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While researching the subject of today's episode, Jerry Pinto, I came across something
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Jerry once said when he was asked how to get over a writer's block.
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He cited Nizam Ezekiel's advice, which was to take a blank sheet of paper and write on
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And the rest would come from there.
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And indeed, when I think about my motivations for the episodes I do, all my sentences begin
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I want to know more about this subject.
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I want to understand the world.
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I want to know more about this person.
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I want to know how she was shaped.
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I want to know why I want what I want.
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And I always find that when I read about others or listen to their stories, they'll often
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But as a reader, I end with I.
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All my favorite books, films, music, I love them because they speak to me and sometimes
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they even reveal myself to me.
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That's why good art is always personal.
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That's why the lives of others resonate so much when we think about our own lives.
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That's why writing matters and storytelling matters.
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Without them, we could be alone in this world.
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Welcome to The Seen 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 Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Jerry Pinto, a prolific journalist, a novelist, a poet, a writer of
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children's books, a great translator, an editor of anthologies, and a teacher of journalism
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And before all of this, Jerry made his living as a math tutor for many years.
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The Big Whom, is one of the finest novels I've ever read, period.
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And it moved so many readers with this depiction of what mental illness can do to a family.
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Jerry drew from his own experiences growing up with his mother and the response to the
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book was so powerful that he later edited another book, The Book of Light, which pulls
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together stories from others about the mental illnesses they encountered.
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We don't speak about mental health enough in this country, so this is an important book
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and an important conversation.
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One of my most popular episodes, The Loneliness of the Indian Man, with Nikhil Taneja, also
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deals with this subject, so check that out if you haven't already, I'll link it from
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Now, like Shanta Gokhale a few weeks ago, Jerry was kind enough to record this episode
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at my home studio over two days.
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There was a mild comedy of errors on day one when we gave him a vegetarian lunch and he
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assumed I must be vegetarian, as you'll hear in the episode, but on day two I reverted
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to type and we shared agartala pork stew and kerala beef chilli and all was well with the
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We've spoken about so much in this episode that I can't quite put a label on it.
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Like my last 8 hour episode, Shanta Gokhale, it covers multitudes and it holds possibilities
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for more conversations, more writing, and certainly for me more thinking about stuff,
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because there's so much in what Jerry spoke about that I need to listen to again and process
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You should also go out and pick up as much of Jerry's work as you can.
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Emin the Big Home and The Education of Yuri are marvellous novels.
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I loved reading his crime thriller Murder in Mahim.
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His translations will open your eyes to new worlds and most inspiringly, he started vlogging
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about writing on Instagram.
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All these links will be in the show notes, but before we begin, let's take a quick commercial
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all face
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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.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
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ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Jerry, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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I've so enjoyed listening to the Shanta Gokhale episode that you did.
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I'm looking forward to exploring others as well.
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And honestly, you know, before I recorded with her, like I've been thinking of inviting
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both you and her for a long time.
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And the reason I hesitated was actually the same, that I just felt intimidated by your
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And I felt that I have to get myself up to a certain standard to be able to have these
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And I know you're just going to be modest now, but we'll leave that aside.
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Now while, you know, reading all of your work, and there is so much of it and so varied and
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all that, but I'm going to start by quoting you from something you wrote at the start
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of an interview with Adil Jussawalla, where you said, quote, an interview is an artificial
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conversation between two people.
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It is shaped in three tenses, the future expected and the present imperative and the past perfected.
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So it is a revenant with more than the usual freight of inequity and mischance.
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Things get even more complicated when you have known someone for nearly 30 years and
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are trying for cogencies, top code.
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And the advantage I have is I haven't known you for 30 years.
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I don't know you at all in a sense, right?
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I just know all of you.
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So I feel that I have a natural advantage there that I can just, instead of thinking
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about what part of you I want to present, I can just follow my natural curiosity because
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I do want to know more about you.
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So tell me about your childhood.
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Like Mahim is such, of course, such a big part of all your work and even your social
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media handles and all of that.
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So tell me about your childhood, where did you grow up, what were those early years like?
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So I grew up in Mahim, which is the northernmost tip of the island of Bombay.
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You go a little further and you fall into the Mahim Creek and then if you manage to
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drag yourself out on the other side, you are in Bandra, which is hugely fashionable now.
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But none of this applied when I was a child.
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In fact, when I went to college, I remember I said to a young woman, I said, I live in
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Mahim and she said, reckless, I didn't know what that was, but I think it was something
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So Mahim was kind of like a little strange always.
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It seemed to be neither here nor there.
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And when I was growing up, I wanted to escape it because it seemed very small.
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I'll give you an example.
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I was eight years old, I think, and I went to look.
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And you know, the week in the buildings around our area, many of them had ground level tanks
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And from time to time, these tanks would be open and we were often, you know, schoolboys
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often tell each other stories.
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So there was supposed to be a shark in one of the tanks and another tank had a monster.
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So I went to peek in and see if this shark was there.
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And by the time I got home 20 minutes later, someone had told, rung up my father and said,
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what is your son doing?
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He was peering into that tank, if he fell in and drowned, what would you do?
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My father didn't take this terribly seriously, but I certainly felt like there were eyes
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It's like everybody seemed to know your business.
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Everybody seemed to know what you were doing.
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So as soon as I finished school, which was Victoria High School in Mahim, many of the
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Christian boys went off to St. Xavier's College.
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Many of those who did really well went to Rupert L College, which was in my Dadar, just
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on the fringes of Mahim.
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I chose to go as far as possible without falling into sea on the southern side.
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So I got into Elphinstone College, which was, I think because I went to school early, I
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think the priests were kind, my mother was mentally unwell.
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So it was thought that maybe it would be better for me to just go to school as early as possible.
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So I think I began school at the age of around three and a half.
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And so I finished my 10th standard at the age of 14 and went to college at 14 and a
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So I was vastly ill-equipped for college either.
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But of course, I never thought so.
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I don't think the young ever think they are ill-equipped for anything.
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And that is in some ways a kind of protective cocoon, which serves for a while until it's
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terribly punctured and you end up very bruised, but that's part of growing up as well.
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I think we had a school which was important to me in the sense that it was very bare bones.
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So there was junior school, there was a graveyard, and there were senior schools.
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The graveyard was in between, which led to all kinds of teachers saying things like one
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slap fall flat straight in the graveyard on your back and other such nonsense rhymes which
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There was no library in the school.
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We had in each class room there would be a metal cupboard and the last shelf of the metal
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cupboard had about 30 to 40 books, which I would read in the first one and a half month.
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Other reading around that was supplemented by the circulating libraries that we had.
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So we had Victoria Circulating Library, which is still standing, we had Koshish Circulating
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Library, which did great binding, we had Prabhat Circulating Library, we had three or four
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circulating libraries like that to which we went and where we got our supply of Hardy
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Boys and Gerald Darrell and War Comics and Archie Asterix, all the things that you were
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not supposed to be reading.
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But most of the boys in my class did not read.
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They were first generation learners.
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The principal who had founded the school, Monseigneur Ligery, his name was, had a fundamental
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idea which he expounded once and he said, if you take a child from a family that is
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already well educated, you have got a rough diamond and your job is only to polish the
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But if you take a child from a first generation family, you are getting mud and you make bricks
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and bricks build society much more than diamonds do.
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So I went to school with the Gurkha's son, I went to school with the tomato seller's
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We went to the beach and often when we were playing on the beach, one of our friends would
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be helping at the Vailwala's stall because he was there.
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And there were middle class boys, the daughters and the sons of doctors and lawyers and engineers
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and even a couple of industrialists, a poplay boy was there, studied there too.
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But I think the wisdom of crowds was what really got to us because we heard all kinds
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There was Konkani, there was Marathi, there was Hindi, there was Gujarati, there was Marwadi,
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a little Tamil spoken very reluctantly by the Tamil boys because they would be mocked
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as Andagundu and things like that, we were ruthless.
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The notion of political correctness was so far in the future that we thought nothing
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of calling people Langda, Kaliya, Gudu, all kinds of words that were pejorative and hurtful
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But that was how we grew up.
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So I remember the great excitement was the possibility that someone from the Christian
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community would die in April because if they died in April, the grave would have to be
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Now, normally what they did was when someone died, they dig the grave as soon as the students
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But if you died in April, rot tends to set in fast in the heat.
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So the grave had to be dug up during the day and we waited for the coffin to come out.
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We waited because the grave had to be recycled like everything else in a space-strapped island.
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We waited for the coffin to come up because we wanted to see the skull and we wanted to
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But somehow we never managed, somehow they managed to operate so that we missed that
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So they recycle the coffins in the body?
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In every cemetery, you will have what are called permanent graves, which are about like
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And those are the very, very elite people, you know, Dr. Ernest Borges has a permanent
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Dom Marais has a permanent grave.
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It's that level of society.
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For the rest, you get a two-year period.
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And after two years, they'll ring you up and they'll say, okay, it's time, we'll be digging
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up your daddy or your mummy or whoever it is now.
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And if you want, you can have a niche in the courtyard, in the wall of the graveyard where
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the long bones and the skull goes, so that all the walls of the graveyard are actually
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just mine houses, they're bone houses, the people are stacked.
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My school recently at Parish Church had a moment when one of the walls dissolved.
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So all the bones got mixed up and there was much confusion and lamenting about that.
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But it's been restored and all the bones have been put back.
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In a way, we are all living amid our ancestors.
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So you know, even today, when I kind of look around and it seems that every suburb of Bombay
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is just completely different from every other, obviously the world evolved, but Andheri,
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Bandra, Mahim, whatever, we've got images in our heads and you know, they're all different,
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but it must have been that distance must have been so much greater in your time.
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Like in this time, the world has shrunk so much.
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When we were born, we were born in communities of circumstance.
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We were limited by the people around us and we were limited by whatever scraps of literature
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or music or whatever we could get.
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You know, that's pretty much what it was.
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Whereas today you have the entire globe and you know, it's just changed dramatically.
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And I think the distance between people has also kind of changed a bit, that a kid in
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Mahim can aspire to the same thing as a kid in Colaba and you know, that distance is also.
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Give me a picture of what it was in your time.
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Like what is your world until the point that you go to college in Elphinstone and you kind
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What is that world like and how big of a move was it for you to just go to college in Elphinstone
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Like the very evocative parts of your book about Yuri, which I loved so much, are those
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early parts where he is so insecure in who he is and this place he's going to where everyone
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is wearing t-shirts and jeans and he's never worn a t-shirt in his life and he's aspiring
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He's shy about his underwear, which is a langot and so on and so forth.
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And that's so evocative because you know, those worlds are further apart.
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So give me a sense of that.
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I think Mahim was very, my overriding memories of Mahim are strangely enough natural.
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For instance, I remember at least three wells into which we would spit and catfish would
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come up to eat our spit.
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Turtles would circle underneath these wells.
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I remember going frog hunting on the edges of Mahim Khadi and bringing tadpoles back
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for our class experiments where we kept a bottle full of the water and we watched the
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I remember there were still spinach fields in Mahim, which we passed every day, where
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they were actually growing spinach and now has become the garage for the fire brigade.
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But that's inevitable, I suppose.
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I remember going to the beach regularly and also I remember playing in the beach, sometimes
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having a challenge match and going and playing on the other beach and coming back with our
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feet dyed green because the mills there were dyeing cloth for the army.
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So we knew exactly who was being dyed for whether it was khaki or it was blue because
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our feet came back with that raw, obviously toxic dyes were coming in, coming out raw.
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It was a very, very fertile kind of soil all around and there were stories because you
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walked past each kind of building and there were many different kinds.
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So there was Jahangir Bagh, which was obviously lower middle class down to near tenement.
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And then there was Debonay, which was one of the first sort of multi-story buildings.
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There were very settled areas like the Karnataka society, which had, I think for a while, Girish
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Karnad actually lived there in a balcony with his cousin.
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Yeah, yeah, because there were very wide balconies.
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So those balconies were very like if you had someone who was coming in from the village
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and staying, then you popped them into the balcony.
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It was also the time when I remember we lived in a one bedroom hall kitchen, but eight relatives
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would descend and would live there with you for a week or 10 days at a time because they
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had come to find a suitable groom or they had come to do wedding shopping after they
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found that suitable groom.
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We were immensely flexible about this.
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The only moments of tension I remember was that I learned to get up at about five thirty
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to use the bathroom first so that there would be no thumping on the door when I was squatting.
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It was also a very mixed culture.
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Effortlessly, we went to the Urz every year, the Mahim Urz, which is Mahim Wale Baba, who
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is of course the patron saint of the Bombay police.
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So the commissioner of police and the assistant commissioner will come and will cover their
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They will take off their caps so they won't wear the full Vardhi and they'll tie handkerchiefs
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and they raise this Janaza and they take it out every year as part of the procession.
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It's part of their duties, literally.
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And I think it's a bit of community relationships as well.
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But we hung out at St. Michael's as well and we went and peeked in at Sheetaladevi because
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she's a very upfront goddess.
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She looks right out at you from the temple.
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It seemed to me most of the time that my childhood passed in a complete disregard for religion
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or for anybody else's religion.
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We all knew that on Sundays there would be something that the Christians did and people
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would say it's my Thursday so I won't eat your chicken or whatever.
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But other than that, it didn't seem to impinge on us.
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I think my first understanding of these things came in 1992, literally, when the riots broke
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out and we began to see actually that there were fault lines in society.
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But up till then we lived in this slightly mythic world where now it seems like that.
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We really thought that the island city of Bombay had sort of drifted away from Europe
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and attached itself to India.
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And the hinterland was where these people went and beat each other up over God.
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We were too busy getting it done and making a living and improving ourselves to be worried
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about something as mundane as God.
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We proved very badly wrong in 1992 and since then it's just been going downhill.
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The mix that there is, we have a Gurdwara right around the corner from where I live.
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We have a Hindu temple.
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We have at least two churches and we have a Dargah and on the far side of the Jama Masjid.
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So we have like a representation of almost every faith.
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That I think was very, very important and very influential in my childhood because it
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also presented little hints of how ignorant one was about other faiths, you know, because
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someone usse langar ka din hai bhai jaana hai jaldi.
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And you didn't know what a langar day was, but you could find out.
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You could go and you took out your dirty handkerchief and put it over your head and went into the
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It seemed effortless at that time.
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You've got a lovely line in one of your novels, I think M. Forgotten to note which one, but
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I love the sentence where the protagonist says, I lost my faith as an hourglass loses
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sand, right, which is so beautiful.
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And I want to sort of double click a little bit on that.
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Like in my case, when I talk about my atheism, like the way I define atheism is as an absence
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So I don't believe that there is no God, it's just that I don't believe.
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And therefore I don't think I became an atheist as much as I discovered that I was one.
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And I'm interested in how you interacted with faith because on the one hand, I can see faith
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as being something that plays a big part in community feeling, right, that binds people
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And that is something that Sugata Srinivasa Raju used this lovely phrase in his episode
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with me, rooted cosmopolitanism.
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And when I look at myself, I see the cosmopolitanism, but I lament that I don't see the rootedness.
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And I think part of the rootedness comes from that community of birth and part of that rootedness
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perhaps comes from faith.
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And like you said, there were many faiths here and in both your novels, it's in the
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So you have a sense of the faith community that it does matter that people rally around
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and you have a feeling that, you know, this is a solid part of my identity elsewhere.
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I think at one point you were, I think it was in a context of translations where you
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pointed out that we should never diss them and speak about what's lost in translation.
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And you said about yourself that you learned everything about your religion through translation
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because originally it's Aramaic and whatever, right?
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So tell me about the role that faith meant for you in all these different aspects.
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One is in, you know, as part of the community and obviously the attachments that form, thereby
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whereas a ritual of going to a church on a Sunday and meeting, seeing old faces can still
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be valuable even if you're not an actual believer.
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And then that sort of intellectual aspect where even if you are an atheist, you're still
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interested because the history is rich and there's so much understanding there.
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See, I think, you know, if you actually were to scratch the believer, you know, you'll
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find someone who doesn't care, really, for whom, you know, the virgin birth say, right,
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is an article of faith because they're just not bothered to interrogate it actually at
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some fundamental level and to ask questions about it because it's somehow just not part
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It's as much, I often say, as fashion.
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For some people, they get up in the morning and really plan what they're going to wear
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There are some people who go to their cupboards and think, what is ironed?
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And just put it on and get on with it and get out.
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Men generally, women have to have a much greater sense of what they are wearing because of,
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you know, the various possibilities of attack and people saying things.
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So let's leave that out.
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But I'm thinking that often religion is a matter of, for all of us, is a matter of ascription
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You get born into a certain religion and most parents are intelligent enough to keep the
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It's not like you have to do this every day, but if you do it on the six days in the year,
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that should be enough for you.
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Christianity makes a very big ask, right?
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It makes 52 times your ask plus another Christmas and New Year and feast days and whatnot.
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And since there's a constancy because there's a geographical definition, there's an economic
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definition because, you know, the church will play a role in your life if you are a poor
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person by offering you monetary support, et cetera, et cetera, your association then becomes
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far more grounded in other people than in Jesus.
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So it's about like, you know, the fact that you go regularly and the auntie is in front
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of you, there's an uncle who sits behind you, you're in your places where you're supposed
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I think, so therefore, in many cases, what happens, I think, is people don't ask themselves
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the really important questions.
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They spend much more time on what should I eat this Sunday than thinking about do I really
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believe in, I don't know, the fact that every homosexual is committing a sin because Jesus
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says, because the Bible says you shouldn't be, you know, shouldn't lie with a man as
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with a woman or whatever it is.
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So I think most of it passes in a haze.
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And then there are crisis moments and the crisis moments are when, for instance, in
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murder and Mahim, when Peter's wife is really troubled by what her son is going through
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and the fact that he might be involved in a murder, she runs to church because that's
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her go-to place for a little calm, a little quiet, a little serenity and maybe even just
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the ability to think things through in silence.
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So I think faith is not simple, any more than atheism is simple, you know, like I like this
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thing that you're saying you discovered that you were an atheist and rather than becoming
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an atheist, because I think the natural tendency of the human is a healthy skepticism, which
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is beaten out of us, I think, because there's so much more invested in making people not
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thinkers rather than making them thinkers, most of the powers that would like us to be
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So one of the ways to control sheep is by very powerful supernatural presence, which
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no one can disprove or prove.
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So you can see how it works and at the same time, you can see that if you are a writer
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in India, ignoring religion is really stupid because it's such a driver of so many things
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So much that happens in this country is determined by that.
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I mean, you know, the notion of the arranged marriage, for instance, is simply, I mean,
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80% of us marry into our faiths.
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I'm just making a guess here.
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So all those lovely romances that happen in college, you know, where everybody's trying
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out different personae and different tongues and different everything, suddenly collapses
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when college ends and your parents say, okay, now it's time, we're going to figure out
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who you're going to get married.
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That seems like such a shift.
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Maybe it's just that you're on vacation and when you're not on vacation anymore, you're
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expected to settle down into the real world and the real world is, let's get you married
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in the community so that we can make this into a paying proposition for everybody.
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I think as a writer, living in India is just the most enormous gift, because it's everything.
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If you can look without judgment, okay, and you can listen without judgment, I think you'll
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be given a story every day.
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It's just like without any effort, you'll be given a story and at some point, the good
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thing about being a writer is to present that story and let the reader make the judgment.
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So the reader's call, I mean, do you think this person is stupid?
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He went to church because he was unhappy.
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Do you think he's stupid?
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Okay, you think he's stupid.
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I'm recording what my character had to do.
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And that point about how even if you scratch a believer, you find unbelief there or not
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that level of commitment.
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You know, I first came across this point in this book by Stephen Landsberg called The
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Big Questions, where he says exactly that, that when push comes to shove, if you're drowning
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in an ocean, I mean, if there's absolutely no hope, then sure.
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But otherwise, your first port of call is never going to be religion and we are all
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sort of in our revealed preferences, we are non-believers.
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And I'm just thinking aloud here, like I think the human need for religion really comes out
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of two broad needs, which is one is the need to make sense of an incredibly complex world.
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So religion gives you a frame that, you know, all the whys are taken care of and you just
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start there and you're fine.
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And the other is the need for belonging and community.
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And in modern times, it seems to me to be the case, like Douglas Adams once said that
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I stopped needing God the day I discovered the theory of evolution, right, which really
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takes care of the whys and all of that.
