete reality the whole world
#
cannot become concrete reality for you and therefore then you think in terms of groups
#
of monoliths and that's where politicians take you for a ride because they know that's
#
how you feel so yeah that's so good for them.
#
Leckie had written this book titled I think a history of European morals at the turn of
#
the 20th century where he came up with this phrase called the expanding circle and his
#
the concept of the expanding circle was that initially we consider only a small circle
#
of people worthy of a moral consideration so it could be your family then it could expand
#
to your tribe then it could expand to a larger community then it could expand to a nation
#
and his sort of thesis was that that circle is expanding for humanity in fact Peter Singer
#
wrote a book called the expanding circle about you know postulating that it will once expand
#
to include animals but the point you seem to be making is that there is a natural limit
#
to that expansion because as you point out there is a limited amount of place in our
#
heart that we are hardwired in a sense to search for our tribe our community those are
#
our people no one outside that is worthy of our consideration is that correct?
#
No additionally also the logistics the physical impossibility of meeting I mean I've never
#
met an Eskimo for instance and not likely to so in a general kind of way I think of
#
him as another human being like me and in a general kind of way I not being moralistic
#
would grant him certain good feelings let me put it that way and whereas if you think
#
in terms of enemy groups then you attach certain attributes to them which don't belong to any
#
of them individually but you're thinking of them as a group it is a physical impossibility
#
of meeting the huge diversity of human beings that make up the planet and to some extent
#
then you do think of them in this abstract fashion if someone is not driving a wedge
#
in and saying it is they and we are us so that has to be engineered within ourselves
#
I don't know I think I'm about to say all human beings are good no it's not a question
#
of good and bad I really think it's a question of circumstances it's a question of history
#
it's a question of upbringing all sorts of things so I'm going to come back to that
#
but before that let me go back to the question of the concrete and the abstract in another
#
context at one point in one of your writings you've written about how you happen to mention
#
to Govind Nihalani that you've written a play and he mentioned it to Satyadev Dubey
#
who was a friend of yours and didn't know you had written that play and then you write
#
quote the next day Dubey was at my house angry that I had written a play and not shown it
#
to him he took it away and within six weeks it was on stage in his original language Marathi
#
this was my first and only experience of being one of Dubey's writers and I must confess
#
he did not change a thing in Avinash name of the play the only thing he did do was give
#
it a time 1974 and a location Shivaji Park I had not located the play in any particular
#
time or place because I was convinced it could happen anywhere and at any time in India but
#
Dubey did not care for ambiguities which is why he asked me to close the open end of the
#
play with a strong speech that would remove all ambiguity stop quote and here there is
#
that point about ambiguity but there is also that point about he's asking you to make it
#
more concrete so that people can kind of relate to it more and is this you know and this is
#
something I tell my writing students I teach an online writing course and I'm always about
#
get concrete get concrete you know don't stay up in the sky common writing advice and tell
#
me about your sort of learnings regarding this in art in the writing that you've done
#
in the place that you've written and so on and so forth
#
see in this case you cannot close an issue with a statement a statement applies that
#
the person who's making it knows in this case she doesn't know what's happened is that she
#
is pregnant and there's a lot of talk about DNA being passed on and her husband has had
#
a mental problem so who is this child going to be I don't care whether it's a boy or
#
a girl but there is a fear and I'm going to live and learn she she says this this to me
#
is not ambiguity what we wanted was for her to know and then to say what she knew but
#
my question is in a larger context that when you write when you sit down to create is it
#
but do you then focus in on specific so it's like where do you start do you start with
#
saying I want to write about X and then you look for specifics or do you start with a
#
story that has moved you and whatever emerges from it emerges
#
I am given to the concrete totally because I have realized that I don't fly I can't
#
let myself go or perhaps there's nothing to let myself go on I have never had fancies
#
I have never had dreams of the kind that I want to follow up in my writing I am extremely
#
ground bound and a lot of the work that I do when I'm writing a novel for instance is
#
to put down the timeline very clearly to read around and I like to refer to certain real
#
events so I want to know exactly what happened I want to know how ten different people felt
#
about that so that if all of that doesn't come into the writing but it gives the writing
#
a kind of base in the concrete so I do believe very much in concrete detail as I said because
#
I know that I can't do the other thing that's not one of the skills that I have but this
#
I do have because this comes with this can be done with a lot of hard work study thinking
#
and that I can do and I love doing so I must tell you with my novel Grow Fall where in
#
an early scene one of the protagonists tears up 12 years of diaries which she has kept
#
consistently and the last diary I think has a picture of Hrithik Roshan on it and Jabir
#
said no you've got that wrong Hrithik Roshan became popular so much later and that really
#
upset me because that's the kind of detail that I worked to get right and I had missed
#
it so I'm extremely I'm paranoid about it I want all the details concrete details to
#
I'll come back and ask you many many more questions about your writing later in our
#
conversation but to kind of go back to your childhood you know one of the themes that
#
has fascinated me is how are people formed like in one way we couldn't be formed like
#
who we are could be partly an influence of our parents if they are a particular way we
#
grow up in that household maybe they have books so we read more maybe they are liberal
#
so you know we become liberal maybe there's a certain kind of conversation in the dining
#
table and we imbibe all of that and that's one way another way is from our peers like
#
Judith Rich Harris wrote this great book called The Nurture Assumption in the late 90s where
#
she looked at a lot of data and spoke about how the role of parents is overplayed that
#
how more kids learn far more from their peers and so on and that shapes them a lot and there's
#
a lot besides these two also going on like I think one of the things that many people
#
don't realize is how contingent their character is you know I use the example of the 19th
#
century railroad worker Phineas Gage who was working at a railroad and a metal rod went
#
through his head and he managed to survive his memories were intact everything was intact
#
but he from a very calm soothing kind of person he became an angry violent person the character
#
just changed because part of his frontal lobe was gone similarly I think of one of my heroes
#
the great musician Chris Cornell who took some medication for some problem he had and
#
that medication was later found that it makes people suicidal so his chemical balance changes
#
and he kills himself and he's got such a great career and such a great tragedy right and
#
it tells you that we often sort of have so much certainty in who we are that I am this
#
right but everything is contingent you know you get the genes you do it's an accident
#
your circumstances are an accident you change the chemical balance everything changes you
#
don't have breakfast one day you're a different person in the afternoon so looking back on
#
yourself you know I want to I want to ask you about the shaping of you like what was
#
your conception of yourself and when you now look back in hindsight what do you think are
#
the things which shaped you and also what parts of that are contingent and what qualities
#
are essential like do you think that there is something essential to Shanta Gokhale that
#
no matter what else happened this would define you this would still be you the core of you
#
which has never ever changed yeah I still don't know who or what I am frankly I think
#
yeah this question was asked to me some time ago during an interview and that's when I
#
realized that I haven't really given myself thought I have you know this great question
#
that people ask who am I and what am I doing here these are the big questions which I don't
#
remember ever asking myself this is I think it has made me happy but I think perhaps in
#
terms of the kind of character that you become maybe it's an inadequacy that I have not not
#
asked myself these big questions I think I have the one thing which has been rock solid
#
inside me is can't bear injustice that is I mean just two days ago I was thinking you
#
know these little memories that are stuck in your mind and you try and figure out why
#
particularly that memory so this memory is of when I was about six years old and the
#
class teacher was called Miss Jacob and I was very fond of her extremely fond of her
#
and I was always a very quiet child very shy I had friends but I didn't much care to open
#
my mouth and speak publicly about anything and we were walking in one of those crocodile
#
queues that children have to make at school to go from one part to the other and someone
#
behind me whispered to me and I wasn't sure what it was but Miss Jacob was heading the
#
queue heard a voice turned around came and gave me a slight tap with her cane on my calf
#
on the calf it was my left calf I remember and I remember the hurt of the injustice done
#
I hadn't talked it wasn't me and I think that it was because of that intense emotion of
#
feeling the injustice the unfairness of it that has kept that memory so vividly alive
#
in my mind so I that's one thing which you know it really I mean it makes me angry truly
#
angry but most other things yes well everything sounds so trite when you say it but things
#
like living simply I can't bear to see too much flash and I mean it's okay it's there
#
outside and people are there and they're enjoying it but if I'm there I feel distinctly uncomfortable
#
I have a great regard for the hard work that makes money money is a serious business and
#
do you make it or don't you make it and if you make it how do you make it and test it
#
always against one's freedom this I came face to face with in the times of India where they
#
started taking people on contract rather than as employees so people could be picked up
#
from one department and put into another because they were on contract and they could be thrown
#
out anytime I was editing the arts page and there were certain things I was doing there
#
which I believed in and it was getting a lot of response from readers also so I realized
#
I was doing the right thing more or less but I also realized that it wasn't exactly how
#
the management wanted that page to go it was suggested to me that I should have some features
#
on shirt design and stuff like that and I stood my ground and I said that's not how
#
I have conceived of this page you have given me just this much space and I'm doing in it
#
what I think is of value culturally the rest of the paper carries stuff about shirts and
#
jewelry etc so why on this page and I knew I could say this because I was an employee
#
of Bennett Coleman and company I was not on contract I had turned down the contract I
#
had received calls from Delhi trying to persuade me and I stuck to my guns I was making less
#
money than my assistant so for me that's where money stands if it means compromising my values
#
or my freedom to do what I think is right chuck me out but if I'm there I'm going to
#
do what I believe in so then money is not an important factor so that's me money and
#
freedom and as you have detailed your father made so many similar choices in his life quick
#
question about the distaste for flashiness or the distaste for you know spending too
#
much and all of that is it ascetic or ethical in the sense that the ascetic aspect would
#
be that hey it's gaudy it's flashy you know just keep it simple and the ethical aspect
#
would be that is wastage you know we had to work so hard to earn our money are they even
#
can you disentangle them from each other sometimes they're mixed because very often money does
#
get splashed around without any taste at all but there's some very tasteful places architecturally
#
which I admire and perhaps now that you're putting it that way as a kind of binary I
#
think I'm rather happy in a tastefully done place however because the word flashy doesn't
#
apply flashy only applies to something where money is put on show and new trends are being
#
followed without having any organic relationship with the function of that place it is just
#
a new trend like you make a dress and because everyone has bows you add 10 bows to your
#
dress it doesn't make sense so it is aesthetic but there is a middle-class ethic there at
#
work I suspect there is because I do feel that spending 2000 rupees on a single dish
#
of food is not right at all not in our country not here because the minute you step out you
#
see people I won't go into that that sounds like but yes it hurts me.
#
Have you changed a bit in that regard at all like I remember with my parents it would always
#
be like don't waste anything and eat every little last bit of the plate and you know
#
very and my sense of sort of their hesitancy to spend money on expensive things or things
#
that they might consider expensive even when they could very much afford to is that you
#
know their generation grew up in a time of scarcity where money had so much value but
#
you reach a stage later in life where the money itself you have enough of it that you
#
know the scarcity of that is not an issue but you know the scarcity of time is a bigger
#
issue and if there's if just you know buying things will get you some kind of other kinds
#
of pleasures you know they're more worth it because the money is no longer a scarce resource
#
I mean I remember whenever I would take my father to a hotel buffet like to the Marriott
#
or something he would want to try every damn thing because you know I'm guessing it's
#
a Paisa Vasuli mindset that you know he would want to try every damn thing you're spending
#
so much you know like while my thing would be that oh I just feel like an omelette today
#
and I'm done with that which would seem like such a preposterous waste to him but for me
#
the value is that I'm spending time with you yes yeah or that I'm sitting in a nice
#
air-conditioned place and we're having a good quiet conversation that's a value I'm not
#
spending for so do you feel that you have softened up in that respect as the years have
#
I mean I haven't arrived in that space of having that kind of money because of the choices
#
I have made I was saying okay let me I have this wonderful man who works for me for the
#
house he comes in two two hours every morning a lovely person and somehow circumstances
#
so ordained that he was offered a plot somewhere and he put in some money there then something
#
else long and short today he owns three flats wow I live in a rented place I have loaned
#
him money from what I have and he pays it back regularly monthly installments now his
#
house in the village everything flew off during the big storm that hit he's from the Konkan
#
and to repair it now he needs to go down to the foundation itself and this was going to
#
cost him some six lakh and then an additional one lakh and he has borrowed money I've also
#
loaned him money and he's been anxious because he can't be there she can't supervise etc
#
and the other day I said to him Sanjay I'm so happy I don't have a single brick or stone
#
to my name and I'm going the way I came my children have done well and I have softened
#
to the extent that I allow them to treat me and when I'm with them I know that they can
#
afford it and so I'm perfectly comfortable I don't get all jittery and I really do enjoy
#
myself so to that extent it's not like it's exactly what you said that if you have you
#
moved into that kind of economic class yeah treat yourself to something that you value
#
more and Girish for instance values the fact that he can celebrate say a novel of mine
#
has come out you know or when I was going through cancer each time my tests came clear
#
he would take me and Jabeen out for a celebratory dinner it was lovely it was really wonderful
#
so in that sense I'm not moralistic but in my own life I do work with within this kind
#
of framework and they also mentioned in one foot on the ground that when you had cancer
#
at when you had to do chemotherapy I think Girish opted for the more expensive imported
#
drugs because it'd be less side effects yes yes he did and that's the other thing which
#
I must say if he is doing it I'm not saying no no no no don't do that why waste your money
#
I'm not saying that I think that he it will spoil the feeling with which he is doing it
#
so it's wonderful that he expresses his love in this fashion without blinking an eyelid
#
he said whatever is best we are going for that and and what you said earlier about leaving
#
the earth as you came into it reminds me of that you know that old that old rock music
#
quote if you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose yes that's precisely it yeah because
#
you know okay I have friends who have money but I for my writing I haven't got paid much
#
in fact I think one of my publishers has never ever paid me forget advances even royalties
#
and these people with money wonderful as they are are really belly-aching about you know
#
so-and-so got so much advance and I'm going to ask for this much more so I've happily
#
let myself out of that race entirely and it has to do coming back to your earlier question
#
of how you are shaped you mentioned a few factors but there is nothing called your nature
#
and I have done things my way but I have never wanted to show rebelliousness and perhaps
#
you don't I don't know the fact that I don't go after money is probably because in that
#
respect I'm lazy you know these days you have to make invoices for payment and I hate doing
#
it and I've said to the publisher look this is my gift to you either you get me out of
#
this invoice business and pay me some other way or it's okay you know you need the money
#
as much as I do I totally share that feeling because I just hate the paperwork like every
#
time I'm like now of course I've decided not to work for anyone but myself but every
#
time I would write for somebody new they'd ask for like thousand documents and it's just
#
such a pain and you are 30 years younger than me when I started writing it was so simple
#
just check yaar so recently someone for whom I had written an essay for a book happened
#
to ask me for my bank details and said or would you rather have a check and I said check
#
I haven't had a check for years please send me a check so that that's I think there you
#
is a question of getting used to I'm so used to the old way when Girish was traveling abroad
#
and he wanted me to do something to do with his bank and I was not to face a human being
#
I was to deal with a box and I was just to put this thing into that box and I stood there
#
staring at the box thinking are you doing your bit are you doing your bit I can't see
#
anything happening that's also a wonderful metaphor for humanity and modernity right
#
you standing and staring at a box yeah yes it is because that's where I'm stuck and
#
that's where the box is on the other side so yeah I think the difference between human
#
beings and boxes is that boxes can't drink tea and I think it's time for us to take a
#
break so we can get you some tea sure sure lovely have you always wanted to be a writer
#
but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love to help you since April 2020 I've enjoyed
#
teaching 27 cohorts of my online course the art of clear writing and an online community
#
has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter to showcase
#
the work of students and vibrant community interaction in the course itself through four
#
webinars spread over four weekends I share all I know about the craft and practice of
#
clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and a lovely and lively community
#
at the end of it the course cost rupees 10,000 plus GST or about a hundred and fifty dollars
#
if you're interested head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash clear writing
#
that's india uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given
#
talent just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine
#
your skills I can help you welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with
#
Shanta Gokhale Shanta ji so you know we kind of meandered all over the place as happens
#
in conversations I want to sort of kind of go back to your childhood like one of the
#
interesting anecdotes about your childhood is that you ended up going to school a bit
#
early because you you would stand in the balcony and just cry when you saw the other kids go
#
to school so your parents quickly went to Dadarege of Balmohan Vidya Mandir and said
#
please girl wants to learn please take her yeah so tell me a bit about what kind of girl
#
you were what was school like I wasn't I think even as a child a person for crowds but I
#
think it was books really even as far back as that and I would see these children going
#
with books and I wanted to be where there were books so I was kind of an honorary member
#
of the class and and they didn't bother to include me into the lessons and stuff like
#
that but I was really happy sitting by myself and just listening and because it was a junior
#
class and there were also things like play acting and singing and I think I've talked
#
about Jogrekar sir who was a music teacher and he always made me sit on his desk and
#
sing and I was I have a feeling that I was tuneful I think I've been tuneful but but
#
without the voice to go with it I've learned music but for my own pleasure my voice has
#
always been too weak really to sing but those I mean what was I about two and a half then
#
but I seem to carry very distinct memories of sitting on that desk and singing and looking
#
back I wonder how I did that because I really was very shy if I was asked my name it took
#
me a while to say it out loud but then I jumping forward to my first experience on stage I
#
think to perform which is not talking about yourself you sing someone else's lines you
#
say someone else's lines you become someone else and that fascinated me that becoming
#
someone else because it was like a shell then behind which I could hide and this other person
#
could perform and for the longest time I played this game with myself even as a grown-up if
#
I ever had to talk publicly I would say you know forget it it's not you it's someone else
#
talking and it was a stupid game to play and I wasn't a fool but I think it got me over
#
that hurdle of the first few minutes and then I was fine after that so yeah two and a half
#
I was at school and Dadare was extremely upset that I was taken out of his school and put
#
into Scottish school which was then Bombay Scottish orphanage and I felt I should go
#
back to that school and give back something for those first two years of school life that
#
I enjoyed that and really thoroughly enjoyed and I offered to take voluntary classes in
#
English because I knew that you know Marathi or any children studying in Indian language
#
schools had a problem when they went to college and when I came back from England I was actually
#
teaching at Elphinstone so I knew these children and how they hugged the walls as they walked
#
whereas the English medium school children walked straight down the middle of a corridor
#
and that was very hurtful so I offered Dadare my services free to teach his students 10th
#
standard students English and I don't know if he still held on to the graduate but he
#
That's a very evocative image of hugging the walls and you've written elsewhere about
#
the caste system that language can bring about right and you were of course shifted you know
#
from Dadareghe's care to Bombay Scottish because Marathi medium to English medium and
#
as you've written elsewhere and spoken about elsewhere you got to Elphinstone and you realized
#
that the Marathi medium kids were just having a difficult time and I think at one point
#
you tried to teach them in Marathi and then your superiors your seniors rather said why
#
are you doing that English is a medium and you were like the point is to learn how will
#
My question is there also about languages like you know all of our regional languages
#
also have proud local cultures but there is an asterix to that proud you know in the sense
#
that Marathi theatre is so rich, Kannada literature is so rich, Bengali arts are so rich and you
#
know locals who speak those languages correctly take pride in them but at the same time there
#
is in a sense an inferiority complex because of what English is and inferiority complex
#
or this postcolonial thing that we perhaps still carry as a hangover that you know when
#
a white man says something good about us we feel proud and Oscar will win will mean so
#
much just because it's like validation from there and I remember the Kannada writer Sugata
#
Srinivasaraju in his episode with me made an interesting point he said you look at the
#
translation that is going on English is always there it's Kannada to English or English
#
to Marathi or whatever why not Kannada to Marathi and so on and so forth so tell me
#
a little bit about this complex world of the languages because we are all in a sense multilingual
#
you know I wish I had not sort of neglected the other languages I know so much to the
#
extent that I can only read comfortably in English and I feel that's a great drawback
#
but you know you are of course effortlessly multilingual you've created and written in
#
at least these two languages Marathi and English how does one navigate this both the pride
#
and the joy that comes from the richness of one's language but also the sense ki yaar
#
I have to hug the walls yeah yeah luckily if if you if language is also if English is
#
also one of your languages then you already have that confidence that you've spoken of
#
and you then when you speak in Marathi or when you write in Marathi then a very strange
#
thing happens on the English reading side they suddenly sit up and think okay so if
#
this person who writes in English is writing is choosing to write in Marathi then we have
#
to look at Marathi a little differently from what earlier I know a friend of mine would
#
say it's a servant's language Marathi because socially they never met Marathi people because
#
Marathis were never members of that economic class so servant's language this has been
#
said to me and I didn't feel the need to defend the language because the language is so great
#
I I why would I want to defend it but I'll tell you it's lately it's not just English
#
it's Hindi as well and this was my experience at one of these Lit Fest and there were two
#
I don't want to name them but there were two other people on the panel with me and I forget
#
what the subject was that we were discussing but both of these people were constantly speaking
#
in Hindi and it was supposed to be an English speaking panel but they didn't think twice
#
about moving into Hindi not just that one of them read out poetry in Hindi and I thought
#
oh okay how would it be if I read out Gnaneshwar or Tukaram or Arun Kholadkar or Dilip Chitre
#
and this man's poetry is third class compared to that but one I wouldn't be understood
#
because the audience knows Hindi doesn't know my language so the the richness or greatness
#
of a literary culture doesn't get transmitted across the country and through translation
#
it's another language again so at the most people say oh wow this kind of book was written
#
in Marathi but that language culture hasn't come through and it's a tricky situation and
#
I think one that many languages in the world are facing and Ganesh Devi has been working
#
all his life to try and give them their own space in the total language thing of India
#
but no it doesn't work and I think to some extent whereas our government Maharashtra
#
government could have done a lot towards making Marathi popular rather than saying you know
#
change your signboards and put Marathi there that's just showing your political power but
#
to make people love your language and it's so possible to do if you communicate it to
#
others imaginatively I remember in the Doordarshan days old days there was this very famous series
#
based on the writings of a humorist Marathi humorist Chibi Doshi and Dilip Prabhavarkar
#
and someone else played two characters and the whole of Bombay was watching and it was
#
in Marathi and it was getting across and they were enjoying it so there are ways and means
#
in which you can pass a language on I think in Bengal because people don't really speak
#
too much Hindi or English a lot of people who want to live there have to learn Bengali
#
to some extent or the other that hasn't happened here.
#
So I have written about PK Atre in my book on Shivaji Park he was an educationist before
#
he became a political activist and he had taken his degree in education from London
#
came back and looking through the textbooks the readers that were being used in Marathi
#
schools he was so depressed because as he says these selections are not going to create
#
in the students the love for the language pride in language is a political thing love
#
for the language is something else that's cultural and he therefore compiled books to
#
be used at school and there's two or three generations of people who even today talk
#
about those books and what they meant to them in terms of coming close to their own language.
#
Are they available somewhere online?
#
I had the whole set I mean objects not online I don't know but yes I think they still are.