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So the why is no longer like you don't need religion anymore as a frame to see the world,
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but you still need it for comfort.
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So in a sense, the functions of organized religion have been disaggregated, if I may
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use the technical term, and you have modern religions, you know, our political ideologies,
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for example, through which people will try to make sense of the world, right.
#
And I'm all for political ideologies when they are fixed on values.
#
But when they take on a vision of the world that this is the way things are for this reason
#
and all of that, you're always simplistic and you're always wrong and it's pretty much
#
And this is why in a sense, you know, like you were mentioning at lunch just before this
#
that I used to get into too many political arguments back in the day and you're absolutely
#
And I sort of realize the futility of this when I realized that it's not about reason
#
It's, you know, you can't argue a person out of their religion.
#
What are your thoughts?
#
I mean, I was just thinking about it.
#
I think also there is one more thing.
#
I think you put it very clearly as you always do.
#
I remember even when I used to follow you on Twitter, I used to think he's going out
#
in a limb, but that limb is logic.
#
So you put it very clearly.
#
I think there's one more thing that I think we all pray to, which is fear.
#
And fear comes at us in so many different ways.
#
So banding together in a tribalism becomes an us and a them.
#
And we can be a little more comforted when we see us in a large number together.
#
But when we see them in a large number together, we're also like discomfited.
#
And I think the other way that fear, I think, fear makes you vulnerable.
#
If you are afraid, then you are actually admitting to being weak because something is stronger
#
than you and you are afraid of it.
#
So you turn that into hate and you say that, you know, I hate you.
#
And now hate seems like a more positive and much more patriarchally acceptable position
#
to be in rather than to be fearful.
#
So I think when I learned this, I kept looking at all the things that I hated and really
#
underneath there was fear.
#
And if you can deal probably with the fear, the hate falls away naturally.
#
Or if you can just confront the fear and say, yes, I'm afraid.
#
I'm afraid to be alone.
#
I'm afraid of dying of cancer.
#
I'm afraid that all this is meaningless.
#
Those are the things that I think lead you to God also.
#
So if you are going to actually be religious rather than be a hater, then maybe religion
#
But if your religion is then going to turn around and make you a hater, then maybe what's
#
the use of that religion at all, right?
#
Because it was supposed to take away your fear, not channelize your fear into hate of
#
So you have this great passage on fear and this is in a different context, but I'll just
#
take a digression now so we can talk about it in here.
#
You wrote early on in Amit Bighum where you wrote, I feared hundreds of things, the dark,
#
the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice at the death of my mother,
#
sums involving Vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing to do, death by drowning.
#
But of all these, I feared most the possibility that I might go mad, stop quote.
#
And this is, of course, your character talking just to make that distinction, the narrator
#
of the novel, and we'll talk about the madness later perhaps, but just talking about fear,
#
like if we are shaped by what we fear.
#
And I think that what we fear obviously changes over time, right?
#
So is this the stuff that the, like what did the young boy in Mahim fear and today, 50
#
years later, what is it that you fear?
#
Like how has that changed?
#
How has that graph changed and what kind of different directions has it taken you in?
#
Because I'm guessing that in the answer to this is also partly a story of how you have
#
changed as a person, how what you want is different, how you see yourself as different.
#
I think one of the things that when you fear as a child, you fear the immediate and you
#
fear the, at a personal level, you are afraid of the class bully, he's going to beat you,
#
you're afraid of the teacher, she's going to fail you, you're afraid of, you're afraid
#
for your parents, they might die.
#
As an adult, what you are given is, you're given solutions to many of those early fears,
#
You hire yourself a bodyguard, right?
#
Your parents are now dead, the worst possible has happened.
#
But what you begin to look at is the implausibility of India.
#
It is not, you look, I look out of the window every day and I see thousands of people intersecting
#
with each other and managing to live in conditions that no zookeeper would keep his animals,
#
no enlightened zookeeper would keep his animals, we inflict this on ourselves, we live in this
#
constant, close, almost, almost unbelievable intimacy that we all have with each other.
#
So you know, the neighbours, the larger world, everything impinges on you all the time.
#
So the fear then becomes a larger and more, it actually shades into, okay, in the technical
#
hierarchy, fear is supposed to be stronger than anxiety, right?
#
Anxiety is, but anxiety is much more free-floating and much more infectious, whereas fear can
#
be limited, anxiety colours everything.
#
So there is sometimes an anxiety about how a structure, how many shocks can a structure
#
And every morning the newspaper says, there are more shocks waiting for you, there are
#
more, there are more blows that have been administered.
#
And you wonder when something is going to tip over, I think the constant fear in any
#
multicultural community is the fear of the riot in India, at least in India.
#
We have tried to cure ourselves of this fear with gated communities and by kind of cutting
#
out potential antagonists or potential problem makers from our world.
#
Now problem makers are defined in so many different ways, right?
#
Single men are problem makers, North Indians are problem makers, Punjabis are problem makers,
#
non-vegetarians are problem makers, couples living together are problem makers, single
#
women are problem makers.
#
It is as if there is someone waiting to label you a problem maker at every step of the way.
#
So it is not improbable that anxiety and fear become kind of almost worked into the nature
#
of our encounter with each other in a city.
#
And keeping the heart open and trying to keep judgment out of your gaze actually becomes
#
like a constant effort and you often wonder, another anxiety arises, have I slipped?
#
Did I make that judgment out of fear?
#
Did I make that judgment based on a stereotype?
#
Did I make that judgment called because the person is not deodorized enough for me or
#
Which of these is my problem today?
#
It's a constant, I think cities encourage you to live on that cutting edge of yourself,
#
like where you're constantly being asked to investigate what you did just now.
#
Because most of the responses that we make are untutored.
#
We get into a bus and immediately if the bus has like five empty seats, in the choice of
#
making that where you're going to sit, you're asking yourself, is the person taking up too
#
Is it likely that he'll be smelly?
#
Is the woman likely to feel that I'm impinging on her space?
#
All these questions have to be dealt with and in choosing one seat, you have refused
#
four others, not that the four others are like watching you, but just in case they'd
#
What is that rejection that they would feel?
#
It's a constant play, I mean walking down the street and taking a cab, you're rejected.
#
The reason why people hate the taxi driver saying no is because it's a rejection.
#
So rejection of you and where you're going and what you want to do, they're just saying
#
And the taxi driver is almost inevitably of a class lower than you.
#
And he should not have the right to say that.
#
How can he reject you from your position of superiority?
#
So almost everything that we, that, and I think most of the time when people talk about
#
taxi drivers for instance, just to give them that as an example, is they have recourse
#
to the law and they say the law does not allow them to permit me to refuse.
#
We all break the law routinely, but the taxi driver breaking the law seems to be unforgivable
#
in the middle class scheme of values.
#
And I think it's largely because that taxi driver has for that moment established his
#
sovereignty over the space of his taxi and has refused to stamp your visa and has sent
#
you off to look for another.
#
It's just like galling.
#
No, I even have a term for this that, you know, the rejected customer feels like in
#
poker there's a term called tilt, which is basically a broad term for all kinds of anger,
#
which make you play badly because you're angry, you're tilting per se.
#
And there's a specific kind of tilt that I realized that I was susceptible to, which
#
And this is called entitlement tilt.
#
And in the context of poker, it's because you think you're better than all the other
#
But obviously in any given session, any given hand, luck plays a big part.
#
So somebody sucks out on you and you get angry and you feel entitlement tilt, ki yaar, I
#
I am the best player on this table.
#
I should be the big winner.
#
And I guess when a taxi guy turns you down, it's that same entitlement, you know, putting
#
any of that shit into words.
#
But I am the Saab, you know, you are the guy in that khaki uniform or whatever.
#
And you know, why aren't you sort of stopping for me?
#
I want to continue talking about traffic, in fact, and cities and double down a bit
#
on that anxiety and fear to try to understand your point better.
#
There's this lovely passage in the Big Home where the Big Home speaks about his first
#
And he says, quote, On the first day, I felt dizzy at the thought of so many people.
#
All of them looked like they were about to crash into each other, but at the last moment
#
they would manage to slip past.
#
It was like watching a hundred games of football going on at once and me in the goal waiting
#
for a hundred balls, none of which I could see.
#
And it strikes me here that to sort of try to get a grip on I think what you meant by
#
fear and anxiety, that in that traffic, your immediate fear would be that something is
#
But even after you have sorted that fear out, that you know that nothing's going to hit
#
you, everybody's going in a particular way, there is still an anxiety that there is this
#
chaotic traffic around that at some point something will give.
#
At some point, the law of truly large numbers states that there will be accidents and people
#
And in fact, if you live long enough, you would be one of them.
#
But that sample size won't be so large.
#
So is that sort of one way of understanding, is that the point you were making about fear
#
and anxiety, that fear can be specific, ki yahaan pe riot ho sakta hai, this can spark
#
But the anxiety is general, that the way things are going, how will this hold?
#
I think also, you know, there is when you live in a multicultural society, which is,
#
I have always said is like really important and valuable, but there is a lot that you
#
need to know, right, without thinking offends somebody by saying something, you know, which
#
in your community is harmless.
#
But in that community, I remember first week of college, there was a young woman who was
#
sitting next to me and she was eating and then she dropped her spoon and the curry that
#
she was eating splashed everywhere and I said, Samina, you pig, which is what we all say
#
in at home when someone's been a bit messy, right?
#
No, and yes, I know pigs are very clean animals and we keep them in bad conditions, all that.
#
But that's what we used to say.
#
Samina was really offended.
#
And she said, you're going on my religion.
#
And I said, no, sorry, what?
#
She was a Muslim and she said, you know, like calling me a pig is really, really offensive.
#
And I just said, I'm really sorry, but she marched off to the principal, but who then
#
made me come to the principal's room and apologize.
#
And then Samina wanted a written apology.
#
So I wrote a confession and apology under the, so there was a Christian, there was a Muslim,
#
there was a Parsi principal.
#
And I was thinking, we are the minorities, we can't get off.
#
So there's so much that you've got to know about like just fundamentals of, you know,
#
I'm going to a Varma household.
#
You know, I'm going to a Varma household.
#
Can I, I'm going to a Shahani household.
#
I'm going to a Gokhale household.
#
And actually it should be, it might well be no, yes, no, because Gokhale is also Brahmin
#
and then for normally vegetarian and Shanta is vegetarian, but we'll serve chicken, right?
#
I will give you chicken any time.
#
That's what I'm saying.
#
So also I'm saying it's as simple as that.
#
It's as simple as our constantly negotiating difference.
#
And there is a faint spark of like, what do I have to not do here?
#
What do I, what do I get to do here?
#
What do I get not to do here?
#
So remember going to the first time to a friend's house and routinely walking into the, into
#
the kitchen and helping my, opening the fridge, taking out a bottle of cold water, drinking
#
it, take, pouring it into a glass and drinking it.
#
And once one day I did that and she was making frantic gestures, stop, stop, stop, stop,
#
And I didn't know what she was saying.
#
So I opened the fridge and I'm saying what?
#
And her grandmother was there and her grandmother was from Uttar Pradesh.
#
And I'd come in, it was a Brahmin grandmother who was appalled at a beef eating Roman Catholic
#
or supposedly beef eating Roman Catholic going into the kitchen and drinking water.
#
So she wanted the whole kitchen washed down with Ganga Jal.
#
And it was, but luckily the, the family Pandit came and sprinkled some Ganga Jal and said
#
it Dholia, everything is clean now, Pandits are good at that sort of thing.
#
But I remember feeling really mortified and, and sorry for having done that because if
#
I'd known that the grandmother was in the house and I knew that she was going to be
#
offended, I would not have done it.
#
I would say, could you get me a glass of water?
#
You, you know, you understand like there are lots and lots of people.
#
When I remember a friend, a cousin of mine went and told my grandma, my grandmother that
#
I was dating, I was seeing a Hindu girl and my grandmother said, is she a Brahmin?
#
So that was what was important.
#
And I hope she's not loose, she said.
#
So it's everybody's grandparents.
#
I mean, I'm sure if we were ever to be grandparents, our values would be laughed at by our grandchildren.
#
So I'm saying, I think we are in a constant state of dealing with the unknown and we don't
#
know where the unknown is located.
#
It's not, it's like a really mystical algebra where the X keeps slipping, slipping about.
#
You don't know whether it's like bookshelves that can be touched or you don't know whether
#
it is any number of things that any number of places where a boundary can be crossed
#
with words, with actions, with food, with, you know, suggestions.
#
How dare you ask me to dinner on the day when you know I'm fasting.
#
You've known me for years.
#
But you know, I fast on this day of the year.
#
I'm sorry, I forgot, but it happens.
#
So we've got no gift comes without some kind of strings attached.
#
So we've got the gift of multiculturalism, we are really, really required to look after
#
I believe I think that is one of our fundamental duties of looking after multiculturalism simply
#
because it has made us so rich and varied.
#
I mean, you know, it's not some accident that three major world religions are born in the
#
same country, you know, and harbors are the major world religions without and as for the
#
longest time harbored them without too much effort or too much anxiety recently, it's
#
But I'm saying these are the these are the our gifts and we need to look after them.
#
But the cost of those gifts is also there all the time.
#
And that's the anxiety of the of the minority.
#
No, and I think about, you know, want to try and disentangle what you spoke about the other
#
two anecdotes that in the case of the offended grandmother, one understands where she's coming
#
And that's perfectly fine.
#
And eventually generations change and change happens.
#
In the case of your neighbor in the classroom, who took such offense that she went to the
#
principal, what I would imagine is that once you say sorry, and she realizes that it was
#
not a deliberate insult, she should assume you were acting in good faith and the matter
#
And I bring it up because I think a lot of the discourse that I see today does not make
#
that assumption about good faith, you know, does not assume goodwill as it were like my
#
principle in every interaction is assume goodwill.
#
Don't think the worst unless you have specific reason to, you know.
#
So if I inadvertently like inadvertently, I will sometimes, you know, make mistakes
#
and then I can just say, hey, I'm sorry.
#
It's not how I meant it.
#
This is how I meant it.
#
And the moment I do that, you should be cool and say, OK, you know, I'll take your word
#
Because you are going to have to ask for the same favor at some point at some, maybe with
#
that, not with that person, with someone else.
#
And if you expect to be forgiven for a mistake in good faith, you need to forgive a mistake
#
But except that what I see in modern times is that and this is perhaps a vocal minority
#
on social media more than a silent majority, but I really don't know where people don't
#
want to assume good faith.
#
People are happy to take offense because it gives them a cause to rally against people
#
So often and again, I'm not generalizing, not all people.
#
But there is this tendency to always, especially on Twitter, you know, outrage against something.
#
You'll see a word or a phrase and you'll take it out of context.
#
You know, Pratap Bhanumata called it the decontextualization machine as I was relating to you earlier.
#
And I worry that from an equilibrium where everybody broadly trusts everybody else and
#
is taking it in good faith to another equilibrium where everybody is, you know, stressed out
#
and is looking for offense and is hypersensitive, you know, and I worry that, you know, one
#
is a virtuous cycle, one is a vicious cycle.
#
Would you think there is something to that?
#
Like again, I'm thinking aloud, but and I know both of these can coexist.
#
But I worry that if the discourse passes a certain point, then that those assumptions
#
of good faith stop happening.
#
Then Samina will always assume that everything that you're saying is tinged with prejudice
#
because after all, you are, you know, whatever.
#
Yeah, I have the feeling that one of the most terrible things that happened to us was the
#
immediacy of posting, right?
#
In the old days, if you wanted, like I remember going to a friend's house when she was clearing
#
stuff because she had to leave the city and go and live somewhere else.
#
She was moving because she'd got a job abroad and there was a pile of letters and she said,
#
these are all the angry letters I've written to you over the years and which I didn't post.
#
So I said, can I have them now?
#
And she looked at them and she said, Jerry, they are so, so pathetic, really pathetic.
#
I feel embarrassed when I look at them and I wonder what would have happened if we all
#
lived in this world where, you know, you can send angry WhatsApp in a second and it will
#
be received in a second.
#
She required to get a piece of paper, write down what she thought, then get a stamp, get
#
an envelope, get to the post office and post the letter before it came to me.
#
There were many moments at which she could stop.
#
So I have a friend called Nilufar Venkatraman who once advised me when email just started,
#
she said, you know, if you ever get angry, write the email, write the angry email, but
#
And then the next day send it.
#
I have found this is invaluable because the next day I can actually, I have distance and
#
sometimes I just think this is not, this is not worth it.
#
Let me just call the person and say to them, look, you just annoyed me yesterday.
#
Can we just talk about that?
#
And I'll tell you why and you know, often it can be resolved at that moment.
#
Often the rage is at a corporation, right, which has not been paying you and you don't
#
want to slam the door and not ever work with them again.
#
So you tune it down and you do a few CCs to important people in the organization and you
#
find that you have resolution at the end of it.
#
So I think the real threat is immediacy and the asynchronous nature of communication that
#
you're not seeing the person's face, that you're not seeing the person's body language,
#
you're not seeing the abhinaya, you're not seeing the mudras, you know, all the things
#
that can undercut a statement and contextualize it instead of which you're just seeing words.
#
Then I think the next thing that we have to recognize is that this anger is not a directed
#
It is a free-floating rage.
#
It's a free-floating rage that this country I think is air to because we are always surprised
#
Like if you travel to someone's house, you say, I got into the train and got here on
#
time and then I got an auto and there was an auto and he was willing to take me and
#
I got to your house without any traffic jams and I'm, wow, you're just so surprised that
#
So we built up frustrations about that.
#
I have another pet theory that we have all at some stage been molested sexually and this
#
has left us with a huge amount of rage.
#
It has become so normal that I think for my generation, the uncle who squeezed you on
#
his lap or pinched you too hard or, you know, cornered you and tried to get a feel was just
#
And you learned as a child that everybody had certain ways of skipping around him and
#
evading him, but no one confronted him about it.
#
No one ever said anything.
#
And sometimes if he went too far, you know, he would be told, don't ever go near him and
#
he would not be invited over, et cetera, but no one ever took it on, right?
#
Because we have so much invested in the family.
#
So there's so much that gives us rage.
#
Then there's the caste system, which gives us rage, right?
#
And, you know, there's a sense of entitlement, which is a warring against other entitlements
#
that we see as made available.
#
So it's a constant source of rage.
#
And in none of these are we ever being honest and confronting the rage.
#
So it has to go somewhere.
#
This is so much energy, so much psychic energy that is.
#
So eventually, I think in America, it explodes as road rage, right?
#
I mean, we don't do road rage that much.
#
We've done Twitter rage now because it's completely disembodied.
#
You can threaten rape and murder and all kinds of things on hapless women who have made some
#
opinion of theirs known without incurring any possible, even social outrage.
#
No one will call you out for having done that, right?
#
So hey, it's like almost as if social media threw open the doors and said, guys, here
#
Let it all out here, OK, because and that's what we're doing, just paying for blood all
#
And that asynchronous effect is a big deal because, you know, people behave on social
#
media in ways that they never would in real life.
#
And I think one of the other dangers of that is that, you know, when you and I were in
#
our 20s, we couldn't get our opinions out there at scale so easily.
#
So we were not tied to anything.
#
We had the freedom to evolve and take different paths.
#
And I definitely had many stupid views when I was 20 or 25 or even 30.
#
Nobody's screenshotting them and coming at me.
#
And also, what is most important is that I don't have to double down on them.
#
If Twitter was there when I was 20 and I write something stupid and I find a tribe accidentally
#
because of that stupid thing I said, and I also have enemy tribes because of that.
#
And then I find myself doubling down because of, you know, it's published, it's out there.
#
Then I get ossified as a person, I get restricted instead of having so many different directions
#
I feel the need to double down and assert that side.
#
And I think that's a great loss.
#
Another sort of interesting aspect along with the rage that all of us carry is that I think
#
there is a sort of bewildered rage that men, in particular, have been feeling over the
#
last 25 years because, you know, I'd done an episode with Srigna Poonam on her excellent
#
And this was a point driven home at great length by Nikhil Taneja, we'd done an episode
#
called The Loneliness of the Indian Man, which is that women all across India, with access
#
to the internet and everything, have frames to figure out what is happening to them.
#
You know, there is today feminism all around them.
#
They have frames to figure out even if they don't have the privilege or the opportunity
#
to necessarily escape it, they can at least understand it at an intellectual level and
#
make whatever little escapes when they can.
#
But men do not get that.
#
Men don't have those frames to understand how they are also trapped by patriarchy in
#
certain rules that this is how men are and this is what men must be.
#
And I think that there is pent up frustration, you know, exploding there as well, like this
#
And these roles are something that you've also written about at, you know, in various
#
parts of your books, like at one point in MN, The Big Whom you wrote, at that point
#
I realized what it meant to be a man in India.
#
It meant knowing what one could do and what one could only get done.
#
It meant being able to hold onto two patterns simultaneously.
#
One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated, and the outcomes depended on fate, chance,
#
The other was intuitive, illicit, and guaranteed.
#
The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the lie, to peel the
#
file of a table and give it to a peer and to speak easily of one's cousin, the minister
#
or the archbishop, stop quote.
#
And again, these are prisons, you know, that a man must be like this, masculinity, notions
#
I think I have the feeling that Indian men are kind of evolved themselves into a position
#
Like, I mean, they got so, they got everything that they needed.
#
I mean, you know, you think about the dowry system and how much that must, like if you're
#
young man lying somewhere in bed thinking I'm worth 25 lakhs and a scooter and a fridge
#
But now this is the downside.
#
The downside is that you don't have any emotional clarity.
#
The downside is that you're not taught to think about yourself as a thinking, feeling,
#
You're just taught to think of yourself as a penis with a body attached.
#
All your friends will have the same attitude as you.
#
So if you say to a friend, I'm depressed, he says, we'll go out for a drink.
#
That's the only thing that they have on the table to offer you.
#
It's not even a question like, okay, tell me what you're thinking.
#
Tell me why you're feeling depressed.
#
Do you know why you're feeling depressed?
#
You know, there is competitive depression these days.
#
I'm 10 times more depressed, I have like much bigger problems.
#
I'll show you my problems, your problems will shrink in comparison, competitive.
#
So I think we've painted ourselves into a corner, okay?
#
Much of this is our fault, literally.
#
Many of us, I think my generation was the Bachchan generation, right?
#
And Bachchan spoke with his fists.
#
And not only spoke with his fists, he created a persona in which anger was dominant.
#
And anger is not a very useful emotion when it comes to the downtime, right?
#
When it comes to the tender moments.
#
I suppose we are all suffering from that at this point in time.
#
And you're quite right about the bewilderment.
#
I think there is a great perplexity about roles right now, there's a great perplexity
#
about gender, there's a great perplexity about entitlement, and the free-floating anxiety
#
that the patriarchy produces.
#
Because you can't say, okay, for six months carry me while I go through this.
#
You can't tell anybody that.
#
Because you're supposed to be the strong guy, you're supposed to be the guy who's always
#
in charge, in command, in control, shifting between those two patterns, always on the
#
spot, always doing the right thing, and always doing the wrong thing when the wrong thing
#
So bribing the policeman, but exactly at the right moment.
#
It's a big ask, and it's one that we've set ourselves up for.
#
We are failing it all the time.
#
And maybe this new generation, which is coming along, and which is maybe interrogating the
#
patriarchy a little more, might have a little, might have a better time of it, I'm hoping.
#
In fact, it's kind of, it's both comic and tragic that, you know, the chal daru pite
#
hai thing, because, you know, when two men have a problem, their solution is to go destroy
#
Like, how does that make sense?
#
How does that make sense?
#
So and, you know, earlier you were talking about, and this is again in passing, but since
#
we're on the subject, you were speaking earlier about how real marriages are so bizarre when
#
you just take a step back and think about it.
#
But you know, when I take a step back and think about it, marriages are bizarre.
#
You know, you look at the typical marriage in India is really imprisoning two people
#
into specific roles with a particular individual.
#
And it is almost in the majority of cases, it feels like, you know, and maybe I'm being
#
too, there's a lot of, you know, happy love stories out there.
#
But in general, marriage itself seems to me to be a really toxic institution.
#
I, you know, I, I feel that when I'm, I have taught my class at Sophia Polytechnic, the
#
social communication media department, SCM for 30 years now, and I always say that, you
#
know, you've got to actually think very carefully about marriage and not only about the institution
#
and about whether you're actually suited to it, because no one is really suited to it
#
and no one knows anything about marriage until they actually have it happen to them, right?
#
So we set up such high expectations for two young people who barely know each other.
#
And I'm even saying, like, if you've been going around for a year, you don't know it,
#
you don't know anything about that person, and you're going to go off and say, let's
#
spend the rest of our lives together.
#
And then you're actually in India marrying into two, you're marrying two families.
#
So you're managing the emotional demands and needs of two families on either side.
#
And the burden is, is borne largely by the woman in this situation, you know, men are
#
I always say, you know, watch a man and a woman go for a wedding.
#
The woman is in a sari and is wearing all the gold that she can possibly accommodate
#
The man is in a shirt and a pair of trousers, because he's saying, you look at her and you'll
#
see how successful I am.
#
So he doesn't have to make any effort.
#
And this is kind of symptomatic of how we conduct all our marriage, our marriage lives.
#
I mean, women do the heavy lifting as far as the emotional and psychological needs of
#
And the men just like, I mean, are supposed to bring home the money and they get a pass
#
It's not a pass because you know what you're doing is you're accumulating stress and you're
#
accumulating unresolved issues, which is not good for you, right?
#
So I have the feeling that we are a nation of widows as well.
#
Lots and lots of men who die much younger than their wives, because, you know, you can't
#
carry around that kind of stress and so many resolved issues without having repercussions
#
on your entire body and on the body of your family.
#
So in the writing course that I teach, I use this great example of show, don't tell.
#
I think it's from the History Boys by Alan Bennett, though I picked it up from one of
#
my early teachers and boss, Tim Delisle, who's also written a book on it.
#
And Bennett is talking about how history is so male dominated.
#
And he puts this lovely image where he says, what is history?
#
History is women following behind with the bucket.
#
And that tells you so much about how they played a subsidiary role, how they have to
#
clean up the mess that the men leave behind.
#
And you know, then whose history is it?
#
You know, what's it's who keeps the world together?
#
Let's sort of go back to chronology, chronology, as it were.
#
And let's go back to your chronology, like, you know, to take you back to Mahim.
#
And in that phase where you transition into Elphinstone and all that, what is sort of
#
at that point, your conception of yourself?
#
The one thing that one felt, I think, at that point was that I didn't feel, I felt that
#
the world was self-sufficient, that everybody seemed to be walking around with a lot of
#
information and I had missed out on some on some circular that had come out and which
#
would have cracked everything for me.
#
I couldn't understand how there was so much anger and sorrow among the people who had
#
Like when you went to the bank, for instance, nobody wanted to help you.
#
You know, everybody had some reason not to let you do what you wanted to do.
#
You went to the post office and people were reluctant to help you there as well.
#
Wherever you went, it seemed that and you looked at them and you thought, well, yeah,
#
I understand that and you seem to be trapped doing it.
#
So I understand that as well, that you wouldn't be happy.
#
But why did you ask for it?
#
And now that you have it, why are you unhappy with it?
#
And then I kept worrying that at some point I would be behind that counter and I would
#
be being nasty to someone who was coming up to me to help for wanting help because I would
#
be unhappy and I was a bright student, but I wasn't academically gifted.
#
You know, I was a solid, say, fifth to tenth standard, tenth rank student.
#
And so you're the undifferentiated middle.
#
You're not that brilliant child who's guaranteed a seat in medicine.
#
You're not the absolute dodo who has to go to technical college and learn how to be a
#
You're somewhere in the middle and there's nothing that you can hold up to the world
#
So women and boys very clearly had specialities in school.
#
Celestine was the fast runner.
#
Ryan Oliver played defense in football like nobody else.
#
Someone else, you know, Utkash Angchekar was definitely getting into medical college.
#
He had finished the entire tenth standard syllabus before we started the year.
#
He had finished it all.
#
And he told us this also terrified me.
#
So there were very clear roles.
#
Did you become a doctor?
#
Yes, I'm an orthopedic surgeon now.
#
But I'm saying overall there is this, there seemed to be people who had very clear roles
#
I was flailing because I had no idea what I wanted to be.
#
It didn't seem like when, and because, you know, you were not, you were not what they
#
It was assumed that you would not do arts, okay.
#
Only duffers and girls did arts.
#
But I think, you know, just you were wise and your parents were wise to say, hey, he'll
#
Let him go and do arts.
#
I don't think my father would have said, no, don't do arts.
#
But I didn't even ask him.
#
I went and did science because I thought that was what men did.
#
You became an engineer or a doctor.
#
I knew I wasn't going to get into medicine.
#
I just, I could tell in advance that I wasn't going to get into medicine.
#
So I wasn't even terribly like, I mean, I didn't have that terrible anxiety about it.
#
I just was sure that I wasn't going to get those 98%.
#
But I wasn't sure what I would do after that.
#
So I did shift over to arts like Uri does in the education of Uri.
#
But I remember three years of just enjoying tremendously the thought work, right?
#
Like bending your head around psychology, sociology, economics, logic, philosophy, history.
#
I was that nerd who had 120% attendance.
#
I attended my lectures, I attended other teachers.
#
We had, Elphinstone had wonderful teachers at the time, you know, Professor Malapur in
#
economics, Professor Bongle in philosophy.
#
So you just went and hung out, Professor Sardesh Pandey in the French department, you just
#
hung out at their lectures because they were so good.
#
And those were the most joyous times because there was no stress.
#
You were just sitting there listening and you didn't take notes because you weren't
#
sitting for those exams.
#
You just had to listen to them.
#
So it was just wonderful.
#
But underneath there was that worm of anxiety that said, yeah, this right now, so good,
#
but what are you going to do afterwards?
#
What are you going to do afterwards?
#
It was always there, always that present fear that, you know, how do you find your way into
#
And then because I also had a deep desire to, you know, buy books, et cetera, et cetera,
#
my father did not allow us to buy books.
#
He was dead against anyone buying books until the age of 21, he said.
#
By the age of 21, you might be able to know what you'd like to read in the future.
#
But up to the age of 21, you're not going to be able to, you'll buy rubbish books and
#
you might as well go to libraries and read them there.
#
That made my sister and me kind of, we became, buying books became our rebellious activity.
#
So we would hide them, sneak them into the house, conceal them, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But so because I wanted to buy books, I accidentally stumbled into teaching students mathematics
#
So I started with an uncle's reject.
#
So he was teaching in a big school camp in high school in South Bombay.
#
And there was a lot of demand.
#
And he would hand me the students that he couldn't cope with.
#
And I started teaching them and I got to be known as Duffer Sir, because I was the only
#
one who was willing to take the child on if they had got 40% in the 8th standard.
#
And I would assure the parents that by the time they got to the 10th standard, they would
#
be passing and they would get into arts college.
#
So don't worry about that.
#
But your job, I would say, is to go and intervene every year if they fail in maths, is to intervene
#
with the principal, give whatever you need to give, do whatever you need to do, kiss
#
whatever ass you need to kiss and get them into the next year.
#
But I'll get them through the 10th standard, but don't worry about their maths marks till
#
they get to the 10th standard.
#
And I remember I had some signal successes, you know, Masoome Ali Khan asked me, do you
#
think I should take maths in college?
#
I said no, not calculus, not differentials, please don't.
#
If you can, like, I mean, you feel confident here, I'm really happy, but please not college.
#
And you know, Imran Ali Khan, her cousin, used to whistle when he was doing quadratics,
#
which I thought, okay, good space, that fear is gone.
#
These are the things that I valued about doing.
#
So I did that, I think, from the age of about 16 to the age of about 30.
#
And when my father died at the age of 21, I turned that into a full time profession.
#
Because I thought, I mean, I needed money to run the house, my mother was ill, I had
#
to pay for my mother's expenses.
#
And my father had always said, rolling, you must live on rolling.
#
Don't eat into capital, right?
#
I was going to earn the money, I wasn't going to like, you know, sort of, what's the word
#
I wasn't going to eat into, obviously, this was not such a sensible thing.
#
My father also told my mother, right?
#
He said to her, the shares are to be sold in times of emergency, never otherwise, do
#
Then we had 100 shares in Mazda.
#
At the time that Harshad Mehta was like, wildly pursuing it, I don't know why he was buying
#
so many shares in that Mazda company.
#
But I told my mother, I said, it's time to sell, like, I mean, you know, these shares
#
were bought at some 13, 14 rupees, then now some 900 rupees, let's sell them.
#
And she said, is it an emergency?
#
Your father said, in an emergency, we sell shares, otherwise, we don't sell shares.
#
They were in her name, so I couldn't do anything about it.
#
So we didn't cash in on that opportunity.
#
And then of course, it vanished again, those shares.
#
But I'm saying I think there was that fiscal propriety that was built into all of us, that
#
you credit cards were kind of like the gateway to hell.
#
You were going to end up in some kind of debtors prison, even if there is no such thing in
#
But I mean, you would end up in some terrible place if you ever got a credit card, you only
#
spent what you had earned in that month, etc, etc.
#
That fiscal propriety was there.
#
And between the age of 16 and 30, I ran my chula, as it were, on the money that I made
#
out of mathematics tuitions.
#
And at the age of 30, then I took my first job, which was a great mistake, I stopped
#
teaching, mainly because I think I had come to the point at which had become a bit of
#
You know, there's a new book, Marcus, the Sautoy has written a book called The Art of
#
And he talks about about shortcuts.
#
But I had stopped trying to get my students to love mathematics, I stopped trying to explain,
#
you know, I did very little philosophy of mathematics.
#
But in between, I would try and explain that every equation is a sentence, because normally
#
the kids who have a problem with mathematics are the ones who like English and history
#
and geography and those subjects, right.
#
So if you can get them to believe that mathematics is also a language, and it's just about language
#
and logic, just calm down and a few, you've got know a few things about like, you know,
#
Euler's theorem, and Pythagoras and stuff, you can get them a lot closer, I'd stopped
#
And I was just giving them shortcuts, you know, minus B plus or minus B squared, square
#
root of B squared minus four AC upon two A, solve your quadratic equation, get it done.
#
Look, you just made that mistake, otherwise it's okay, you know.
#
So I thought I'd burnt out and not being a good enough teacher.
#
So I stopped being a teacher and I joined the Times of India, big mistake, you know,
#
two years later, I had gone from being a fairly cheerful person to being a very unhappy person,
#
but then I left it again.
#
So you know, before we come to the job, before we come to Times of India, I'm kind of curious
#
about the act of teaching mathematics, because I think, whenever in my limited experience
#
of teaching anything, whenever when you teach something, initially, it really helps you
#
understand it better, because obviously, the best way to learn something is you teach it,
#
and you've got to get down to first principles, and you've got to find things in it to love
#
so that you can communicate that.
#
And I guess that process must have happened.
#
But then the danger is that after a point in time, then it becomes routine, you know,
#
inertia sets in, it becomes routine, you are kind of playing the part.
#
And earlier, you weren't playing the part, you were the lover of math imparting your
#
love, you know, you were Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, except in a mathematical
#
But then you're, you know, sort of playing that part and so on.
#
So tell me a little bit about your sort of relationship with maths before this.
#
Because when one thinks of, you know, Jerry Pinto, the writer, the translator, the man
#
of the arts, one doesn't think of someone who knows what a quadratic equation is, right?
#
You are busting the stereotype.
#
So you know, how did your love of math come about?
#
And how does it affect the way that you look at the world around you, any differently than
#
you would have if you hadn't loved?
#
I have the feeling that one, you know, okay, the way we studied in school had nothing to
#
do with the real world.
#
So the whole of school was a silo.
#
It was an incomprehensible silo.
#
We didn't know what we were doing.
#
But we did it because we were told that we should do it.
#
So you know, you had long lists that you had to learn out, you had to learn some lists
#
in order, some lists not in order.
#
You remember those, there were those bioelectric lists about like, you rub this with this,
#
then this becomes positively charged and that becomes negatively charged.
#
Science was not my thing.
#
So you know, the valency of chemical substances, etc, etc.
#
You balanced equations, you did, you know, you did sums of hypotenic calipers, you did
#
You did language and you did mathematics also like that.
#
So there was a, the tipping point came for me in the eighth standard when I was sitting
#
in class and you know, there is a particular way that the student who is not coping with
#
mathematics sits, which is to cover everything with the hands and the body and right inside
#
the shell of the body, the notebook is so that the teacher can't see.
#
And my teacher, Mrs. Linwin D'Souza was passing me and she tapped me on the shoulder and she
#
said, what's the problem?
#
She said actually, mathematics is just a language, numbers are adjectives, equations are sentences,
#
these operations plus minus they are verbs.
#
You have language, you have logic, you have mathematics.
#
And slowly I came up, I came up for air literally and I began to breathe and suddenly it became
#
very clear that I just had to think of this as another way of talking, another way of
#
And I loved language on the other side, right?
#
I still remember the poems that I learned in three languages in school.
#
So there was, I suddenly was rescued from this, from the phobia and I think I wasn't
#
doing badly at mathematics, I was doing all right, but I kept getting tripped up by tables
#
and by the calculations of it and there was very savage way of correcting at that time,
#
which is if you didn't get the answer right, you got the whole thing wrong.
#
Like, you know, you didn't get marks for working and you just got it wrong, right?
#
So that can really cripple you.
#
I often feel as long as the process is okay, just like, don't worry about the product,
#
just look at the process.
#
Have they learned to think logically and within the parameters of a given set of ideas?
#
That's what mathematics should be and no one was thinking like that in those days.
#
So you were penalized because you thought seven eighths are 52, you know, you just did
#
that calculation quickly inside your head, not 56 and you got it wrong and they just
#
give you zero and five and you, you know, your marks.
#
So I wasn't doing badly, but I had no relationship with this whole system of mathematics and
#
in the eighth standard that changed dramatically, I actually managed to form an interesting
#
relationship with this.
#
This doesn't mean that I went straight up to 150 on 150 in mathematics at that time
#
it was out of 150, but it meant that I looked forward to new concepts with interest.
#
Like, I mean, what is this sine, cos and tan?
#
How are they interacting with each other?
#
How do they interact with each other?
#
Why do we even have them?
#
And so I'd go home and luckily I had a father who would try and answer these questions and
#
I would sit with him and say, you know, like we're doing trigonometry and all the answers
#
that I didn't get in class because then class it was really about process.
#
It was about you see this angle, you see this ratio, you figure out this answer, you're
#
You don't get the ratio right, you're wrong.
#
So I could go home and ask my father about trigonometry and calculus and all the rest
#
And so I've managed to cobble together a working sort of relationship with mathematics and
#
This is what I brought to my students because all my students were in that same situation
#
as that's why I was the duffer, sir.
#
If I had a 90% student, I would not have been able to add anything to them.
#
But when I had a 20% student, I knew exactly what was wrong.
#
That they had at some point, you know, one of their building blocks was bad and the rest
#
of the superstructure that was because that's unfortunately mathematics is really about
#
If you don't each block will support another block.
#
So all you had to do is go and do a little diagnostic, you know, sort of investigation
#
and say, okay, you don't get integers, right, okay.
#
And yeah, negative two into negative two becomes plus four, sounds odd, yes, but let's figure
#
And once you get that, we can build this up again.
#
So I, you know, I became that kind of teacher.
#
I feel looking, I also began to read a lot about mathematics.
#
I loved Hardy's mathematician's apologia.
#
I enjoyed reading The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel when it came out later.
#
I started reading, you know, David Berlinski and people like that on mathematics just because
#
And because, you know, at some point you slip a bit and you think, okay, I didn't get that
#
and you can say to yourself, I don't have to, I can just walk, you know, I'm not giving
#
an exam in this, I'm just reading it for fun.
#
And as long as you can have that attitude, you know, that it is play, that this is play
#
actually, maths can be a lot of beautiful fun.
#
And so in that sense, I mean, you know, after that, I began to enjoy mathematics a lot more,
#
just, you know, doing stupid things like adding up numbers, trying to find, guess how many
#
prime numbers on taxi drive, taxi cars I'll see, you know, on there, this thing in a day,
#
probabilities, all kinds of things can be just tossed into the pot.
#
You probably did a lot of mathematics with your poker playing.
#
I mean, there's, there's definitely like most poker players, professional poker players
#
have some intuitive notion of probability that they have, that they're working with.
#
They may not have worked it out, but they know when they see their cards, what the probability
#
of the spread of cards is around the table and they're operating on that, on that principle.
#
So when I was a kid, I used to greatly enjoy Martin Gardner's books with mathematical
#
Martin Gardner, yeah, how could I forget that Alice book was fabulous.