#
If I find them I'll link them from the show notes you know I completely agree with what
#
you say about this hubris that Hindi speakers often have that India hai everybody speaks
#
Hindi and I remember I faced a dilemma because my podcast of course is English and everyone
#
knows that but there was one episode episode 86 I did with the former leader Gunvan Patilji
#
and he could not speak he was comfortable in Hindi so I did the Hindi episode and then
#
in the introduction I apologized in advance saying that I couldn't help it I had to do
#
this but in future especially in the last year I have realized that there is a trade
#
off and one trade off is that of course I want English you know everybody to listen
#
to this but at the same time I also want my guests to be authentic to themselves and some
#
times if they slip into their you know the way that they speak that authenticity also
#
So I've done episodes where Mrinal Pandeyji spoke in beautiful Hindi Varun Grover came
#
on the show Hussain Haidari came on the show and I decided to go for authenticity and just
#
hope that you know people so just for my listeners that's why I made that choice it's not meant
#
to be disrespectful to non-Hindi speakers but it's just a difficult trade-off and you
#
know I five years ago I would have you know lamented that all these languages are being
#
suppressed and they're going and you know that's been my lament throughout that there
#
is increasing homogenization and everything is towards English and now Hindi in this political
#
environment but recently I've had reason to be a little more hopeful I mean just in the
#
context of Marathi there is this great audio platform called Storytel it's like Europe's
#
audible but it's run in India by a very dear friend of mine Yogesh Dasrath and he made
#
it a point where he came ki Marathi content chahiye and it's got tons of great Marathi
#
and Hindi content it's Pula Deshpande and when it comes to Hindi there's Raghdar Bari
#
and Kashi Kasi and that's great and the other thing that gives me hope which is an intensification
#
of this is that I did an episode with a young entrepreneur named Vinay Singhal not the
#
VHB guy this guy is a young entrepreneur he started something called stage which he describes
#
as an OTT for Bharat so like a Netflix for Bharat except that by Bharat he doesn't mean
#
Hindi Punjabi Bengali the big languages he means the dialects and he started with Haryanvi
#
Rajasthani and I think they've added Ghojpuri now and his thing was ki dekho bhai sheher
#
mein bhasha hoti hai sheher ke bahar boli hoti hai bolis are dying that's what I would have
#
thought ki homogenization bolis are dying urbanization all of that his thing is ki nahi
#
bolis ko mande nahi denge so he started this movement where he now has I think when I last
#
spoke to him three four months ago he had more than a one and a half lakh subscribers
#
paying Netflix subscription fees to listen to Haryanvi Bhojpuri content and he spoke
#
about how so many kids tell him ki bhaiya mein jab sheher jata tha na you know hugging
#
the walls the same thing I used to feel that complex and now I don't anymore meri apni
#
jaga hai duniya mein and I just find that that is so beautiful and maybe there is some hope
#
there that we can all be empowered to keep these things alive and not have to go to the
#
and see what happens is medium is a message kind of thing that when it happens on a platform
#
which is technologically advanced immediately it elevates the status of the message so that
#
that's happening I think in with a few platforms for Marathi also I think story tell is partly
#
Marathi but the boli bhashas in Maharashtra are so sweet they are so lovely so musical
#
absolutely and but there are still those prigs who argue in newspapers what does this mean
#
what does that mean well it may not mean anything to you but it is very meaningful to the people
#
who are saying it but coming back to what you were saying that on your podcast you
#
also want people to be comfortable I can't be all the people you have mentioned that's
#
my limitation yes exactly I apologize that's my limitation so it's still it's there and
#
the South Indian languages are really cut off from all this they're not so easy to learn
#
because a script is so different and that they have this feeling against Hindi is for
#
me perfectly natural another question on the same theme that I wonder if there is also
#
danger that people in the languages face that their culture becomes insular so it's deeply
#
rich it's rooted it's grounded but it can be insular because the world isn't flowing
#
in like English is that sea into which everything else flows you know all languages will be
#
translated into English but not to each other and English may not necessarily be translated
#
everywhere so where does that knowledge that outpouring of art that that vast ocean can
#
it flow into those and an example of that of course is you wrote this great essay about
#
you know the impact of a doll's house on Marathi theatre where you speak about you know Henry
#
Gibson's great character Nora and the choices that she makes and did it influence Marathi
#
theatre and that's of course a whole different debate and argument you get into but without
#
getting into that argument necessarily is that then a drawback that you know while if
#
you are sitting in London and speaking in English all the world's theatre and art is
#
flooding into you but if you are sitting say in Satara you know it's so limited part but
#
not any more so much by geography because we are all interconnected but as much by language
#
yes yes well about two months ago or three months ago Lok Satta ran a series of articles
#
of people looking back on 75 years of a particular art form and seeing where it has gone and
#
of course the visual arts have gone completely global while being rooted. Film has never
#
had the kind of problem that word oriented arts have. I was asked to write about the
#
Marathi novel and this is precisely the conclusion that I came to because I was addressing this
#
a feeling of resentment that a lot of Marathi writers have that we are nowhere on the national
#
scene leave alone the international scene so what does it take to get there and this
#
is precisely it or what okay let me explain this the Marathi novel to begin with was confined
#
to Pune and Mumbai all the educated people lived here and they wrote novels and very
#
middle class concerns and then in the 60s or so people who had roots in villages became
#
the new literates and they began to write and obviously they wrote about their lives
#
and what they wrote at that time made the urban elite sit up ah this is happening that
#
is happening and that was great then the Dalits began to write and that was another little
#
shock to the middle class urban elites but then what happened is that that became a cause
#
in itself because if you can get this kind of traction writing about your own lives then
#
you continue writing about them and your experience of the world if that also is limited to a
#
small town or a you know second tier city there again you're not feeding on any kind
#
any kind of broader thinking or you are not seeing multiple viewpoints coming through
#
about life itself about the world itself so that becomes a huge drawback and so my argument
#
was that the Marathi novel if it doesn't break these boundaries in some way or the other
#
will stagnate because there's no push even to experiment with form because your experimentation
#
is using your dialect how long can that last as a form of experiment and because we belong
#
to a traditional society society itself is not evolving we we still have certain mindsets
#
and each feeds into the other and helps the other survive so it's a it's a real trap
#
and the effect on the Marathi writer then is we don't care we're fine where we are
#
we are true to our soil that is the phrase and that soil unfortunately isn't getting
#
fertilized by anything else so it's the same soil and and you're true to it fine but you
#
can't deny that that limits you so you can't and I also quoted from Salman Rushdie's introduction
#
to his compilation name what was it called some Indian literature I've also forgotten
#
and then Amit Chaudhary also compiled a book edited a book and both of them said that what
#
comes through to us as Indian literature comes through in English translation and to some
#
extent the standard of the translation reflects the qualities of the original so what comes
#
through is not the best in a in a global context and that's what we are doing trying to locate
#
these in a global context so therefore there were no Marathi stories in either of those
#
collections as far as I remember and that's also because my huge complaint is that because
#
Marathi people have this very very tough kind of dilemma about language pride in language
#
their language means not giving or not putting any effort into learning the other language
#
and if that's where you are then you're twice stuck and when you go back to the thirties
#
people who went abroad came back wrote novels with that sort of worldview which they had
#
acquired which wasn't westernized they were writing about their soil but that soil had
#
been fertilized by other ideas and so those novels stand today even today as modern offers
#
and nothing that has happened after the sixties has gone further so it is it's a trap it's
#
a problem I love the phrase you use that soil has been fertilized by you know outside ideas
#
as a friend of mine and a writing student Shakil who once asked me this question I could
#
not answer then and can't answer now he said look I write in this dialect of Kannada which
#
is not mainstream Kannada you could say it's like a bully and he said that I feel that
#
to be true to myself I have to write in that dialect but I know that if I do I will never
#
have any readers so what do I do and I don't know what to answer him because it is a classic
#
difficult trade-off and the purest in me says be true to yourself and any story is universal
#
and blah blah blah but at the same time if you want readers you know you also have to
#
be practical and I just feel that that's I don't know what to say but you know no but
#
you know Amit I'm surprised because as I said earlier there were all these writers writing
#
in their dialect in Maharashtra there were the Dalits writing often in their dialects
#
and readers were reading them that's how they came on to the literary map at all and I'm
#
surprised that the Kannada reader isn't reading dialect.
#
I actually have again a hopeful take on this because I've done a few episodes in the creator
#
economy and thought a bit about this and I think there is one fundamental way in which
#
the world has changed for creators or is changing for creators and I include writers of course
#
in that and one see in the past like 30 years ago there are two things that writers creators
#
would have to contend with that one to be successful you need scale you know one percent
#
of artists are going to succeed the rest are not going to make any money so you need scale
#
you need to be in that bestseller list otherwise you're not going to make it and the other
#
was that to have the privilege of creating itself often of getting your work out there
#
you need to get past elite gatekeepers yes right so if you are not with the conventions
#
of the time or in the right circle that just becomes difficult for you today I feel both
#
of those are crumbling in some cases have crumbled in some cases are crumbling where
#
one you don't need to scale anymore like Kevin Kelly had this great essay 12 years back called
#
a thousand true fans and what he postulated there was that if you are a creator if you
#
can find a thousand fans will pay you a hundred dollars a year that's a hundred thousand dollars
#
a year it's you don't need to scale you need those thousand guys in fact another writer
#
whose name I forget but I'll link her essay from the show notes wrote about how today
#
a hundred true fans is enough will pay you a thousand dollars a year and there are people
#
who will care enough so the thing so that's one thing and the other thing is the means
#
of publishing are now open to us like my podcast is independent I don't have to go through
#
a gatekeeper and gatekeepers would laugh me out of the room if I said I'm gonna do a five
#
hour conversation right but I don't need to do that everybody has a means of production
#
open to them and therefore it seems that if I'm a namdev dharsal today you know then I
#
can get a cult following that also makes me money and gives me a good life that allows
#
me to do the kind of authentic work that I want to do and not have to crave for translation
#
and reaching other audiences and go with hands folded to elite gatekeepers and say please
#
please appreciate me also yes yes but then how do you apply this to the person you were
#
talking about yeah I see there is also the other thing that a writer feels he is writing
#
from the heart that he is saying something that is true is it good literature because
#
I think readers do respond to something that is good and to some extent publishers in the
#
languages do because publishing in Marathi for instance doesn't have the same costs
#
as English language publishing so they're able to put out a huge variety of books and
#
if you're even halfway good you find a publisher so I really don't know what this case is about
#
but this is something too because too many people think that they're writing about a
#
good cause and therefore that work is good it isn't it isn't I agree with you yeah so
#
if that is the case then there are all these other factors coming in which I think in the
#
case of so you know three quick thinking aloud kind of responses to the question you asked
#
what about my friend then the response one is that writing is probably the last of the
#
creative arts in that sense for whom this can apply it's much easier say on a video
#
if you're making tick tocks or reels or if you're on YouTube it's kind of much easier
#
to break through that barrier you know that's one thing and the other thing that I would
#
say is that someone who has the urge to tell a story back in the day we used to think in
#
terms of forms and we would therefore put ourselves in a box so if you thought of yourself
#
as a novelist you would say I'm a novelist too and you would not once you've put yourself
#
in that box you would not think of expressing yourself in other forms and you are an outlier
#
in that sense of course you've done you know you've worked in so many different forms but
#
a lot of people will define themselves a particular way and what I would urge my friend also to
#
do is don't think of yourself only as a writer think of yourself as a storyteller and creator
#
and maybe other forms emerge where you know you could make YouTube documentaries or you
#
could just do a vlog in your dialect and see if it picks up and if people can and the third
#
thing to contradict what I was saying earlier is that just because scale isn't necessary
#
doesn't mean that it's not possible like my favorite living writer of course an English
#
writer but my favorite living writer is Alice Monroe who basically writes about one little
#
district in Canada right that's it and yet her stories touch hearts all over the world
#
of course she has the advantage of the English language but my point is that your subject
#
or your milieu is not a limitation a story is a story and the Korean series Squid Game
#
the great success of Squid Game is another example of that that if you tell a story well
#
you can touch hearts everywhere and obviously then there's a lot of luck involved in actually
#
getting to them but you know it.
#
But what do you think of as a story that's the point you yourself sitting where you are
#
if your idea of a story is limited by the definition in your mind of a story then you
#
can't break through and certainly speaking for Marathi writers there are a number of
#
writers who are writing within the so-called conventional short story form and then that
#
plus your lack of exposure to other worlds and other world views the two things combined
#
make your story insular then you can't like Alice Monroe be dead in Japan for instance
#
you can't be so that also is a problem because it's a it's it happens for instance in Marathi
#
theatre because it's an industry and industry means that the producer is taking a certain
#
risk and the producer has ideas of what the audience wants so he becomes what you said
#
called a gatekeeper your first gatekeeper director is your second gatekeeper and you have to
#
get through all that the best way then is to write conventional stuff because the audience
#
that is coming is not experimental you need a reader or an audience who is willing to
#
open up to experiment if the audience comes with the idea that they have paid X amount
#
of money to occupy this seat and therefore they demand entertainment and they do not
#
want their ideas to be disturbed too much then the writer director producer all together
#
produce a product for this consumer and theatre remains where it is once in a while and it
#
has happened on the Marathi stage and so refreshingly that people from outside the upper cast have
#
broken in and they have brought with them their tradition of folk theatre and they have
#
just let themselves go on stage and when they have done that with the conviction that they
#
bring to their performance the so-called conventional audience sits up and laughs and claps so where
#
does that confidence come from it comes from people saying to themselves okay so you want
#
to keep this to yourself do you this space sorry we are coming in and that is with our
#
own thing but if you belong to the conventional playwright producer kind of clique then you
#
limit yourself and nothing moves then so there have been some wonderful examples on the mainstream
#
stage of experimentation in the face of ruling conventions and have they been outliers or
#
have they actually managed to change something like could you talk about some specific examples
#
for example see there was this wonderful play called Yadakadachit it was done by people
#
from the working class textile mill areas of Baikal and all those places which used
#
to have their own theatre when that culture was booming now this was a take and a very
#
naughty take on the Mahabharat I don't know if it can be done today but it was when was
#
this this was I think in the mid 80s perhaps and one of the things I've seen it three
#
times because and it was hilarious each time one of the scenes that I remember is Draupadi
#
saying no this time around I'm going to ask for a good sarees I am not going to let Krishna
#
wind me up in any old thing and she she does it with such flair that only VHPs will find
#
it difficult to laugh but then again with a play like Sakhara Ambaida going back to
#
the 70s and all these people were on the streets asking for it to be banned and all the rest
#
of it it's a pretty conventional play it breaks new ground because it brings on to the stage
#
a protagonist who does not belong to the middle class he's a bookbinder and there is violence
#
there is sexual innuendo all this is happening so of course the middle class was up in arms
#
and the director decided then to go to Bharat Sahib Thackeray that your people are protesting
#
you see the play and tell us what's wrong with it and Bharat Sahib enjoyed the play
#
and he told his boys you know don't be stupid but he could do it Tendulkar was very upset
#
because taking the moral stand he said why do we have to go and plead with Thackeray
#
let this stand or fall but we are not going to plead but the producer and director said
#
it's our life and we have to allow this play to be staged so that happened now Yadakadachit
#
was followed much later by a wonderful play it was called Shivaji Underground in Bheemnagar
#
Mohalla and the story line is very simple and that Shivaji has passed on but he's left
#
his turban behind on earth and some emissary is sent to earth to find it and how do you
#
know it's Shivaji's turban so this is a running gag throughout that this man keeps placing
#
the turban on various heads who are claiming to be Shivaji's heirs political heirs and
#
doesn't fit any of them at all so none of these people have anything to do with Shivaji
#
now there are two parties here one Bheemnagar Mohalla party and the other is not named but
#
it is the Shiv Sena type party and they're fighting over Shivaji and what he stood for
#
and the right-wing people are saying he was this that the other and these people challenged
#
them because it is a musical and they say fine our parties will sing you tell us what
#
Shivaji was we'll tell you what Shivaji was and let's see who wins so the right party
#
is talking about in extremely vague and romantic terms about bravery and how the corn was always
#
golden in Shivaji's times and all the rest of it and with each verse also the other party
#
is talking about the concrete things that Shivaji did his administration his respect
#
for women his agrarian reforms stuff like that which is all part of history which these
#
people know nothing about and ultimately the right-wing party loses and these people win
#
now in Maharashtra to talk about Shivaji is a risky thing because you never know where
#
you will put your foot down and will be seen as a wrong foot so Sambhaji Bhagat who comes
#
from our mill area and he's a Shahid and a rebel he had his boys lined up outside the
#
theater on the day of the premiere that we are going to have people protesting and they're
#
going to come and bring the play down which has been a tradition in Maharashtra and here
#
we are let's see what happens and nothing happened nothing happened because how could
#
it because the Bhimnagar Mahala party was actually saying much more in praise of Shivaji
#
than the right-wing party and it was an absolutely brilliant musical and it came from outside
#
because the playwright Tangde doesn't belong to either Mumbai or Pune or Nagpur he comes
#
from Jalna which is a pretty backward state place rather and I like to tell you about
#
how this man came into theater he as you know there are no regular there's no regular power
#
supply for farmers in agricultural areas and it's well known that they steal power from
#
the connection and there's a way in which they do it they have a hook in Marathi it's
#
called Akara and they kind of allow the part to be conducted through to whatever connection
#
they have now this fellow Tangde had written a play about this problem and entered it for
#
the interstate drama competition that's a big thing in Maharashtra and one of our critics
#
from Mumbai had gone as a jury member and he loved this play he thought this Bombay
#
has to see it so he arranged for these people to be sponsored on the Mumbai stage Shivaji
#
Mandir and they acted out in the dark and they say to the audience first that you have
#
never experienced what we go through so please welcome to our experience there will be no
#
lights and soon your eyes get used to seeing people in the dark and then they talk about
#
this and ultimately one farmer dies he's electrocuted and this happens very often when there's
#
stealing power later on this actor Nandu Madhav who discovered this play then went on to make
#
a film on it and that's how Tangde came into a onto the map theater map in Mumbai and Pune
#
and then he was asked to write this play about Shivaji underground with Sambhaji collaborating
#
with the music and he's doing things now from some remote place in Jalna he was able to
#
break through because he had that he had things to say and he had a theatrical imagination
#
in which to say it so in a way while the Marathi theater is kind of height bound it is possible
#
to break through and when some such breakthrough happens the audience is very responsive so
#
when mainstream producers decide that the audience will not like it or get it they are
#
wrong if the play is good and done with conviction it carries so all these things have been happening
#
not on the so-called experimental stage but on the mainstream stage but no such thing
#
is happening as much as it should in literature tangential question for you before we get back
#
to your school days we were discussing in the break earlier and we were broadly in agreement
#
that our hope lies in people from small towns that people from small towns have so much hunger
#
and imagination and like Mr. Tangre as you as you just mentioned we'll see the world a little
#
differently you know us elites in the big cities you know we'll see the world in a particular way
#
possibly the same particular way and you know and a lot of the boxes that we think in simply
#
don't exist if you're not from here and that's one angle of it that just being from a different
#
location different circumstances can help you see differently and come up with you know new ways of
#
expressing yourself and also one fundamental way in which India has changed is that you know back
#
in the 50s 60s 70s 80s perhaps up to the 90s everybody knew everybody else when it comes to
#
the elites you know so I've one of the many episodes I've done with Ramchandra Guha he talks
#
about how you know he's in one of those elite colleges of Delhi in the 70s and all his classmates
#
are so and so and so and so and so and so and it's basically anybody of that age who's who is from
#
there you are from that cluster of three four colleges you are from that cluster of a few schools
#
that's a Delhi milieu Bombay will have its own thing every place will have its own thing
#
all of the elites know each other and all of that and today it's way more diffused and democratized
#
and spread out which is mind-blowing it can be disorienting if you're part of the old elite and
#
you're kind of you know functioning within that system but I just love it because there are so
#
many unexpected explosions happening from all over which is why I love TikTok so much before
#
it was banned because you know yes what's your feeling but that you were talking also I think
#
in the break about the hunger that people outside the metropolis have for experience
#
you know of other worlds so to say and one of the things that I always argue against is this
#
very glib kind of statement oh people don't read nowadays and again and again one has discovered
#
that you go to some remote place and someone comes up and says oh you know I've just read so and so
#
novel of yours so and so something and you're looking at the person and that person doesn't
#
fit your idea of who your reader is but then the questions are asked and you think wow this man has
#
read it much more deeply than any of your friends back home the other thing that I have this
#
wonderful friend Atul Pethay who is a director, theatre director and social activist and
#
he has a huge network of connections in the remote areas rural areas of Maharashtra and
#
he takes his place out and then the local NGO or social organization will host the play and the
#
locals will come and watch and what he does and the depressing thing of course is that we don't
#
have we don't believe in libraries as an institution so what Atul has done is to carry a bag full of
#
books wherever he goes and with this hunger that people have which is you know not satisfied
#
locally the books are gone within the blink of an eye all the books have been taken so we aren't
#
providing the hunger for books for plays for films is all there but we have not bothered to take these
#
things across. I've just been reading a very interesting book in Marathi written by a woman
#
she's the mother of Chinmay Tumbe who is an author who's been on my show a couple of times he has been
#
so his mother spent six or seven years in South Korea in Seoul Seoul Seoul whatever Seoul yeah
#
whatever we call it but she learned Korean and she throughout the book calls it Seoul and she's right
#
obviously obviously that's why it says Seoul Seoul whatever you want and she writes about
#
a global center there are global centers all around where people from outside foreigners
#
are given facilities to learn the local crafts and arts the local language to become part of
#
society through all these things and her book tells you how enriched she became through these
#
through these global centers she joined one then she joined another and we don't even have libraries
#
for our people it's I mean it's stupid to compare yourself to any other country at all because we
#
all have our histories and our cultures etc but to this extent at least we should do something
#
you know one of my one of my metrics for deciding on whether I liked the city or not was the quality
#
of the bookstores so if a city had great bookstores yes I was happy if like I in my years as a
#
professional poker player I spent a lot of time in Macau and Macau has no bookstores they've got
#
one dinky shitty bookstore what are the places nothing it's casinos and all of that and you know
#
you speak of the hunger in small towns one of the sort of one of the sweetest anecdotes that I've
#
got in the course of recording all the episodes I have is from my good friend Suresh Rai you know
#
grew up in towns and villages and all of that and he spoke about how when he got his first salary
#
or stipend or whatever as an intern he happened to be in Baroda he got eight thousand rupees
#
and he took he withdrew all eight thousand rupees took it to a bookshop and went to the owner and
#
said I don't know anything about books here are eight thousand rupees please select books for me
#
and give it to me oh wow and I just love that story so much because you know that is so and
#
people like me you know growing up in elite circumstances always surrounded by books
#
I've taken books for granted all my life and I feel so guilty about that yeah yeah and I yeah
#
yeah I remember an out of town young man who was sitting beside me at a performance in one of the
#
NCPA theaters I think it was experimental and during the interval he turned to me and he said
#
you come here often and I said yes I do he said it's my first time and I don't belong to Mumbai
#
and I have never seen a play before and I'm utterly fascinated but by what I've seen and then we got
#
talking and I happened to mention some book and he said oh I'd love to read that where can I get it
#
and then at the end of the play he came after me and he said I could I make a request I said of
#
course what he said please make out a list of books that you think I should read I don't have
#
anyone to guide me and it would help me a lot so then we sat down in the foyer I asked him what
#
his interests were and then I made out a list of about 10 books I didn't meet him afterwards but
#
it it really made my evening to think that there was a young person who wanted to read
#
and wanted to be told what to read well I'm glad he sat in the row he did and sat beside you because
#
it might have made your evening it could have made his life you know little things discovering
#
going down the right path and the right rabbit hole and you know whenever people say that
#
people kids today don't read enough my two responses to that is that one even in my time
#
very few people read it's a very small percentage it is today what has happened is all the non-readers
#
are more of a voice but the percentage might well be the same of readers exactly and the other thing
#
is that there was a time where to get a certain kind of storytelling or knowledge or whatever
#
you only had books today you can get knowledge and art in so many other ways and I won't even
#
look down on things like tiktok because no they cannot you know you can have great art from there
#
also yeah absolutely yeah I'm learning this from my grandsons okay yes because you know when we were
#
growing up there was a thing about comics you shouldn't read comics when my children were
#
growing up Amarchitra Katha was strong and so was Asterix and Tintin and they were of course reading
#
them and I was told oh why do you let them and I said it's not a question of letting I was allowed
#
to read what I like and they choose to read this that's fine by me similarly now there's a big
#
thing about screens how much screen time should young people have and my older grandson is 24
#
hours on the screen and on his phone and there is a lot of apprehension because you think of eyes
#
you think of posture and yes this does affect those things and we keep talking about it and earlier
#
both Renuka and I used to try and get him to read get both boys to read and no they didn't read
#
whereas earlier when they were growing up it was constantly read from this book read from that book
#
and we were constantly reading to them so it wasn't as if they didn't know they they weren't
#
they weren't fascinated by what books can give but they had moved on now to the telephone etc and
#
one day we were discussing something and my grandson said something about some film
#
and gave me a pretty clear analysis of it so I said wow that's good I must see this film and
#
that word which you used I didn't think you knew it so he said nani I know more than you think
#
more than you think from this little instrument that I spent time on which are constantly saying
#
I shouldn't do so I said sorry I'm learning so but it is it's true I mean it's not just a screen
#
it's what you are choosing to see on it and obviously these two boys are seeing some things
#
which older people will sniff at and they're seeing other things which are pretty worthwhile
#
and thinking about it and that's what books make you make you do so. So let's talk about books and
#
let's go back to your childhood like one of the things I struck a chord with me when you wrote
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about your school days is about how you know after price distribution days you write quote
#
it was gratifying to come home with books middle march great expectations far from the madding
#
crowd which opened up new worlds to me stop quote and I had you know before my father passed I sat
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down had long conversations with him about his childhood and he was you would have been pretty
#
much as old as you and he spoke about the same thing you know he would always stop his class and
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he would always get books as a reward you know and eventually he read all the standard books
#
and then he would go and exchange them for other books and that tells me not that you won a lot
#
of prizes or he was good at academics but that tells me that there was a value given there
#
to reading to knowledge and all of that so tell me a bit about that value and also tell me a bit
#
about how your relationship with first reading and then writing evolved yeah actually it's
#
something that I'm writing about also entirely for myself because books have meant so much to me
#
that I thought I have to start putting this down before my memory begins to fail worse than it's
#
failing now and so I have written about how I think at age seven I my father had a huge library
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of course and the lowest shelf I could squat in front of it and reach into that shelf the others
#
were out of reach to me and there was a set of books times library they were called and I picked
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one which had photographs it was a book of photographs and for me then photographs were
#
snapshots and suddenly an entire visual world opened up through this book and I remember that
#
I kept going back to it again and again because I think some if they were all black and white
#
and something about those tonalities and the rhythms of the lines which the photographer
#
had managed to capture without understanding what was fascinating me I know I was fascinated
#
so my relationship with books began with this kind of very strong visual experience and then
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definitely through all the books that I won at school all of which I read except I was very
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scared of Alice in Wonderland I found it extremely disturbing I didn't want her to fall through
#
the rabbit hole because it was going into nowhere and that was scary and then to drink something
#
which made you so tall and then to eat something that made you made you so short so obviously you
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know this kind of magical thing scared me more than fascinated me and I came to Alice in Wonderland
#
much later when I was about 14 or 15 and then thoroughly enjoyed it but not at a younger age
#
Dickens of course and it was wonderful to feel sorry for those poor boys and I would
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weep copiously over Wordsworth's Lucy and Dickens' little poor boys etc etc so it was also a
#
sentimental journey but on the other hand I remember thinking because this was a
#
pre-independence day and the Brits were still around and I thought oh they had poor people
#
their people were in rags so how do I kind of you know how does that tally with who is
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tally with who they are now and so I know that that consciousness of the history of peoples
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came to me with Dickens and his books and then of course there was a wonderful holiday
#
that we had in Pune and my father had dedicated it to reading and we had carried a trunk full
#
of books and that's where I read a lot of plays I read JB Priestley I read Shaw I read some
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Shakespeare got acquainted with that so Shakespeare from then became an important part of my growing
#
up and thinking about life I think having been close to his work has shaped my thinking
#
about people and the kind of compassion that he has for people who are not necessarily virtuous
#
was something which appealed to me hugely yeah so I mean there was a point I think I remember my
#
mother saying she used to come and on Saturdays Sundays when I was head down in books and she
#
would call me for lunch and I'd say coming and she'd call and I'd say coming and then she'd
#
and then she'd finally come and kind of drag me up physically and she'd say okay for as long as
#
you are with me and I'm with you I will do this but I worry for you because no one else is going
#
to get after you to have your food and you're going to starve no use feeding your mind with
#
these books if you can't feed your body with food so she used to be pretty upset with with me and
#
earlier we were talking about growing up in a certain kind of environment and being shaped by
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it but now when I'm speaking about this I realize that we probably get shaped in different ways
#
because my sister couldn't bear to read a book she was an outdoor person and she was just waiting to
#
get out and start playing with her friends while I was with my books and what what did that mean?