#
I think there was Mukul Sharma in the Sunday Times, those columns, which was about maths
#
and about other things, but yeah, but I was actually never into math till I became a professional
#
And poker is really all math, you know, people outside it think that, oh, it's all reading
#
body language, who is bluffing poker face, actually that's way overrated.
#
It is entirely math and I credit poker in fact, for teaching me the probabilistic way
#
of thinking about the world, like the way we think about the world, I think the greatest
#
mistake people make is a hindsight bias of assuming that everything that happened was
#
Because when something has happened, when it's in the past, things have either a hundred
#
percent happened or zero percent happened, there's nothing in between.
#
But when you look at the future, you know, everything is probabilistic, you know, if
#
somebody had a bad outcome, it doesn't mean that he did something right and did something
#
And I think that's led to a diminishment in the certainty that I feel about things.
#
And also, I think what that's led me to realize is that the quality that is most missing in
#
the modern world is just fricking humility, you know, that most people who are successful,
#
like 98 percent of it is luck, but they let it get to their heads and they become arrogant.
#
And most people who fail to whom bad things happen, 98 percent, it is luck.
#
And of course, in poker, what you can do is you can get lucky or unlucky in one hand,
#
but you can put a big sample size of hands out there and eventually you kind of get what
#
you know, your process gets you what you deserve per se.
#
But in life, you don't have that sample size.
#
You know, you're born on the wrong side of the tracks, you're born on the wrong side
#
So that's one roll of the dice.
#
That's one roll of the dice.
#
And every day the dice is rolling.
#
But the dice is very heavily weighted from that one roll about where you were born.
#
The next 10 years or so is going to be like literally and then 20, 30 years is going to
#
be determined by that one roll.
#
And the stone can't be a diamond, right?
#
Like you said, it can be a brick.
#
And you know, that's so, in a sense, tragic.
#
And of course, there are depending on where in the world you are, what society is like,
#
you can ameliorate it to one extent.
#
But I think the key there that happens is that you can then at some level, determine
#
your own happiness by not making it contingent on the outcome of what happens to you.
#
But just realizing that, okay, a lot of this shit is outside my control.
#
But what is in my control is what I do and what I feel about it.
#
Very helpful at some level.
#
So let's on that note, let's take a quick break and we'll continue after the break.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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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.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with a very kind Jerry Pinto over here and I say very kind partly, and
#
I don't know if you'll notice this from the quality of the sound changing, but I've suddenly
#
got this bad cold which flared up in a swollen eye and Jerry straight away said that, listen,
#
you got to take it easy.
#
Let's, let's record without the air conditioning.
#
And he said it's in, you know, that we Indians are meant to sweat.
#
So thank you for that, but we'll put the AC back on if we need to.
#
So I again want to go back to the sort of the chronological narrative.
#
Talk about your sort of journey reading in terms of, you know, in the education of Yuri.
#
One key part in the coming of age story is a book that he is reading all the time.
#
And in fact, I think the appreciation of the book is deepened if you've read any of those
#
because you kind of get where he is and what's happening.
#
And you've even, you know, in one of your children's books, you've got this lovely
#
poem called reading, which I will in the spirit of the name of the poem read out where you
#
write quote, the more you read, the more you know, the more you know, the more you grow,
#
the more you grow, the more you live, the more you live, the more you give, the more
#
you give, the more you get, nothing out does reading it.
#
So tell me a little bit about how that journey started, because just in my own life, I remember
#
I was very privileged to be in a home where there were lots of books all around me.
#
And I remember at the age of 10, just going to one of my father's fancy looking shelves
#
and picking out a book which seemed to have an exciting title, The House of the Dead.
#
So I thought, okay, which thriller hoga, kuch maza aega.
#
And it was, of course, Dostoevsky's book about his time in exile in Siberia.
#
And it's like something just opened, like you suddenly realize that shit, this is a
#
book is not just an entertaining story.
#
And I'm not dissing it, you know, I'm not dissing any of what I read before that the
#
Annette Blightens and all that, but something just opened for me.
#
Tell me about sort of that process for you, where you come to realize that, you know,
#
that something is happening, that you are now living other lives, you have access to
#
other worlds, that excitement, take me through your journey as a reader.
#
I think, you know, I can't remember a time when I was not reading, though I must say
#
in the way that I was a needy child, I like to be read to as well.
#
Okay, so I would harass my mother to when she was well, to read to me and the book of
#
choice was Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
#
For some reason, I couldn't understand why, I don't even know why now.
#
But maybe it was because of that sense of the possibility of being a horse and speaking
#
from horsiness and you know, ginger and all the other things that made up that book.
#
So I think it was a very, it was, I can't remember a time when I wasn't reading, I
#
have always been reading, I can't remember a day that I did, I can't remember an entire
#
day that I spent without some encounter with books.
#
So in some fundamental way, I do believe that I'm made of the stories that I've read.
#
And the great thing was that both my parents had not gone to college.
#
So they had decided that their education would consist of books, and they would buy large
#
quantities of books, because they both became able to, but it was not the time when you
#
My father did eventually become an engineer, but my mother didn't, and so we had loads
#
And I remember that nothing was ever banned to us, no one ever said, that's not something
#
And I remember picking up Lady Chatterdee's Lover and being, like after about 30 pages,
#
figuring out that there was something here that perhaps, you know, I shouldn't be reading,
#
but I plowed through it, and I remember laughing uncomfortably at, you know, naming genitals
#
But no one ever stopped me or said anything.
#
Remember picking up Mr. Isherwood Changer's Trains, because it seemed like I had two days
#
holidays and I thought I'd be able to finish it in two days.
#
It just was slender, it had lots of dialogue, it was like ridiculous amounts of bad choices
#
for my age and reasons to read.
#
But now going back, I think there are no bad reasons to read, I mean there's only bad readers.
#
And I think for me, the turning point was going to college and discovering all those
#
Our world was a white world, an anglophone white world.
#
There were some exceptions, like for instance, I remember there was a collected Sigrid Undstedt.
#
She was a Norwegian writer who had won the Nobel Prize in 1922 or 23, sometime in the
#
And my father had dutifully bought all her books because she'd won the Nobel Prize.
#
So zahir hai, she was a great writer.
#
And I read them all and they were fabulous because Sigrid Undstedt dealt with, you know,
#
Norway when it was in its primal stages of rape and murder and pillage and violent action
#
and revenge being taken and cold-blooded murders, it was wonderful.
#
And then, strange story, I was at the Jaipur Literary Festival and I was sitting at dinner
#
and there was a young man next to me, white man, and I said, hello, how are you, where
#
He said, I'm from Norway.
#
Hello, Sigrid Undstedt Territory, and he looked at me and he said, you know Sigrid Undstedt?
#
And I said, of course, who doesn't know Sigrid Undstedt, she's like, she won a Nobel Prize.
#
So he said, yes, but not me, many people in Norway even know her.
#
So I said, yeah, but I, you know, I read collected works and I was telling him about Christine
#
Lavran's Datir or whatever, and he said, you must come to Norway and live in her house
#
And I said, yeah, I must do all these things, I must, but he said, no, no, I am in charge
#
of the Sigrid Undstedt Foundation and I am inviting you next year to come and live.
#
So I actually went and sat in Sigrid Undstedt's house.
#
She'd actually tamed a small revue to run under her floor.
#
So there was water music throughout the day and night, sat there typing away, happily,
#
Only, of course, the downside is that Norway is terribly expensive and they weren't giving
#
So I had, I learned all kinds of tricks, like for instance, when Norwegian people buy bread,
#
they cut off the sides of the loaf and toss them away.
#
So I would go to the supermarket and scoop the whole bag up of side slices of loaves
#
and then buy, you know, like just toppings and, and, and, you know, and eat them.
#
That would be lunch and dinner because it was frivolously expensive, but still it was
#
So I remember one of the most significant, two really significant, one was Junichiro
#
Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, which was just like nothing I had ever read.
#
Great book on marriage and relationships.
#
And just, you know, such, such a severe and austere and beautiful book.
#
And on the other side, it was Chinua Akebe's Things Fall Apart, which was about another
#
But I had never believed that English could possibly encompass the tribal experience.
#
I did not think it was possible because I thought English was far too non-tribal a language.
#
It was far too much a language.
#
And of course, up to then I'd read Jane Austen and, you know, Hardy and whatnot.
#
And those were all civilized people in a very civilized environment.
#
They were drinking tea and exchanging pleasantries.
#
And here, Chinua Akebe captured that feeling of a changing society and it was just incredible.
#
And I remember actually feeling thirsty, like I remember thinking, I hope there is more
#
I want there to be more like this.
#
And many, many years later, I was in my 40s when someone told me that to be a successful
#
child writer, you have to have about 40, 50 books.
#
Because if children read one famous five, they want many famous fives.
#
And if there are many famous fives, they feel reassured and they settle in.
#
And I was about to laugh at this stupid thing that children wanted.
#
When I remembered my Chinua Akebe moment, I had wanted more like this.
#
And unfortunately, the world at that time was very closed in.
#
We had very little money in the nation, as it were.
#
So therefore, book imports were very restricted.
#
I remember a time when there was one copy of Orientalism by Edward Said in the whole
#
It was owned by CED, the Center for Education and Documentation.
#
And there was a list of people to which you added your name.
#
And you knew when you were going to get your Said chance.
#
In one of your novels, I think your protagonist is sixth on the list, right?
#
So that was one part of it, that books were not available.
#
The second part of it was that we were in the middle of the Cold War.
#
So both America and England were very willing to let us have their books.
#
So you could have the USIS with great magazines available, with great quantities of Poe and
#
Hawthorne and Fonagut and everybody.
#
You had the British Council Library with all the latest and you had all those great poets,
#
This is very valuable, but we were very white.
#
And I wanted, without knowing the words, without ever thinking decolonization or any of that,
#
I wanted more of this stuff.
#
So it was in nooks and crannies that you found it.
#
You found it because some hippie had dropped off his copy of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Get
#
His Gun and he had noted lots of things like weird and cool on the sides.
#
I remember just also the one thing that was missing in all these places on the street
#
was poetry because I have always believed that when you buy a book of poems, if it doesn't
#
speak to you, it's very easy to get rid of, but if it speaks to you, it is part of your
#
life for the rest of your life.
#
So there was very little poetry and there was very little poetry in English because
#
Indian poetry in English suffers from the world's worst bunch of marauding publishers.
#
They are absolutely parasitical.
#
So they will bring out endless quantities of huge anthologies, but they will not support
#
the poet when the poet has a collection.
#
They just want to do anthologies because those will go into syllabuses and maybe make them
#
But they won't support the poet and that I find egregious to say the least.
#
You would want to read Kamla Das and there was no Kamla Das.
#
You'd read one poem in an anthology in a book somewhere and you thought, hey, she's speaking
#
You couldn't find any Kamla Das.
#
Then DC Books brought out a collected Kamla Das.
#
I remember buying it and railing at the way they had laid out the poems, one after the
#
other, no spaces in between.
#
I thought this is such contempt and I got very angry with this and I thought a good
#
Kamla Das anthology is what I need and my sister at that point said, hey, listen, the
#
university library doesn't have Kamla Das.
#
And I said, okay, take it and then I couldn't find it again.
#
I couldn't buy it again.
#
So I wrote to DC Books in Kerala.
#
I sent endless letters to them.
#
They didn't reply either and they just stopped doing it.
#
And for 10 years, I had no Kamla Das until the poor thing died.
#
And then they brought out her book.
#
So in English letters, your collected comes out when you die.
#
Otherwise, you're not going to get it corrected.
#
She's like so shameless Indian publishers, I tell you.
#
So I became the bottom feeder of Smoker's Corner, New and Secondhand Bookshop, The Circle
#
at King's Circle, all the booksellers who lined these places and often I would actually
#
have very good friendships with them because I would say, okay, I don't have like 40 bucks
#
for this, but I do have 25.
#
I'll give you 25 and I'll bring back 15 and I would and they were my education.
#
So I often felt like a lot of the education that happened when I was in college in those
#
five years, some of it happened in the classroom, definitely.
#
A lot of it happened because Girish Shahane, Ranji Thoskote, Arunati Subramanyam, these
#
were the people who were Naresh Fernandez.
#
These were hanging around and we were chatting also.
#
So those received ideas that came on high from the English, the Parsi English literature
#
teachers got ground in the conversations that we had and then were taken out into the world
#
and we tested them against the stuff that we were reading from the streets and from
#
So in some ways, I think the shortages, the paucity made each thing like a delight.
#
Like you found a book that you had been waiting for and it settled something.
#
Like you couldn't wait to get home and settle in and consume it.
#
And I think it is wonderful that young people just say, yeah, I just looked on a book Choran
#
there it was and I bought it and it's coming home.
#
But I had the feeling that the reason why we value the books so much more is because
#
each book then is not just itself, but it is also a container of the histories of our
#
longing and our desire for those books and the final acquisition of them, which was so
#
You know, being tempted to steal books from people's houses and saying to myself, Jenny,
#
you can't possibly do this and resisting the impulse, I must say.
#
But it was a time of book hunger that I hope we will never experience again.
#
I would not wish it on anybody.
#
And so therefore, you know, when you went into a house, there was an automatic judgment
#
Is it a house with books or not?
#
And if it is a house with books, I want to read every single title and tick off what
#
I have read and know what I have not read.
#
And you never asked to lend because no one lended books, no one loaned books to anybody
#
They were just too precious.
#
You knew that, you know, a couple of teachers would say, if you'd like, you can sit here
#
It's not likely to actually go all the way to a teacher's house and sit there and read
#
Though I was very tempted often to try to just to see whether they were actually going
#
to to stand by what they said.
#
But you know, therefore, those libraries, the British Council, the USIS, the Maximula Bhavan,
#
even all became such, such deeply important resources for us, you know, bringing these
#
Yeah, I remember one argument I had in the 90s with my father and I was so convinced
#
that I was right and he was so obviously wrong.
#
But today I look at that argument a little differently is where all the many TV channels
#
came and I went wild because all the music on MTV star movies are showing cinema all
#
And I was like, what a harvest of riches.
#
And I was saying, wow, you know, the world has changed so much with so much choice and
#
And he was giving this old foggy argument that, do you know, there was only Doordarshan
#
once upon a time, but we watched everything, you know, we didn't have a choice, but we
#
And I think net net, I still think my side of the argument is right.
#
But now I understand where he's coming from, that, you know, one example I like to give
#
is, you know, Pradeep Kishan's film in which Annie gives it this one.
#
It was shown once on Doordarshan, but everyone I know of my age watched it then that one
#
It is the one time and we all have like sharp memories of it.
#
We all have shot the kiss in the lift and everything.
#
It's imprinted on the brain, right.
#
And you know, another of my friends, Subrat Mohanty was on this show in this beautiful
#
episode on films and he was talking about where his love for films began.
#
And he speaks about, you know, 80s, Doordarshan, whatever they showed, he would watch.
#
So one day they announced that they would show Tosca on Sunday.
#
And in Subrat's words, humne socha bhai hum kya kar rahe hai, dekh lege.
#
And today all of this is...
#
It was in the middle of the rains.
#
It was rain and it started raining when Tosca was on.
#
I remember thinking this is just magical.
#
So I threw open the big, you know, the front doors.
#
It was raining outside and Tosca was singing madly and there were parts of it that I didn't
#
I want, I mean, I got the big areas and the lovely, you know, the big music.
#
But there were times when you were falling out of it and thinking, okay, okay, but it's
#
It was just a magical moment because I don't know, I think there were some things that,
#
you know, that happening, Kenneth Clarke's Civilization, which was shown on Doordarshan,
#
they were just imprinted on you because you just felt at that moment that you were in
#
the presence of something and why can't we do this?
#
Why can't we do be doing this for ourselves?
#
You know, we never saw like, for instance, I don't remember ever seeing an entire Bharat
#
Natyam performance on TV.
#
You saw five minutes on an excerpt.
#
You saw some, you know, like on Young World, there would be one 10 minute thing of a Bharat
#
Natyam dancer who has gone abroad and then she would like a couple of, you know, moments
#
and then it was gone and everything was just flashes.
#
So remember the world this week with Appan Menon and how we all wanted to be Appan Menon
#
with his well-traveled passport.
#
This is Appan Menon in Cuba.
#
What are you doing in Cuba?
#
That's where I should be.
#
And the thing is, the fact that, you know, you and I can sit here and immediately, oh,
#
Tosca, we can connect and Subrata listening to this is also no doubt saying, one more
#
And I'm thinking in modern times what has happened and I'm not lamenting this.
#
I'm really glad that we have the media, we do the access, we do everything is there.
#
But one, what I was, you know, mentioning at lunchtime and I've spoken about it on
#
the show a few times before, you know, Jonathan Haidt's observation that despite all the world's
#
art and music and literature available to us, most of us are spending the day consuming
#
what was something that was produced in the last three days.
#
The other thing is that because of the means of production being so democratized, it's
#
not one mainstream pushing one big star.
#
It's, you know, there are so many strands of interest you can now pursue.
#
And again, that's such a huge net positive and thank goodness for that.
#
My show would not exist without that.
#
But what it's also done is that for a future generation, you know, if there's an Amit somewhere
#
who's 12 and a Jerry somewhere who's 20, you know, they can't have a call when they have
#
a conversation 30 years later.
#
Those common connections in which Annie gives it this one, they got Tosca, they got those
#
common cultural connections may not be there.
#
And I just wonder that is there something that is lost there?
#
Well, you know, while, of course, it's a big net positive, but is there something that
#
Is that common connection important?
#
And looking at it another way, is that common connection that you and I are able to now
#
make with Tosca a sign of our eliteness?
#
Because most of India would not have had a television at that point in time.
#
But you know, I also want to say that when, okay, let's not during the Tosca time, but
#
even just five years before that Tosca moment, there was one television set in the five apartments
#
It wasn't our television set, it was the neighbors.
#
And so when we had to curate very carefully what we wanted to see, because my father didn't
#
think we should go every day, and certainly not even every week.
#
So it would be like a film that we really wanted to see, then we'd go and ask him.
#
And he'd go and ask our neighbor, and our neighbor would say, are you send your children
#
And he'd say, no, no, they must study, and all these very true, very true, then we would
#
go across and we would be dressed up well, and we would be carrying something for them.
#
And you know, we'd offer make that offering, then they would say, why are you bothering?
#
Now, you must just come.
#
It was a certain formality about it.
#
And then at at about 730, when the Marathi news came on, because it was generally the
#
Sunday film, that's when you know, something from their side would come out of the kitchen
#
And we would, it was like, a lot of the scarcity brought us together, you know, it brought
#
us together in ways that, that large amounts will never do, because that disaggregates
#
It just throws you out because there's so much to watch and, you know, everybody is
#
I think even now, at one point in time, I remember you could tell when the Mahabharat
#
was on TV, because the soundtrack just blew out of everyone's house.
#
And everyone could hear the sound, everyone was playing it.
#
Now there's total silence at that time, because everyone's on their phones.
#
Like there is no sound of TV in the middle class anymore, that's gone.
#
But what I think does still unite people is music, you know, like you listen, you watch
#
young people dancing at a nightclub.
#
And you see that there is a commonality there.
#
That is the one thing that is left to all of them.
#
So that, you know, kardirabrabu kardire, whatever, that some Daler Mehendi song from like 20
#
years ago still gets everyone excited and they're all bopping about on the floor.
#
So I think percussion may well be the answer to the question of what is commonly left.
#
And as for the rest of it, you know, I think your father was quite right, but so were you.
#
You know, both of you have very, very valid standpoints.
#
And that I think is one of those gifts of late middle age, is that you begin to see
#
that an argument doesn't have to resolve itself.
#
An argument has to be presented so that you can listen to the other person.
#
You remember your father's argument.
#
You may not have agreed with it then, but you remember it.
#
The two of you shared this moment where you argued with each other, giving both each other
#
time and space and attentiveness and listening to each other's point of view.
#
And both of you probably went to be a little richer for that because you listened.
#
And you know, I think what we have lost is the ability to listen.
#
And when I say listen, I mean active, attentive listening, which says, okay, not just what
#
you are saying, but what you want to say.
#
Because not all of us are gifted with fluency.
#
Not all of us are gifted with the ability to articulate what we are saying.
#
So can we look beyond sometimes limited vocabulary?
#
Can we look beyond people's immediacy that the fact that they are speaking immediacy
#
into like the deeper heart of what they are saying and pay attention to our listening?
#
And I think if we did that, a lot of the screaming, the hoarse screaming that we hear these days
#
Because we are not doing a good job of listening anymore.
#
So the availability is there, there's so much, you know, I mean, to think about the choices.
#
I said, at one point I said, it's some festival or something to young people, I said, we will
#
always have read more than you, than you at the same age, because there wasn't that much
#
We, our default setting was the book, because it could be read again and again.
#
Films were at the mercy of someone who was programming a theatre.
#
You had to cross down to see films.
#
If you missed out on a film and you wanted to see it again, you had to take a day off
#
from college and see the matinee show.
#
And then for that you had to cross down to go to some B grade theatre and see it.
#
So if you wanted to catch up on say, if you were in 1981, like I was, and you wanted to
#
catch up on Mother India or Mughal-e-Azam, you had to wait till a scratched up print
#
came and was shown somewhere.
#
And you went and you saw it there.
#
Here you just download, you know, and you have it.
#
So the net-net is that I think young people download quantities of stuff and don't watch
#
You know, it's like they have it, but they don't read it.
#
Much like I have to say, like our TBR lists and the amount of books we buy.
#
But I will get, I will get around to reading every single one of the books that I've bought.
#
That's a, that's a guarantee.
#
I'm not sure if I'm a young person anymore, but guilty as charged because
#
Under 50, just don't talk about it.
#
I will attempt to stay under 50 forever.
#
And so I want to pick up on a couple of the things you said.
#
Like one thing that, that I have learned about myself, maybe improved about myself is certainly
#
You know, you have also in one of your great videos on Instagram and you know, I think
#
everyone who is listening to this should just head to Instagram after this episode and watch
#
all of your vlog episodes.
#
If I may call it a vlog, but you've also said quote unquote, the job of a writer is to listen.
#
And what I've sort of personally found is that in the context of creating this show,
#
it's made me a better listener and has been driven by the form, right?
#
If I was doing like a 10 minute podcast, I would not have to listen.
#
I would not even have to read your book to talk to you.
#
I could ask standard questions.
#
In fact, after this is over, I will show you.
#
I asked chat GPT, what should I ask Jerry Pinto?
#
It gave me 10 questions and they're all like very standard issue stuff.
#
I would have, I would have just taken it from there and asked you.
#
Um, and by the way, I also asked digression and also asked chat GPT, tell me everything
#
you know about Jerry Pinto, right?
#
And the only thing it said, which I didn't know, which I think is false is according
#
to chat GPT, you won the Padma Shri in 2021.
#
No sugar, sugar is poison, but that's, that's a, that's a, yeah, but that's a digression.
#
But so what happened was because my show got longer and longer, first deep dives into subjects
#
and then deep dives into people, I became a much better listener.
#
And because I became a much better listener, I approached all my reading in a, in, in that
#
particular way where I'm trying to sort of soak in the essence of everything the person
#
is about and not just look at their words for information.
#
And you know, Stephen Covey once said that the problem with us is that we listen to respond
#
And the key point, there is a point of the ego that in every conversation, if it is going
#
to be a conflict of egos to people saying, okay, what is my witty comeback?
#
What do I say now to show how smart I am?
#
Then you're not really going to have that kind of productive exchange.
#
And I think changing the form made me a better listener.
#
And therefore it made me a better person in a way only relative to what I am.
#
I'm not a paragon of anything, but just in terms of having a little more terror of being
#
able to step back and look at things.
#
If we shift, you know, the question of form from how I am creating something to how we
#
consume content, most people today, including me, are consuming content by swiping left
#
or right, by scrolling up and down.
#
It's bite, bite, bite, bite, bite.
#
And obviously I'm not going to come up with a generalized complaint of, oh, people have
#
a short attention span because this show itself proves that they don't.
#
But a lot of the time consumption is happening in short bites.
#
A lot of the time when we are sitting with close friends in a cafe, not only are we not
#
actually listening to one another, we are not even with one another.
#
We are all in our little black screen, six atomized people physically in the same space,
#
And you have given this advice in your video that, look, you know, if you are sitting in
#
a bus, for example, and you're looking at a screen, what a freaking waste of time.
#
You want to, you know, put the screen away, look around, listen to the conversations around
#
you, maybe start a conversation, say hello.
#
You know, there's a value in that.
#
And I just think that, you know, back in the day, I once asked one of my guests, Sarah
#
Rai, the writer and translator, you know, how her memory when it came to details of
#
her childhood was so acute.
#
And she said, Amit, we noticed everything because we had nothing else to do.
#
And I, lovely, but I still feel there's a selection bias because not everyone is noticing
#
everything, but those who are want to can kind of do.
#
But today we are noticing anything and I wonder if this changes in some way, if form feeds
#
into content and feeds into character, then, you know, is there something larger happening
#
here which is a problem?
#
And at an individual level, of course, I try to be aware of it.
#
I try to put my phone in another room for a period of time and not look at it.
#
I try to pick up a book when I'm bored instead of my phone.
#
But in general, is it an issue?
#
You know, I think we will have to consider what exactly is an issue in the first place.
#
And second, there is a little bit of like, see, I think we are all, okay, let's even
#
take the calculator, right?
#
When we were growing up, calculators were very few and far between and it was held that
#
the calculator would kill us mentally, you know, that we would all forget how to how
#
to multiply, add, divide and subtract and we'd become, you know, sort of mindless typing
#
away on the on the machine.
#
I think that's not true.
#
I believe that the calculator took away some of the grunt work of our lives and maybe opened
#
Now when the grunt work is taken away, you have an opportunity, you have like that one
#
hour that you are not actually adding up numbers and you have now a one hour of choice.
#
That one hour of choice, you could you could read philosophy slowly, studiously, attentively
#
and use that perhaps to become a better person in your own terms, whatever better is.
#
You can also swipe left and swipe right, right?
#
Most people will probably choose to swipe left and swipe right.
#
That seems to be that seems to fall under the rubric of human nature, you know, that's
#
So if that's human nature, if that's who we are, short attention span, time wasters are
#
not very disciplined people, people seeking atomized interactions, which are probably
#
easier than the complex messiness of human interaction, because that's very satisfying
#
but very messy at the same time.
#
You know, a lot of this is about individual choice.
#
And I'm very deeply in favor of people making their choices.
#
I would like at some point to sort of draw their attention to the fact that their choices
#
may not be the optimum choices for them.
#
And then with deep reluctance, leave them to make those choices again.
#
I think, you know, teaching, for instance, in the beginning, I was very much an evangelical
#
teacher in the sense I wanted, I wanted to bring the good news of I had had such a blast
#
with journalism, right?
#
I met authors and writers and scientists and politicians and lots of people whom I would
#
not have met otherwise.
#
And I thought, hey, guys, all of you can do this too, right?
#
So you should all be journalists tomorrow, come on, let's do this together.
#
And now I have what I call Lake Dharma for teaching, okay, which is I am a lake and I'm
#
here and I'm always available.
#
You can come and drink or you cannot drink if you don't want to.
#
And I found that many people don't want to drink and that should be fine by me.
#
It's not, it hurts because you feel that, you know, it's a rejection of who you are,
#
but you hang on to that notion that they are free to come and drink if they want to.
#
And they're free to not drink if they don't want to.
#
And that actually is a relaxing thing.
#
It makes you calmer as a teacher.
#
It makes you also more willing to accept that there is more nuance in humanity than you
#
I remember at the end of one year, and I always feel that I have brought a wide variety of
#
things to the table and talked about so many issues, and I was doing a little exercise
#
with my students, tell me what you think you learned.
#
And one young woman said, I learned you said that anything we spray on our armpits goes
#
straight into our bloodstream.
#
Okay, that's all in this whole year of interaction, but yes, that's what she learned.
#
And hey, if it rewrote your use of deodorant, okay, maybe that's a good thing.
#
I'm saying, so really teaching is like a lesson in postmodernism and the idea that you may
#
be thinking that you are sending out message X, but message Y is being received.
#
So you learn to live with that.
#
So these choices that people are making all the time, we've got to learn to live with
#
the possibility that we are also wrong.
#
Somewhere this might even be better for them.
#
I cannot imagine how ideally serious, but is that because I have an investment in being
#
the way I am, and I want everybody to be the way I am, because all of us are little tin
#
pot dictators inside our heads also.
#
Some of us I think a little more aware of this and hold on to it and restrain that dictator.
#
Some of us just let him run, or is it that I just don't understand this new way of being?
#
So at some level, people will say things like, I can't do FaceTime.
#
I much prefer, that's our generation will say, I much prefer personal interaction.
#
But only of course, if the person is in America and you can't meet them, maybe that's what
#
these people are thinking, but maybe they are also thinking, I prefer FaceTime, I'd
#
I'd rather be able to cut you off and say, sorry, network issues, you know, put your
#
phone on flight mode and say, sorry, network issues, whatever.
#
Is that a way of ending a conversation that you don't want to have?
#
Okay, that's your way of living.
#
See, we're always going to be a little puzzled by other ways of living.
#
But that is what is fascinating, I think always fascinating, that you're not quite sure why
#
Why, as you said, why would you want to cross the city to meet a friend, sit down in a coffee
#
shop and then both of you look at your phones?
#
What would be the, what makes sense in this?
#
Nothing as far as I can see, but hey, that's what they want to do.
#
And maybe it's an unfair stereotype, like one thing that I've certainly started trying
#
to do a little more in the last couple of years, at least, is meet people in person
#
Even the recording of this, I was forced to do it online during COVID, but otherwise I
#
much prefer it in person, it's just, there's just something about it that really works
#
Now a lot of things I want to double click on into what you said, but instead let's go
#
back to reading and poetry in particular, you know, in the sense that one, initially
#
when we get drawn to poetry, we, you know, the, the kind of poetry one first gets drawn
#
to is a very basic one where the meter is set and it's rhyming and it's musical in
#
And you kind of go with that and later on you go a little bit beyond that and stuff
#
And my relationship with poetry is that work that means the most to me in literature is
#
Like if I had to take one book to a desert island, it would be Mark Strand's collected
#
You know, perhaps even his last book, Almost Invisible, those prose poems, if you've read
#
them, I just love them so much.
#
They speak to me so deeply, but it's not something that I can really say that I can articulate
#
You don't have to articulate.
#
If you're like, I mean, that's what literature teachers always mess up because they've got
#
to make it all about themes and tensions and texts and contexts and stuff like that.
#
We can just read poetry and either be swept away on its riptide or say, well, okay, someone
#
else's riptide, not mine.
#
So what I'm going to ask you to do is, if you're up for it, read out a couple of the
#
early poems that, you know, flick the switch somewhere that meant a lot to you.
#
The first poem that I think really startled me, actually left me almost shell-shocked
#
is this one by Eunice D'Souza called Forgive Me, Mother.
#
Forgive me, mother, that I left you a life-long widow, old, alone.
#
It was kill or die, and you got me anyway.
#
The blood congeals at lover's touch.
#
The guts dissolve in shit.
#
I think for me, that line, in dreams, I hack you, may even have made the way open for M
#
It told me it was okay to talk like this in a certain way.
#
Now this is a bit of a slightly more obvious kind of choice, but I'll read it anyway.
#
This is Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning.
#
The rain set in early tonight.
#
The sullen wind was soon awake.
#
It tore the elm tops down for spite and did its worst to wax the lake.
#
I listened with heart, fit to break.
#
When glided in Porphyria, straight, she shut the cold out and the storm and kneeled and
#
made the cheerless grate blaze up and all the cottage warm, which done she rose and
#
from her form withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl and laid her soiled gloves by untied,
#
her hat and let the damp hair fall and last she sat down by my side and called me.
#
When no voice replied, she put my arm around her waist and made her smooth white shoulder
#
bare and all her yellow hair displaced and stooping made my cheek lie there and spread
#
over all her yellow hair, murmuring how she loved me.
#
She too weak for all her heart's endeavor to set its struggling passion free from pride
#
and vainer ties to sever and give herself to me forever.
#
But passion sometimes would prevail, nor could tonight's gay feast restrain a sudden thought
#
of one so pale for love of her and all in vain, so she was come through wind and rain.
#
Be sure I looked up at her eyes, happy and proud.
#
At last I knew Porphyria worshipped me, surprised, made my heart swell and still it grew while
#
That moment she was mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good, I found a thing to do and all
#
her hair in one long yellow string I wound three times around her little throat around
#
No pain felt she, I am quite sure she felt no pain as a shut bud that holds a bee.
#
I warily oped her lids again, laughed the blue eyes without a stain, and I untightened
#
About her neck, her cheek once more, blushed bright beneath my burning kiss, I propped
#
her head up as before, only this time my shoulder bore her head which droops upon it still,
#
the smiling rosy little head, so glad it has its utmost will, that all its scorn at once
#
is fled, and I its love am gained instead.
#
Porphyria's love, she guessed not how, her darling one wish would be heard, and thus
#
we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirred, and yet God has not said
#
It's like an eerie brilliant poem, and Elizabeth Barrett must have been terrified to read it.
#
And I'm going to just try and find an Nisim Ezekiel poem to Bombay, that famous one, unsuitable
#
This is as much like a memory of Nisim who was a very strong influence in my growing
#
up years as a poet, as much as it is about this poem, because almost every day I have
#
a moment when I think unsuitable for song as well as for sense, when I look at the city.
#
Island by Nisim Ezekiel.
#
Unsuitable for song as well as sense, the island flowers into plums and skyscrapers
#
reflecting precisely the growth of my mind, I am here to find my way in it, sometimes
#
I cry for help, but mostly keep my own counsel, I hear distorted echoes of my own ambiguous
#
voice and of dragons claiming to be human, bright and tempting breezes flow across the
#
island separating past from the future, then the air is still again and I sleep the fragrance
#
of ignorance, how delight the soul with absolute sense of salvation, how whole to a single
#
willed direction, I cannot leave the island, I was born here and belong, even now a host
#
of miracles hurries me to a daily business, minding the ways of the island as a good native
#
should, taking care and clamor in my stride.
#
What I'm also sort of interested in and this plays into poetry, this plays into writing,
#
this plays of everything is this notion and I first picked up the phrase earlier today
#
from one of your Instagram videos itself, but I've been speaking about the concept
#
for a long time with my students and that's the phrase complicit reading, where you say
#
that as a reader and the phrase I use with my students is like I say both mindful reading
#
and mindless reading are fine, they're both great and mindful reading or complicit reading
#
as you put it is where you are with the writer and seeing all the tools and how they are
#
using their craft to create a particular effect on the reader and all of that and my guess
#
is that at that moment where you begin complicit reading, that is the birth of you as a writer.
#
Oh, totally and it is the death of you as a reader, a reader who enjoys reading and
#
just can, you know, sometimes I think the innocent readers, what I call the reader who
#
just reads and then goes off and is a CA or a plumber or a mechanic, they have the best
#
of both worlds because they can like, I mean, the reading is effortless, is thought, is
#
maybe thoughtful and it may be mindful, but it is not penetrative, it is not deconstructive,
#
it is simply like, I mean, accepting the terms that the text has said and rejoicing in those
#
Whereas we are penetrating the text, we are deconstructing it, we are lifting up the words
#
and looking underneath to see exactly what was done and how it was done to see that whether
#
we could replicate it, to take it within.
#
So this mindless, mindful reading is also a very lovely way to say it.
#
I call it innocent reading is when you're just reading.
#
But I actually feel that there are times when one must read innocent, you know.
#
So it is very good to sometimes just read in a relaxed fashion, just to absorb and to
#
let subconscious processes also take place.
#
But it is also good to read with careful attentiveness to see how it is done, because that's what
#
the masters can teach you.
#
So I think, you know, in the old days, we painters would go off on the grand tour.
#
I'm told that Air India had this scheme by which they would send you to Italy on a tour
#
of Italy to see all the great paintings, the great masters.
#
And after a month, you came back and then you gave them a painting in exchange.
#
Air India developed a great, you know, sort of repository of paintings.
#
And of course, all these people benefited by seeing the great masters.
#
So it seems like a lovely give and take situation.
#
Now, what is our equivalent of going in and sitting in front of a great master and actually
#
replicating it, stroke by stroke, trying to figure it out, is actually to read with deep
#
attentive seriousness and maybe even, I would say, copy out things, like, you know, actually
#
take passages that I think matter to you and write them out in your own handwriting.
#
Because at one level, what you are doing is constructing the black box of your reading.
#
At some point, you'll be able to look back and some of the things that you thought to
#
copy out will appall you.
#
You'll think like, what could I have possibly got out of this?
#
But it will remind you of who you were.
#
And working on the education of Yuri, I often have to remind myself, I'm not this, I'm not
#
omniscient, I'm not well developed, I'm a bumpy adolescent boy who's struggling.
#
So going back to the journaling that I did when I was 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, revealed to
#
me the shallowness of myself, I have to say, at that age, revealed how very strange small
#
things could knock me off balance for a few days, revealed how easily I made judgment
#
calls on great writers.
#
Because you're journaling on your own and in private, though, of course, we all know
#
that the diary is never private, it is always a public document that you're hoping will
#
be stumbled upon when you are the great writer and everyone wants to know what your backstory
#
But anyway, in the act of writing, you can tell yourself, write it, because it doesn't
#
matter, no one will read it.
#
And so you write it down and you write down everything that you were feeling.
#
That journaling came in great handy to create Yuri and his insecurities and his level of
#
dire neediness sometimes, because that's what the Jerry Pinto of the 14, 15, 16 was.
#
So the act of copying down, however, makes you aware of the artisanal quality of writing
#
So I would say paper and pen are your greatest allies in this.
#
The Kindle made it possible to just mark off certain things and highlight them and keep
#
them there, bookmark things and hold on to them, very good in a certain way and useful
#
in a certain way, not denying that at all, but to write out physically is to own, to
#
make this your own for a temporary while.
#
And in that paper, it is your own.
#
It is not somebody else's.
#
If you ever use it and claim it is your own, then you're in trouble.
#
But otherwise it is for that moment your own, that beauty, that grace, or that lack of beauty
#
and grace which you have been struggling for is your own for that time.
#
So copying it out becomes really an important exercise.
#
And I think it also slows you down and makes you aware of very rudimentary and strange
#
things like the size of words, the punctuation that the person has chosen to use.
#
And of course, it may not be the person, maybe an editor who came in later and punctuated.
#
However, but it has become a text and this is the text and we know it with a comma there.
#
So you're actually physically laboring on writing and that is a great help because then
#
something in you I think also I feel, at least with my generation, may not be with this generation,
#
that when you have indulged in something that is physically laborious, that has much greater
#
value than something that is not.
#
So for me, the act of writing begins with paper and pen and I cannot start typing because
#
It feels like those letters that Microsoft Word just pops onto the screen so effortlessly,
#
I feel there's something a little facile about them.
#
So my second and third drafts are always on the computer and that's not a problem.
#
And I'm not even saying that this should be anybody else's method.
#
I'm saying this is mine, that when you are physically laboring over the writing, less
#
is more actually becomes a way of avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome.
#
It becomes like a, do you really want to use that big word, Jerry, or is this sort of useless
#
You just go back to basics and say, okay, I can write this without that.
#
I can do this without that, it helps.
#
So in some senses, complicit reading is if it becomes an obsessive habit, it can destroy
#
your love of reading because there are so many reasons why we read.
#
One of them is because I think it's just pure love, you stumble into it.
#
I know my basic fundamental criterion, my belief is that children who have grown up
#
in houses with books, as you did and I did, have a much greater chance of loving books.
#
But there are lots of people who have grown up in spaces where there are no books at all
#
and still grow to love books.
#
Dayapavar says in Baluta, in fact, that he began to love reading and in all the reading
#
that he did, he saw a world to which he wanted admission, an ordered Brahminical world, because
#
of course the writing came out almost, Marathi writing came out of Pune from the Saraswat
#
Brahmins who dominated Marathi at that time, but that world had no room for him.
#
So he was caught in a double bind between wanting to belong to that world and not being
#
admitted into that world and so he made the signal and brilliant decision to insert himself
#
into that world and to write Baluta to begin with, which was just incredibly useful for
#
everybody who came afterwards, who read the book or for those who began to write their
#
versions of their lives afterwards.