#
My father used to even in England get after your sister get her to read and I know that I wrote
#
back and said yes yes she's reading but she wasn't she would read one book and think that was enough
#
and much later I thought why why should she read if she doesn't feel like reading? She wants to do
#
other things so what is this kind of snobbery that we think only someone who reads is worth
#
something and others are not and I think my sister grew up with something of a complex about this
#
because we had a huge showdown after attending a wedding where one of my father's colleagues was
#
present and he kind of said hi to her and he turned to me and said so happy that you're getting all
#
your father's intellectual legacy and she stared daggers at me. It's not your fault it's that guy's
#
fault it's so uncool but you see that was the it was the accepted thing you that's not something
#
you objected to he was saying what everyone should be saying and I think it really used to
#
depress my sister a lot so same environment she went to science I went to arts we are two totally
#
different kinds of people. One of my favorite quotes is from Stephen Pinker who said nature
#
gives us knobs nurture turns them and it so happened you had the reading knob she had the
#
outdoors knob and you know you both of you were lucky enough to be born in a family where both
#
those knobs were turned yes you pointed out your sister also excelled in one sport after another
#
yes yes absolutely and she problem of course is that I was sent to England and I hadn't shown
#
any particular inclination that way and yet that was chosen for me my sister wasn't given training
#
in sports she did what she did off her own bat because she was naturally so good
#
but had she got training and she wanted to she wanted to she she ran and she wanted to be
#
trained as a runner and she wanted a pair of spikes and my father couldn't afford them
#
but he was affording my education so it is ultimately telling my sister that what
#
what your sister is doing is important enough for me to beg borrow not steal
#
for her education but your shoes I can't give you. So here's a you know a question that comes from
#
me thinking aloud really before we go for our overnight break for our listeners we are recording
#
this over two days so we'll now take a break have dinner and tomorrow Shanta will come back again
#
but a question before we go in there is that you know these days people keep raving about
#
the great job that AI is doing and I am frankly blown away by it you know GPT-3 is a tip of the
#
iceberg I think for people to judge AI based on the pros turned out by GPT-3 is like people
#
judging computing based on the earliest mainframe of 2MB right I think the future is limitless and
#
some people worry that at some point that inevitable moment comes where AI is creating art
#
better than human scan and what happens to us artists then and frankly I'm not so worried
#
about that because my sense is that for an artist the joy will come from doing the art and of course
#
you will have people who will appreciate it and thousand true fans and all of that who will want
#
that authentic human experience behind it also but the joy will come from the doing of it and
#
it seems unrelated but the reason I thought of it is you spoke of how your sister loved to run
#
but you know your parents couldn't get her that training and maybe in India that training just
#
wasn't there in those days I mean you know if you know we can get you books if you like to read but
#
if you have the outdoors not too bad what do you do yeah right but you know in all of these fields
#
I feel that you know whether you're a creator whether you're a sports person you know on the
#
one hand there is a desire to do what you want to do for the love of it and to excel in it for that
#
alone and on the other hand there is a validation that you crave so an artist may crave applause
#
or a sports person may crave competition to beat people and to get a medal yes and in a sense these
#
are two separate things that can often play off against each other and you know I'm not making a
#
judgment either way obviously I would love to be good at something and also be acclaimed for it
#
because why not but at the same time they are separate things yes what are your thoughts yes
#
no no that's true even forget about AI even by yourself your writing and if you are at least
#
a little self-critical you do say to yourself yeah this was fun writing but this is where it remains
#
and it goes into your bottom drawer you don't always write to publish I have written a lot
#
without publishing and that's because of the joy of creation that you speak of and publishing may
#
or may not bring the applause you're not looking for that either because then it comes to calculating
#
how that applause will come you're still writing for yourself if the applause comes well and good
#
you enjoy it so yes there are two things but I think they are a continuum because if you're
#
if you're writing for yourself it means that writing is a thing of joy and that allows you
#
to put joy in the writing that you do for publishing and that's an important quality
#
of that writing also so the one feeds into the other I don't think they are two separate things
#
unless there are artists who crave for awards but craving is fine you can't write for an award
#
award is a chancey thing ultimately there are five people in the running
#
and only one can be chosen so you take your chance there nothing can in art you can't or
#
you shouldn't calculate it it destroys the joy and the joy I think is the important thing at least
#
it is for me and when I read books where I sense the joy of writing I respond to it very very
#
strongly because that makes that book more meaningful along with whatever else it is doing
#
in terms of theme subject characterization but it's alive for me then so yeah musicians
#
I mean I think look if you have a voice and you've trained for years that why isn't it an end in
#
itself I remember a time when I had gone to Gwalior for a sangeet samil and they have one
#
they have one annually and it's an all-night thing and on the second day morning
#
we were walking around the park and there was a temple there and from far away
#
we heard a voice singing it was a early morning raga and we thought what and where and we followed
#
the voice and there was this man he had a briefcase next to him so obviously from here he would go
#
onto his job which could be as dull as a clerical job but here he sat in this shrine facing that god
#
and singing singing divinely now the environment the situation all of it added to the effect of
#
this music on us perhaps if you put him on a stage in an enclosed auditorium he would have been one
#
of the many singers but here he was extraordinary because he was doing it for something inside
#
himself and I actually feel that you know it's it's probably a false dichotomy and you're right
#
that it's a continuum because I think those who eventually achieve that kind of excellence and
#
validation and win the big competitions are the guys who are doing it for the love of it for the
#
love of it for the simple reason that whenever we start doing something we suck at it right we are
#
we are bad and if we are doing it only for validation because the immediate validation
#
will not come we will soon give it up yes but if we love doing it yeah then we will do it anyway
#
we might suck at it but we might say okay you know I will lift my skill to the level of my judgment
#
I will work harder yes and only constant iteration makes you achieve excellence in anything yes
#
and if you crave instant validation immediate gratification those never come yeah yeah yeah it's
#
and I have constantly done this and the most recent example is I was very disturbed by
#
the film made on Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter and the kind of hysterical welcome
#
that women gave to this film and saying things like this has never been done before this has
#
never been said before and of course it's been said of course women have been shown to rebel
#
to do their own thing in fact this woman seems to be a little more stuck than the women that
#
I have encountered in film and theater and I thought I have to read the novel perhaps the
#
film has been unjust to it so I ordered the novel and I read it and I realized where the
#
limitation of the film was coming on from but I found that there were layers in that novel
#
which set off some of those ideas that had gone into the film and had they come in it would have
#
given it a certain fullness and people were laughing at me my daughter was laughing everyone
#
because I was obsessed with this film and this novel and how do I deal with this obsession I have
#
to do something and I thought okay film has been made can a play be written based on this novel
#
and the minute the thought came I got down to it and for about two months I was writing this play
#
and after it was written I felt shant I had done what I could do with that novel I think that I
#
had brought all the layers in so I said it could have been done so it was the director's cussedness
#
that she didn't bring it in full stop I was happy.
#
Wow maybe I'll have a follow-up question on that but for now let's let's take a break for dinner
#
and I you know thank you so much for your patience I look forward to chatting with you tomorrow.
#
The scene and the unseen is that funny place where as a matter of structure I put in commercial
#
breaks but I generally get no commercials and end up talking about my own courses and so on
#
which is cool because I spend zero time looking for sponsors I would rather focus on the show
#
itself which is my labor of love but I thought I should fill this commercial break with a goodwill
#
free shout out to a brand that used to be an early sponsor and supporter of the show and who are
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relevant to what I'm discussing today with Shanta Gokhale. Storytel is an audio platform that is
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like the audible of Europe but when they came to India they came with full respect for the
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Indian market and Indian languages they have built up a mind-blowing catalogue of literature
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and local languages especially Marathi and Hindi Pula Deshpande is here in Hindi classics like
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Raag Darbari and Kashi Kasi are here some of the world's best literature across languages is here
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so do check out Storytel at Storytel.com that's S-T-O-R-Y-T-E-L.com and even if you don't have
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time to sit with a book and read it you can always listen to a great audiobook while commuting or
#
working out in your language so remember Storytel.com. Welcome back to the scene and the unseen I'm
#
chatting with Shanta Gokhale about her fascinating life and her work and so on and so forth so you
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know yesterday we recorded for more than three hours and we just about got to that part of your
#
childhood where you are where you're finally heading to England so tell me a little bit about
#
you know that phase that you know were you excited by the thought of going to England and
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what was it like you know what were you expecting there and you were just 16 so
#
what was what were your expectations like and how did they modify themselves when you finally got
#
there? I think what happened was because I'd been reading so much and your question reminds me of
#
shadow lines where he knows exactly what is where so to some extent London was that way
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that's where I went to school and I had heard of all the places and I knew the lifestyle
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of the people I knew what kind of tea they drank and what kind of pastries they had for tea
#
so none of that was a surprise what I'd say was a surprise was the atmosphere at the school
#
now going there I yes I was excited and I really had no idea of what school after school
#
was to be like because I thought I'd finished school and I was going back to school so what
#
are these mysterious A-level exams that I have to appear for and then when we made our
#
introductory visit to the school I gathered that my admission wasn't final I didn't have to luckily
#
appear for a written test but a very brisk grey-haired teacher who was to be my counsellor and
#
guide later Miss Jenkinson was appointed to take me around and gently question me about things
#
so we sat on this bench facing the school tennis courts and so I thought to myself okay
#
the school has tennis courts that's something and then she questioned me about what I had read and
#
what I thought and I think when I told her that we had done Macbeth for my senior Cambridge exam
#
and she popped this question at me about whether I thought it was a tragedy
#
as it called itself and if so what was tragic about it and of course
#
I couldn't say because everyone dies at the end and I had to search for the reason because
#
suddenly I realised that this was certainly not an aspect that our teacher at the Scottish
#
school had touched upon we were just expected to know the meanings of things and so I kind of
#
blundered through that answer and I think she realised that it wasn't something I knew so she
#
politely passed on to a next question which I could understand and answer and then
#
we were taken to the high mistress's office so that was the second thing high mistress not head
#
mistress and she said we are happy to welcome you to this school etc etc and then she asked
#
me then we were into the shopping for school clothes and for the first time I realised I was
#
expected to wear a hat we had to wear hats and there was a particular shop which supplied
#
school uniforms and they were hugely expensive and so I think a new coat winter coat and
#
we were starting the winter term so those were clothes we were buying cost something like 13
#
pounds now I wouldn't normally remember this figure but I've just written my mother's memoir
#
and these are the things that came up there because from the word go she and I wrote weekly
#
letters to dad and he wrote weekly letters to us and unfortunately I'm jumping when I made my final
#
return to Mumbai I didn't take those letters with me you mentioned this yesterday yeah weight limit
#
weight limit yes so but I discovered that my mother the great preserver had kept every single
#
letter she came back in a year's time before that my father had preserved the letters and then she
#
took over so this was a great documentation for her life which I was recording
#
and there she I think my father must have written saying why are you buying second hand clothes
#
and her letter says here is why so Nirmal that's my younger sister her coat is 13 pounds
#
Shanta's secondhand coat is three pounds if you can't see the difference
#
then I will elaborate my answer further and that 10 pound difference is big even today but for 1955-56
#
it was massive it was huge and as we said yesterday you said that my father had resigned from his job
#
and he was into a new one and so it was financially tight times for him but and my
#
mother knew this fully well so she spent her year there skimping and scraping so this this luckily
#
the same shop received worn coats to sold to be sold secondhand so we were able to get all our
#
clothes it was a navy blue coat and a navy blue hat that struck me like a bowler you know with a
#
you know with a round crown and I felt quite odd to see myself because I used to wear two pigtails
#
and this thing sitting on top of that but we got used to that so that was a surprise number two
#
the third surprise was the classroom a Bombay Scottish had been a co-ed school and we were really
#
used to a mixed gender class this was a girl's school so for the first time I was in a class
#
with Jessica's and it was a small class we were just about a dozen of us and at that level
#
we weren't all doing the same subjects for eight levels we had to choose three subjects
#
the one that we wanted to major in and two subsidiaries so we weren't always together
#
but at the beginning of the day we were all in one class now I think a lot of those girls had taken
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English which was my subject and that was the big surprise that the teacher didn't walk in
#
and start teaching as such while we scribbled down notes instead of which she opened up a discussion
#
on some point that arose out of what we were reading and as I've said I was extremely shy
#
and secondly I was out of my depth because I had been so used to receiving
#
knowledge or maybe information and here I was supposed to have thought about these things
#
by myself and I hadn't so I really was at sea for at least the first half term also and then once I
#
opened up I just realized how quickly my mind was growing at what a pace and how wonderful it was to
#
walk into the school library and borrow books that would allow me to read around the subject
#
that we were doing and from there of course have my own things to say so that was hugely exciting
#
and so those two years were extremely enriching and my father was keen that I should do as
#
many other things as possible so I had taken elocution classes and I remember the
#
the reports at the end of term very polite she has problems but she is working hard
#
but by the end of our second year I was considered good enough to act in a scene from Shakespeare
#
of course I had to die very fast in the scene while others carried on but I was told that I died very
#
well so they were fun years and I met some very made good friends I met a lot of wonderful girls
#
but I made a few really good friends and I was invited to their homes because you know
#
that I didn't have a home and so Christmas and Easter breaks I would be by myself and they always
#
managed to give me two or three days of a local celebration whatever it was and that also was
#
amazing I remember a family of a friend of mine the lead betters and the four of them there was a
#
pair of twins and then my friend and her younger brother and they were all musicians they played
#
various things and on Christmas Eve we were invited to what turned out to be an annual kind of ritual
#
with them they lived in a place called Tunbridge Wells which is an out-of-the-way villagey kind of
#
place they lived in a place called Tunbridge Wells which is an out-of-the-way villagey kind of place
#
a famous cricket destination as well okay now me and cricket so I wouldn't have known
#
but we went to some friends of theirs and it was this extremely culturally sophisticated
#
kind of family like the lead betters so they some sang and the lead better siblings played their
#
instruments and it was all great fun but also very serious there was laughter but the laughter was
#
also very serious there was a lot of eating but serious eating you know so that that was great
#
fun I spent about two or three days with them and I think perhaps for the first time had what I had
#
read about toasted scones yeah all these Ennard Blyton books we would read about these I hadn't
#
read Ennard Blyton by the way okay that's one writer I hadn't grown up on but other books had
#
scones I was familiar with them in description so I had them and so the English way of life
#
of a certain class revealed itself to me during those two years as it happened because we weren't
#
rich and I was there on a middle class income also there was a tight control on foreign exchange
#
in those days so even if my father had had more money he couldn't have sent it so we had to look
#
for accommodation that fitted our pockets and that had to be in the working class area so while
#
my mother was there and we were living in a flat it was in a working class area called Shepherd's
#
Bush which was close to our school which was in Hammersmith and then when we went into digs
#
when my mother came back to Mumbai then that house was in a place called Acton which was also close
#
to Hammersmith and our landlord was a factory supervisor so that was another slice of life
#
all together and I remember when I was appearing for my Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams
#
and I didn't get into either university because my Latin wasn't up to the mark so back then Latin
#
was still very important and Miss Jenkinson came to this place in Acton to talk to me about the
#
the next exam that I was to give and it was the first time she saw where I was staying and she
#
I think in her head decided that perhaps my environment hadn't equipped me for Cambridge
#
and Oxford exams entrance exams so in her very polite way she suggested that maybe I should
#
change my digs and she said I'll help you find them and she wrote off to her friends in London
#
and of course all of them were way beyond my budget so I stayed where I was but for the first
#
time she had a glimpse of the second life that I was living and I hope that opened her eyes
#
as the school had opened mine so it was tremendous to be able to see the entire class
#
differences from school to home and back again and living with spending time at my friend's
#
places and the kind of food we would serve there and the way it was served and the way that
#
my lad lady Mrs Dean who is a lovely person and loud and full of life and how she served
#
our meals and then I felt that she didn't really have an outlet from this rather restricted life
#
that she was living and she had a lot of fun in her and once in a while she would entertain me
#
by dancing and you know the good old folk dances which she did kicking up her legs and lifting her
#
skirts and it was tremendous fun and I could see how much she enjoyed having someone appreciate
#
what she was doing so it was those two, two and a half years were quite amazingly rich
#
and then I was applying to a whole lot of other universities and Bristol was one of them and I
#
was very keen on that even keener than getting into Oxford or Cambridge because somehow having
#
been there just on a tour I found it stuffy and I don't know I thought I would have to be a lady
#
there and an intellectual lady kind of brown woman in blue stockings. I wasn't very happy
#
with that image of myself so Red Brick University seemed to be the right place for me to be and
#
luckily for me they laughed at the idea that Latin had been found to be so important
#
and I got my seat and then I went on to university. So you know I find this whole process fascinating
#
of how when you're so young you go to a new school in a new country like when I think of myself in
#
my youth every time I went to a new school or a new college I would have to deal with the anxiety
#
of fitting in wanting to be liked of you know being among the cool boys and equally I remember
#
as a kid when I'd go abroad you know I'd feel I mean there would be such a complex that you see
#
white people with fine accents all around you and you kind of feel a little in front dig you're very
#
careful of everything you're saying and the way you're saying it and all of that and I want to
#
ask you about those standard growing up anxieties which everyone goes through that I guess in a
#
sense you know there are two processes that are simultaneously happening at this age and one of
#
them is that there's the anxiety of trying to fit in with wherever you are and dealing with all the
#
baggage of you've come from a different place and all that and at the same time I guess there is that
#
process of just finding yourself you know learning to be comfortable in your own skin which for some
#
takes a whole lifetime and for you even for me it's still a work in progress in my late 40s
#
so you know what were those like for you yeah I yeah I don't remember feeling those anxieties
#
I don't really know perhaps it was the kind of confidence that I had acquired growing up in
#
Mumbai and already knowing that I didn't quite fit but enjoying the non-fitting part and
#
finding that there were things that I gained out of not fitting so that was already my
#
Mumbai experience for instance I grew up listening to and enjoying raga music because my father would
#
take me to concerts and I had grown to love it in my school in Mumbai already I couldn't share this
#
with any of my friends they were all into Hindi film music which also I enjoyed so I could share
#
that but this part I couldn't share with them as you said yesterday a lot of people weren't
#
reading so that part of my life I couldn't share with even the closest friends so I was already
#
in a sense a misfit and I had grown used to it also I must mention that both I and my sister
#
were dark-skinned and that gives you a lot of grief in our country but with my parents
#
and I don't know I think I've quoted it somewhere but my father said Tanvi Shama
#
you know that famous verse from Meghudut he would quote that and and say well you know that was our
#
idea of beauty of a dusky skin and that's what you have and he said you know you're going to have
#
men line up at the door asking for your hand not that that thought ever entered our minds at that
#
age but so we were given that sort of confidence and in London because one had heard about the
#
Kalabha so much from everybody who had been there I was prepared for it and I the experience came
#
when we were hunting for a flat because I would call up see and add find that it seemed to be
#
right for us call up and we'd be invited to see the flat and the minute they saw our brown faces
#
they'd say oh sorry dear it's just gone and not being a fool I knew what that was so then this
#
flat that we went finally rented in shepherd's bush and I announced myself first I said we are
#
interested in the flat that you've advertised but we are Indians and the voice at the other end said
#
and said so what dear just come over and it was so lovely to hear that voice and she wasn't British
#
she was South African but white South African and we came to this house where our upstairs
#
neighbours were from New Zealand and there was another neighbour from the Caribbean's so we
#
realised that there are those people also where colour doesn't matter and then going to not to
#
a state school but to a public girls school where everyone is well brought up and and have thought
#
about race and stuff like that so I was at school never ever made to feel that I was a wrong colour
#
and as I have said I visited my friends in their homes and I was always welcomed and
#
so yeah colour bar was there but I was in a place where it didn't seem to matter
#
me. In your book you've used this beautiful phrase vertical London where you speak about
#
going up and down vertical London in terms of the class barrier and you know you're at a reasonably
#
posh school with reasonably well educated people but where you're staying is eventually a little
#
infradic perhaps you also speak of Mrs Dickinson's surprise when she sort of you know sees those
#
situations and that got me to thinking about how you know through our lives any society a lot of
#
the world around us is sort of unseen to us we don't even realise that those layers are there
#
you know and at one level I guess a lot of people in London don't really know all of London don't
#
really know maybe another layer and I'm talking over the time that you were there and you can see
#
both so you can kind of straddle it and equally I guess in your own life back home or wherever
#
I think part of my process of growing up and coming to adulthood was seeing layers peel away
#
it's almost as if you know emerge into adulthood one is blind and then gradually layers peel away
#
and you begin to see what class can do or what gender can do and all of those things so tell me
#
a little bit about that not just in the context of perhaps your London experience but in your
#
own life like while it seems so far in your narrative that you've got great parents you're
#
really sorted you're sure of yourself but and this tremendous clarity of thought that emerges
#
throughout your narrative but you know what were the kind of layers that peeled away from your
#
eyes as you were growing up and coming of age? Okay you spoke of gender and things like that but
#
I would say coming to grips with reality let me put it that way and the first reality that I was
#
forced to come to grips with was of caste and this happened on the street where all of us would come
#
down to play wonderful street games and they've been lost now but that's okay they have video games
#
to supplant those but it was a time when Shivaji Park the neighborhood where I live was becoming
#
the stronghold of the middle and lower middle class and these were people who were getting
#
urbanized and they still had their roots in villages and placed small towns perhaps
#
and there was a strong caste instinct and the funny thing is that whereas elsewhere later
#
I found that people could mention caste in your face here I think everyone was aware that it was
#
a mixed neighborhood we had not only caste different castes living there we had people from
#
different Indian regions we had Punjabis we had Malabaris as they were called from South Kerala
#
we had Gujaratis of course and Tamil people all in one gully so to say and we all came down to
#
play together but the the first time caste was sort of came out was when either I or my sister
#
did something which didn't get the approval of two other girls in the group and one of those girls said
#
you know in Marathi bhaturdi ti bhaturdi bhaturdi is a very rude way of referring to Brahmins
#
and a Brahmin will always be a Brahmin is what she was saying and then when we went up I knew
#
it was something rude but I didn't know exactly what it was so I asked my mother and she said
#
my mother and she was rather sorry that she had to explain this to me and so she told me what it
#
meant and I had got the tone right it was rude so then I kind of probed her further and asked her
#
what all this caste is and later at school of course we learnt about the four the varna system
#
but she and that was the time when she said caste is important in Hindu society and that is why
#
your grandfather was ostracized that is why the Dhanu people the Brahmins did not socialize with
#
us as much as they would with each other so that that was a kind of punch in the stomach and
#
stomach and I had to deal with living with this enforced superiority I was playing with everyone
#
from all classes and castes and I really didn't want to feel superior and so I think all of us
#
have had to deal with our caste whatever it might be if if you don't believe in it if you believe
#
in it that's fine because then you're with everyone else so this was an eye-opener to me
#
and we spoke about how my father you read out in fact how he told me education is what he would
#
give us and marriage we had to look after for ourselves find your mate he had said and I had
#
a very close friend who had fallen in love now of course it was 15 16 year old love and possibly
#
wouldn't have lasted but her parents were horrified when they heard about it and of course
#
the local gossip was quick to pass on this bit of news to them and then they got going quickly
#
looking for bridegroom for her etc and meanwhile keeping a watch on her movements and I was away
#
in England when she got married and this is what I heard from my mother from her letters
#
that this had been happening to my friend and I thought how strange it was because we had not
#
only grown up together we had gone to the same school and it was a co-ed school an English medium
#
school plus we had played badminton together and that's where she had met this young man
#
so all these things were like modern life she wore shorts pleated shorts but shorts all the same
#
and then what was this I couldn't understand and by then I was sure that I did not want to ask my
#
friend why she was doing this by then I had understood reality enough to know that what my
#
parents thought was not what other parents thought and ultimately my dear friend's life
#
was in that sense going to be different from mine so that was one more eye opener to me but about
#
but about myself we spoke of atheism that became strong while I was at university through attempts
#
to convert me and bring it into the fold so to say so when you are opposed I think your ideas
#
crystallize and become firm and you know why so that was an important part and then of course
#
because I got to know this Norwegian young man lovely person and with whom I fell in love
#
and we had a lovely relationship for three years we traveled together quite a bit he in fact took
#
me on my first trip to Edinburgh where he knew a few people so I got to know Scottish life not
#
just and how different it was from British life so that opened up another door and how they looked
#
upon my dark skin because I think I've said this in my memoir that we were there for Christmas Eve
#
and I was taken the family we were with went first footing and this was to bring luck to the
#
to the people we were visiting and they were thrilled that I was not only dark because it has
#
to be a dark person by which they mean dark hair but I was dark-skinned as well so that meant double
#
luck for the people we were visiting and once again you know it struck me that I was so completely
#
accepted and although my boyfriend and I as a couple he white and I black it didn't seem to
#
matter to anybody so that was the other part of life that was repeated to me on the opposite side
#
of the color bar that I had experienced and I realized that the university is an open space
#
whether it's gender or color the British university and even the school that I went to
#
had a kind of well-considered process by which they got rid of what was naturally planted
#
in their minds it has to be a process for overcoming discriminations of all kinds I mean
#
uh people who discriminate against Dalits it is in their mind it's been planted there
#
there through generations and it's it it has to be a conscious choice uh I don't think this is right
#
and therefore how do I get myself to believe not just mentally but at every level that this isn't
#
right and I think uh all my uh uh batch mates whether it's school or college had gone through
#
that process must have done because they came many of them came from uh families which weren't
#
upper-classed working-class families also so and that was a real eye-opener again and something
#
which forced me to uh into a comparison with my home country that at least there is this set of
#
at least there's this set of people who have thought their way through to equality of gender
#
and race and I didn't really see it happening so much at home and of course it has been
#
worse in the last few years you know you you mentioned uh the friend of yours who very early
#
on I was have you know fell in love with the badminton club and it changed and there's this
#
lovely passage in your book about this lady called queen ji and there is a part and I want to read
#
it out because your book is so enjoyable and I want to read this out where you write as secretary
#
of the vanita samaj badminton club which also allowed membership to men she had promoted several