#
But he says also something that I think middle-class children would never say, that reading for
#
me was horror because it excluded me, I saw how I was excluded and for all of us, even
#
if we read books which were about white children, we knew that we were the privileged elite
#
So whether we, no Indian child ever figured in the famous five or if they figured in the
#
famous four, I think in the four there was an Indian boy who was always stupid and let
#
his hair fall into his face and then he had a haircut and he became British, so all was
#
I don't think we were very troubled by those exclusions because we knew our position and
#
our inclusion was always a given, whereas for him it wasn't.
#
So I think if reading complicity becomes an obsessive thing, it actually will probably
#
kill your love of reading and then I don't know whether you can write into a form that
#
you don't like anymore.
#
So it's got to be handled with care, you've got to do a lot of some mindless reading and
#
some just relaxed reading.
#
So I often suggest that if it is a good book and you think you might gain something from
#
it to read it twice, the first time you read it, you just force your mind into relaxed
#
mode and just read and the second time that you read it, you read it with care and attention
#
and then you can even read it selectively.
#
You can say, oh, that scene was extremely good, I need to look at that scene again or
#
you can say those descriptions on page 17, wow, I need to do that again.
#
So I often say that it might be good to even be a little desecrative to your book and mark
#
and pencil what you think you need to go back to.
#
So lots and what you said, which is resonant and I'll share this really interesting experiment
#
carried out by one of my writing students, which both inspired me and moved me.
#
But first, I'd say that, you know, what I kind of tell the people I teach is that both
#
The point is that if you say, oh, I'm just going to notice a craft, I'm only going to
#
do mindful reading, it sometimes is too much of an effort.
#
Sometimes you have a million things going on and you just want to curl up with a book
#
and just enjoy the story.
#
And my sense is that that's great.
#
You know, you will just buy osmosis, you'll imbibe and then whatever you like, you can
#
go back to it and read it.
#
In fact, in week one of my course, I send them can lose great story, paper menagerie
#
if you've read it and I asked them to do exactly this.
#
The first time just go with the story and of course it is going to make everybody cry.
#
It's just such a great story.
#
But the second time, just look at the language, look at the clarity, the simplicity, you know,
#
notice all of these things.
#
So there was one of my students, Rita, who once asked me this question about English
#
is not my first language, but I want to write in English.
#
So we were sort of discussing that.
#
And I pointed to Jhumpa Lahiri who'd learned Italian and written a book in it and Jhumpa
#
has done this great interview with the Tyler Cowell in Conversations with Tyler, where
#
she spoke about this writer called Agata Kristof.
#
And I discovered Agata Kristof because of that interview with Jhumpa, who was Hungarian
#
or something, went to France as an adult during the wars.
#
I think she was 21, learned French from scratch, wrote a series of books in French, later translated
#
into English, of which there's a set of three called The Notebook Trilogy, which might be
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
And it's a masterpiece.
#
It's also language stripped down to its essence.
#
You know, it's so bare bones, so stripped down, it's so beautiful.
#
So I recommended to my student Rita that why don't you check her out.
#
So she got that book and then she told me that what I have started doing is I'm taking
#
pen and paper and I'm copying it, I'm just writing it down by hand.
#
And I found that so beautiful that someone should think of doing that herself.
#
I didn't tell her to do this, that someone should have that desire to get so close to
#
the language because like you correctly said, you know, the mindfulness with which you're
#
doing it, the granularity, because then, you know, what we tend to do, I think, is that
#
You know, we don't put thought into every word, every punctuation mark, every choice
#
Maybe people like you and I will train ourselves to do that in the second or third draft.
#
But to be carrying out this exercise, I thought, wow, this is just so kind of mind blowing.
#
In some senses, like, I mean, obviously, Rita went instinctive on that.
#
She went with instinct on that and I think that was wonderful.
#
And that also, I think, is one of those magic moments of teaching, where the student just
#
stumbles into a possible solution to her own issue.
#
But you've just like maybe moved some of the brambles away and pointed in the direction
#
And then that next step is something that is taken instinctively.
#
And you know, let's, I mean, it, the next steps, I'd love to know, but they must remain
#
At some point, Rita may write a great novel or a short story or play or whatever.
#
I hope she is because what happened in November was, you know, there's this thing called NaNoWriMo,
#
where people try to write a novel in November.
#
So just as an experiment, I said, here's what I'm going to do.
#
I'm going to open a Zoom call at 6 a.m. on November 1st, is going to run till the end
#
And the whole deal is that anyone who wants to put in writing sessions at any point in
#
time during this time, just come.
#
And you don't have to keep your video or audio on, but you will just know that other people
#
are there and they are also writing.
#
If someone volunteers to keep their video on, it's fine.
#
People may benefit from seeing you at work.
#
And I did that for a while, but, but that became a habit.
#
And Rita was one of the people who was writing regularly during that point.
#
And I hope she won't mind me sharing so much, but yeah.
#
I mean, I think, as you can see, I mean, you know, discipline is a sort of constant problem
#
So whatever hacks you can find to get around it, to make these sessions happen.
#
You've spoken about journaling, you know, from when you were very young.
#
Tell me about how that process of writing actually started for you.
#
Like how did you find your way in writing?
#
Like early on, were you, you know, inspired by the great books that you were reading?
#
Were you thinking that I'm going to be a great novelist, I'm going to be this, I'm going
#
to be that, as we tend to do when we are adolescents or whatever.
#
And what was the journaling like?
#
Because that really fascinates me because, you know, since I did an episode with Amitabh
#
Kumar on his book, The Blue Book, which is essentially a collection of journal entries
#
on Instagram and otherwise, me and a lot of others have sort of really become evangelists
#
of journaling in the sense that I think that if you write every day, you are changing every
#
day, you're looking, you're making an intentional effort to look at the world and you're also
#
being forced to look at yourself.
#
And cumulatively, you know, a person who journals every day versus the same person in a parallel
#
universe who doesn't journal every day are different people after a year.
#
So tell me about your experiences of…
#
See, I think the self is a moving target, you know, which makes it so exciting because
#
the act of journaling, as you pointed out quite rightly, changes the self.
#
So while you are trying to pin down and to explain to yourself what happened yesterday
#
or I would, I often say when I'm talking to people who want to be writers, I say make
#
sure that you're narrativizing as well.
#
So journaling can become a solipsistic and narcissistic exercise in which you think that,
#
you know, the fact that you had a headache yesterday is a no-chattering experience when
#
it's actually just a headache, right?
#
But if you are trying your best to record a conversation or to tell a story or to explore
#
a moment with great care and attention, so the kind of journaling that I think people
#
need to avoid is a narrative account of the day, you know, where you just say got up in
#
the morning and had a cup of coffee, felt a little better, etc., etc., stop, like maybe
#
just look at coffee and what does coffee do to you?
#
Just maybe look at the moment of getting up and what was that like, actually, actively
#
try to find your way into the language of that moment.
#
And this discovery I think came from my father who said I had, as everyone knows, a fairly
#
mixed-up childhood because my mother was bipolar and my father was kind of the rock of the
#
And he encouraged both of us to keep diaries.
#
He'd give us a diary at the beginning of the year and he'd say write in it.
#
And at the end of the year, you showed him the diary and if you had covered most of the
#
pages then there was some reward involved, which meant buying a book or whatever, increase
#
in the amount you got to spend at the library.
#
And I think I stumbled into journaling as a way of making sense of the world.
#
I thought at that time it was about a way of making sense of the world.
#
It was a big project and I liked big projects as a child.
#
You thought you could do this.
#
Actually it was about making sense of me.
#
I was making sense of me at the time and it was rich therapy also, I think.
#
It was a rich vein of therapy because in that journal you were allowed, I think middle-class
#
children are often told that to talk about yourself is to put yourself forward.
#
And that was like a great crime to don't put yourself forward, you were told regularly.
#
Achieve modesty in all things.
#
In the journal, you were free to be as big as you wanted.
#
You could sprawl all over those pages.
#
You could be as intense or as, there was a certain, I think in English if you have an
#
anglophone life, intensity is kind of frowned upon.
#
Irony is the preferred mode of sophisticated elucidation of the self.
#
You're much more likely to be taken seriously if you're ironic rather than if you are intense.
#
And this is, I think, the difference between the anglophone existence and the Indian Bhaasha
#
existence, which has absolutely no…
#
Is world cinema versus Bollywood?
#
No compunction about intensity.
#
So I have the feeling that journaling became the space where you could actually play out
#
your Bollywood fantasies also.
#
You know, of bereftness and of sorrow and of heartbreak and loss and anxieties and fears
#
could all be put down there.
#
So there was a sense, I think, of a way of feeling your way into yourself, right?
#
And I think only when you have a little, some place from which, you know, that famous thing
#
that Aristotle says, give me a place to stand and a big enough lever and I'll move the
#
But you need that place.
#
However small that place is, you still need some place to stand before you write.
#
So that place, finding that place from which you can make your big play at immortality,
#
which is what writing is about, your big play at immortality.
#
Finding that place is really the most challenging thing.
#
And it may be actually what growing up is about, finding the place from which you can
#
stand and then, you know, finding a way to perceive the world will be a right lifelong
#
You know, the lineaments will be set up fairly early and except for a few people who have
#
a road to Damascus experience, you're not going to change your mind that much at any
#
But what should happen is inflections, negotiations and modifications somewhere along the way
#
and those in general one hopes are gently.
#
So I want to ask you about both the content and the form of the early writing that you
#
did and how that evolved and I'll begin with form because I think what often happens with
#
young writers is that you are just so much in love with this newfound power you have
#
of the language with the prose, I can do this, I can do that.
#
You know, we've all been through that phase as young writers.
#
In fact, in the education of Yuri, Yuri and Muzammila having all these wordplay games,
#
which is exactly that they're just delighting in their facility with the language.
#
And initially, I guess that's what it is.
#
And there is I think in the process of becoming a writer, this period where you have to learn
#
to get past that because that is part of a projection of what you want to be seen as
#
and to get to the real you, which I guess should be much easier if you're journaling
#
because there's no audience at that moment, but to get to the real you, you also have
#
to get past these pretensions, this overthinking it, this extra language like at one point
#
and I'm in the big home, you know, the narrator says about M's prose, about how effortless
#
That quote, I have discovered since that such effortlessness is not easy to achieve and
#
it's weightlessness is in direct proportion to the effort put in, which is very profound
#
and while reading Murder in Mahim, which I loved so much, I was, you know, I was reading
#
it simultaneously, mindlessly and mindfully.
#
So it is possible that, you know, I could see the effortlessness and I was just loving
#
it as a reader for that reason.
#
But anyway, that aside, aside, how did that finding of a voice kind of evolves?
#
Because especially when you're journaling, there are no readers, there is no feedback,
#
there is no need to impress.
#
So what was that journey as a writer like?
#
Were there writers who you admired, whose form you would take on?
#
Is it something that would shift from period to period?
#
You know, maybe you have a Dostoevsky phase and then a Joyce phase and whatever.
#
And how did it gradually, you know, like, how did the you that is you begin to form
#
as a writer in terms of?
#
I think one of the things that also, you know, just I think, in my experience, there was
#
an audience, which was I would read back my own stuff and I was fairly critical of myself.
#
So and I was also in the habit of editing my journals.
#
So in the early days, my father would give us those standard, you know, page a day diaries
#
with half a page for Saturday and Sunday, because I suppose they were really constructed
#
for working people, those diaries, and I found those very constricting.
#
So eventually I started using just notebooks, like 300 page notebooks, which I found much
#
And I began the process of also reading the days, the yesterdays and sometimes three or
#
four days back and editing and sometimes just tearing out the pages and rewriting them because
#
So there was all of it.
#
There was the audience.
#
There was the there was the standards I expected of myself and I was fairly harsh on myself.
#
So I think that was early training in how much the feeling that raw inspiration will
#
It is enough to just the early poems were like that.
#
I mean, when I wrote poems, I thought if they come in under pressure and because they had
#
the words are knocking at the door and pushing their way in, they must be this must be poetry.
#
This must must be the real stuff.
#
When you read them out, the first time I ever read a poem out, I think it was at a Nissa
#
Masekel workshop in college and I felt nude.
#
The only way I could get through it was to actually pretend that I was somebody else
#
and I was reading a poem by somebody else.
#
And I don't just some kind of act of ventriloquism had to be conjured up.
#
And I thought the psychological effort for that was so high.
#
In that moment, I thought he has to like this poem because of what this cost me, just because
#
And he didn't like the poem.
#
He never said he didn't like a poem.
#
But what he did was he would not respond to the poem and he'd say, next, please.
#
And that meant this is not a poem, try again, which was fine.
#
It was a civil way of going about it, but it was very hurtful.
#
I mean, it hurt me at that time.
#
I don't say he was hurtful because he was not.
#
So that hurt me at that moment.
#
But I realized that as I was going home and I was journaling, I journaled that particular
#
incident about seven times because the first one was very raw and it was sort of like full
#
of the rage that I felt.
#
And I wrote out the poem there.
#
And as I wrote out the poem to say, you know, Nisam Ezekiel did not like this poem that
#
And I was writing, copying out the poem from the text.
#
And I realized, no, no, no, no, no, one minute, I need to edit this poem.
#
This is not working the way I thought it was working.
#
And I started editing it.
#
Then I was caught with that moment of this is not true.
#
I can't edit this poem now.
#
I have to, if this is a journal entry, I have to show that poem as it was.
#
And I'm putting it down and writing the poem as it was and saying, but actually, I think
#
it could be better like this.
#
And I was writing it down again and thinking, okay, then how wrong is Nisam?
#
If I can't be comfortable with this poem, that is, but I thought, no.
#
And all this, like I started writing this again that, you know, but on the whole, I
#
think I made some changes, but it was roughly the same poem.
#
And I'm arguing myself into a corner realizing that if you've changed a few words, it's
#
not the same poem, but it is fundamentally the same.
#
And then I had this long argument with myself about, say, I have a haircut tomorrow.
#
Does that make me a different person?
#
But, and this was a haircut for the poem and I didn't like that as a metaphor.
#
So I'm starting again, again, the poem is changing.
#
And I discovered in that moment, the processes of rewriting, just the process of rewriting
#
that that was, that was literally the magic that was going to change my poems.
#
And the next poem that I read at the next week's workshop, because it's some kind of
#
three week, three or four session workshop, the third was a very boring session on form
#
and not on form, but on scansion and you know, meter and things like that, which I sat through,
#
but I wasn't particularly keen on.
#
I actually worked on the poem several drafts.
#
And when Nisim heard it, he said, ah, and he nodded.
#
And then he said, he asked me a few questions about the poem because he was responding.
#
I calmed down a lot and I felt very, very reassured that the poem was actually working.
#
And then once he was leaving, he turned and he said, you know, I did the PEN journal.
#
Would you like to submit that poem for the PEN journal?
#
You know, you're 17 or something, you're just like a stupid idiot brat.
#
But what exactly, you know, on the way home, I took it to myself, you said no, you said
#
no when Nisim Ezekiel wanted to give you, wanted you to give, I couldn't believe it.
#
And I kept saying to myself, no, but you know.
#
And then I realized, okay, went home and journaled this to try and understand why I had said
#
And I came to the really damning conclusion that I wanted to serve him back for having
#
hurt me in that first week with not liking my first poem.
#
I wanted to like show him that you think you want this poem, you didn't like my first poem,
#
I'm not going to give you this poem.
#
It was as childish as that.
#
So that I have to eat humble pie and I have to go back and I have to say, Mr. Ezekiel,
#
Do you think you might want to publish that poem again?
#
I kept diddling over this.
#
I would go up to his office at the university or at the, I think it was at the university
#
at the time and I wouldn't have the nerve to go in.
#
And then a month passed and by then college catches up with you and there are so many
#
other things that you're doing and I forgot about it.
#
And then many years later, I met him again, a couple of years later, I met him again and
#
I went with a couple of poems and I said, can I take some time and read?
#
And he said, right now, right now, read them out, read them out.
#
This was the man who'd invented modernism in Indian English at any rate.
#
He was like one of the greats already, but he had time for you to listen to you.
#
It was, I think only Bombay produced this magic that there was, you know, Nisim, Adil,
#
Eunice, Dom, all of them sitting around and all with some time for you.
#
Dom needed you to be a drinker.
#
He needed you to come and have a drink with him in the evening and read a poem.
#
And he needed you to be, you know, of the odd and spender, you know, using poetry with
#
the full sense of its great reserves of music, of anglophone music.
#
He needed that out of you.
#
Adil was much more open to the possibilities that even non-English speaking Englishes,
#
you know, could bring to the table.
#
Eunice was a lot more unavailable and I think she was kind of, you know, in a sense, defending
#
And also she was Xavier's and we were Elphinstone.
#
So there was that old, old rivalry going on.
#
Though by then Xavier's was kicking Elphinstone all around the courtyard.
#
And you know, one of the great things, I was researching this, this sculptor called Pilu
#
Pochkhanawala, whom I want to write about at some future point, because I just think
#
she's another forgotten figure.
#
And my first encounter with modern art was Pilu Pochkhanawala when the bus, so the buses
#
that we took as children were normally the one, one limited, four limited, which went
#
down that straight spine road from the other TT Khodadad circle right up to Flora Fountain,
#
But on special days, we took the 83, 84, 86, which went across by the sea and so the flashes
#
of the sea, which was very lovely.
#
And you know, in the rains, the rain, the sea water would come in and the rain water
#
was coming in and you were drenched, it was lovely.
#
So the 83, 86 was great, lovely bus rides.
#
And when you came to Haji Ali circle, there was a huge springing thing, which was Pilu
#
Pochkhanawala's, I think it was called spring or tension or something like that.
#
It was one of her sculptures, which was on public display.
#
And in sometime in the 80s, I don't know when it was, the BMC decided that they would
#
take it down and scrap it.
#
And that was, it was a bad moment in our history and then in the process of researching many
#
things about Pilu Pochkhanawala, I discovered that the first time Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
#
heard Nisim Ezekiel reading poems was when he was, no, heard Nisim Ezekiel reading Adil
#
Jasawala's poems out was at a evening salon at Pilu Pochkhanawala's house.
#
I just so love this idea of these multiple things happening altogether, a great friendship
#
between Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Adil Jasawala springing up, clearing house coming out of
#
that, Pilu Pochkhanawala's intervention in this, Nisim reading the poems of a young
#
man who's in England because he thinks they're great poems and everyone should read them.
#
How much generosity of spirit is on display there?
#
I don't know if these, there's a Parsi, a Jew, a Hindu, it's just, it's made for Amar
#
It's made for that mythic, wonderful, inclusive city that we all had once.
#
I think it was such a great story when I read it and so there, there I think it was some
#
of the magic of the, of this whole encounter between Jerry Pinto in his small way, the
#
city, its histories, its geography, all of it plays into this magic when you hear that
#
If ever a film is made on that period that would make a lovely starting scene where you
#
have a close up of a diary and you slowly pull back and as Nisim reading Adil's poems
#
with all these other people around him and what a scene that would be worse.
#
So tell me something when you are, like one of course you demonstrated so well here how
#
journaling can help you understand yourself better in terms of just taking that first
#
poem back and figuring that shit out, beginning to rewrite it and then later next week figuring
#
out that this is why I said no and you know, so that writing is such a great process of
#
What I am also curious about is that when you are sort of editing your poem, doing that
#
rewriting, what are your metrics?
#
Because when I think about prose for example, you know, my metrics are kind of clear in
#
I want to make it more vivid for the reader.
#
I would like, you know, verbs and nouns to do all the work and you know, all of that,
#
But with poetry, while I love a lot of poetry, while I hold it really dear, you know, I haven't
#
been maybe because I haven't studied it deeply enough, but I don't, I'm never sure of what
#
Like if I try writing poetry, I'm never sure of whether it's good or not.
#
I just feel that I don't have a way of kind of, so when, as a young person, when you are
#
doing that, how do you know, you know, what is working, what is not working, maybe what
#
you think is a metric for better poetry might just be a fashion of a time or something that
#
is part of one genre that you're into right now, but it may not necessarily be bad per
#
Just go back in history again, because you have this fondness for those details.
#
Back in the day, a group of poets, R. Raj Rao, Menka Shiv Dasani, I think Akhil Contractor,
#
Dinyar Godhrij, these were the three or four names that I remember started something called
#
I think what their feeling was, was that when you said that you were a poet in public, generally
#
people weren't very, very receptive.
#
They would say things like, oh yeah, I used to read poetry in college, I wrote poetry
#
in college, I don't have time for it now.
#
So they wanted a protected space where poetry mattered.