#
court romances with eager zeal marathi fiction of those times was full of young men and women
#
falling in love on badminton and tennis courts and here she was living that life in full albeit by
#
proxy watching glances being exchanged hands brushing accidentally unnecessarily slow walks
#
home knowing how vigorously the girls family would families would oppose such goings on
#
she opened her house to the woes in the wood if the badminton club secretary was inviting
#
players over for tea which family would object two such romances were flowering nicely under
#
queen ji's patronage when a rival gossip spoiled the fun she reported queen ji's activities to the
#
mothers of the two girls the girls memberships of the badminton club was summer summer release
#
my pronunciations are terrible summarily terminated within a year both were married off to suitable
#
boys that is young men who had settled in america and lucrative jobs the local boys whom the girls
#
had unhappily dumped spend their lives in shivaji park married to suitable girls that is girls who
#
had never stepped on a badminton court but who cooked and cleaned for them and gave them two
#
children a piece thus all four couples lived happily ever after stop quote and you know one
#
of the interesting parts of the book for me which sort of fascinated me and you know i'm going to
#
double click on is your friendship with auto right in the sense that when i was in college in the
#
80s and early 90s our conception of romance was such that i assumed that if i have a girlfriend
#
you know i will marry her and all the rest of that that is just the conception that you were
#
kind of brought up with and it was a sort of popular culture enforced that and even if bollywood
#
did show creepy men doing a lot of stalking eventually they would get married and have
#
honorable lives and all of that so in the 50s i find it so bold that one you are kind of
#
independently thinking of you know independently you know getting into a relationship with a white
#
man and so on and so forth and also you know i mentioned your clarity of thought earlier
#
and the part where i was really sort of struck by it is when you you know write about the end of
#
the relationship and again i'll quote your words quote auto's love for me was total mine for him
#
when it came to the crunch was wanting when we said our last goodbyes in july 1962 after my
#
graduation he proposed i said it would not work i wanted to live and work in my country he offered
#
to divide his time between norway and india he even made two trips to bombay to see how it could
#
how he could work it out it could not be and i was not willing to compromise in the end our long and
#
lovely relationship ended in mutual pain i knew i had hurt him badly but i also knew i would have
#
hurt him worse had i married him stop quote and this kind of clarity is mind-blowing to me because
#
i don't just look at myself and see this completely missing when i was young but
#
i see this missing in all young people in general you know it takes a so tell me a little bit about
#
how you kind of came to this clarity like what were your conceptions of love and marriage and men and
#
all of those things because i imagine that in those times any girl who is getting into a
#
relationship with a man there are so many thoughts that can come in the way of is it a moral thing to
#
do am i a bad girl you know and now that i'm with him you know i should settle down you start
#
fantasizing and daydreaming about a life together and all of that but you are so incredibly clear
#
on that at least but you know that's what it seems from your memoir so tell me a bit about that
#
see i i think that the reality from which all these feelings would come off nervousness and
#
having to do this and having not to do something else were really not part of my thinking i
#
i was a completely liberated person secondly my reading it comes back to that that i had read
#
enough to understand men to understand women to know what each wanted and the nuances of their
#
wanting the nuances of various kinds of relationships it was never a woman in general
#
and a man in general if you got to know somebody you also got to know the the core of their
#
aspirations and with Otto i hadn't really found that core of his aspirations he was training to
#
be a dentist he was a wonderful dentist but in all our meeting with friends being at parties
#
doing things together i hadn't really found exactly who he was he was a wonderful person
#
a wonderful company he didn't have fusty ideas about what women should or should not do
#
when i visited his place and i spent about a fortnight there which was a great time i had
#
he took me to his various aunts and uncles and i was welcomed there and i realized that unlike
#
here where you can't introduce a non-brahmin to your brahmin family leave alone another race
#
all together i realized that here was certainly freedom enough for me to have pursued a number
#
a number of my interests but i was also rooted in marathi culture i had my book reading was
#
half marathi and half english and as much as i felt at home in england totally at home
#
uh i i knew that my real home was back here so perhaps if uh his working out
#
trying to find a place in mumbai had worked out then i i might have said well six months when you
#
come here we'll be together rest of the time you do your thing i'll do my thing my father meanwhile
#
after i had come back had said to me why do you want to marry at all
#
he said we are going to move to taregao where he was building his retirement home
#
and uh he come and stay with us pune university is a wonderful place teach there read uh write
#
uh so uh that was an alternative life that was being offered to me so i knew that anything that
#
i had to do had to be done here um it was also this this feeling of nationalism i hate to use
#
this word today because it has been abused is patriotism a better word it's worse i think
#
i don't know i i'd rather say it's love of country that uh and that's a good escape from both words
#
but love for country in the sense because because of my father and my mother i had grown up being
#
aware that this nation had to be built that we were starting off on our own from scratch
#
and uh whatever we did uh would add to to the growth of the nation this was i think a very very
#
strong feeling and it's amusing that gireesh karnad says something like that in his memoir
#
and he always uh told us this anecdote as well that when he and mohan rakesh were in kolkata for
#
a theater festival and some outdated kind of musical play was being presented and both of
#
them were laughing and then mohan rakesh turned to gireesh and said do you know why we are laughing
#
do you recognize this laughter and said we are laughing because we think we are the future of
#
indian theater we are going to make indian theater now no artist after that has felt that kind of
#
claim on the future of the country but we grew up feeling that we had a contribution to me
#
and that contribution was important it was necessary and it would add value so uh it
#
it's a generational thing because gireesh and mohan were also talking in the 60s that's when
#
i came back home so as i said when i say my love was wanting yes because there was rival love
#
uh which was holding me back and decently i met an old colleague of mine from the times who has
#
married a norwegian and she uh she had to be in conversation with me during the delhi lit fest
#
delhi lit fest precisely about this memoir and she said to me before why did you give him up i
#
married mine but then i said you did it 30 years after i gave him up so we live in different
#
countries what i'm struck by about this is the clarity with which you were looking at auto
#
was perhaps more than the clarity with which he would have looked at himself and i sometimes
#
think that you know among the layers that i mentioned earlier one layer that men which is
#
unseen for men and which eventually perhaps some of them learn is that extra layer of awareness
#
which women carry around with them for example you know i can go out on the street for a walk
#
at midnight or i can enter a lift without having to look around and see who the others are and
#
women always have that extra layer of awareness and there is it seems to me in man-woman relationships
#
this layer of awareness and interpersonal relationships as well for example you know
#
to in different parts of your writings your autobiography and other writings you know there
#
are different aspects of men which are coming out which might perhaps be invisible to them for
#
example one there are the uncontrollable appetites of men like you speak about your domestic servant
#
sathe and the things he got up to or the sadhu who flashed you and so on and so forth and these are
#
appetites which tragically men can often be prisoners to and can be in denial of and refuse
#
to face up to but a woman from the outside can be aware of them and can take that into consideration
#
while doing whatever she does second there is also male ego you know there's a moving passage
#
in your book about how at 13 you had a growth spurt and you were taller than most of the boys
#
and and to compensate for being taller for them you took to stooping and your father would tell
#
you mind your hunch you know and this is another kind of accommodation which you see women making
#
to the male ego i mean that famous scene of sutra jitra is aran adin ratri where they have
#
you know playing the memory game and you know she knows how he will feel if yes yes you know and
#
that's a classic example of that and part of you know another aspect of this male ego is perhaps
#
the certainties that men carry like another delightful sort of anecdote in your book is about
#
your friend dilep adarkar who has a certainty that all allergies are a fiction of the mind they're
#
psychosomatic and you insist you're allergic to eggs and then at one point he takes you out and
#
orders a chocolate mousse and you say hey that looks eggy and he goes to the chef and the chef
#
says it does have egg but he lies to you because he feels the psychosomatic and you straight away
#
have an allergic reaction and in all of these cases it's the men themselves are not aware of
#
this they cannot be reflective enough to see the ego or the false certainty or the delusions
#
or the uncontrollable appetites but women to navigate their way in the world have to be aware
#
of all these aspects of men and factor that in it almost seems as if you are kind of taking a step
#
back and men are still stuck there but you've taken the step back to be to have to see all of
#
this and so on and so forth so it was I have recognized a number of problems as emerging from
#
the male ego and for instance in my first marriage there was a problem about education
#
because my husband had joined the navy and that wasn't college it wasn't sort of seen
#
as college and I had been to university so there was always you know some remark or the other
#
that he would make which made me feel that he felt he didn't want to feel inferior and he was
#
therefore getting his back on me by saying something snide and there was no way that I could
#
have it out face to face I never ever said to him I think this is what you are doing and it would
#
have been perfect if I had been able to say look I do not believe the university is the only source
#
of education he was a voracious reader and so on that I thought was the biggest education anyone
#
can have to be reading and then I did something which I laugh at when I look back at it I was
#
I was doing my MA because I wanted to continue teaching and I needed an MA to be able to do that
#
so I said to my class friends I had a group of about five friends I said you know come over
#
because this thing that we are discussing right now talk to Viju about it he has lots to say
#
so five MA students landed up at our place and you know there was a discussion and in my naivety
#
I thought that I had sorted out the problem but it doesn't get sorted out that way because
#
these complexes and these ego things go very very deep and I had exactly the same
#
problem in my second marriage where my husband came from a Marathi medium school and as a matter
#
of fact he is a citizen of the world you don't remain where you are he has grown way ahead of
#
where he was but he still carried that little thing in him of Marathi and English and I often
#
say to him you know I speak a lot more Marathi than you do you speak English all the time
#
all the time very often with Marathi people have you noticed so I said let's forget these language
#
differences both of us read and write in both languages so let's let it lie but he couldn't do
#
that so much taunting went on and ultimately it stopped it had to stop after I wrote Rita
#
Vellengar and it was in Marathi and it was read by Marathi readers and appreciated and after this
#
he could hardly think of me as an anglophile and whatever else he thought but it was it was ego
#
we're constantly in competition I didn't see any competition I was happy to grow and I grew in
#
various ways both with my first husband and my second husband but they wanted to be themselves
#
just that so sad. Before I ask my next question I want to you know as a brief comic break you know
#
read out a couple of passages different passages from your book about uncontrollable urges and
#
the first is about sneezing where you write quote I would sneeze as soon as my eyes open to a new
#
day and I would not go apchi which sounds inhibited I would go hashu like a clap of thunder
#
and besides a puckered face arrested breathing disappearing eyes and bent back I would also
#
raise my left knee to aid the firing of the shot and I would not stop at one sneeze I would do
#
half a dozen or more in quick succession all as hearty as a first stop quote and later you write
#
about your father where you say quote father was no competition for Beckett's protagonist but when
#
gas did escape from his fundament he found it as funny as we did he even had a name for each sound
#
his repertoire covered the duck quack the bullet shot and the thunder clap while we split our sides
#
laughing at these involuntary performances mother who thought the whole thing was thoroughly bad
#
form found in the explosions another instance of father's uncontrolled impulses she since she
#
could not rein them in she contented herself with hitting her forehead with her palm and
#
demonstrating mildly really Gopal Rao stop quote and on a more serious note I'm still laughing
#
because those conversations and what he made me read you referred to Beckett and that whole
#
I hardly fart at all he says at the end this was so delightful because it put us in touch with
#
our natural bodily functions and it's okay this happens I'd say that was part of his legacy to
#
to me and and you know these are of course in a humorous note the sneeze and the fart
#
but you know throughout our book and perhaps throughout any book throughout any memoir
#
one gets reminded of certain things about oneself which one cannot help you know you spoke of your
#
first husband we do and his lassitude is uh you know one core characteristic which you've
#
described of how what drew you to him was he was always reading but later it almost becomes a kind
#
of a bug and not a feature because he's always horizontal and reading a book as you say and not
#
a man of action at all you have to kind of do all the work and you know equally with your second
#
husband our own cook girl you know you speak about his proclivity and again something that
#
he perhaps couldn't help of of having relationships you know which you knew about before you married
#
him but you kind of did it anyway and we see two men here who are kind of in a sense prisoners of
#
character that this is what they are it's not something about themselves which they can help
#
but it is just what they are and and equally i wonder if for women there are also these aspects
#
of character or wantings which they really can't do anything about like i sometimes wonder if for
#
some people you know wanting to have a baby is is such a big deal motherhood is such a big deal it
#
is such a strong impulse that women take one path instead of another path and their whole life is
#
completely divergent and different because they chose this path but had they never had that longing
#
to be a mother for example they could have had a different life perhaps fulfilled in a different
#
way and all of that so all these sort of counterfactuals exist and in your own case it kind of
#
seems to me that you know that at one level you recognize with these men that perhaps they're not
#
quite right for you you know certainly with you know arun you point out how when you are at a
#
beach i think and he tells you that listen i've been like this but i'll change now and you
#
immediately agree even though at that very moment one part of you is saying what are you saying
#
you're an educated woman yes you know yes so do you you know so how did you manage those sort of
#
contradictions when perhaps there is a urge that i really like this man you mentioned how charming
#
viju was what a wonderful person so on the one hand there is that attraction there is a desire
#
to have that kind of life and perhaps that kind of domesticity but on the other hand there is who you
#
are and who you've grown up to be where on the one hand you're an independent person engrossed in
#
marathi theater but on the other hand you become an army wife and you're going to be shaka patnam
#
and living there and you're going across the country and all of that so how do you feel how
#
did you navigate these sort of conflicting impulses within yourself see that actually was a problem
#
wasn't it that you you don't know beforehand what the life is going to be with this person whom you
#
love you're fond of you you're spending time with them but living together always is something else
#
and you don't know how it's going to affect you now point is that you go into marriage with a very
#
conventional idea of marriage that this is forever my mother had said
#
and so we didn't per se leave divorce out of our thinking it wasn't there in the forefront
#
but if we felt or if i felt that i was frustrated that i wasn't able to put my skills my knowledge
#
to use and that was important that i had to be a useful human being this was basic with me
#
and while i was having children and i love children i wanted to be you didn't i did so it was for me
#
that i had children and it was wonderful bringing them up spending time with them but beyond a
#
certain point they also had their own activities their own friends and i was free to be myself
#
also that other me and while i was translating and writing and all that went on i was very keen
#
on teaching for me my first experience at elphinstone college was decisive this is what
#
i want to do i was very clear about that and so i went around first in vishakapatnam later when
#
we were transferred to hyderabad to the university of foreign languages and talked to people and
#
ultimately one dean told me we are not even looking at your qualifications you don't belong
#
to andhra and there was trouble enough in andhra at the time and we will not even consider your
#
application so now i couldn't use my skills i couldn't take part in what i had considered was
#
my vocation and that was a shock i had thought that wherever i went in this very pathetic life
#
of a neighbour wife i would always be able to get even a temporary job in some college university
#
if that wasn't happening then something very important in me and for me was being taken away
#
and when that happened then of course there was the scales and a weighing up of things
#
this is important that is important and in my nine years of marriage i hadn't felt at all
#
that my being with viju was in any way suppose it wasn't helping me was it helping him
#
was i helping him to build up a career and viju wasn't interested in a career at all he had told
#
me before we married that i'm going to be stuck in this left hand and command rank how do you feel
#
about it i was equally i couldn't care less about ranks etc so then what was i doing
#
and he didn't want children i wanted children so that was part of the my side of the balance
#
the balance and and then i thought no this this can't go on but i didn't really take that decision
#
immediately i had begun to feel that way but i had to find a way where the children would
#
you know would not get neglected and this friend of mine that i've been talking about who
#
was finally married off to some other chap very fine person by the way anyway so her aunt
#
and uncle ran a school in uti and her aunt was very fond of me and she had kept urging me
#
to go and teach them and i thought that could be a wonderful way out i didn't necessarily want to
#
divorce viju but if i was separating and taking the children with me then that would be a place
#
where i could teach and they could study but even while i was considering that and i think i had
#
written a letter to the aunt meanwhile my mother who had spent time with us and seen my life and
#
i think yesterday you read out that little bit about her saying this is not why we sent you to
#
england and she then wrote to me an enclosed little notice which advertised for a lecturer's
#
post at hr college mumbai and she said just come and i came and i got that job and from there of
#
course there was i had to finally give up teaching with much regret but the system had changed and i
#
didn't have a place in that system and so on and so forth but i had still only separated
#
i wasn't going to divorce viju at all that wasn't my aim but but then arun came into my life and
#
you asked about how i could knowing full well what he was like why did i marry him and perhaps you
#
know i've been asked this question so often and there were two things one was i was not at bristol
#
university where i could go around freely with auto and then decide no i can't marry you
#
in shivaji park living with my mother who went to a place called vanita samaj every friday
#
where women had many things to say about everything that was happening and i was being seen around
#
with arun i didn't feel the freedom i had earlier felt to say no i know this isn't going to work and
#
no let's just keep it where it is i didn't have that i didn't feel free i wasn't strong enough
#
strong enough to do that so in a way circumstances did push me into this marriage because i had gone
#
so far into a relationship the other thing and that perhaps wasn't a thing that i was conscious
#
of at the time but i think it entered as a compensation for having made a wrong choice
#
and that compensation was huge because i got into filmmaking i understood what cinema was about
#
because arun was passionate about cinema and of course he is such a fine mind his vision his
#
sensitivity to sound to everything that actually makes up a film and i got all of that i got to
#
sit in on the edits of films i got into a serious script writing i had done two or three scripts
#
before for documentaries but this was something else it was another kind of documentary and that
#
and that opened another door to me so when people ask me now how do you not regret that choice
#
and i say because i got a lot out of it and i know it was quite awful for the children
#
but now i think i compensated for that to some extent at least and took the pain of it away as
#
much as i could but yes that is the reason why i don't regret the first marriage because i got
#
that i got to know what the navy was about i saw the gender discrimination where men and women
#
when they were out together never spoke to each other if the men spoke to the women they suddenly
#
changed their tone of voice and said so i believe the tomatoes are now very cheap in the market my
#
wife has been making ketchup and i would have to say i'm sorry i'm not into ketchup making
#
wow i'd rather be talking about what you people are talking about but it's a very
#
gendered society you know you if you go to the naval hospital for instance
#
uh you can't say you're Shanta Gokhale you are wife of lieutenant commander Vijay Kumar Shahani
#
it's like that so it i was quite amused by it i thought okay the whole world is like this and so are
#
you but so again i learnt a lot about the navy about the forces in general the kind of lives
#
they lead i made a lot of excellent friends i had a huge argument with a batch mate of
#
videos who said why you want to do MA and i thought it was such a radical question to ask me
#
and being puzzled i asked him a couple of counter questions and i realized where he was coming from
#
and i didn't feel that i could explain anything at all to him i was looking at Viju
#
hoping he would step in and say something to divert the conversation he was sitting cool
#
and not really even engaged with what was going on so then finally i said look all of us have to do
#
something and i can't just sit around doing nothing that's why i'm doing it and i removed
#
the sting from this kind of female aspiration to which i had no right at all i removed the string
#
by saying you know also what kind of a house wife i am so i have to do something and i'm doing MA
#
and that seemed to satisfy his male ego and we became good friends afterwards also
#
you know one of the things i liked about your book again of the many things is the sort of
#
compassion you have for all the people who've passed through your lives like at one point
#
you write about Viju quote years later i would look back and feel deep compassion for him in a
#
situation he had never bargained for when marrying me all he had ever wanted in life was to be allowed
#
to do his job which he did exceptionally well drink play cards and read that was not asking
#
for much but if it was you but it was if you were married or married to me stop quote and i'm you
#
know my mind is taken back to your father's exhortation to you that you need not marry
#
it's okay and more and more when i look at modern life perhaps it is not true all these centuries
#
and marriage of course has evolved and endured for a reason but today it seems that many people
#
could legitimately look at marriage as an institution that has run its course i mean if
#
you look at you know what a man may if you draw say a wind diagram or what a man may want and what
#
a woman may want you know those two circles will perhaps intersect only very slightly and within
#
those intersections some of the things like companionship can actually be achieved outside
#
of marriage you can say that maybe if you're having children in the society that we are in
#
maybe it is better to be married but even that is debatable but certainly you know it seems
#
that more and more it feels like an outdated institution and there is you know that if people
#
are actually thinking rationally about it perhaps your father was on to something yeah so you know
#
what what did you feel about it yeah yeah he was on to something but it wasn't a choice he gave
#
himself had he he had married and he had made a wonderful marriage so his advice to me was partly
#
at least keeping me to himself not not seeing me go and he did have a very specific he had
#
i didn't he had a very specific idea of the kind of man he would have welcomed as a son-in-law i
#
remember one music concert we went to and there was this young man whom he had met once or twice
#
he was at the tata institute of fundamental research so he was basically caller researching
#
and he whispered to me take a look at that man in so-and-so blue shirt or whatever it was and i
#
looked and i saw a very pleasant person i still remember that man curly hair and carried himself
#
well and he was at a music concert so he was cultured so yeah fine but i didn't know him
#
and his world and mine were far apart and i cringed at the idea of being brought together
#
artificially with a view to marriage i just couldn't bear that idea so i said to dad i said
#
yeah he looks lovely i'm sure he'll make a good husband and as it happened within the year he
#
married a neighbor of ours in shivajipat and someone that i knew so i told dad that one's gone
#
but he had this great joke running of these next-door neighbors of ours who earned who
#
owned a shop which sold stainless steel utensils and he'd say why don't you think of him you know
#
you'll have your house made ready made for you what more do you want and he seems to want to
#
attract your attention otherwise why when he comes down he has said goodbye to his family
#
why does he honk and i said i don't know maybe his family comes out to the veranda to wave to him
#
i certainly don't go so he he knows it's a failed signal if it's men for me so we had this back and
#
forth about men and marriage but uh yeah i don't regret what i did it's okay in general if you were 20
#
today do you think you'd look at the concept of marriage differently of course i do i i definitely
#
do because there are i think there are different ways of living together and i have a lot of
#
differences and i have found that men and women who don't necessarily want to part
#
negotiate their differences and manage to live separate lives and just have a little bit of each
#
common life that's one way to do it but and that means a as you said if there are children then
#
being together becomes that much more important but secondly there's also with a lot of people
#
even today a sense that marriage is sacred and as far as possible we should try and hold it together
#
so once you've stepped into it and then all these things kick in to step into it in the first place
#
i think a lot of young people maybe not today i don't know but they see it perhaps as the only
#
way in which they can be sexually satisfied because even today the larger part of our society
#
our society doesn't approve of intermingling and having relationships outside marriage so perhaps
#
that's a point that factor that pushes people together and there is i've called one of my
#
chapters is called the mating game there is something very instinctive about women and men
#
wanting to get together and if marriage is the only way then let's do it all the forces are
#
pushing us towards it all families become hilariously happy to see two people coming
#
together all the shosha and the tamasha that happens so fine we'll do it so i think in india
#
marriage is very strong very strong and i think there are a lot of commercial forces that work
#
there the goldsmiths are over the moon when marriage season comes around we hear about
#
how much they made last year as compared to this year and the pandemic was terrible gloom for them
#
because no one was getting married so i think it it works for a lot of people i loved your phrase
#
you the phrase you just use hilariously happy and in my nihilistic way i think that could apply to
#
all kinds of happiness and i also think the question you asked your dad about your stainless steel
#
neighbor could actually be a great title of a book about men why does he honk yes yes yes yes i
#
remember that thank you so uh yeah maybe you'll write that book so you know earlier when you
#
mentioned when you were at last it was such a change that you had to think for yourself you
#
couldn't just you know knowledge was not just something you received but that you had to coax
#
out by asking questions and thinking independently and it brought in mind something that the wonderful
#
jerry pinto wrote about you in the introduction to the engaged observer where he wrote quote
#
with goclay you will get an honest and clear-eyed hearing she will listen to you ask questions and
#
then tell you what she thinks this is a rare thing the ability to you the ability to offer
#
one's interlocutor the gift of engaged attention it is probably what makes her such a fine journalist
#
she does not lose her balance easily but you get the feeling that it is not an act it is the effort
#
of a civilized mind seeking to find a civilized way to disagree stop quote and and just yesterday
#
i was kind of after you left i was fantasizing about what if you had done a podcast with all
#
the great men that you have uh you know interacted with through your life it would have been so
#
wonderful because you would have been so great at that but the question that i'm arriving at is
#
that there what i think jerry is hinting at is a certain kind of intentionality where you sit down
#
and you try to make an effort to find out what the other person is thinking and to engage to
#
listen to understand and not just to respond you know and i want to ask you about the other aspects
#
of the other intentional efforts that have gone into shaping who you are like yesterday we talked
#
about the shaping of you but we did it in the context of you know things outside your control
#
where you're born circumstances parents peers but you've also clearly done self-reflection and there
#
are aspects of yours which you have consciously shaped saying that i want to be like this this is
#
a habit i want to inculcate this is a mannerism that i want to adopt and so on and so forth so
#
can you tell me about through your life which parts of yourself have you worked on in that
#
manner with that intentionality to shape yourself it's it's i'm feeling a little embarrassed to
#
admit that i haven't i really haven't i'll tell you what one thing that comes immediately to mind
#
is tidiness i am neurotically tidy now but i was not as a young girl i was untidy and my sister
#
was so neat so tidy so organized and i remember watching her and how she how she laid out the
#
things in her compass box and how she wrote her name on her notebooks and and how she never had
#
never had ink stains on her fingers and that i know for sure was something that i had to cultivate
#
and i did cultivate it and i found that it didn't require too much effort because i i realized that
#
my mind was organized it was only my habits that had to fall in with my mind so i began
#
to organize things so well that yeah it's i'm glad you said intentionality because
#
when something is intended and worked upon and it happens that's one thing i'm proud of
#
i i i can't say i'm proud of i write yes because it comes to me this i do because it comes to me
#
but this didn't come to me naturally and i worked at it hard and now when someone i remember a few
#
months ago some visitor came and she wanted something and i opened a drawer and she was
#
standing there and she looked at the drawer and said that's where i want to get
#
i said it can be done i've done it you do it wow instantly you should have taken out a big
#
cleaver and chopped her to bits and put her in the drawer that's where you get but so so you know
#
tim hofford wrote this great book where he kind of redeemed messiness and said that messiness is
#
you know we shouldn't always frown upon it it's a characteristic of creative people perhaps even
#
essential and as you can see from my desk it's a bit messy i spent time clearing it up to make it
#
at least this presentable for your visit but something you said is very interesting you said
#
that your mind in terms of being organized was already there and your habits caught up do you
#
think it can also work the other way in the sense that if you make it a point to inculcate certain
#
habits that those habits can then change the way that you think in the structure of your thinking
#
i'm certain about it because you are creating a different kind of space and that that has to
#
affect you i mean you for instance walk into a room which has purple walls i mean imaginary but
#
there are homes with purple walls and i i think it really turns my mind around i i don't think
#
i would be able to sit in that room and write even two sentences so if i'm saying this it means
#
that your environment affects whatever you're thinking or doing so if you create an orderly
#
environment i'm i'm sure i mean i expect it should affect how you think and maybe bring order into
#
your mind if you want order in your mind and there are two ways of working writing the way
#
i write there are people who don't write that way who muddle their way through and and then find
#
something and then build something out of it but because i love order i have to order my mind
#
before i get down to writing and not to know what i'm going to write but to be clear about
#
the theme the focus and i have all the notes that i have made so i know more or less the direction
#
in which that will flow but i'm sure that i don't want to fix the end the end has to come through
#
what i have written in the beginning and the middle that should lead me naturally to the end
#
lead me naturally to the end to that extent i'm open but otherwise yeah you're you're invoking
#
a room with purple walls and the need to have your own space brings to mind virginia wolf's great
#
phrase a room of one's own which you also invoke so often and we'll talk about that and much more
#
after a quick tea break as well long before i was a podcaster i was a writer in fact chances are
#
that many of you first heard of me because of my blog india uncut which was active between 2003
#
and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time i love the freedom the form gave me and i feel i
#
was shaped by it in many ways i exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about
#
many different things because i wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended
#
for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now i'm doing it through a newsletter i
#
have started the india uncut newsletter at india uncut dot subtract dot 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 india uncut dot subtract dot com and
#
subscribe it is free once you sign up each new installment that i write will land up in your
#
email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the india uncut newsletter
#
at india uncut dot subtract dot com thank you welcome back to the scene in the unseen again
#
i'm chatting with shanta gogle about her life and her learnings and so on and so forth and you know
#
before the break we spoke about you know virginia wolf talking about a room of her own and all of
#
that but i want to talk about writing a little later and get back to the sort of the chronology
#
as it were chronology some shit that you know we spoke about your time in england and you've
#
kind of come back from england and you've mentioned a few times how much teaching meant to you so tell
#
me a little bit about that phase of your life and just elaborate a bit on what teaching does
#
because a little bit of teaching that i've done which is the online writing course that i teach
#
and all that i feel it's changed me in some ways because whenever you teach something you are
#
firstly you're forced to know your subject so much better and drill into it because if you're
#
teaching something you really have to know what you're talking about and secondly i just feel that
#
that in some ways it makes you a better person also because you have to be you can't be judgmental of
#
anyone you have to be understanding of where everyone is coming from and you know cater to
#
that as well so tell me a little bit about your teaching experiences and yeah it was actually a
#
revelation because as i've been saying all along i was incurably shy and suddenly facing a class
#
full of students wasn't something that i had expected to feel comfortable about but strangely
#
i you know there are things about yourself that you can't quite understand because you think this
#
is you but then you're doing something which doesn't fit in with what you think you are
#
and i've spent a lifetime saying i'm shy i'm shy i'm shy and but when this telephone call came
#
this was a friend of my father's who was teaching at elphinstone and i had just come back
#
and he called to say you know there's a temporary vacancy here in english department and you think
#
shanta would like to step in so my father said talk to her uh so he put me on phone and i don't
#
think i thought twice before i said yes so looking back i couldn't quite put that together with my
#
so-called shyness maybe what was important at the time was to find work to start earning
#
and i had i had a few friends in the advertising industry and i knew there were openings there
#
and i could have stepped in and started making a fair amount of money but that didn't fit
#
you know i couldn't think that i could lend my writing skill to selling
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face creams or toothpaste soaps whatever i had nothing to say about them so i had to
#
so i had rejected the one or two kind of not offers but soundings out that had been made
#
and with a degree in english what else could be done so perhaps somewhere at the bottom this
#
thought also played out the years work with a monthly salary so i'm going to say yes and
#
he was very happy that he'd found someone for the vacancy and my first class was what was known as
#
compulsory english which meant everyone in a certain year had to attend that class and so
#
it was one of the big classes and my father's friend knew what that meant so yeah i found that
#
that as soon as i stepped onto the desk and i had read what i had to teach beforehand
#
and i had things to say and i said them and i found that the students were fairly attentive
#
so when you get that kind of vibe from students you put that much extra into what you're saying
#
so i felt that a contact had been made and i felt that i was capable of making such a contact and
#
and that i was actually enjoying myself i was enjoying this process but there was something
#
mysterious happening at the same time that and this friend of my father's i'll call him
#
raja kaka he was raja dhaksha niranjan raja dhaksha's father yes yes and i didn't have i
#
fondly called him raja kaka and here was raja kaka walking down the corridor it was in the middle of
#
of two lectures so he wasn't going to attend a lecture but he was walking up and then miss
#
humay shroff who was head of the english department i found her walking down and back
#
and so that's how i i mean that registered with me and later raja kaka said oh uh you were fine
#
i said yes i was and uh he said yeah i was a little worried about so and so so that so and so
#
was some ruiya i forget what his first name was and he was a backbencher and supposedly disruptive
#
but he hadn't disrupted my lecture and this is what raja kaka and humay shroff were walking up
#
and down to check on because apparently if he was causing trouble they would have taken care of him
#
on my behalf that didn't happen but another time kumar shani told me this much later
#
he said we were thrilled that a young unattached woman had come to teach and we were very keen to
#
be there you know and so they decided to attend one of my classes where they didn't belong
#
and miss shroff relayed them where are you going and they said oh oh oh to this class
#
she said no go back to your class you don't belong here so he said all our plans fell through because
#
we were going to play an old trick on you they uh used to have specially made spectacles with
#
no lenses and when the teacher looked at them they would put their hand through the frame
#
and scratch their eyes and expected the teacher to be taken aback and this didn't happen so it
#
was very disappointing but i i realized then in my very first year that i was being taken care of
#
and perhaps that made life easy for me in that first year and then of course i fell into it and
#
and i was kind of disappointed to see that the senior lecturers were all using old notes they
#
would walk into the class with a fat book of notes which they had made over the ages and i
#
guess they added some fresh things for each class but i realized that is also what teaching can turn
#
into that you're teaching the same book year in and year out so what do you do how much new can
#
be said about any book however great it may be so it was a kind of tiny warning at the back of my
#
head that if you don't want to be doing this you have to find ways out for yourself but teaching
#
itself therefore became the goal of my life and after hr of course i had to give it up so in
#
in any profession as in teaching you know the danger is that you can get into a groove and you
#
can just stick all the boxes and do the same damn thing every day and you know if you're a teacher
#
just you know you have a syllabus you have the book you just teach from it you're saying the same
#
things year after year you just go through it and that's a danger and the other danger i think is
#
that comes with the human relationships that at first on your first day you know everyone's new
#
to you and you're kind of you know alert of the connections that you're making but after a while
#
you know the danger is that it can just be a see your faces and you don't really care and you go
#
through the motions and they go through the motions and that's what there is and you said you figured
#
out ways of avoiding these traps so can you elaborate a bit yeah see i had two years at
#
Elphinstone and after a gap of nine years i had about two or three years at hr so i hadn't put
#
myself through that kind of test at all Elphinstone was one kind of student hr college was another
#
kind of student but what i did find at hr was being involved with extracurricular activities
#
which prevented you from thinking of any set of students as a see your faces
#
because when you were working with them on the college magazine or on the college day programs
#
each one of them became an individual and each individual belonged to a group which wasn't
#
participating but was their friend's group so you got to know people better out of the classroom
#
than in and that carried into the classroom as well because i think meeting them outside in cultural
#
programs made them feel that they could be equally open with me in the classroom so then
#
questions came normally they didn't ask questions but when questions are asked then it takes you
#
away from the text proper and each time with each class the questions can be different
#
so i found that to encourage questioning was a good way to not fall into this trap of stagnating
#
and using the same notes throughout your life and i think those students even at hr people did
#
ask me you know what are you doing at a commerce college but teaching is teaching you are teaching
#
is really making connections and so the a strong human feeling exists between teacher and student
#
if the teacher is so inclined students are open to that kind of relationship and unlike my
#
experience at elphinstone with the compulsory english class the first compulsory class that
#
i took at hr was definitely a different kind of experience because the backbenchers decided
#
to move like cattle and i ignored it the first time around but i was teaching of all books
#
a passage to india and i was partly sympathetic to people who wanted to move because you know
#
it it's a difficult book to like and to engage with so ultimately i just closed my book and i said
#
look i'm here as a teacher i would like to share thoughts with you but if you aren't interested
#
then i would prefer you not to come to class and for today that entire corner from which i heard
#
cattle moving must leave class i will give you your attendance because that's what matters to you
#
that's why you're here in the first place so i'll mark all of you present then please leave
#
leave and there was much protest but not too loud and i think they were quite happy to leave their
#
attendance was taken so that was it and ultimately this class this compulsory class was reduced to
#
about 25 students from about a hundred and i would take the attendance at the beginning
#
and then wait for two minutes while the class emptied out and then i had wonderful lectures
#
with the remaining 25 because they were there because they were interested they had questions
#
to ask so we had a ball so you know i find that you know when we read books there are different
#
stages in how we read the books that we read initially we are just reading for enjoyment
#
then as we get into literature we might be reading a little deeper and you know finding new layers in
#
it when we begin to think of ourselves as writers maybe there's another layer when we notice aspects
#
of the craft and when we teach something you know that can also deepen the way we read something
#
because just in the act of intense examination that teaching something and discussing it with
#
students involves you kind of begin to look at books differently also so during this period
#
so during this period you know while you were teaching you know did your relationships with
#
these books and with the act of reading perhaps in the way that you read did all of that change
#
see unfortunately my second stint my first stint came immediately after i had finished
#
university and all my thoughts were very fresh in my mind and it was two years so there was
#
no question of repeatedly reading and rethinking and rediscovering then hr college i didn't have
#
to teach literature a lot of it was communication skills etc and this was one text which i had to
#
teach but it was to this huge class but even with that i went back to it every year because
#
it's a it has a mystery at its center and it was a mystery that bothered the students because
#
uh their question was and i think it is a question that the normal reader asks that you know the
#
one of the protagonists goes into this mysterious cave and something happens in that cave and she
#
comes back and accuses one of the other characters of having molested her but it is never proved
#
so the question what exactly happened in that cave is right there unanswered and the students
#
always said surely ma'am the writer has to know the answer otherwise why is he writing this novel
#
and the only answer i could give which was what i thought it was wasn't going to and never did
#
satisfy them which was that there are certain mysteries in life uh and ambiguities for which
#
there are no clear answers and it's for us to think about it and to and finally does it matter
#
does it matter suppose i say to you now that i happen to have read what this author says about
#
that mystery and Aziz did not molest this woman i say to you then what do you do with it what
#
what follows would follow in any case because as i've explained to you it has to do with the ruling
#
race and the subject race and to what extent the rulers are willing to believe their own against
#
people who are not their own and that is the crux so what difference would it make if i solved
#
that little puzzle for you and they said no ma'am but you know when you're reading you need to have
#
these answers fair enough but we left it at that so it's uh as i said i didn't teach literature so
#
there was no question of reading or reading for my teaching as such but i have always done it for
#
myself i have in fact during the pandemic i decided that since i have this kind of free time
#
which has come to me after several years let me start reading so uh i went back to the classics
#
i read middle march i read anna karenina i read far from the madding crowd i read tacarez vanity
#
fair i read re re re read alice in wonderland and uh i didn't read ulysses
#
because ulysses had been in any case a difficult book to read when i first read it and i would like
#
to i would like to because it it's a challenging book for a writer how how do you spin out a day
#
a day and still engage the reader's attention so i'll soon do that but i need a stretch of time
#
for that given the vast number of people who haven't managed to finish ulysses despite trying
#
to in which number i include myself i would you know quibble with whether he really engaged the
#
reader's attention as you put it and i you know just thinking aloud your students who were
#
perturbed at the ambiguities in a passage to india would have been equally perturbed by picnic at
#
hanging rock have you seen the film no no no yeah it's an early 1973 film by peter weir and
#
that contains similar ambiguities uh similar sort of metaphorical whatever uh so here's sort of a
#
question thinking aloud that you know you you speak about rereading these classics middle march far
#
from the madding crowd all of those how did you feel reading them because you know there's on the
#
one hand there are people like calvino who wrote an essay i think with the title why read the
#
classics who feel that we must engage with the classics and read them over and over again
#
but another way of looking at it is that you know the majority of literate people to ever have lived
#
are probably alive today and the the sample size in terms of just the amount of literary work that
#
is coming out is far greater today than it has ever been and therefore just applying a statistical
#
lens to it you should say that we should expect more great work to emerge from the current moment
#
than necessarily from the past and people could say that perhaps we romanticize the past when
#
we place it on a pedestal or perhaps these works are valuable as to understand the history of how
#
our literature evolved but not much more than that on its own terms and and and i'm just thinking
#
aloud so i don't have a position on this i think there is some truth perhaps to both of these
#
uh but you know since you've just reread the classics i'm wondering if you would have some
#
insights to share well i can only speak myself exactly and since i am two things a serious
#
student of literature and a writer i go back to books with a different kind of view what what do
#
what do i want and i do know that anybody who reads a book for the first time and wants
#
misses a lot of what the author has put in on an absolute uh uh superficial level there is
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a story there are characters there's a plot and that engages the first time reader
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now it is only a writer or a student of literature who will then want to go back
#
and sort out where all the things that have impacted her as a reader come from what has
#
the writer done then there is a whole question of the language how is the language being used
#
being used so that is the most conscious part of what a writer does and you discover little things
#
that the writer has done and you realize that had this word been replaced by a similar word
#
it would have had a different effect so when you are writing you become more conscious and more
#
careful about using precisely the word for what you are trying to say the feeling you're trying
#
to express but all this as i said belongs to this kind of person who is a student and a writer but
#
recently i have come across i think it was after i read anna karenina again i think for about the
#
fourth time and i was full of my ideas of how it had been the first time and the second time and
#
the third time and i was keen to hear what other lovers of anna karenina felt about it
#
and i am amazed and the number of people who are attached to this book and young people young
#
people who are who have their own channels and talking books and they're talking anna karenina
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quite often and they're addressing their viewers who apparently are asking questions so they too
#
are reading so there is a large world of people who are reading the classics we don't know them
#
but they're there i think and not necessarily belonging to the group that i spoke of
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of students and writers just people who are interested in books and in reading
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and discovering other words words from the past words from other spaces all of that i think so
#
but funnily enough i was interviewed by someone after my translation of smriti chitre came out
#
and it was a very strange question he said at a time when nobody is reading the classics
#
why have you translated smriti chitre so there were two implications a that smriti chitre was
#
old hat and and b that people weren't reading the classics and um first of all i said look
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this is a translation and as a translation of an old classic there's a whole new reading
#
a whole new readership that it will have probably in universities in women's departments etc etc
#
and i had already by then received a couple of emails one from scotland one from america
#
with questions about smriti chitre so i said the translation isn't for the local reader and
#
secondly i don't know why you assume that people aren't reading you don't know the entire world of
#
readers neither do i but from my experience unexpected people are reading unexpected books
#
so i don't go with your premise at all that people are not reading and he and if you're saying young
#
people then again i don't know we have a very glib way of saying young people i said we were young
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and none of my classmates had read smriti chitre even back then and i had so there are young people
#
and young people in every generation anyhow that was my answer to him but about a week or so later
#
i got a call from a friend who said that her nephews and her own grandson were so excited
#
that there was now a translation of spriti chitre because apparently it was a set
#
text for them at school some i think for people who had opted for marathi
#
were asked to read smriti chitre so and that that's in answer to that but there was another
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question that you asked you asked whether classics were classics because we romanticized them partly
#
the answer is in the answer that i've just given that lots of people are still reading it but
#
sometime ago i decided to go through the books that i had inherited from my father and reading
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the blurbs on the jackets and many of those books were called book of the century or book of the
#
decade or whatever it was and people were not reading it anymore therefore it hadn't
#
become a classic so what makes a classic i think because a book has a continuous readership
#
down the ages therefore we call it a classic not because we think it's old and therefore
#
there's so many novels written around the time that Tolstoy was writing they're not classics
#
so it is and it it these are very very special books so if you take the trouble of reading them
#
then sitting here today you recognize them as classics for the quality of the writing quality
#
of the thought the expansiveness of the theme all of these things so yeah yeah i mean you know a
#
classic is a classic for a reason because every other book in its time which is not a classic is
#
not read anymore but that classic still is so clearly it's doing something right and there's
#
value there and you know when people like one of the habits that irritates me is when people who
#
can't do something themselves or don't do something themselves they extrapolate that preference to
#
everybody else and they say oh i find classics boring and therefore they imagine that everybody
#
else must find classics boring that you know i don't listen to long podcasts or i don't read
#
hundred books a year or i don't listen at higher speeds so everybody else who is is doing something
#
wrong they are skimming or they're pretending and i i think we should all be a little humble and
#
realize that preferences are different tastes are different and so on and so forth and you know and
#
you mentioned Smriti Chitre i was reminded of Hemabati Sen you've heard of her of course yes
#
yes yes yes yeah i mean who's who wrote a book which lay in a trunk for i think 80 years or
#
something before it was discovered and yeah you know just just the value of the book and
#
yeah you know just just the value of being able to read something like that is magical do you have
#
any comfort books like books that you go back to and you reread again just because you just like
#
like you know we have comfort food so comfort books like that you know something i think the
#
books that i have read are also my comfort books there is but there is another kind of reading
#
i do i wouldn't call it yeah perhaps i can call that comfort reading that's a really good detective
#
novel yeah the same for me yeah i'm not i don't belong to a cult and there are certain cults
#
i have read books and i haven't enjoyed them for me because i do so much serious reading
#
and i need to be engaged by a mystery straightforward i want a dead body within the
#
first chapter maybe in your drawer like that lady requested yes yeah exactly something straight out
#
agatha christy gives you that and there are a whole lot of other writers who give you that
#
so the question is set up then follow all the clues and it helps your mind in a different kind
#
of way because you are in competition with the writer you're saying this but i think i can go
#
i can go beyond what you have shown and i suspect this and then things keep unfolding and uh red
#
herrings or as puaro says red fish being strewn all of them not fish puaro it's herrings
#
herrings says captain hastings but it's engaging and i am truly impressed by how
#
these people's minds are organized they know the end and yet they can construct a novel in such a
#
way that they don't know so i need that kind of straightforward detective novel there are
#
detective novels which i have been given to read etc which want to be literary
#
and they build up local color they build up characters and i'm saying don't bore me please
#
and i put that book away so yes those those and those are books that i take to bed with me
#
and they're nice handy books you know paperbacks uh they don't break your wrists as middle march
#
would do so you can put them aside when sleep takes you and uh that's it it's lovely yeah i
#
mean my my comfort reading i now realize is a lot of the things i read in my childhood like
#
shallow comes in agatha christie like maybe lord of the rings some wood house and the thing with
#
you know shallow comes in agatha christie and all is that in adulthood i kind of discovered later
#
detective fiction and almost got a snobbish attitude that hey i don't like all this plot
#
based thing where is the depth in character and all of that but later i've kind of again reversed
#
myself and said ki nahi there's so much charm in just what those guys did and yes and there's a
#
great book i'd recommend to you if you haven't already read it called the golden age of murder
#
by martin edwards oh which is a historical book about that entire agatha christie period and all
#
the other writers in that golden age so to say and i remember when i was reading it i bought some
#
30 40 books on kindle just you know reading about it in this great history and yes picking that up
#
so okay i'll i'll link that from the show notes as well yeah yeah but you mentioned wood house
#
that's another old favorite like i stopped reading wood house uh when i was about uh 15 okay i know
#
and he is lovely he makes me laugh and at school we used to use his kind of language to talk also
#
that passed and then as you say a snobbery stepped in and haha wood house who wants to read him
#
and i didn't and then as i have said in my memoir during my cancer i needed to laugh
#
i had to you know too many people around me were looking worried and almost weeping at the thought
#
and cancer by itself didn't depress me but this kind of thing did luckily my son and daughter-in-law
#
and my daughter weren't weepers and then gireesh and jameen would take turns reading wood house to me
#
wow and the entire six or so large wood house omnibuses were presented to me by arun kopkar
#
who was no longer in my life but i just had to say you know this is a time when i want to read
#
wood house and within a few days this pack of books landed up so the books were there readers
#
were there and we had a whale of a time and since those books are with me even now during the
#
pandemic i felt i had to challenge myself by trying to translate wood house into marathi
#
yeah it hasn't been done i believe shashi tarur who's a great wood house fan he was on one of these
#
uh youtube channels talking about wood house and saying that there is one telugu translation of
#
wood house so i decided i'd have a bash at it and i translated three stories and um i saw all the
#
problems that i was coming up against i found solutions i wasn't sure that they they were funny
#
solutions but they were in the process i had never actually studied wood house he was fun to read
#
but during this process i saw exactly what kind of humor he was using to make us laugh and this
#
this insight helped me in my translation and then i offered one story to an editor of a diwali
#
diwali special issue and it was published and there was no feedback at all except from a fellow
#
translator who said you've done a pretty good job of wood house of all people you know but it was
#
something that i'm glad i did you know three stories that told me this is not possible
#
uh are they online somewhere and we can link them no i haven't put them online they're in my diary
#
and because i i hats off because i would imagine wood house must be so difficult to translate
#
purely for the reason that a lot of what he does is he plays around with the english language
#
yes of course and to play around with marathi in an equivalent woodhousian way would be almost like
#
an act of creation anew it was it had to be in fact uh i coined two or three words yeah like
#
i can't now because of my memory i can't remember what they were but i had to do that
#
and i remember one thing and that i struggled with he is talking about his uncle and he is saying
#
that everyone in london knows him no or uh yeah we all know or some such thing that so-and-so uncle
#
is an eyesore on the face of the city first problem marathi people don't talk about uncle disrespectfully
#
respectfully second eyesore is idiomatic we do not have an equivalent thing so what would i do
#
there used to be in the old days an eye condition which i don't see around anymore but that's
#
perfect because he also belongs to a past and that word i thought would fit very well into this
#
context and i used that so i found an equivalent in the marathi culture because unless it belongs to
#
who the the target culture so to say it can't stand so to that extent but whether that made
#
the sentence equally funny is another thing and if you can't make woodhouse funny what's the point
#
yeah i mean i'm reminded of another great line of woodhouse which i like very says that
#
as maids go she was good and as maids go she went you know so which is again pure word play
#
and therefore therefore impossible to you know exactly kind of go to make up your own quip
#
let's talk about writing now you know jerry in his essay quotes you as telling him about
#
when you first start writing and these are your words quoted by him and now i'm saying them so
#
this is getting very sort of my chain is being formed i began writing when i was 12 i felt a
#
compulsion then to feel out what i was all about a thought expressed on paper was concrete proof of
#
what you were when i put thoughts on paper as many young people do i recognized that i got a
#
particular pleasure out of choosing certain words above others and putting them together in a
#
certain way that wasn't just about making sense this kind of writing was therefore a solitary
#
exercise stop quote tell me a little bit about you know what drew you to writing and did you
#
begin to get a sense of yourself as a writer or did you begin to get a sense of yourself as someone
#
who would always write whatever else he would do or whatever else it might be and how much of a
#
part did your parents play in this because your mother you have mentioned was an excellent
#
storyteller with tiger cubs with the taste for mangoes in her past life and at the same time
#
your father was a very clear and incessive writer there are excerpts that you've quoted from his
#
columns from you know the 40s and 50s and so on yeah yes i never thought of myself as a writer
#
so the second alternative that you've offered is true of me that i enjoy the process of writing
#
which is what jerry talks about and if that made me a writer then i was a writer but jottings that
#
you make and they're not uh offhand jottings you're taking care over the sentences over the
#
choice of words which is the process which i have said i always enjoy but to become a writer you
#
have to write in a certain form that gets published so journalistic writing was the first form of
#
writing that i did and it really happened entirely by accident because of the joy that
#
i took in and the process of writing one of the letters that i wrote home the mr matthew whom you
#
have quoted already who used to look after the sunday supplement of the times of india
#
read this letter because my father had enjoyed it so he had handed it over for him uncle matthew to
#
read and uncle matthew said i shall publish this and suddenly i was published now that's the first
#
tam that tells you you are a writer because you're published but and then i continued
#
because this is a slot that i had found and i used to write middles for the times of india
#
because it allowed me to to to express my view of the absurdity of things and and and they paid
#
pretty well for the times and i did want to make money at that time then i realized the dangers of
#
doing the same thing over and over however fresh each column was it was still a 450 words and was
#
still something light and refreshing etc two things happened miss jasawala also of elphinstone
#
college said to me once we were i think it might sound unlikely but miss jasawala and a few of us
#
from the english department were watching a film i forget what it was but we occupied two rows she
#
was in the row in front of me and it was obviously a funny film and laughing and miss jasawala
#
turned around and said to me shanta i think i can hear the rumble of a middle coming from
#
you i thought oh god no surely not that was one and soon after that a very good friend of mine
#
said to me have you planned to die writing middles and that was a reality check and i thought no
#
that's not how i want to die i want to write other things also and that article i don't know
#
if you were referring to that article but i wrote an article for the times of india
#
my first serious article talking about the brahmanism in university education the brahmins
#
being the english medium people and all others being non-brahmins and it was much appreciated
#
so i thought fine i'm not just a middle writer i can write serious stuff also and that opened out
#
that avenue to me of serious journalistic writing but then later i discovered that i wasn't much good
#
at doing news stories news features because it involved talking to strangers and it involved