#
And not only did poetry matter, but it mattered to the point that a comma could be discussed
#
for an hour and no one would think it was a wasted hour, which in the rest of the world,
#
it would probably be seen as just navel gazing or whatever else people want to say.
#
So they started the Poetry Circle and then when a few years later, I heard about it and
#
And at that place, I discovered two voices that would be very important to me, but would
#
be completely different from mine.
#
So one was Ranjeet Hoskote's voice and one was Arundhati Subramanyam's voice.
#
They're both completely different poets, but for some reason, the three of us had in some
#
ways something to say to each other.
#
It was not about our poetry, but it was about our ability to listen.
#
Like when you read a Ranjeet Hoskote poem, most of the time, I feel I have just witnessed
#
a beautiful and very strange word artifact from another civilization that has plonked
#
itself down in front of me in my quotidian life.
#
And I need to wait and experience this.
#
I will not be able to understand it or deconstruct it very easily, but it is of great value here.
#
And Arundhati's poetry, while not being like Ranjeet's poetry, has levels and shades that
#
she brings her femininity and her experience of the spiritual too, which I again, as a
#
beginner in all these worlds or as an outsider to femininity, I will need to work with to
#
So the three of us were very different in our approaches, but we formed something like
#
it was like having bouncing boards, which were very valuable.
#
I think in some ways, they became two voices, not voices since I met them, but Dwarpalas.
#
They became the Dwarpalas, and most of the time, I would read the poems to them and imagine
#
what their responses would be.
#
Do I sound like my, okay, so the first metric for my poems is, does this sound like me?
#
It's as simple as that.
#
Very often, I think when you're actually making a poem and you're working on the poem, a part
#
of you wants to bring in something that will stun the reader with one's erudition, say.
#
You want to say, I don't know, the silokanth in me, because you know what a silokanth is,
#
Or you want to say, you say scripted alienism, something like that.
#
You want something that shines out and says, I am more knowledgeable than you.
#
It's as simple as that.
#
Now, often that will not survive the first draft.
#
It will not, because the can't of it is so clear when you're reading it the first time.
#
But if you do not allow yourself to be canting and you do not allow yourself to let go and
#
write out your worst self on the page that need to impress other people, it's not also
#
going to be an honest poem.
#
So the first draft will have a lot of that.
#
The second draft will be about, the first and major question is, does this sound like
#
The third question, after you've got to a point where the poem sounds like you at any
#
rate, it doesn't sound like Jerry's trying to be someone bigger than he is, so does it
#
have any, can it just, can I rewrite it as prose and see if it works?
#
If it works as prose, that's fine.
#
So I leave it as prose.
#
But if it is resisting the transformation to prose, if it goes back into the poem, then
#
I, and this exercise of working with prose is very good for line lengths.
#
And then I read it aloud.
#
When you read it aloud, it is incredible.
#
And you think like, you think this is the fourth draft and this is it, I'm here, I've
#
The reading aloud becomes the music of the poem.
#
Now words said to music, you know, we have so many different definitions of what poetry
#
is, the right words in the right order, all that, you know, we do, we know, and we don't
#
know, we don't know shit.
#
We don't know anything about actually what is a poem.
#
So thankfully, again, as I said, as a practitioner, you don't have to know what it is, you have
#
And someone else has to know what it is, right?
#
That's what literature teachers do.
#
Hey, take it and deconstruct, have yourself a blast.
#
You go back to trying to find where the music was.
#
Now in that rewriting, there's one last moment, which is what was the original impulse of
#
I think there's a lovely line that Arundhati has, which is said, the poem that blinks at
#
you like a newborn kitten of a page, you know, it's that, that you go, you want to go back
#
to that sense of that, that birth moment that, that happened erupted inside your brain, where
#
it's all synapse and electricity, and just like fluid, everything's fluid, you want to
#
go back and this thing on the page is so clumsy compared to that moment.
#
It has captured some sense of that, of that original moment.
#
That's my fourth metric.
#
I don't know if that answered the question, but that's, that's the process.
#
No, no, it's really fascinating.
#
And you know, I like my responses to poet, like the first time I read the Red Wheel Barrow,
#
for example, I was like, what the fuck is this?
#
But today, every time I read it, it almost makes me cry because it is just so beautiful
#
and there's so much going on.
#
And in the show notes, I'll post, you know, Mary Oliver's analysis of that.
#
And you know, perhaps, you know, some of the magic will be kind of imparted by that.
#
And now the thing is, you know, earlier you spoke about how, you know, it's sometimes
#
an interesting practice to copy something by hand because it gives you a sense of the
#
artisanship of someone's art, right?
#
And my, my sense increasingly is that the distinction that we make between craft and
#
art is a distinction that is based on our own ignorance.
#
Actually, if you look at how certain words in a certain order make certain neurons in
#
the brain fire in a particular way and make us feel a particular emotion for reasons we
#
cannot possibly express because we don't know all of this.
#
But if there was an omniscient being to them, there would be no art.
#
Everything would be craft.
#
You know, Beethoven would not be creating art because there would in that be the inevitability
#
that's quite well, lovely, beautifully said.
#
But yeah, that I love that if there was an omniscient being, it would all be craft.
#
So you pinch that from someone or is that a Verma thought?
#
It's actually a Verma cliché.
#
I mean, I've spoken about it a couple of times.
#
No, but it's beautiful.
#
I haven't heard it before and I really like it.
#
With due, of course, credit.
#
What's happening with poetry is that kind of a mystical experience where a red wheel
#
barrel can make me cry, but I have no fricking idea why.
#
And if I say this to anybody who doesn't read poetry, they'll be like, what?
#
But even that mystical experience can be explained, but that explanation is beyond all of us.
#
And in the meantime, we have a full field of people, a profession of people whose job
#
it is to somehow create explanations for what the hell is going on.
#
And my question, of course, is about academia.
#
Like I think the quickest way to make someone stop loving literature is to make them do
#
a literature course, right, where it seems that in a lot of academia, particularly in
#
the humanities, where the fields have gone just miles away from what is happening in
#
So you know, so I respect the practitioners.
#
You know, I will read a Martin Amis writing The War on Cliché and see what he has to
#
But a random university professor saying that, oh, dead poet society was about repressed
#
And I'm like, sir, please, you know.
#
So what is kind of your sense of this in the sense that you are a practitioner?
#
At the same time, you're also a writer about writing critics sometimes, you're writing
#
about other people's work.
#
So it also then becomes your job to make sense of what can perhaps not really be made sense
#
So how does what are your thoughts about academia and then your own sense of it?
#
You know, in the perfect world, we would have different people doing different things.
#
And we'd all stick to our little, you know, I think maybe that was what the caste society
#
But in an imperfect world, we slip and slide and we fracture and we end up doing things
#
that we may not be even equipped to do.
#
So no one, I think, is equipped to write poetry.
#
So therefore, really, everyone is equipped to write poetry, and you must want to and
#
then you must want to do it well.
#
All those are the essential steps.
#
Now, as far as like the fact that the poet is also sometimes the critic.
#
So there are many ways in which one is the critic.
#
One could be a reviewer at one level, one could be the writer of the blurb at another
#
level, one is the writer of the foreword at a third level, the writer of the afterword.
#
You know, all these various roles are response roles, like actually responding to poetry.
#
If you are saying something that is pleasant in general, if you're writing the blurb, you're
#
generally saying something that is pleasant, you will pass, right?
#
Except that very often your friends are going to come up to you and say, what were you thinking
#
writing a blurb for that book, because, you know, that's another level of it.
#
So I think over the years, I've come to the conclusion that the best responses come out
#
The reader of poetry who brings an attentiveness to reading, like you're saying that the red
#
wheelbarrow makes you cry, is a very good, tight, critical response to the poem.
#
It is sometimes I think almost all that you need, because there's all the elements there.
#
And when you said, I feel like crying and I don't even freaking know why, right?
#
That also encompasses the mystery of poetry and the mystery of your response to it.
#
Does that mean that I would say that we don't need this broken down?
#
I don't know that we, it isn't something that I'm drawn to.
#
I don't really enjoy reading analyses of poetry.
#
I don't think I've read any, with any thorough, careful, except for say, for instance, as
#
you said, like a poet writing about poetry is very valuable to me.
#
So I have Seamus Heaney, you know, that sort of thing.
#
As for the writers from, see, academia becomes, I think, a self-serving kind of ecosystem.
#
And all the symbiotics are so well settled into their relationship with each other that
#
nothing is ever going to disturb that.
#
So I feel that it is incumbent upon us not to let it disturb us.
#
So sometimes very big startling revelations can be made by academia as well.
#
But in the sphere of poetry, especially, where a lot of it is about magic, this attempt to
#
reduce magic to the formula, or to say that, hey, guys, this was the sleight of hand behind
#
the magic trick, is actually bound to fail.
#
It doesn't matter that they try.
#
Because eventually, if you, for instance, the example that you gave of Dead Poets Society
#
being repressed homoeroticism or whatever that person said, the one thing is to dismiss
#
it out of hand because you didn't see it.
#
The second is to see Dead Poets Society again through that lens and judge whether this is
#
And maybe the third is just to see it again and just let the magic wash over you again
#
if you love the film in the first place.
#
It's as simple as that.
#
I mean, you know, the caravan of poetry is still on its way.
#
And the academics will say what they say, I suppose it's a way of making a living.
#
Like you correctly pointed out earlier, people respond to art in the same art in different
#
Like perhaps your student's takeaway was about the deodorant or whatever, but that's just
#
like perhaps one extreme example of it.
#
And I sometimes wonder that, you know, whenever somebody asks me for feedback now on something
#
that they have done, I'll put a hazard caveats.
#
Like first I'll evaluate if I should, you know, if it will be taken in good faith the
#
But I'll offer a hazard caveats because I think an opinion is just usually an opinion.
#
And I was struck by and we'll talk about M and the Big Home in some detail later because
#
I want to, but I was struck by this aspect of it, which you mentioned where you spoke
#
about how many words you used to, you wrote to be able to distill the book down to what
#
Or you said in an interview, I think, quote, I learned that I'm a really bad writer, but
#
I also learned that I was a good editor.
#
For this book, I wrote about 65,000 words, but before that I had to write 7 lakh words
#
before I could choose those 65,000 words which would work.
#
What worked in my favor was that because I wrote those initial 7 lakh words, I had 65,000
#
words already in existence, and later in an interview to the New York Times, you spoke
#
about how, you know, right from the time you were a kid, you were writing drafts of that
#
You eventually wrote the book which we read after you were 40, but before that, you know,
#
you wrote one draft was like a Rajshri novel, another was more like Amitav Ghosh and it
#
was, you know, decades and you had seven and a half lakh words which is three times war
#
It was all handwritten and you write, quote, I re-write it and it was bilge.
#
I was actually weeping at the point, stop, quote.
#
And the question that struck me and an almost sacrilegious question is that, are you sure
#
At some point, if you should be interested, I mean, it's still around.
#
I do not throw away the handwritten drafts ever.
#
I'll tell you what I think was wrong with it.
#
I think what was wrong with it was one, it was self-indulgent and in the sense that it
#
At the second level, I think it was also that the presiding influence, I think, was Desani,
#
Jeevi Desani, which was like use the big spade and throw all the details in, like everything.
#
The third problem, I think, with it was that it was really offensively over explained.
#
And I think that in some ways, that desire to explain everything may have come out of
#
the fact that I've spent so many years as a teacher.
#
You want to be very clear that you are getting the point across and so you are saying it
#
in as many ways possible so that it will not be misconstrued and of course, every way can
#
So those are false reasons.
#
So finally, I think Bilge may be a very strong word, but I could see a lot of it was acceptably
#
literary fiction and I didn't want to write acceptably literary fiction.
#
I wanted to write really good literary fiction.
#
So when you're seeing that you're doing just about as good a job as most published, people
#
say to me often, I read that book and then I thought I can write like this.
#
And you're saying, why would you set your standard there then?
#
So that you can write, this is this rubbish even I can write, why would you set your standard
#
How is that even a logical thing to say?
#
Why would you add more rubbish to the world?
#
So I'm not saying I feel that it was none of it was really awful stuff, but it was pedestrian
#
Lee ordinarily recognizably a novel.
#
I mean, none of it was stuck and I didn't want to write a recognizable novel.
#
I want to write something else.
#
My question is not even about the book per se.
#
Like I love the book so much as it is that I don't think I would now accept any other
#
version because I would be just biased for it as it is and I hold all those values dear.
#
But it's a, it's sort of a larger thought about a couple of things.
#
One is that as you have pointed out elsewhere, that a book is a collection of words until
#
the moment it reaches readers and they respond to it, which is the point at which it becomes
#
a novel and they will respond to it differently every time.
#
So you don't know, you're not in control, you're not as much in control of that necessarily
#
because people respond in different ways and so it's entirely possible that to a different
#
version people respond differently and all those are counterfactuals that we don't have.
#
And the other aspect of that, which is a conundrum, I can't figure out and you know, perhaps you
#
can, you know, help me think aloud on it is that one of the things that I've realized
#
about the creator economy is that what is important is that you keep producing, right?
#
In the same way that, you know, we both agree and it's a common thing that you have to keep
#
writing, except when you say keep writing, you're, you know, you're polishing the craft
#
but you're not publishing, whereas in the creator economy the, the, the motto would
#
be just keep putting stuff out, don't look back, keep moving ahead because what happens
#
is only constant iteration leads to excellence.
#
You keep doing it again and again, those gems will emerge.
#
You know, you can't decide this is a gem, that is not a gem.
#
Even with the seen in the unseen, people have responded to episodes in unusual ways I did
#
There's some episodes which I didn't think were great, though I have to say I'm favorably
#
disposed to everything I do because of the intensity I put in and the guests are so great,
#
but there'll be some episodes I'll think, ah, this, this is, I like it, but it won't
#
be popular and suddenly it's a super hit and there'll be something else which is incredibly
#
close to my heart, but people just won't respond that way.
#
And one is not, so the credo there is you keep producing, you keep putting stuff out,
#
you keep doing it, but you know, when it comes to being a novelist, for example, you could
#
be polishing something for three, four, five, six, seven years and you're not putting all
#
You know, you might write your 800,000 words and bring out 70,000, right?
#
And this is something that I can't resolve, I'm not arguing for one or the other.
#
I see exactly what you're doing that to write those good, perfect 70,000 words, you have
#
to do the exercise of writing, you know, 800,000.
#
But at the same time, what creators in other fields like YouTubers or podcasters or whatever,
#
you know, what works there is that don't be self-conscious, keep putting stuff out and
#
gems will emerge and you won't even know it yourself.
#
I don't think there's anything wrong in that.
#
I mean, I can't see the flaw in that argument, as it were, but I think eventually everybody
#
gets choices about how they operate, right?
#
I mean, and so if someone were to come up to me tomorrow and say, Jerry, you just like,
#
you know, okay, let's look at the time of Graham Greene and Somerset Maum and I don't
#
know, Alice Huxley, all of them.
#
They produced a novel every year or two years, it was like clock ticking.
#
Many of them were actually on the clock, like they would have like a three novels for the
#
next three years contract and these many pounds a month given to them so that they've turned
#
out those novels and they did some very fine work against all that.
#
I'm not arguing with that.
#
What I'm saying is that eventually you get you, what is what your job is, is to find
#
out how you do your stuff, right?
#
And when you learned how you do your stuff, that's how you should do.
#
I think it is very good to try and experiment and push the, push your boundaries and get
#
out of your comfort zone and see where the other things work for you or not.
#
But you don't have to inflict all of it on an unsuspecting public.
#
You have to be a little respectful of their time.
#
I think the biggest non-renewable resource, the most valuable non-renewable resource is
#
So when I'm saying I would like you to read this novel, I should be fairly sure that it
#
should be worth your time.
#
It shouldn't be, it shouldn't just, so this, this scattershot creator economy that you're
#
talking about, which is put it out and you know, you don't know what's going to be good.
#
You don't know what's going to be bad.
#
I have the feeling that it is, it is anxiety driven, okay, that the way to deal with the
#
constant anxiety of inventing universes, because that's what you're doing when you're writing
#
a book and who needs another book, who needs another universe, is this even worth anybody's
#
time is to say, put it out now.
#
And if 200 people say like, or put hearts or say ooh, or whatever emoticon is the emoticon
#
of choice, of approval, that's given you some validation, move on to the next one.
#
If that's the way you choose to live, sure.
#
I actually think it's not that like for all the good creators, there isn't that anxiety.
#
There is the recognition that just continuously producing makes you much better at what you
#
Like, for example, when I put something out every week, you know, I'm absolutely sure
#
that if I was to say, let me plan one great episode for one year and do it, that one great
#
episode would not even be as good as a median episode if I do it the entire year round.
#
Because what is happening the entire year round is just by doing it again and again,
#
I'm getting better at it.
#
And it's also forcing me to think about my craft and see elements of it, which otherwise
#
I would not even know I have to think about if I was just planning one episode every month
#
or one episode every year or whatever.
#
So I think the serious creators who are really going out there and getting better all the
#
time are not even doing it from, you know, that sense of chasing validation, which is
#
in fact quite contrary, you know, the serious creators know that validation can be a trap,
#
you know, that if you chase validation, you lose your soul, then it's a race to the bottom.
#
But it's just about it's you also discover yourself faster, you grow your craft faster.
#
And it's probably a false dichotomy because there is a place for both of these.
#
I agree with you entirely, see, I think where, for instance, you have something to do like
#
you're doing, or the column that I'm doing for the Hindustan Times called jaywalking,
#
we're going to walk every week, just doing it regularly, you discover what you can do,
#
what you can't do, you get better at it, undeniably so.
#
I'm also saying that there are certain things that need a little more baking time.
#
Like a poem is not going to be, I mean, I don't think you should put out a poem every
#
day or, okay, you could, you could take up one of those challenges and say a poem every
#
But within that metric, within that rubric of saying this is a poem every day, there's
#
a certain, a certain leeway that is allowed, you know, you say, okay, great, it's a, you're
#
doing this great, we are with you on that one.
#
And with, with your, with a podcast like yours, which requires an immense amount of preparation,
#
like you do a lot of reading, you know, everybody, you've read practically everything I've written,
#
Shanta's written, that's a lot of reading to do.
#
Once you're doing your work, I got no issues with it.
#
I only feel that if it is like, put it out, put it out, put it out as on, on some kind
#
of, on some kind of treadmill, that's not going to be good for you.
#
I think mindless production wouldn't work for audiences also, audiences would not go
#
So, so, but on the other hand, for a while, they might be with you for a while, even if
#
you're, you're doing a kind of, say, a comic, you know, you're making jokes.
#
They want to laugh because I think the rise of stand-up comedy is, is, goes in tandem
#
with the rise of anxiety.
#
So you need to go somewhere where you're guaranteed a laugh.
#
And therefore the anger of the heckler, when they're not presented with laughter, but they're
#
presented with something that will make them laugh thoughtfully and will make them interrogate
#
their biases, it often makes them very angry.
#
And that's where the heckler arises from.
#
Because you're actually going there to say, hey, make me laugh, you know, I need to chill
#
So you can fall, I think, so no, by no means would I disagree with you at all on any of
#
I think the more you, I think learn in the world of creation, doing is learning, right?
#
So a workshop like yours with, with prompts, with encouragement, with sharing of wisdom
#
It's a great idea to do it.
#
But otherwise the workshop can be your workshop.
#
You can just sit down and read to us every day, read mindfully, read mindlessly and write
#
500 words every day and do this for the next, as long as you're comfortable, as long as,
#
and you will get a workshop.
#
The point is most people need the discipline of having paid some money, right?
#
So that now you need to get some value out of it.
#
So therefore you will follow the prompts.
#
So therefore you will work on it.
#
So therefore you will, you will have some, something to, to push you into doing it, which
#
is also not a bad thing because we live really frantic lives now.
#
Just keeping up is, is a, is a chore.
#
It's kind of like how, you know, if you subscribe to the New Yorker, for instance, it just becomes
#
kind of like a pile of unread New Yorkers being at you.
#
Someone wrote this great piece.
#
Someone wrote this great poem.
#
Someone wrote this long piece on this.
#
You will understand completely the history of Nicaragua and its present situation on
#
page 47 to 98 of this issue and you're looking at all of it and thinking, even you are pressurizing
#
me now, you know, and then there's the bookshelf and there is the music and there is the, and
#
there is all the relationships and the work and everything that we've got to do.