#
probing into their personal lives and one such story really upset me i was asked to go and
#
write about a rape that had happened and i i mean it it was a horror story what had happened
#
everyone knew what had happened and what was i going to do i was told go and talk to the girl
#
and i went to this place it was in a slum in wordly and i stood outside that door and i dared
#
not go in i i just simply didn't want to ask that girl the stupid question how do you feel
#
and i came back and and did the most unprofessional thing i told my editor no
#
i'm incapable of doing this story so i realized that i wasn't what they call
#
a hard-nosed journalist and i think that is what turned me towards writing on cultural subjects
#
and other stuff like that and then in those days a lot of magazines were still publishing fiction
#
and it's a strange thing that people assume someone who can write journalistic stories
#
can write fiction i had never shown any kind of skill for writing stories but requests kept
#
coming write a story for this special issue right for that seminar each weekly and then what was
#
that magazine imprint requests came and suddenly if a request came there was a story in my head
#
i had always loved listening to stories and i had loved telling stories so it was a question of
#
the question of putting them into words and so my first short stories and perhaps my only short
#
stories were written on request by these magazines by illustrated weekly and by some marathi
#
magazines also so both languages i have used in short fiction so that was another form
#
which i went into and then the play that you referred to aminash which because i was so much
#
part of theater enough watching plays i had read a huge amounts of plays american russian english
#
german everything so playwriting seemed to come to me in a fairly natural way if a subject lended
#
lent itself to a play the writing of it came quite naturally and i discovered this with aminash
#
because i was so preoccupied at that time with this whole business of
#
mental conditions which are put down as madness and lunacy back then you didn't kind of differentiate
#
you didn't think of mental illness as illness at all it was all madness and i was terribly disturbed
#
by two or three such things that had happened in my circle and it was through that kind of deep
#
concern that i sat down to write aminash and i i wrote it i think in about a week or so and i
#
didn't have to write rewrite any part of it it just stood the way it was written in the first draft and
#
that's how dubai did it so that was playwriting i didn't follow up with any other play
#
till lately when i have written a few plays not all of them staged but some read some
#
some performed to some extent a couple of them published so that i came into because of this
#
extremely strong emotion that i felt and felt that it could only be expressed through a play
#
and then finally the novel which happened in 83 84 or so were again impaired by two or three cases
#
of extramarital relationships that were happening around me and my friends were the other women
#
not the wives so i was seeing things from their viewpoint and the other woman's viewpoint has
#
never been central to any marathi novel in any case and i felt very deeply about it that's how
#
rita wellinger came up came about so that was the first novel so from journalism to short fiction
#
to playwriting to novel so you know we were discussing earlier about the relevance of marriage
#
and all that and i'm reminded of this lovely passage from rita wellinger where one of the
#
female characters is telling a man quote i'm not asking you to step out of my life i'm stepping
#
i'm stepping out of yours and removing you from the center of mine in order to live alone i'm
#
taking away from you that special place in my life which you alone occupied not in order to hand it
#
over to someone else but to reclaim it for myself stop quote and just a lovely passage
#
i had once written this essay sort of talking about my podcasting and that as well about how
#
the form shapes the content of what you do and that in turn can shape your character in the sense
#
my observation there was that as my episodes got longer and longer like i started off doing
#
like 20 minute episodes my shortest episode is just 11 minutes wasn't oral history format then
#
it was just one issue and whatever quickly and it was shallow stuff and i realized that as i got
#
longer and longer it forced me to become a better reader because i have to do much more work reading
#
it forced me to become a much better listener and that in turn forces humility because if you are
#
going to then listen genuinely to try and understand the other person your ego has to go out of the
#
equation and i felt that what happened was that the form that i had chosen the long form podcast
#
shaped the content that i was producing you know more considered slow conversations like this one
#
and that i think changed me right and i want to ask you a question about the various forms that
#
you have therefore worked in because you're starting with the middle and at one point when
#
your friend advises you are you going to write middles all your life it is in a sense it implies
#
that a particular kind of person writes a middle that you're sure shallow and humorous and you're
#
not really digging deep into things and there also one feels that if you wrote middles all your life
#
and none of this other stuff that you mentioned i suspect you would be a different person
#
right and stepping out of the middle forces you to go somewhere else writing hard-nosed reporting
#
would have made you a different person from just immersing yourself into culture you know in a
#
different context you've written in your book about how when you were in tlaxo you wanted to
#
organize plays which the workers would do but because the lunch break was 45 minutes and they
#
take 10 minutes to eat you decided to constrict whatever you were doing to 30 minutes and rewrite
#
it accordingly yes and that's also a constraint that's also a form and constraints of course can
#
create great art by just you know being constraints but equally they uh you know force a certain kind
#
of expression and and i just find that this connection is everywhere like the shallowest
#
people are on twitter because you have 280 characters though i believe that's being changed
#
soon but you have 280 words uh characters sorry and you know so what is your experience with all
#
these different forms that you worked in that do you feel that they shaped you and changed you do
#
you feel that a novel required you to become something else in order to write yeah yeah i
#
think stepping out of middles was stepping out of a comfort zone because i knew this is something
#
i could do i think i was despite the fact that i loved writing and i keep saying the process
#
of writing not the product and i keep saying that because it's i i was diffident about the product
#
when i said that i wrote my first serious article it was certainly because of these promptings
#
which i have spoken of but also always out of a deep emotional disturbance when you're not
#
when you're not asking yourself can i do this because i know at any given point of time if
#
i asked myself can i do this my answer could possibly be no come on you can't when have you
#
done that no no no but it was a strong emotion that forced me into writing something and that
#
something happened to be a different form from what i had done earlier i said the same thing
#
about avinash strong emotion rita strong emotion it was even after rita i refused to call myself
#
a novelist if anyone called me that i would stop them and i would say unless i have written a second
#
novel i'm not a novelist i i'm just a one-off thing so there were all these kinds of lines
#
which i drew for myself and each time i stepped across a line it was actually to discover myself
#
because i hadn't thought i was capable but this proved that i was and then short stories so if
#
a short story idea comes to me and if i want to publish a short story i will be published i can
#
write an adequately interesting short story with the novel i had given up after writing four
#
chapters because they were written in english because i automatically thought if i'm writing
#
a novel it's going to be in english but i stopped because i instinctively realized that
#
realized that it wasn't working something was not working and of course my conclusion was
#
you're not a novelist why do you bother so i had set it aside and it came back because i began
#
thinking of it and hearing the character speak in marathi and i realized that i had been using
#
the wrong language for what i was wanting to write and that's how i started writing dita again
#
in marathi and once that was done i thought yes i think marathi is my language for
#
uh novel writing so the second novel i had absolutely no doubt which language i was going
#
to write in and although it was about a theme that isn't normally written about in marathi
#
literature which is the visual arts and violence i didn't i didn't feel diffident i felt perfectly
#
confident in writing in a form in which i hadn't written earlier because it's not a linear story
#
from a to z but i i by then i felt confident and at the end of it i was okay with people saying
#
calling me a novelist no problem so it was actually a discovery of one's own capacities
#
when Govind Nihalani asked me to do my first ever script for a documentary i wondered if i could
#
and he said it's a documentary i'm giving you all the research material you just have to read
#
and i had said to him let me read and let me feel my way to a script if i feel because i've seen
#
enough excellent cinema both feature films and documentaries so i have certain standards and if
#
i can come up halfway at least then i accept this assignment and i found that it was happening and so
#
it happened that first script after which i became pretty confident about writing film scripts also
#
so it's a it's really a process of self-discovery of overcoming confidence diffidence and in a way
#
i think i'm glad i was diffident because i see a lot of confident people around and i see their
#
first novels which they think are you know up there and i can see so many flaws but to come
#
to novel writing later in life after you have read so much you have certain standards and you
#
may not be up there but you know where you are and i'm happy with that i'd actually say that
#
diffidence or what i would call humility is an essential part of becoming a good artist because
#
you only become good by questioning yourself all the time you know literally almost every
#
person i have met who has accomplished something in life suffer from some form of the imposter
#
syndrome where they think why me what's so great about me you know either they do what they did at
#
some point and i find that a good sign because you know and those are the kind of people if you
#
if you think you've you know you're already the cat's whiskers yeah it's a dangerous sign
#
another consequence of diffidence and perhaps related to the anxiety or wanting to fit in or
#
wanting validation or wanting to be acclaimed for what you do is sometimes that i guess when
#
you start writing and it's something that all writers might go through is that they overthink
#
it that they can come out with writerly prose because they're trying to write in a particular
#
way and be impressive and at one point you know there's this great passage by you again quoted by
#
jerry who almost feels like a co-author of the podcast now but he quoted you in his introduction
#
and i'll read this bit out because i send this to all my writing students also because i wanted
#
them to read it and you wrote you get an idea you think oh this might make a great story or a column
#
but when you get down to it you find that it needs to be expanded this is easily done if it is an
#
argument but that's not what i'm talking about here this is something fluffier you have to think
#
up metaphors you have to put in images you have to add quotes and for that you have to have a good
#
memory which i do not have this is called filling up i have so many ideas that fleet across my mind
#
i have learned over time to enjoy these and to let them go in a book i have called the creative
#
process a symposium many people from mathematicians to artists to writers talk about the processes
#
one of them is katherine and porter a short story writer she says it was pointed out to her that
#
she could not describe her short stories lack descriptions so she set herself an exercise
#
she went out and sat down somewhere on a hill or something and looked around her with the intention
#
of going home and describing things when she got home she tried and found that she could not do it
#
she could not describe what she had seen and she decided that there was something she could do
#
and something she couldn't and that is why i say i can't fill up stop code and and the lesson in
#
this which i lesson for me lesson for my writing students when i told them is that it's okay you
#
know you'll have strengths you'll have weaknesses if your strengths allow you to you know get to the
#
essence of something that's what matters it doesn't matter that oh i have to learn to describe well or
#
use big words or whatever i find the most common mistake young writers make is your overwriting
#
because you're overthinking so tell me about your process of sort of coming to terms with this and
#
coming to terms with what kind of writing you want to do because one i imagine for a journalist it
#
would be almost forced upon you because you have deadlines you can't overthink or override too
#
much but what was your process through your life of finding that phase where you're comfortable in
#
your writing skin and you're like this yeah see i think that that kind of overwriting or that kind
#
of florid prose that young people want to write is because they are imagining a reader and wanting
#
to impress that reader i wanted to impress myself i wasn't looking to impress anyone outside myself
#
and to impress myself i just simply had to be honest to myself to recognize myself and then out
#
of that recognition put everything i had into my writing and at the best of times good language
#
for me has never meant big words i think good writing is good thinking and finding the right
#
words for what you're thinking or what you're feeling and those words can be three letter words
#
or 10 letter words doesn't matter but you're not going for the 10 letter words because
#
they sound impressive so yeah if that answers your question yeah i mean i'm kind of envious
#
because you seem to have you know some of us like even me when i when i started writing in my 20s
#
i look back on that writing and i cringe so much because i was obviously trying hard to impress and
#
you seem to have bypassed that completely and and and there's also a lovely passage where you write
#
about academics and you and i'll just quote this because i really like it a quote for someone who
#
loves language it is painful to hear academics binge on words like negotiate problematize navigate
#
inscribe predicate hegemonize subaltern and cite worthy words all but without any resonance of
#
sound or sense does that make me anti-intellectual no it makes me anti a certain stripe of academic
#
i believe that those who speak and write the sturgeon jargon use it as easy currency for an
#
exchange of ready-made positions if intellectual means thinking independently struggling to find
#
words to express thought and coming up with fresh formulations to stimulate further thinking then
#
the people i had heard in seminars weren't it excuse me if i don't listen i i would say
#
and doze off dreaming of resonant words like crepuscular kairos guru ephemeral gamble
#
diaphanous gossamer ensues ensues eons mellifluous palimpsest one could go on forever the riches of
#
the english tongue are infinite stock quote and i'm sure i pronounced a few of them wrong but i'm
#
also certain that you and my listeners will forgive me tell me about sort of you know earlier
#
and in your writing you've referred to virginia wolf talking about how every woman needs a room
#
of her own which is not necessarily only a physical space but i'm guessing also something
#
in your head where you can sit down and find that peace and and it is way harder for women than it
#
is for men you know for most men if they say i'm going to write in my study every sunday for four
#
hours don't disturb me it's easy you know that the house will run everything but women have to think
#
about a hundred things and you know the routines have to be different and there is kind of so much
#
yuga are involved yes tell me in your life how you dealt with this yeah the question first arose
#
as a problem was in vishakhapatnam when i was translating godavari parude kar's book called
#
uh and the children were young um i think two and four possibly and uh they weren't ever noisy
#
children but they like to keep sharing things with me i was around they were around so i had uh i
#
played a trick and they appreciated it during this translation period i had told them that
#
i am not i i'm shanta gohli and that was see it acted like moving out from home into an office
#
that is a physical space a lot of people say working from home is comfortable but it's too
#
comfortable if you have to go to the office then your entire attitude to your work changes i
#
couldn't change spaces but i could draw the line in this way so i was shanta gohli and that became
#
my space and uh they would keep to themselves of course i didn't try their patience too much
#
i would translate in stints of up of about one hour or so at the end of which i'd be with them
#
and then back again so and that's how i managed it then what i couldn't manage successfully
#
and here i'll go back to virginia wolf because uh she says apart from having a room of one's own
#
and she doesn't mean it metaphorically because she says and 500 pounds so it's space and money
#
to keep you going and so that part wasn't my problem space was i have written a maximum
#
proportion of my total output in these last 20 years since i have had my room to myself
#
and i have realized how important it is that i should have that because with arun it was always
#
a question i had a desk wasn't as if i didn't but he with that male ego which you've been talking
#
about and i have agreed to full-heartedly felt that what he was reading was so important that
#
i had to keep aside whatever i was doing in order to let him speak about it so a lot of the time
#
that i could make for myself from housework and from being with the children and being with my
#
mother was taken up in this fashion and it was a kind of relief which i cannot even begin to describe
#
when that room came totally into my control and i could be at my desk and i could write 10
#
continuous sentences without someone saying listen to this and break my link so that having the the
#
space is is extremely important the physical space mental space i always had i could actually write
#
writing to the office on the bus for rita wellinger i have done that
#
office on the bus for rita wellinger i have done that i just needed space to myself without
#
interruption so yes that's why i have i keep quoting virginia wolf she had it right she knew
#
what a woman required if she wanted to be a writer at at different points in a memoir you talk about
#
the importance of other people in being a spur and you're going into certain directions like
#
you mentioned that you sent your poetry to Nisim Ezekiel and he was like you know his two his two
#
sentences of advice were like number one give up poetry and number two write in marathi why
#
don't you write prose in marathi and later you speak about how satyadev dubey at one point
#
told you that you were vegetating you've become a cow you do some work translate the play that's
#
coming to you by separate post and then he sent you ct khanulkar's avadhya and considered you know
#
by people as a first adult play in marathi i think that's how madhav manohar described it yes and
#
and then you got down to translating it yes so tell me about the joys of this like one
#
i would imagine that both of these when you start writing in marathi and when you start translating
#
there must be like let's talk about writing in marathi first that it must have been like did it
#
feel liberating for you that you are you know it's almost like a part of you which really is kind of
#
there but it's like kind of suppressed not in the sense somebody is suppressing it but it's not
#
found full flower yes and it just blooms when you start writing yes yes that and there was something
#
else and that something else was total trust in the person who was telling you if nisi mizikar
#
was saying try this it meant that one person outside of myself thought i could
#
so it was time to test myself on it and when i did actually you know i wrote three whole stories
#
so they were there the language was there and i just needed to be tested and this could happen
#
only if the person was suggesting it was the kind of person that nisim was totally generous
#
in spirit and always very careful about what he was saying and knew he had actually worked with me
#
on a translation from marathi so i realized that this was there somewhere at the back of his mind
#
also so all these things combined gave me that trust in his judgment see it it was entirely
#
possible for me maybe not me but people would say he's an old fogey what does he know i'm i mean he
#
doesn't understand what i'm writing so it it required that kind of trust in this person to
#
in this person to do what i did with satyadev he was a very close friend and jerry was rather
#
wondered why i wasn't offended when he called me a cow and i said friends are allowed to call me
#
that because there's so much love behind the word so and i knew his passion he was such a passionate
#
man where theater was concerned he lived it he ate it and if he was saying do this i had no
#
questions to ask at all i had the time and i had the space so i did it and as you say that
#
pushed me into translating plays it also established me as a translator of plays
#
so a whole lot of playwrights who later asked me to translate based their request on a fact that
#
i had done avadhya which had been published in a magazine and it was there for people to see
#
uh so i mean i'm eternally grateful to satyadev for having called me a cow and pushing me
#
away from my god which i'd be chewing friendly advice to listeners do not go around calling
#
your friends cows it worked in this instance but kindly do not do it here's another thing i'm
#
curious about that when you write in different languages whether you're translating or you're
#
translating or you're writing your own original content when you write in different languages
#
are you necessarily in different modes in a different person almost because elsewhere
#
you also mentioned that when you wrote letters to your mother they would be in marathi but when
#
you wrote letters to your dad they would be in english you know uh are you kind of switching
#
from one world to the other when you do that so you know that perhaps what you said about
#
rita wellinker that when you started writing it in english perhaps it didn't belong in english
#
and you realized it belonged in marathi is there that kind of difference that is there
#
that something will always meant to be written in one and not in the other because that's just a
#
mode it isn't i think so because there are occasions not only with me or with any indian
#
i would say who has a language besides english there are things that you can't say in english
#
and immediately your hindi or your gujarati or your marathi comes and there are things which
#
while i'm talking to someone in english i suddenly say in marathi because that's the right word
#
for that occasion or for that person so of course there are certain things which have words
#
words very effective words in one language and not in another but it's not when i'm actually
#
writing either in english or marathi i'm not conscious of being in another mental space
#
another linguistic space obviously but mental space no and i think that is possibly what people
#
say to me that you hold back on your emotions that's my sensibility and it it is both functions
#
in english and it does in marathi if i were actually moving into another world i would move
#
into the characteristic marathi world which is highly emotional which even now thinks of people
#
as good and bad and the modern writer has found grayness also but the very typical marathi
#
culture is to think in terms of good and bad and a lot of people write that way and write
#
emotionally about things which i don't do so the language doesn't take me into that other world
#
that other world the language is my tool which i use equally in both words as such but through
#
the same mental makeup do you feel that languages and i'm not referring to your own work in english
#
or marathi but in general english literature marathi literature that over a period of time
#
because they have evolved differently they develop different sets of values for example it could be
#
said that you know some languages are just naturally minimalistic like perhaps japanese
#
and korean which is why novelists in those languages even in translation tend to be quite
#
sparse whereas some languages are given to expressionism like maybe bengali or urdu so if
#
you are to translate something from urdu word for word to english it might seem to someone who's
#
only read english literature that this is too ornate that this is too flowery that you know you need
#
to kind of tone it down and i'm wondering if you know that is something that therefore affects
#
the literature of these languages that one they are intrinsically different in certain ways
#
certain immutable ways and also that they have evolved differently well whereas you know a
#
language like english is really a global global language there are tributaries from everywhere
#
coming into that ocean but smaller languages might be kind of more insular and not have had that
#
opportunity to you know take those influences in i think it's a question of the total aesthetics
#
of a culture it's not something that evolves it is there in the culture so if for instance
#
you look at our oldest temple architecture it is covered in carving totally covered so
#
we are not our aesthetics is not minimalist whereas the south asians do have that minimalist
#
culture as such you see it in their calligraphy you see it in the way they dress in the kind of
#
neatness of their appearance you said south asians i think you mean far east asians right
#
sorry yes not south asians south east yes south asians are like us all of us yeah so and we can
#
we can see through the manifestations like temples dress painting tanjore painting for instance
#
is a kind of colorful and blingy form of painting so that's our aesthetics and the language which
#
tends to be florid is part of that aesthetics and even today for instance if i go to a wedding
#
and i think that i'm dressed for the wedding my relatives will say how little you're wearing
#
so much is beautiful little is not and that's our aesthetics so i mean i think in a sense it can
#
evolve also like i did an episode with varun grover recently he's a scriptwriter of the film
#
masaan and masaan in its sensibility to me is takes much more from world cinema than from
#
indian cinema in the sense that it's not spelling anything out there's no insistent background
#
music telling you how to feel there are things left to your imagination like the way it ends
#
for example which is so beautifully suggestive but yes yeah but that's because as you said
#
he has seen world cinema absolutely so it's a question of what you what you find interesting
#
and fascinating in the exposure that you get to other cultures there are people who who may see
#
that and who may appreciate it also but don't necessarily see it coming into their work they
#
would rather stick with their own aesthetics so uh in masaan this has happened because obviously
#
varun has a deep connect with ambiguity minimalism and it comes into his work so
#
yeah but it's not evolution even then evolution would suggest that it uh it's it's internally
#
motivated and it goes from stage to stage and it arrives at a certain point which is distant from
#
the starting point here it's very clearly a departure straight and a departure that has come
#
because of an external influence not necessarily internally motivated that's a great point and i
#
should also assure listeners that neither of us are passing judgment on this form over the other
#
they're just different and there is so much joy and delight in both of them and i think as indians
#
we are really lucky to be multilingual and to have access to different kinds of art with different
#
kinds of aesthetics yes yes yes absolutely because you look at tajjar painting and you
#
you don't kind of compare it or with say anything that say prabhakar barve did you don't because
#
there are two different frameworks and the two different purposes for which these artists were
#
painting and i know that it has happened with me in assessing plays if a play is calling itself
#
experimental then i have a certain framework which is global experiments have happened all
#
over the world and where are you in that context is the measure which i'm using for you i go to
#
mainstream theater and i know the framework within which those people are working and i look at the
#
play within that framework and i see the little attempts that have been made at a breakthrough
#
and i appreciate them these people are not saying we are experimental but that artistic impulse
#
is driving them to break the mold to some extent at least and my friends in so-called experimental
#
theater have said to me you're very lenient with them and you're very strict with us i said yes
#
yes you have chosen to occupy another frame altogether and you're accountable to that
#
let's let's take a quick break and we'll have dinner now and then
#
we'll continue for the last leg of our recording right after
#
have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well i'd love to help you
#
since april 2020 i've taught 20 cohorts of my online course the art of clear writing
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an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter to
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the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars and is a monthly thing so if you're
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interested head on over to register at india uncut.com slash clear writing that's india uncut.com slash
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clear writing 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 i can help you welcome back to the
#
scene in the unseen with shanta gocle shanta i'm going to you know pick up on a theme that
#
you mentioned earlier in our conversation where you spoke about how idealistic you were with that
#
idealism being one of the reasons that you came back to india and how that idealism was mirrored
#
in so many people that you met and people that you saw and you know when i my father was an
#
i.s officer joined in the 60s and and and i often asked him why did you know i mean apart from it
#
being you know he kind of almost got into it accidentally so to say he was in love with my
#
mother and her parents wouldn't allow a marriage unless he had a stable job so he had to so he
#
just gave the exam and joined but one thing i realized is that he's like that in that generation
#
of you know him and people like him there was an idealism about the whole process whereas i have
#
actually had episodes with i.s officers since on the show and even if the odd i.s officer today
#
can be idealistic and driven to do something for the country but you know a lot of people
#
join for the wrong reasons and you cannot exactly blame them because that idealism as a whole
#
seems to have gone from society a bit i mean that is one way to look at it the other way of looking
#
at it is that you know if idealism is basically a hope for a better life maybe in younger people it
#
manifests in other ways which have nothing to do with the kind of ideals that we had so what are
#
sort of your thoughts about this yeah i i have uh just uh thinking of it and speaking entirely
#
off the cuff so i guess my biases will come through i think if your objective is to make
#
as much money as you can i i can't see where idealism can come in i said biases because
#
this is i mean a kind of anti-money bias which i have but on the ground
#
um i do know people who are wealthy and i find that those who belong to the earlier generation
#
and who inherited money didn't run after it it just came to them can be idealistic and are very
#
often but those who have suddenly found that a certain a certain branch of education will bring
#
them a certain kind of job which will bring them a certain amount of money and they go to that
#
they go to that branch because they have this long-term view which is which has money at the end
#
then what are they idealistic about i don't know i had an experience with students of
#
management at the bangalore institute of management and two of them came to me after my lecture
#
and i was talking about art and they said you know we are here we know we will get very good
#
very good jobs but we mean to chuck them up as soon as i as soon as we have enough money
#
because we want to go into rural development and we believe that unless that happens the country
#
can't be said to be progressing so it was idealism on hold and everyone else had their goal fixed
#
i the problem between idealism and money can i think be settled if you believe in philanthropy
#
and a lot of people who make a lot of money also give away a lot of money and they do it for the
#
betterment of the world which is not the world they inhabit so they're not self-centered in that
#
sense they open out to the rest of the world so i can see idealism playing a part there
#
but i don't see too much of that happening here
#
and i keep wondering i haven't really read or thought too much about it so it's just a hunch
#
that charity is done to lesser human beings as i said i'm thinking off the cuff but i'm trying to
#
i mean are you thinking that in the charitable instinct itself there is a kind of self-aggrandizement
#
there is there is that and how do you overcome that do you overcome that sometimes when i read
#
what certain philanthropists are saying i think that it comes from a genuine place
#
but to what extent can you actually think they are that through what they are saying
#
if i'm face to face with someone and that person is saying something i'm looking at his eyes i'm
#
looking at his body language and putting all of it together to decide whether what he is saying
#
is an affectation of wanting to say the right things or whether it's coming from deep within him
#
but to read it in the printed word i don't have all those things so it's it's just a hunch that
#
money making cancels out idealism and if you are idealistic what what does that mean in the first
#
place that terrorists are often called idealistic meaning that they have a dream they have an idea
#
and a goal towards which they're working so i mean we need to go back to a definition of idealism
#
because i think you used it and i responded assuming a certain definition of idealism
#
definition of idealism which is ethical which we think is ethical now to have an ideal of
#
one country one culture one color one language it's a dream it's a big dream
#
it doesn't fit my definition of idealism so that is a problem with the use of certain words
#
as well but i think in the course of saying all this i have defined what it means to me
#
and it's within that context that i have spoken yeah and i i share that context and of course as
#
i say one man's a terrorist is another man's freedom fighter you know something you just
#
know something your son girish besides being a good friend of mine is also an excellent poker
#
player and i used to wonder when i back in the days when i was active that so many times i will
#
bluff into him and he will call me how does he know i'm bluffing and just now you said that
#
when people talk to you you look at their eyes you look at their body language and i think some of
#
that might have passed down to a couple of points of response that if we look at idealism like what
#
does an idealist want to do however he defines it an idealist wants to make the world a better
#
place however the idealist defines a better place and how this plays into money i think that there
#
are a couple of aspects to it as far as philanthropists are concerned and a lot of people
#
who've not inherited money but made it themselves like the nilikanees and azim premji and so on
#
are also great philanthropists and the way i would look at that is i don't really care what their
#
intent is whether there is self aggrandizement behind that or whatever i look at the effect
#
of their money in the real world and if it is making the lives of people better off that's great
#
the other aspect of it is that in a free market which is not crony capitalistic like india often
#
has been you know the only way you can make money is by making someone else's life better off by
#
providing them a service that they want so i wouldn't completely look at the desire to make
#
money as something crass because unless of course you're using the power of the state as so often
#
happens in india to do rent seeking and all that you know the way you make money is by giving
#
somebody something that they want and making them better off and i think that's perfectly
#
honorable in a sense and even if people are driven by the desire to make money like a lot of
#
capitalists who made the world a better place have done it because not because they wanted to make
#
money per se but there was some problem they wanted to solve and they get in there to try and
#
solve the problem and then it helps the world at large and i'm also kind of okay with that so i
#
wouldn't look at money as something that is necessarily a counter to the idea of idealism
#
i had once written a column where i address a question that people often bring up that why
#
were our freedom fighters such great leaders you know even if we disagree with them on some
#
particulars we can accept that they were all great leaders great men and women but modern
#
politicians are not looked upon in that way and my thesis was that back then that it's all
#
about incentives that back then you know people like gandhi patel nehru all of these people
#
there was no power to be had for them so they were driven only by principle and with no pot
#
of gold at the end of that rainbow and therefore the sort of people who became freedom fighters were
#
people like that whereas today the way you know the state has such a big role in our lives where
#
power and money have this interplay and this vicious circle that goes on between them a
#
different kind of person is drawn to politics and that makes me wonder that if gandhi was born today
#
if nehru was born today what would they be doing and uh you know i once in fact said that a modern
#
day version of nehru who wrote and read and thought so much is perhaps someone like pratap bhanumaita
#
you know more of an intellectual who stays away from the muddy waters of what uh politics does
#
but i imagine one place where idealism should have survived is the world of the arts because
#
i think artists have often looked upon as yeah you got to make money you got to do things to make
#
money but at the same time they are drawn to art in the first place towards becoming artists
#
because of their just their passion and their desire for the arts so what's your sense in the artistic
#
world because the world of theater back in the 50s and the 60s i'm guessing must have been driven
#
by you know by idealism perhaps even a foolish idealism at times whereas today so much of the
#
arts are so commercialized that anyone who chases the lowest common denominator is necessarily not
#
being true to whatever impulses brought her into art to begin with yeah i'll just go back for a
#
while sure uh talking about people as you said who have a certain problem in mind and they solve it
#
and that leads to and that becomes a business which happens to bring money and that money is
#
good for everybody fine that is one way of making money but it's not the goal where did he start he
#
started with a problem and he thought he would be able to solve it and once it was solved one step
#
led to another and another i just have a one of several stories that have that i have witnessed
#
there was a friend of my colleague who said that her son was then at college had a certain regard
#
for me and therefore would i talk to him about choice of profession and i said fine i mean let
#
him come when the boy came he said i want to become a journalist and my parents want me to
#
become a chartered accountant and they will not hear of me becoming a journalist because
#
they think it it's not a profession that you can make money in so i said you ultimately
#
you have to decide whether you want to do what you want to do or you want to do what
#
your parents want you to do speaking for myself since i've been requested to speak to you i think
#
your mother mistakenly thought that i would be thinking the way she does because all parents
#
are supposed to think that their children should do well money wise and i said because she's
#
mistaken i love your idea of becoming a journalist i have read what you have written so far and i
#
think you have promise a lot of promise and it would be wonderful so if you choose to
#
follow your heart i welcome you into our profession and then the next day my friend
#
called me and said what have you done and so that's it that's the kind of thing i mean
#
people who choose in order to make money not people who
#
happen to make money because they're pursuing some other goal which happens to bring that money
#
yeah i think you know i get what you're saying completely but i also think that deciding you
#
want to make money and then trying to figure out how to do it is also fine because you know
#
unless you you know again get into rent seeking crony capitalism and all that and unless you do
#
that the only way to make money is by being useful to others you know whether it may be you join a
#
corporation and take a job in a bank because you're useful to the bank but the bank exists in the
#
first place because they are useful to someone else so i i wouldn't diss that so much and also
#
you know one of the themes that i sometimes chat about with some of my guests is the danger of
#
giving the advice to someone follow your heart you know it's almost you're supposed to tell
#
everyone follow your heart follow your dreams follow your passions but the cafes of versova
#
are filled with people who are 45 years old 50 years old who followed their heart and it got them
#
nowhere and now they look around at their friends with their you know comfortable lives foreign
#
holidays big houses fancy cars and they are like why did i do this and you know we often when we
#
speak of following our hearts we look at the outliers you know the ones who made it the one
#
percent who made it we don't look at the 98 percent who necessarily didn't having said that i should
#
be the last person to speak of this because i have followed my heart throughout and you know
#
i'm therefore not a super richie rich but it is what it is i mean even if i'm not a super richie
#
what it is i mean even this show is a labor of life but when we tell people or when i tell people
#
i also point out risks journalism is not that kind of risk i have seen young people
#
raw people step in and then then their skill carries them upwards but there are people who
#
come to my daughter for instance wanting to become actors that's exactly what i mean and
#
that's hugely risky and the first thing both she and her husband do is talk about the risks
#
and they talk about their own choices and how they struggled and how only lucky breaks sometimes
#
give you that first stepping stone and when you say lucky it says it's a chancey thing so yeah
#
there are certain professions where i think you have to forefront the risks and forget about
#
following your dreams and very often where acting is concerned and it's always film acting
#
acting the dream is itself a chimera it's itself a kind of imagined dream
#
and based on no real experience no real skill so that's a totally different thing
#
in the world of the arts and by the arts i don't mean fine arts but i mean just arts in general
#
you know writing theater films all of which you've seen for decades what is your sense of how that
#
has evolved not in terms of its content but in terms of the people the idealism the ethics and
#
the aesthetics you know just in what the ecosystem is like because on the one hand you know back in
#
the day one can imagine that everyone who went into theater knew that it doesn't have money
#
but you do it because you want to do it you love it and you say that i'll find a way to make ends
#
meet but today people who can get into films and they can actually get into it and dream of making
#
money and then those choices come up that do you go in commercial conventional ways or do you follow
#
your heart as it were and try different things and so on and so forth so what is sort of the world
#
you know how have you seen it evolve and what does it look like see if you're talking about
#
film acting and acting i'm talking about just a general yeah but let's begin with film acting
#
an actor is not an independent factor what is offered to her or him
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it isn't always accompanied by choice you aren't being asked would you like to do this role or that
#
role this is the offer you take it or leave it and if at the beginning of your career you leave it
#
then instantly a reputation begins to build up you can't afford to be choosy at the early stages so
#
whose heart the heart is only saying i want to act and only recently i've gone back to Habib Tanvi's
#
memoirs and he says it's acting in films is a profession without any autonomy for the actor
#
and if an actor wishes to say something then he has to change his media so that's a film acting
#
you know it's in theater yes as you said there was a time when in well i can only speak about
#
maharashtra which happens to have a theater industry which most states don't have and because
#
there's an industry there's a possibility of making money and any number of actors in maharashtra
#
have lived off theater and whatever spin-offs come from that there is the other stream of theater
#
where most of my friends belong where idealism comes in where you're thinking of theaters and
#
art and you are wishing to improve what you can do in that art how you can contribute to that
#
art and only the other day there was this young teacher sitting with me and he is doing a project
#
on theater and he was saying that i've been reading a lot around the subject and he said
#
i am totally amazed at the kind of give and take that you people appear to have that you could say
#
to each other look this isn't working or this is bad to put it bluntly and how he said we can't say
#
that to our colleagues anymore so i said yeah that was because of idealism because we weren't thinking
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uh this is my work and how dare someone say that it's all wrong we were all of us together
#
thinking of our work in the context of the art theater art and we all wanted to go further
#
further towards achieving what those ideals were and things did change and i have to return
#
to that same subject because it's a fact you can look at the statistics you can look at people's
#
memoirs and 1985 onwards became the watershed beyond that people stopped being that kind of
#
idealistic about theater and dube himself has gone on record to say i can't do this anymore
#
and this is the man who complained about one of his most popular plays saying it's making me money
#
something must be wrong with what i've done so so that was a complete change of mindset and that
#
coincided of course with the coming of the satellite channels and opening up of opportunities for both
#
actors and writers to move into a money-making part of their profession and if you saw their output
#
you saw that it was class quite a lot of it was class and these were people who would come home
#
or who would meet their old friend and complain about the kinds of things that they were having
#
to write and i remember sulabha deshpande one of our greatest actors who said to me once
#
what's to be done shanta i go there i leave my brains behind i get into whatever glossy sari
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they want me to wear i'm getting up in the morning from bed fully made up that's why
#
i leave my brains behind but it helps me pay the bills so yeah all these are post 90 things that
#
happened and there are many people who continue idealistically sunil shanbagh is one of them
#
i spoke of atul pete who is another and they find backers who will back their ideas but
#
those are people the kind that you spoke of that they're making money but they're trying to do
#
something which helps others you know fulfill their ideals and their ideas so that that is
#
happening but not everyone has the courage or the dynamism to stick it out and in theater at any
#
day to stick it out and just be themselves and do what they want to do you mentioned habib tanvir
#
and in this essay that you wrote on him you quoted him as pointing out that the hillside that swims
#
against the current is sweet yeah you know and maybe there's a sort of a lesson in there for
#
artists as well and elsewhere and i think jerry mentioned this in his introductory essay also in
#
engaged observer you spoke about how you were haunted by something that adipak shinde the
#
artist said to you and he'd basically fought with his family which was a farming family to come to
#
bombay and join jj school of art because he was idealistic about art he wanted to be an artist
#
but by the time he came out of it the fashions had changed and art had gone cerebral as you say
#
and there was the kind of figurative work that he was really good at no one wanted it anymore
#
and you speak of the lost and desperate look on his face as he kind of told you this and you know
#
and i bring up this incident but it seems that this is often an unspoken and unrealized struggle
#
that many artists may go through where they want to do one kind of work but practicality forces them
#
into another direction practicality forces sulbha deshpande to play a character who's
#
waking up in the morning with all her makeup already on right and and the trade-off is there
#
and sometimes you can acknowledge the trade-off and look at it in the face as sulbha ji seems
#
to have done when she said i leave my brain behind but many other people will rationalize it they'll
#
make one small compromise and they'll say it's okay this is also part of my art and they'll
#
make another one and they go on and on and so on and so forth and your contention is that it's
#
much more like this today and is there then a danger that while playing this game you can
#
you can lose that thing which brought you into it in the first place
#
i would suggest that that thing itself wasn't strong because if it was they at least they
#
wouldn't fool themselves they can fool the world and the world buys false art also and often loves
#
it so that that you can see and you're working in within that framework but you are saying to yourself
#
i this is good it helped me to buy a car it helped me to buy a flat but my heart isn't in it
#
if you're saying that yourself then you have to some extent solved this dilemma you are in some
#
respect being true to yourself to yourself but if that original impulse isn't strong then giving in
#
then giving in and fooling yourself along with fooling the world comes easily without a struggle
#
one of the delightful things i discovered about your career is that you actually acted in earth
#
satya you know which i'll link from the show notes for everyone to watch and that was a delight to
#
watch and it so happens that you know i wrote a shitty novel in 2009 which i'm kind of embarrassed
#
about but nevertheless when it came out govind nialani ji got in touch with me and said i want
#
to make a film with it and i actually tried to i remember argue with him that it can't be a film
#
because it was stuck three act structure he said no no i want to make a film with it so i did a
#
sort of a rough treatment note for him and a little bit of a started work on a little bit of
#
a script and he took it around and no one was interested and then he came back to me and he
#
said ki yaar you know yeh hindi film industry mein there is no hope i'm going to make this in
#
marathi and then he said something which i found very interesting he said ki the marathi film
#
industry today and this was in 2009 2010 he said the marathi film industry today has the same spirit
#
that i used to see in the hindi film industry of the late 70s and 80s and you know i wrote a
#
brief treatment with him with you know shifting the scene to puna and but i think i inadvertently
#
kind of hosted him because we just ran out of touch and it never happened and at one level of
#
course i felt incredibly sad that an artist of that caliber is not getting people to back him i
#
mean if i was a big industrialist with a lot of money i would just blindly you know hand him a
#
packet and say do whatever you want but that wasn't the case with him back then and but my
#
larger question to you is trying to understand what changed like part of it as you point out is
#
this desire to you know make more money lowest common denominator these big businesses and get
#
involved and then they cannot think beyond convention so it is you know what we see in
#
hollywood ki ek superhero film ban gaya to you make a franchise and you make 50 more and there's no
#
imagination there at all you follow some kind of formula without really understanding what the hell
#
is going on but at the same time i would imagine there are many more people with money there are
#
audiences have much more buying power which means even a niche audience can actually make
#
something profitable and to some extent we've had all kinds of independent cinema like masaan come
#
up during that time but i want you to give me a flavor of what govind ji was referring to
#
that that spirit that was there in the artistic world that we will try new things and there were
#
people who were backing new things and there were audiences who were sharing that excitement with
#
them and you have seen this across decades and across domains not just cinema but theater also
#
and all of that and it seems that it's lost so give me a flavor of that tell me what were those
#
times like um i think in the 60s for instance this entire movement by the way was a middle class
#
movement the viewers of uh the so-called middle of the road cinema which shan belegal was making
#
were middle class mostly and what's happened to the middle class since the 1990s has made
#
a huge difference so that's one point but going back to those times it was a time of discovering
#
as far as films are concerned discovering world cinema before that we saw certain amount of
#
hollywood we saw special showings of russian films of the time but far east middle east
#
none of these cinemas existed for us and it all burst open when this consciousness of world cinema
#
came in and we had a proliferation of film societies every ilaka had a film society and
#
one of the most well-run of them was used to hold its screenings at a place in Worli
#
ran odd laboratories it was called anandam and a lot of people who
#
uh belonged to the world of cinema indian cinema were members founders and i was introduced to it
#
as soon as i came back from england and by a wonderful character called gopal dutia and
#
it was utterly delightful to be part of that society at the same time because of the film
#
society movement there were theaters in bombay which began showing art films as they were called
#
so there was lotus cinema in Worli which is now lotus house or something like that
#
then there was chitra cinema where i met dube for the first time we were both there to see
#
uh one such film and akashwani theater used to hold screenings of offbeat films etc so there
#
there was a kind of hunger to see films that went beyond bollywood and hollywood and it was entirely
#
driven by the middle class so as soon as the middle class moved into better salaries and better homes
#
and all that goes with it they stopped being interested in in that kind of thing for a while
#
and then they came back like as you said masaan um everyone went gaga over bend it like beckham
#
which was this uh uh film made by gurinder chada who gurinder chada yes uh which uh yeah so again
#
then tastes changed a little and our multiplex places were supposed to cater to that kind of
#
different cinema but the time in between was dead in that sense producers didn't want to back anything
#
that was offbeat and i think quite rightly they suspected that there wasn't much of an audience
#
for it and i don't know i don't i don't have the figures but i think it's a hunch that in the 60s
#
and 70s there weren't those kinds of big stars who are charging the earth which totally changed
#
the economics of filmmaking and that naturally became the cause for things becoming
#
um formulaic that formula seems to bring in audiences who make films like that so it's a
#
whole lot of factors acting together that drove idealism of the kind govind speaks off completely
#
out yeah you know this is sort of this scenario is of kind of how the changing world affected the
#
arts and as you said that maybe it's a sign of hope that despite a you know barren period in the
#
middle there are films like masaan and chaitanya tamah named court and the cyperl and all of that and
#
uh you know uh so maybe there's a lot of hope there let's talk a little bit about sort of how
#
society is changing and how it has affected women for example uh you know we discussed the angle of
#
marriage and our women may no longer need to fit themselves in those frameworks to have satisfied
#
lives in 1998 in loksatya you wrote this great column where you took on pramod navalkar where
#
pramod navalkar had spoken of family values and he was saying that you know in 1970 there were only
#
1000 restaurants in mumbai today it is closer to 9887 and he was kind of saying that listen our
#
kitchens are now deserted and there is a problem women are not in the kitchen and it is a fountain
#
head of homely happiness i think those are the words he used and uh like one i would see this is
#
tremendously positive for women the fact that they are not in the kitchen anymore i mean i'd
#
actually written a column i got blasted for once arguing that rising divorce rates were fantastic
#
because it meant that women weren't trapped in bad marriages and i think this whole trend of ordering
#
out swiggy zamato everything is also fantastic you know it probably indicates that women are a
#
less willing to spend time in the kitchen and b they're working so even they don't have time
#
to cook so it's great and i'm just thinking about the ways in which lives of women have changed in
#
the sense of in many ways india is still deeply misogynistic and sexist and women are still
#
second-class citizens and there's so much data that attests to this but at the same time in many
#
ways in terms of having more choice in terms of being empowered in all kinds of different ways
#
like the technology they have around them to begin with uh you know things sort of have changed you
#
know so tell me a little bit about this because this is not something that a male guest will ever
#
have anything to say about because they won't even have noticed it but you know you've seen that
#
change through the decades and uh you know all around you so tell me a little bit about how
#
we've changed in that regard and i'm a little handicapped in this respect that i don't have
#
a view of the other world the other world comes to me as to everyone else through newspaper stories
#
and newspaper stories are always about women committing suicide because divorce is not an
#
option for them women who are battered in the house but domestic violence is a too edged thing
#
for them because if they complain they lose their protection both social and familial protection
#
and you can rape me you can beat me you can do anything but i will stay with you because
#
that's my identity and i was brought up by people uh parents who thought too much education was bad
#
for women i don't have any skills at all and you are my provider and therefore i shall stay with
#
you uh taking whatever shit you give me but equally i read news items about women who have
#
who have a profession who are doing well in their professions i remember a 30 or 32 year old woman
#
in delhi committing suicide and and uh one question is why you have everything
#
why could you not make an independent life for yourself and that is because uh she is not
#
independent she is still part of a family which is still part of a clan which is still part of a
#
part of a caste whatever and there's a lot of pressure that people bring to bear on individuals
#
and very few people have the courage they may have a profession they may be doing well
#
but they may lack the strength to stand up against all of this and say i shall live i shall not just
#
go away but they go away so women are changing to the extent that their families allow them to
#
them to some families allow them to leap as high as they can
#
but once they marry there's a whole lot of other factors which intrude even the parents say
#
that you're not us anymore and parents who from news items that i read parents who after their
#
daughter has been murdered will go to the police and say we knew that she was being tortured
#
in fact we brought her home and then we tried and counseled her husband and he said he would look
#
he would look after her and he would change and so we sent her back now who sends their child back
#
into a hell if that is happening which woman has the courage to just leave and be by herself
#
and in case she does there is the second very practical problem where does she go
#
do house owners like single women to stay in their will they rent a flat to a single woman
#
instantly which men come how long do they stay questions begin to rise
#
begin to rise you know there's a very fine poet Indira Sant who has written a poem called Ekti
#
and it's about this so so i don't know lives of women continue to be tough and perhaps those who
#
rise and many have risen and broken through the glass ceiling now i'm always excited when
#
i turn to the business pages and i see a whole lot of women's faces as CEOs and CFOs and all
#
the rest which you didn't do say even 12-15 years ago so that's good but and then there are women
#
there are women artists amazing artists who are doing fantastic work which is globally appreciated
#
so so yes there is that happening but i'd say not to the extent that one would hope
#
and expect there's a huge fight still to be fought i guess that old cliche comes to mind about
#
india inhabiting you know many centuries at the same time so there's 19th there's 20th there's
#
21st and even if sometimes we look around in our 21st century bubble and we say all right changes
#
so much changes happened the truth is the other indias are still kind of with us yes in your book
#
at one point you write about this gentleman who was boasting about his daughter and you write her
#
quote in the course of describing his daughter's qualifications the gentleman mentioned a quality
#
of a personality that he was proud of and which he thought would impress me too she is so modest
#
that she has never raised her eyes to look at a man he said poor unhappy creature i thought but
#
who was i to think that perhaps our happiness lay in making a father happy stop quote and at
#
this point you also talk about how you and your sister nirmal always raised their eyes and looked
#
at men and no issues there and it strikes me that number one i think more women today will
#
raise their eyes like that and look at men and one great advantage of the modern times is that
#
women have frames to see all of this by like a woman in the 50s and 60s who perhaps is not
#
from the same privileged background as you you are may never have heard of feminism there or
#
be able to make sense of it or be able to apply those frames to look at her life and see what is
#
adjusted what is unjust and whereas today women have those frames through which they can make
#
sense of what is going on around them and which can help them think more clearly and i for one
#
thing that that's you know but like you said change takes ages you know i did an episode
#
which shreya na bhattacharya called the loneliness of the indian woman she's written this great book
#
on desperately seeking sharok yeah where uh you know she's you know described in such beautiful
#
and vivid detail how so many women across india are kind of trapped and lonely and it just strikes
#
me that you know even if you're brought up in a way and even if you're trapped in social structures
#
like your your parental home and then your marital home and you cannot escape those even if all of
#
that is true at least if your gaze has changed you can bring your daughters and your sons up
#
differently you know there's this old saying about how paradigms change one funeral at a time
#
maybe that's what it takes maybe you know our generations when they pass away maybe some
#
it's a much better world out there at the end of it but already so many generations have passed
#
yeah we are slow and of course things are going to happen but then uh you're also looking at
#
countries where we assume all those things have happened and what is happening to women there
#
why was there a me too movement not too long ago and why had american women kept quiet for 20 years
#
and then found their voice to complain and how much hurt and humiliation they had carried in
#
their hearts all those years while they were living lives which to us looked liberated so yeah
#
yeah if it hasn't happened completely in the west it's going to take at least at least that much
#
time to happen here and i wonder if sometimes we can go backwards like roe versus wade was
#
upturned recently in the u.s you know so which which was almost mind-blowing to me that you know
#
because one assumes always that to paraphrase what martin luther king said about the arc of history
#
that one assumes that the arc of history is heading towards a better place there'll
#
be bumps on the way and all of that but we're heading towards a better place
#
but we look at today's politics we look at the polarized discourse around us and i sometimes
#
wonder if it really is but you of course have had a longer more considered view of this arc
#
of history you've seen in your lifetime what what's what how do you respond no no i uh
#
uh as far as we are concerned i have been a very close observer of what we have seen coming up now
#
and becoming powerful always being there under the surface 92 i realized how many middle-class
#
people friends and relatives were closet islamophobics because for them this was a
#
hugely exciting time now we could throw fireballs at those people and suddenly i realized that yes
#
that yes the crack now has become visible which was always there before so it's not as if it's
#
now happened it was waiting to happen and enough space was made for it engineered for it to surface
#
and take charge so and i think it's the same with germany there is a neo-nazi movement however much
#
they may deny their history this still continues we have to accept the fact that there are human
#
beings who have this particular way of thinking about life and about other human beings that
#
there is a question of us and them and it manifests in different ways at different times
#
otherwise the shocking things that surfaced during trump's time didn't suddenly mushroom
#
they were always there but what they require is validation from the powerful
#
when the people in power begin to talk the way these people have always thought
#
then they know that that thinking is legitimized and and it can be expressed through words and
#
through action you know i i spoke earlier about the different layers that peeled off before my
#
eyes as i began to see things i hadn't seen before and one of those is what you've just
#
alluded to in the sense that i grew up complacently in this elite english-speaking bubble where i
#
thought that how we are a liberal tolerant society secular all of that and and you know as one goes
#
on down the road you realize that hey no i am in the bubble you know i am the fringe in a sense
#
that our country has always had these fissures have been hidden and you use the term closet
#
islamophobes i remember in a column again i got trolled for using the term closet bigots
#
because my sense was that what social media did was it led to what the sociologists called
#
a preference cascade like timur kurran wrote this book public lies private truths in 99 where he
#
spoke about this a phenomenon called preference falsification that people feel a certain way but
#
they don't express it right so you might feel that a woman's place is in the kitchen but you
#
won't express it you'll be uh you know you'll show because you feel that you'll get condemned
#
too much but i think what social media did was that it showed a lot of closet bigots that there
#
were other closet bigots out there and in fact they were the majority and in fact everybody was
#
like that and it leads to a preference cascade where they can express their bigotry openly you
#
don't need dog whistles anymore it's not necessary you can shout it out in public and you know
#
express it openly and it is what it is and in a sense one could argue that indian society has
#
finally caught up with uh you know indian politics in the sense indian politics now represents what
#
indian politics in the sense indian politics now represents what our society always has been yes
#
but uh you know i like to believe i'm saying i like to believe that those people on twitter
#
and facebook or wherever else social media are still a minority they make a lot of noise
#
and therefore get noticed and because we are afraid of them we hear them louder in our ears
#
they become louder but there is that quiet majority and ultimately you have to think of
#
uh electoral statistics and you hold on to the fact that only 30 percent voted for this party
#
and the remaining 90 for a whole lot of other parties why why because they do not believe in
#
the ideals of this party and i hold on to that and i always feel that trolls are just that trolls
#
they're underwater creatures who know that they can do harm and are trying to do it but not really
#
getting very far because people are answering back and there's enough of noise coming from the
#
other side also you know in hindi when you approve of something someone says there is this term
#
and of course sugar is poison so i'm not going to wish that to you but i'll get you some ghee after
#
this recording is over no i've you know what you said is so resonant because i've on my show it's
#
almost a cliche how often i talk of the vocal minority and the silent majority though in the
#
vocal minority i don't include only bhaktsa i also include boks you know the extremes on both left
#
and right but i think the silent majority one would hope are more sensible they just want to
#
stay away from the polarized noise out there and perhaps there is hope there i want to talk about
#
something else another field in which you've been a pioneer which you know intimately and which has
#
also changed recently in worrying ways and that's journalism right and my first question to you is
#
that i guess when you first got into journalism it must have been with the excitement that i'm
#
i'll write i'll earn a salary i'll write about interesting things you know initially i think
#
you even ran a cookery column for right at the start and and then evolved from there to the
#
extent that you were you know the arts editor at the times of india in the late 80s you gave a start
#
to various journalists like ranjith hoskote arundhati suramanian jerry pintu all of these people are
#
kind of you know came up in that time and there was a that beef flourishing period for the next
#
few years from there where you know i remember the indian post and independent and all of that
#
and you had so much arts coverage and it was as a young man at that time reading those it was so
#
delightful to you know have all that there and all that has suddenly kind of changed and in the sense
#
that you know the term godi media of course is popular as media that is sold out and there are
#
sort of two ways of looking at it both positive and negative and the negative way is that if you
#
look at the power of the state today and it's always been much too powerful but if you but
#
you know today if you're a mainstream media house you have too much to lose you don't just run a
#
newspaper you've also got a chemical factory there can be an income tax rate there so you have no
#
option but to toe the line and you know even at the time of indira gandhi there is that famous
#
quote about how the press was asked to bend and they chose to crawl you know and we see a similar
#
thing happening there and that's a negative part of it but the positive side of it is also that
#
the tools of production are in everybody's hands you know we do have independent people like alt
#
news and news minute and scroll and so on who are still kind of fighting the good fight and there
#
is still scope for that but there is a larger question that kind of bothers me which is that
#
what is the central dharma of journalism in a sense like i can look at medicine and say that
#
a doctor's dharma is to help his patients in whatever way he can you know and so on but for
#
a journalism it seems that at one hand is that cold business of supply and demand that people want
#
to receive a particular kind of news and your job is to supply to that demand and on the other side
#
there is a view that no it is a higher calling you have you know pursuit of truth has a value
#
of its own and that is what you're pursuing and how you make that work financially is up to you but
#
truth is at the heart of it and it matters and even there they can then be that separate question
#
of what do i mean by truth because a lot of the headlines that you will see on the news sites are
#
truthful you know janvi kapoor went to the spa today it is truthful but is it newsworthy you know
#
one of my favorite episodes i've done recently is with the journalist samat bansal who talks about
#
the difference between what is newsworthy and what is truthful you know the difference between
#
what is journalism and what is content you know so what are you know how did so really a two-part
#
question and one part is that where did you get your values from in a sense of what constitutes
#
good journalism what was that value where did you get it from and what was it and the second part is
#
that how have you seen it changing today because we can say bad things we can say good things it's
#
it's all a mess and in addition to that there is a fact that there is the mainstream has completely
#
collapsed there is no consensus on the truth everywhere there are narrative battles so you know
#
what were the values of journalism which you imbibed to start with and what was it like then
#
and how has that changed today yeah well the straight answer to the first part is
#
of course i imbibed them for my father but it was the general value it wasn't his personally
#
and it stems from the press being called the fourth column of democracy there was a reason
#
why it was called that and today i think the least that the press can do is to disclaim that
#
that description of itself because it is no longer that if for instance democracy is to present a
#
balanced analysis and to take into consideration every important event that is happening in the
#
country how can you say that a paper is being democratic by front paging second paging third
#
paging and edit paging one set of people and sort of perhaps giving a couple of small columns to
#
something called the Bharat Jodo Yatra which is a huge thing what's happening if that is not
#
selling out what is selling out whatever your reasons for selling out and and the finger now
#
has to be pointed at the center because that is where all the pressure is coming from
#
there are black lists prepared by the central government of journalists who are not on their
#
side and those black lists are presented to editors and they're told clearly that we don't
#
like this chap you don't like this woman so control them please and they controlled a friend of mine
#
who has written a column for the last 20 years is suddenly told that her column will be spiked
#
if two names appear those two names are not to appear in the column this is a directive that
#
comes from the editor and because the editor has received such a directive from this high power
#
this high power so fine we understand we read the paper and take everything with a pinch of salt
#
I turn over the many of the first pages because they all have the same picture on them and the
#
same claims being made for the person in the picture so it's like one capsule one person
#
capsule that's flying around and that's not news for me and no journalist who is working
#
will say yes we are giving news they know what they're doing some of them are helpless
#
some of them leave and go to these independent channels some of them stick on and because many
#
of them are of that opinion and at last the editor isn't saying you have to be balanced
#
the editor is saying be unbalanced we want this imbalance because this is what gets us
#
this is what gets us ads this is what stops raids from happening so it's okay it's the reality
#
and we accept it but I will say that whereas this isn't called an emergency the two years
#
when it was called that there was still a newspaper which thought it could stick its neck out and
#
carry a blank page as a front page let's see a single newspaper do that today so it is a huge and
#
consistently running emergency so I had mentioned this in my episode with Samarth but I'll mention
#
it here again me and Akar Patel were both columnists for a major national newspaper we used to write on
#
Sunday and at one point I remember and like after demonetization I wrote various articles
#
there against demonetization and they carried it no complaints I would keep writing against
#
Mr Modi all the time and they carried it and then at one point in early 2020 or late 2019 I had
#
written a piece critical of the regime and I got a call from the editor of that page and she was
#
almost 20 years and she said that Amit I'm calling you because you know they would send a playback
#
of the text because I knew I didn't like changes so it would have to go through me first so she
#
said before I send the playback I thought I should call you because there is one sentence I've just
#
been forced to cut because our editor got her boss the big big editor obviously got a message from
#
people somewhere saying that you you know you that you better chill out these these guys are
#
too critical of us and and I think Akar and me were you know picked out for a special mention
#
which I guess is an honor and she said that I have to cut this line out I don't have a choice
#
and I'm really sorry and I'm I don't want to do this either but I'm telling you so you can do
#
you can do whatever you want so so I thought about what I should do and one the rest of the
#
column was also critical that one line didn't actually make so much of a difference and part
#
of my reasoning was that listen if I walk away from the space you know someone close to the
#
regime might come there so why give it up just keep fighting as long as you can and I did write
#
a couple more columns in fact the the ministry of Ayush sent an official complaint against me
#
because I wrote a column about the nonsense they do and how it should be abolished with their so
#
called alternative medicine and eventually I stopped writing for them because I decided I
#
will never write for any platform again you know and I never officially broke off this thing and
#
neither did they but Akar recently told me that he was let go by them which I guess would have
#
happened to me sooner or later but the point is Akar is still writing in a bunch of places I am
#
still doing my thing you know I I did an episode with Tista Sattelvad when she came out from jail
#
and a friend of mine told me that listen get two-factor authentication because the IT cell
#
will try to hack you and all and nothing really happened I did get two-factor authentication on
#
all my emails and everything but nothing really happened so I think you know technology has at
#
least empowered us that those of us who want to dissent in our own ways can do so yes yes it is
#
and it's a huge positive and in fact last year I wrote three monologues I just called them monologues
#
about truth and justice and in that the third monologue is about a very idealistic journalist
#
who enters a big newspaper and sees all the nonsense that's going on and she's moved from
#
management into journalism so it's a real idealistic kind of person and she is in despair
#
and then she decides to do exactly what you decided to do she joins or she says she can join
#
an independent news site because she realizes that you know there's a kind of fixed idea
#
even today that print journalism is the real thing and when you're young that's where you want to be
#
and she sees the falseness of it and chooses to move out into the website beautiful I must read
#
these monologues let's move from the broader social context to the more personal one and you
#
know one of the themes I mean the central structure of your autobiography in a sense was
#
our bodies and one of your themes was about you know how we don't pay enough attention to the
#
body at one point you write mentioning Tolstoy you write all those who ask why me suffer from
#
the delusion that they are endowed with specially blessed bodies unlike other peoples Tolstoy writes
#
in the death of Ivan Ilyich the and now you're quoting him the mad death of a near acquaintance
#
aroused as usual in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that it is he who is dead
#
and not I stop code and I often call this the illusion of immortality that all of us behave as
#
if we will live forever and I you know I think earlier when we were having dinner I told you at
#
my you know having used a continuous glucose monitor to monitor what was in my happening to
#
my blood sugar yes and which led me to changing my behavior and my diet and thankfully I have
#
reversed type two diabetes and myself at least yeah and that also got me to thinking that listen
#
I'm 48 and never before in my life have I paid attention to my body I pride myself as someone
#
who is curious I want to know about the world I want to know about this and that and x and y but
#
I'm never looking inward at either my body or the person that I am and I just love the powerful
#
detailed way in which you've done that in your book like in another space you wrote the body is
#
the ultimate truth and the body is the ultimate truth you can falsify your thoughts your feelings
#
your knowledge but your body however surgically falsified as appearance maybe today is still
#
prone to disease stop code so take me a bit about this journey of you know looking at your body in
#
such a dispassionate and objective way which I imagine is fighting that human instinct all of us
#
have of kind of you know it's just natural to be in denial of what's going on here yeah I think
#
not believing in God has something to do with it because all this idea of being blessed by the
#
grace of God helps you to believe that you are that special person and then there are all these
#
ideas of karma and how you are paying for past sins and and but if at 80 you you're still okay
#
then obviously you are specially blessed by God if you don't have that imaginary figure
#
on whom to sort of hang all your fears and all your hopes then left yourself you become a realist
#
don't you you you face up to the fact you you realize that in case you want to change your dark
#
skin you cannot because you've read the story about the crow and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed
#
and still remain black and you've learned your lesson very early on that this cannot be changed
#
then many of my friends regularly applied turmeric to their faces because that was supposed to
#
make them fair I didn't I mean I was living in an environment where all of this was being practiced
#
but I didn't feel the need I was fine as I was so then I think the whole hippie movement
#
which made me think of nudity and what is nudity and what why why do we cover ourselves up and
#
what are we ashamed of are we ashamed or is it something else and that's when I lost my
#
if I had any shame at all about my body I lost it totally and I remember that it was shocking
#
to this company doctor I've talked about him in my book and the first time I went to him and
#
he said Ms. Gokhale please undress and I could of course have questioned him why that was necessary
#
but I knew exactly why it was necessary for him he wanted to look at me undressed and I said yeah
#
and I said yeah sure call your nurse in and can you step out please so he hadn't you know first
#
of all for a woman to see through secondly for her to insist on her right to have a female around
#
and to to send him out of his own clinic I could see the shock on his face because what he normally
#
expected was the woman would blush and get embarrassed and say doctor please why you know
#
you know and all of that would give him a great deal of pleasure because causing a woman to blush
#
means that you have transmitted the ideas in your head and she has received them
#
and is responding and it's a an assertion of your power yes and it's totally sick
#
so when I said this the nurse came in and she had a twinkle in her eyes and I said to her you know
#
I've come to him for something that's gone in my eye do I need to undress she said of course not
#
just sit there and I sat in the chair she went and told the doctor she has something in her eye
#
in her eye doctor so I told her there's no need to undress but I it really I simply can see through
#
what a man is actually asking for and I have to play a game and I think I've gotten very good
#
at playing these games so body has in that sense been my greatest companion my greatest friend
#
and whenever I say to people I'm listening to my body I don't think I want to eat anymore
#
and they think it's some kind of new age stuff which it isn't it's just realistic I know when
#
I say I'm listening to my body I know my body and I have taken I think I made an effort to
#
get acquainted with it in the 70s there was this feminist initiative to go out to women's groups
#
and acquaint them with their own bodies with pictures and charts and I know all these for
#
instance I remember a picture of a group of Rajasthani women with their hands across their
#
mouths giggling away looking at these pictures of themselves this is who you are so the feminist
#
thing also kicks in in the way that you look at your body so there's another great passage where
#
you've written about your materialism as it were in the context of quote I have inherited my
#
materialism from father along with much else including my love for literature and the arts
#
for me too the human body when alive houses all the intangibles that spell what is human emotions
#
desires passions aspirations ideas creativity but once it dies they die with me there is no such
#
thing as a soul this is not a depressing thought for me it is how it is but the other is not a
#
thought one can simply toss off either many fine minds have argued in favor of the soul and his
#
continued existence after death I have tested my beliefs against theirs and found that at some
#
stage the word faith creeps into the argument it is a concept of faith that I have a quarrel with
#
faith does not strike me as a given without which you cannot live faith is a choice the one who
#
needs it lives by it and for it the one who doesn't gets by pretty well without there is no reason why
#
you cannot live in and for the here and now in the best way you know and be prepared to done with it
#
once life ends stop quote and in many ways this is like I'm I'm also an atheist and rationalist
#
and all of those things and this is also a dilemma that I face that I cannot find false
#
certainties very often that you know one has to face up to the fact that when someone goes they
#
are gone that when that a time will come when I myself will be gone and you know and and and
#
and then you begin to question that you know where is the meaning in the things that you do
#
and of course my I'm not nihilistic in that sense my way of thinking about the world is you take
#
you take joy in all the little things that you find around you and you enjoy the work for its
#
own sake and so on and so forth but how is it sort of you know have there been times where you have
#
wished that you weren't this way that you could actually believe or have there been times where
#
you look around you and you see that everyone else is so delusional and then you wonder if maybe in
#
a way you've just chosen a separate kind of delusion I mean how does you know you've also
#
had that cancer scare where you had cancer you had chemo surgery radiation all of that
#
you know what did you tell yourself in those times um this this thought was tested when my
#
father died and it was the one time when somewhere the thought came I wish I believed in God because
#
at this point of time I would have liked to find solace in saying to God please save him
#
but no I didn't feel that need and because one of the things that my father always said
#
there's no need of course he didn't ever expect to die young dying young he was only 56 and dying
#
when your time has come are two different things you certainly I could understand his saying
#
you know if you've lived a full life and you die is a natural thing to happen and it's a good thing
#
to happen because beyond there can be suffering and you've escaped that so it's a source of happiness
#
actually but it didn't apply to my father dying at 56 and at that moment I did not cry it came later
#
but I also didn't feel the need to pray for his life so clearly I was totally convinced
#
and I lived my belief it wasn't something I had thought out and it stayed at mind level
#
and didn't affect the rest of me indeed that's how I have been totally and do you think and I'm
#
thinking a lot here that it's easier for an atheist to feel genuine compassion and empathy
#
because you just recognize that an intellectual level that all of us are in the same kind of mess
#
that you know we are in ourselves and we are in less of a rush for death than we are in
#
and we are in less of a rush for judgment as religious people can often be whether their
#
religion is what we would call a religion or an ideology or whatever but once you realize that
#
the world is messy and we are frail and weak and bound to go at some point you stop judging other
#
people you you you know and therefore that from the compassion and empathy that then arises
#
that that's where real morality comes from and not from received strictures so to say
#
I from my experience I wouldn't generalize in that way because I think atheists want to
#
impose their non-belief as much on believers as the other way around some atheists I mean not you
#
and me yes and I know that my help domestic help who is single and whose nephews stayed with her
#
till two years ago and totally dedicated to her job with us always came on time and one day I got
#
a call from her and she was weeping and saying I want to come I want to bring my nephews with me
#
today can I I said of course you can turned out that one of the nephews was an atheist and at that
#
point of time the woman had turned to God and I think she was influenced by a friend of hers
#
and perhaps being single not having children it filled some kind of a void in her and and this
#
and this man decided she had gone mad and he said to me he sat across from me and said you know
#
you will understand because you care for her so much she's gone after God now so I said no
#
no I don't get your point she she's earning she's feeding herself is she dependent on you what kind
#
of power do you have over her and her beliefs and thoughts you don't and then she told me she said
#
that he slapped me oh my god and then I got really upset I said how dare you you just get out of my
#
house then her the rest of her family came we had a conference it was decided that these people will
#
no longer stay with her and they were packed off to the village but I am I mean an entire ideology
#
I mean is based on telling people they ought not to believe in God that religion is the opium of
#
masses that you will not go to church I mean I despise militant militants of any kind so militant
#
atheists obviously but I've always found them to be the minority I mean most of my friends today
#
are perhaps atheists but we don't talk about it and it's not a big deal but I can totally understand
#
you know what you're saying and maybe it's just my sort of being in a bubble again that I don't see
#
many of these this kind of militancy and you know a different kind of person and they can be fascists
#
fascists and communists yeah yeah and I always say that between non-vegetarians and vegetarians
#
both sides are fascist well Hitler was a vegetarian and no fascist about their choice of diet yeah I
#
mean if you're imposing your choice it's bad no matter what the choice is if you're not if you're
#
not if you're just living and let live then you know by default that's how by not allowing non-vegetarian
#
restaurants to function in your area that's an imposition right it is that is fascist yes
#
but if you just say I'll eat what I want you eat what you want that's you that's how that few do
#
that because it's like all believers that those who do not believe appear to them as a threat to
#
their belief how dare you know I believe how dare you not you know and and then a whole lot of
#
reasoning from the vegetarian side of how terrible how dreadful it is to eat meat and they become
#
highly moralistic about it and I had a friend whose husband would not touch vegetable and when
#
vegetarian food was made for him for me he would look down his nose and say
#
Yes it's very sad that this is the world that we are in and no one is respecting other people's autonomy
#
wonderful so you know I've you've spent a lot of time with me and I'm so grateful for that I'll
#
I'll let you go with a couple of questions and none of them will be about theater because I want
#
to talk about that at length with you you've written this magisterial history of Marathi theater
#
perhaps we'll leave it for some other day because that's another five hour conversation at least
#
but just to kind of let you go now a couple of final questions my penultimate question is
#
what are you working on these days what makes you excited there are two two things right now
#
I have proposed to my publisher that we bring out a set of novellas and some of the best novellas
#
written in Marathi and I'm translating three Jerry is translating two so it'll be a package of five
#
that's one thing and the other which is an indulgence I call it because I don't mean to
#
publish it is this what I call a ramble through my life in books right from the start to my present
#
to my present loves and obsessions and within that there will be two separate sections
#
examining the books that have meant the most to me so one section will be the three big novels
#
and I've been reading and studying and marking and making notes and thinking so it's a and all
#
these three novels happen to have been written in the same period of time but in totally different
#
different spaces and cultures and those the differences in culture are reflected very
#
strongly in each of them so it's a it'll be a study of them as novels as reflective of their
#
cultures and and their place as classics and why so that's one section and another section devoted
#
to brother's Karamazov by itself so these will be two solid sections and the rest will be about
#
reading the pleasures of reading the pleasures of buying books of fresh books with their smells
#
and secondhand books with their little jottings and notings in the margins all of that just a
#
magic of buying books so it's I don't know it's I've written about 30 000 words so far and I think
#
there's still at least 50 000 to go. I love the smell of old books so the other day I picked up
#
my Kindle and it had a lot of old books and I couldn't smell anything of them. Yes, yes, yes,
#
yes. Why aren't you going to publish these? I would love to read these please publish them.
#
No there again I have this constant feeling that who's interested. That's a imposter syndrome all
#
over again come on I'm interested you should publish it for me but yeah and I'm sure many of
#
my listeners are interested what are you saying? No truly I mean yeah well let I haven't closed all
#
doors but I like to begin perhaps by saying that I have to do this. I'm doing it for myself
#
and if at the end it looks as if it has assumed the form of some kind of publishable book
#
then I might but to tell you the truth I am very scared now of publishing
#
because you think that you've written and that's it but now it isn't it. A, you have to go through
#
those proofs and if there's one thing I dislike doing is reading what I have written
#
and the other even more painful thing is being part of the publicity. Only yesterday I was
#
called from someone who's publishing a huge book of compilation of long essays about various aspects
#
of the country over the last 75 years and the request was for me to allow them to shoot me
#
talking about the idea of the book which wasn't mine so those who mooted this idea should be
#
talking about it and talking about my contribution and I said to her I can't bear talking about what
#
I've written others should talk about it and I really thought afterwards that if they gave me
#
five essays from the book I'd talk about them and someone else could talk about my essay but it is
#
now all about self-promotion and that's the painful part now of publishing. I'd react to that by
#
saying I mean one of course I'm fact that you're writing it because you want to write it and for
#
nothing else is such a beautiful reason and I think that's why all artists do the work that
#
they do to begin with that's your general impulse but I would also point out that the whole purpose
#
of a writer giving birth to a son is so that the son can do the proofs so you should outsource the
#
proofs to Girish and as far as the publicity is concerned let me assure you that even most
#
publishers know that most publicity is sticking boxes nothing works in India except one thing
#
which is if the author comes on my show and we can sort that out as well so you just write it and if
#
any publishers are listening to this kindly that you know contact Shanta ji and tell her chill don't
#
worry we won't harass you with anything just give us what you have written and about the I'm excited
#
about the translation project also because you know one there's this one extract where in in
#
one of your books where you talk about Susan Sontag and how she talks about the importance
#
of translating not just to sort of not just to translate a book which may be worth reading but
#
to enlarge the readership of a book that was not just worth reading but worth rereading Stockholm
#
yes yes and you know you use the phrase evangelical incentive she uses she uses the phrase evangelical
#
incentive and you quote it yes and this was behind your translating Smriti Chitray as well
#
as you absolutely that's right and yeah it's a lovely phrase it's a lovely phrase and I you know
#
anyone listening to this who's interested in translating I hope you get inspired by this
#
because there's really higher purpose in all of this not just you know not just because you like
#
language or you like books but it's just so beautiful so my final question to you and it's
#
a question that I ask all my guests and in your case you mentioned yesterday that you have already
#
fulfilled this function for a young man you met at a play and I always ask my guests to recommend
#
books or music or films or plays in your case any works of art which you just love you know which
#
you love so much that you want to shout out to the world that read this or see this you know you want
#
to shout in a soap box and allow those works to make others happy the way they made you happy
#
yeah well as I said earlier and during our break my present love and obsession is Julian Vance
#
and I want the world to read him I think the world is already reading him these people get
#
translated the minute they're published in 40 languages which is usually the number that is
#
quoted I don't know which those 40 languages is one of them no it isn't I'd love to translate
#
Julian Vance oh my god if I would love to but there are all sorts of financial problems there
#
and we can't afford buying rights and stuff like that I don't think any Marathi publisher would
#
stretch himself to that so all that is in my mind in fact even a room of one's own is crying for
#
translation but I keep thinking that somehow it's like rubbing salt into wounds because
#
80% people in our country are living in two-room tenements and here I am talking about the luxury
#
for room of one's own for one woman and 500 pounds which is still so much in India yes
#
so and that's cancelled out that project but yeah Julian Vance people what are the recommendations
#
what books have changed the way you looked at the world or just made you dance with joy because you
#
love them so much what books have done that you know it's sad that over these not sad very happy
#
for me that the last three years I'm really devoted to reading so I can't produce anything
#
new that might excite people even among the classics all the classics which I love people
#
must read people must read some hardy you know far from the madding crowd has such a brilliant
#
opening it is so cinematic you can't imagine and there are such riches there so going back
#
to the classics you're going back to a time of leisure when people were thinking and writing
#
and taking their time and rewriting no pressures on them and that shows in the writing and it
#
I think I mean I'm hugely interested in how history impacts present lives also so to say
#
that that belongs to a certain era is to deny the continuity of human thought and emotion
#
and I think people would benefit by connecting back to how people were how they thought and to
#
find good heavens we are there's so much in common and this is how they dealt with it I wonder if
#
I can take over some of those things and deal with my problems that way it's possible so you know
#
not to put them in a box marked old hat it's not it's very relevant and I would love people to
#
go back to these amazing works of literature speaking of old hat do you have the hat you
#
wore in school you had to wear hats unfortunately not because if I'm not mistaken because we were
#
always so tight for money maybe it went back to Daniel Neal's the shop is sold second hand
#
in the first place and perhaps they sold third hand and fourth hand also and it was always good
#
to have at least a few shillings back on what we had put in so no hats no coats
#
somewhere in England there is a hat with your name on it but what about films or music
#
films this is your moment to be militant and to force your taste on people this is this is a time
#
you're calling upon me to do something which is totally against my grain but I'm asking for an act
#
of generosity when we share what makes you happy with us asking for an act of memory
#
and for me that's dangerous ground as you have noticed you have two memoirs on your website and
#
one memoir published as a book you are good at memory and no because I had material beside me
#
to refer to and I'm really quite concerned about this because nowadays I find myself
#
I find myself checking back on spellings of words also and on a lot of facts which
#
I put down and then I have doubts about so my memory is totally so I'll tell you what I won't
#
push you now but over time if you send me a list of books films music which you really love I'll
#
put it in the show notes oh music classical music I can name the people that people should
#
and people should hear Venkatesh Kumar brilliant and you've your essay on Venkatesh Kumar is also
#
in your book yes I would I would go to I won't say the ends of the earth but certainly the
#
ends of Bombay to hear these people you have come all the way from Dadar to Andheri which is
#
practically like going to the end of Bombay for an old school person like you for the recording
#
of this episode so Shantaji thank you so much it's been a great honor and a privilege chatting with
#
I've enjoyed it too thank you if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show
#
notes there are plenty of rabbit holes for you to enjoy Shanta is not on social media but you
#
can follow me on twitter at Amit Verma AMI TV ARMA you can browse past episodes of the scene
#
and the unseen at scene unseen dot 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
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over to scene unseen dot in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this
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podcast alive and kicking thank you