#
So I think when I say that, that, that you need to be, you need to cut time out of this
#
and work solemnly and respectfully, respectfully, respectfully of yourself.
#
So if you can bring, I think production, you know, the line between production and overproduction
#
Once you've drawn that line and you've said this is the line I don't cross, like for you,
#
you could tomorrow walk into a studio with someone cold and you could pull off a three
#
hour podcast without them knowing that you, that you hadn't read a line or they were,
#
but you wouldn't do it.
#
Now that I, that as that I think is solid, that once you have established what your parameters
#
are, you don't step out of them and do things that would make you think less of yourself.
#
Then as much production as you can.
#
So last year I had four books out, right?
#
I had one Indian Christmas, the book of new beginnings, the education of Yuri and, and
#
Many people came up to me and said prolific and prolific is often a delicate insult somewhere
#
And a few lines later comes churning it out.
#
And I always stop them then say, okay, you know, I know you'd probably don't mean to
#
sound rude, but churning it out is rude.
#
It just happens that these four books, which all of them were in preparation for many years
#
happened to come out at the same time last year.
#
But Citizen Gallery took me 10 years.
#
Education took me since the time I finished writing M. I've been writing the education
#
Look, it's a lot of work that went into them.
#
They happened to come out at the same time.
#
And I'm not fetishizing time either.
#
You could write a book every year like Greene did and still turn out Stumble Train one year
#
and burnt out case another year and Brighton Rocker third year.
#
Whatever works for anyone.
#
Whatever works for anyone.
#
The final thing is you don't put it out until, okay, my way of reading it is every piece
#
of writing I do is my ambassador.
#
You've met me, we get on well, we like each other.
#
99% of my readers will not meet me despite all the literary at festivals attempts at
#
making us kind of public figures, which they're never going to do.
#
What they'll know is my name.
#
I want the name to carry that possibility that they say, oh, I read them last time and
#
it wasn't a bad experience.
#
I might as well try it again.
#
That's what I'm saying.
#
After that, like, the more you do it, the better you get, undeniably, undoubtedly, but
#
don't inflict the failed experiments on people is what I'm saying.
#
No, no, agree entirely.
#
And to anyone who said you were churning them out, I would say, okay, last year you
#
Each of those books took you 55 years to write.
#
I mean, if you don't know, if you think that, you know, as a yoga teen, my name is Ligde
#
Yeah, let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back with the AC on because
#
I can't see you sweat like this anymore.
#
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
#
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
#
The course rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
#
If you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
#
a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to The Seed and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with the generous Jerry Pinto.
#
We kept the AC on for some time and then Jerry said, okay, you know what, turn it off and
#
then we'll turn it on if required and we're going to continue tomorrow.
#
So this will stretch out very well.
#
Before we get to talking about sort of your first job and your entry into journalism and
#
all of that, what I'm also curious about is how your conception as a writer is growing
#
Like in the education of Yuri, Yuri talks about how he wants to be a poet and all of
#
that and there is this thing that you say in that where you're describing how he suddenly
#
realizes he wants to write poetry and at the same time you have this line, with that came
#
the horrible emptiness of wanting to write and having nothing to say, which is I think
#
something that the young would always have in common.
#
I remember certainly in my case, I had this deep desire to write, but like I hadn't lived
#
life and Amitabha Kumar also once said that when you are in your twenties, writing is
#
equal to waiting and elsewhere you wrote, Yuri is thinking aloud and he's saying I wish
#
What will I write about?
#
There was a horror in that about.
#
I declare war on about, right?
#
And so tell me a little bit about what that period was like, that around what time did
#
you get that conception of yourself as someone who wants to write in a serious way?
#
And like earlier we spoke about the forms of writing, finding your voice and all of
#
So this is kind of about the content that what do you then write about, like one thing
#
you're doing in your journal is of course you're turning your gaze inwards, which by
#
the way, I would not take for granted at all because most people don't do it in their lifetime,
#
that self-reflection, you know, so that's incredibly valuable.
#
But how is your journey as a writer in terms of what you want to write about?
#
What do you see yourself writing?
#
Do you want to be a novelist, do you want to be a poet, you know, take me through some
#
I think, you know, there is some material left of what I wrote when I was in my, as
#
a child and I did preserve it, I did hold on to it, which indicates to me a little that
#
there was some notion that I felt that there was, there was something to do with words
#
that might have something to do with me.
#
But the idea that one could actually write seemed very, very alien.
#
It seemed like they've, you know, if you looked at Dom Morais, for instance, his father was
#
His father was already like a very noted editor.
#
He'd been to Oxford, you know, he had this pedigree that just seemed impeccable.
#
And what pedigree did one have and had Elphinstone College and Victoria High School and Mahima
#
and none of that seemed to compute, right?
#
It didn't seem to add up to what a writer was supposed to be in this world, in that
#
world that we lived in.
#
So I think there was a yearning somewhere that I wanted to write, but also a sad result
#
that it was not going to be possible and I would have to find another way to express
#
Both my mother and my father seem to have been writers in a way.
#
I found that my father had made extensive notes towards the kind of philosophy of life
#
I found that my mother wrote in constantly and filled books with her writing.
#
So I thought I was just one of a bunch of unpublished writers who worked in the family.
#
I have an aunt who writes regularly long letters, which are ways in which she expresses herself.
#
And obviously if she, someone would encourage her.
#
So I actually brought out a little book of her writing just so that we did about 25 copies
#
so that she'd feel better about it.
#
I think, so I had absolutely no hope of being a writer.
#
Around that time I was also earning for the family.
#
I was working for the family.
#
So there was no way I could accept, I finished my LLB for instance, I did a law degree.
#
And when I went to interview at a law firm, they said that they would be happy to hire
#
me because I stood sixth in the university or some such ridiculous thing.
#
And however, I would have to pay them some, I think about a lakh of rupees and out of
#
that, they would pay me out of the interest of that.
#
And I said, but you know, I don't have a lakh of rupees.
#
And the man across the desk said, Mr. Pinto, I think you should borrow it.
#
So I was thinking, I want to work and earn money and you want to put me into debt.
#
And he said, within five years time, a lakh of rupees will mean nothing to you.
#
You will be doing so well, you won't even think about it.
#
And again, I just thought there is something fundamentally wrong about this whole offer.
#
I'm not doing it and I refused to do it and I walked away and I continued teaching mathematics.
#
I might have been teaching mathematics at the age of 56 also, but then fate intervened.
#
A friend of mine, his wife, would often when I was talking to them, would say you should
#
You make me laugh and very few people make me laugh.
#
So I would like you to write.
#
And then one day she said to me, I've been asking you for all these years to write and
#
you've never written and I'm not going to ask you again if you don't write.
#
We'll talk because we are friends, but I'm not going to mention this because this seems
#
And I got really sort of vaguely frightened by that because I saw a door closing somewhere.
#
I said, okay, but you know, I have a problem with the ego.
#
I just was inventing this super spartan.
#
I don't think I can bear rejection slips and you know, that sort of thing.
#
And everyone tells you that they paper their walls with rejection slips and stuff.
#
She said, okay, I'll make you a deal.
#
I'll take your writing to the newspapers.
#
You won't have to go and face rejection.
#
So I said, I said, I can't, I don't, I can't type.
#
So she said, I'll type them for you.
#
So she typed, she edited, she chose.
#
And she took, I think, 14 off to midday at that time, which had some, you know, column
#
for funny writers and 12 of them got published.
#
So if it had not been for Rashmi Palkiwala, I would not have become a writer.
#
I would have continued teaching mathematics happily.
#
So I often feel that there were two really, really important women who came into my life
#
One was Rashmi at that point and the other was Shanta who made me a translator whose
#
faith in me made me a translator.
#
I would not have become a translator otherwise.
#
I always say that there was that moment when I said, you know, do you think I could translate
#
And her answer was you with an exclamation mark.
#
She could have said you with a question mark, you.
#
And I would have not translated.
#
So I think that it taught me something about being a teacher and believing in your students
#
so that that exclamation mark that you become in their life becomes something that pushes
#
them onwards because they can fail.
#
That's all that can happen.
#
I could have been a bad translator.
#
Cobalt Blue might have been a dreadful work.
#
Then all she had to do was say Jerry and she was very, very good.
#
One of the finest things about Shanta is ability to give you trenchant criticism while not
#
making you feel bad about it.
#
It's really a highly developed skill with her.
#
So you can tell you the truth about what you are working on, but you don't go away feeling
#
savage like you feel with many other people.
#
So Rashmi at that point and Shanta at that point, the two of them kind of like made one
#
made me a writer, the other made me a translator.
#
But still at that point, the high achievement was getting a byline in the Times of India.
#
I have to tell you, Hamid, I was really, really happy with seeing my name in print.
#
I don't know, it was just sheer delight.
#
I used to look forward to the times when I knew that there was a byline the next day.
#
A day without a byline was like a dark, dull day when I was just like going through the
#
motions of tuitions, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I really discovered that I enjoyed writing.
#
And at that point in time, no way would I have thought that there was a book possible.
#
The only dream I had was the dream of a poetry book.
#
But that was a dream like I suppose, you know, the way, you know, I suppose boys dream of
#
being race car drivers or, you know, or piloting aircrafts or saving the world from, from extraterrestrials.
#
It was that far off as a dream.
#
It didn't seem like a possibility because again, publishing was so small in India.
#
You know, I'm talking about this is the time when we had the Horizon had Jayco.
#
There wasn't much actually, Penguin hadn't started work here.
#
So if you had to get a book published, you had to be Nayantara Saigal or Kamala Markandeya
#
or Anita Desai, you had to have like a white Western publisher, Khushwant Singh also.
#
But those were the people who could get books out, not, not average Johnny's like us.
#
So I think Urvashi Bhutalia once pointed out to me how all the possibilities that opened
#
out were the happened when India ran out of the foreign exchange to buy books and the
#
government suspended the exemption that was given to books.
#
And so suddenly Western publishers were unwilling to send books to India because anyway, we
#
had to remember, I mean, the rupee was maintained at some fake price against the dollar at some
#
35 and it was all just completely chaotic, right?
#
So suddenly the bookshops had big gaps on their shelves and Penguin India and Kali for
#
Women could put their books out there.
#
Suddenly there was a demand for them.
#
So suddenly, you know, you see, you see economics in this kind of like raw fashion impacting
#
And I remember the early years of the Penguin India books thinking I will buy every one
#
of these books just because, you know, hey, these are like our names, Padma Jahe Jumadi,
#
Nisha Dakunia, who are these people?
#
How wonderful that these books are coming out.
#
And of course, like today, you wouldn't be able to follow one publisher and buy all their
#
But hey, that's so good.
#
That's such a wonderful thing.
#
A lot of rubbish coming out also, but a lot of great stuff coming out.
#
So at that point in time, it seemed like a very small elite club.
#
And when you met these people, like I was a journalist by then, right?
#
So I met Nisha Dakunia.
#
She had a beautiful mansion on Pedder Road where she sat among, you know, thousands of
#
books arranged on wooden shelves and offered me tea and fine china and talked about Henry
#
And I thought, well, yeah, this makes sense.
#
I can see why someone would publish your book, right, with a Lalita, Ajmi cover, etc.
#
And I thought, this is not my game.
#
I'm never going to get into the door.
#
The great Dharam Sankat happened.
#
Shobha De wrote a book called Surviving Men.
#
It was, you know, one of our Shobha De book, which, you know, was standard, like very polemical
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and funny and whatever.
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And now this is a story that Anil Dharkar told me.
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I don't know if it can possibly even be true.
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Anil Dharkar, Mark Tully, David Devida and Shobha De were sitting around the table.
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And Shobha De said, you should do a follow up to Surviving Women, Men, it should be called
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And she said, who would do it?
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And all four of them agreed that it should be me.
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I think it was probably Shobha who said maybe Jerry should do it or one of them said it
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But the story, I thought the story was nice.
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All of them agreed I should do it.
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And out of the blue, some young woman from Penguin wrote me this thing saying Shobha
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De's book has come out.
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We thought you'd be a good choice for Surviving Women.
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Would you like to do it?
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And I thought, are you mad?
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I enjoy having women friends.
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It's the kind of book that will piss off all my women friends.
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I'm never going to have a conversation with any one of them again.
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It's my name on the spine.
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It's that holy grail that I've wanted all along.
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But of course, the next question is, is this the book you want, Jerry?
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Is this the first book you want?
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And I remember that night as if by chance I was reading a set of Chesterton essays.
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And one of the lines there said, show them your leer before you show them your fool.
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And I thought, oh my God, literature has told me don't do this.
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You need to show your leer first.
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And of course, at that point, I was still writing M in the Big Who in a different form.
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So I thought, okay, my first book should be M in the Big Who.
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This should not be my first book.
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And I wrote back to her and I said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to do this book.
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And the chapter closed.
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And then that was the end of it.
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And there was a pang of regret here and there, you know, feeling.
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Oddly enough, she quit Penguin about a month later and never filed my letter in response
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So when her file was handed over to Ravi Singh, who had just joined Penguin at that point,
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he was handed a file with one letter in it, which was her letter to me saying, would you
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please like to write this book?
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So he wrote me a fresh letter saying, do you think you're still interested?
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And I thought, okay, second chance, like someone else is starting this.
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Maybe I should think about this.
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I wrote back saying, if you come to Bombay, we could discuss this.
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And he said, yeah, I'm coming.
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He said, I'm coming on so-and-so date and when could we meet?
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And I thought I'll give him 15 minutes and I'll settle this matter once and for all in
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Then I'll have an answer for him.
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And I was veering towards no, even as that answer.
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And then I saw Ravi Singh coming down the hallway at the time, it was a big barn of
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a hall on the fourth floor.
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And I looked across the thing and I thought, friend, okay, this is a friend, this is going
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to be one of my friends.
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And I've always been instinctive like that.
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I mean, I know on the spot, I've made a couple of mistakes, I have to say.
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People whom I've thought, oh God, no, have become my friends.
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But other than that, I'm happy with my instincts.
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So I walked down to meet him.
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I said, this is a terrible place to meet.
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I want to show you Bombay.
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And it wasn't his first time in Bombay, of course, but I took him to the bookshops.
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I took him to eat samosa bhel, I took him to eat tel poli, I took him to like strange
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places and about five hours later, he said, you know, I have other people to meet as well.
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Are you doing that book?
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And I just thought, okay, for you, I'll do the book.
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And I said, okay, I'll do it.
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And he sent me a contract and I signed it with feeling greatly disturbed.
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And then I hit on what I thought was a great idea, not implicating the self.
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I would do a series of long, intense interviews with men, choose a man like, I mean, who just
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had a bad divorce and talk about being divorced, choose a man who's, you know, like had multiple
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affairs with women, like that kind of thing, and put them all together and write an introduction
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and just like, I'm not here.
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And I thought I'd sold myself the Studs Terkel model that, you know, this is about narratives
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I sent it off to him and Ravi wrote back saying, yeah, very nice.
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I'm glad you did all this work.
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But this is not what we want.
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I want you to be in the book and you have to make it funny and not like this, rewrite.
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I was really hopping mad because like by then I was a fairly well known journalist and here's
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I mean, I wasn't getting rewrites from my editors, but then I sort of decided to rewrite
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and I hit on a strategy to defang all my women friends, which is I gave them the manuscript
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before it was published and asked them to write me a letter back, giving their objections
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So all of them did it and I put it all together and sent it off.
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I saved my friendships and I got my first book out.
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The first review that came out.
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So when this book went out, I think in an attempt to publicize it, it was Ravi's first
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book as an editor, he sent it to Nilanjana to read in manuscript fashion and Nilanjana
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was also coming to Bombay and again I looked down the hall and I saw Nilanjana coming and
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I thought friend and again I whisked her out of the building and we went all over the city
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and enjoyed the bookshops and Nilanjana just like gloms to bookshops and so we went into
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all the crowded spaces and whatnot and we had great fun and she wrote a nice piece in
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Business Standard, I think where she had a long running column where she said, guaranteed
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to raise feminists and hackles and everybody's hackles alike and stuff like that and it sort
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So I developed another friendship out of surviving women and a woman friend which was even better.
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Then the book came out and I moved on and at that point in time, Ravi came back to Bombay
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and he said, would you consider writing a novel?
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Of course I would consider writing a novel.
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I have considered all my life writing a novel and I also want to do poetry and he said of
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course Penguin doesn't do poetry.
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That time Dom was the consulting editor to Penguin's poetry list and they had a series
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Yeah, I think Jeet Thail and Vijay Nambisan were one pair.
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And one set was CP Surendran and Jayatirtha Rao who always got, people would always come
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up to me and say are you Jerry Rao and I would have to explain that that is a very high paid
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city banker and this is a low paid journalist called Jerry Pinto, it's even a different
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Anyway, so they brought out these two books.
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So I was hoping that I would feature in the third, so I went and met Dom and he looked
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at the poetry and nothing ever came of it because they just killed Gemini also, they
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never had a third version.
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So we signed, in that year I signed up for M in the Big Home, it's called a novel and
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I got paid the princely amount of 5000 rupees but even then that was, that seemed like a
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I think my salary at that point was about 23,000 rupees.
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So it used to be around 2000 or something.
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So it was fine, it was perfectly acceptable and really I don't, you know this is the thing
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I think that publishing has relied on, that nobody looks to publishing to pay the bills.
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Okay, we don't, we expect that we will have day jobs, we expect that we will write our
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little hearts out in the night, we expect that they will pay us, you know, not much
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and that all that is fine and I think maybe the economics of publishing in India is actually
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It isn't like that they can pay you terribly much more unless you're going to write one
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of those trashy bestsellers or something like that, no problem, I have no issues with that.
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Anyway, so I think the second book that came out was Asylum, the poems.
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That was, okay here's the truth about Asylum, okay because I feel that one, I think your
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podcast is valuable because it is genuine detail, okay.
#
So there is no point telling lies and because that just muddies the water.
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At that point there was in the poetry circle which I talked about, there was a, one of
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our members was a chap called Prabhanjan Mishra who seemed to know everybody in every sphere
#
of life because I think he was a government bureaucrat of some kind and he came to us
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and he said, you know, Allied is publishing books of poetry, so maybe you want to go and
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meet them, they've just published my book.
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So I trundled off to Allied very happily to ask them about this book of poetry and whatnot
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and they said 10,000 rupees.
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So I went away very disheartened, I wanted to call Prabhanjan and say, did you pay 10,000?
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I thought, no, that's not fair.
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His book is out and he wanted to do with it, he did.
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Now you have to decide for yourself and my way of deciding for myself is to take a long
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walk, basically to walk home from VT, like to walk from VT to Mahim and to focus your
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attention on the subject at hand, then to drop it for a while, then to focus again on
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it to see if any new, this has come up and by the end I got home and I was saying, no,
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this is not the way to publish a book of poetry, a first book of poetry, let it go.
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The next morning I found myself writing a letter saying, yeah, I'm happy to pay 10,000
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rupees, when can we start on this project?
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And I started on the project, Baiju Parthan did the cover for me, which I liked very much.
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They did a fine job of the book coming out, they did no distribution because Allied was
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basically a textbook publisher and redistributor, I think, like, I mean, you know, they did
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a lot of Indian student editions of Western textbooks, et cetera, et cetera.
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So this was not something that they wanted to do, they just thought that, okay, let's
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give it a shot and I was therefore in charge of the distribution, the sales, everything.
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I didn't mind, it was my first book, second book, my first book of poetry, I was happy
#
to do it that way and I did sell it and towards the end I began to think, okay, after this
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there will be no copies left because they did a print run of about, I think, a thousand.
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So there are a thousand copies out in the market and I began to see how fragile the
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ecosystem of poetry was and then I remembered wanting to buy Kamala Das and knowing why
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there was no Kamala Das out in the market.
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All the years that I walked around the bookshops and the second-hand bookshops, there was no
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Kamala Das until the time that I think Minoo Choi died.
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Now Minoo Choi was a very sweet, small-made man who had vitiligo and he was a photographer,
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so he would follow every, he would sit in Samovar taking pictures, I don't know where
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those pictures went because he took pictures of all of us for years and that's another
#
archive and he was one of the Tanchoi.
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Remember the, there's a sari called the Tanchoi sari and this is based on the fact
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that there were three Choi brothers who brought that sari, that silk, the Chinese silk to
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India, so it was called Tanchoi in their name.
#
So he was a descendant of that family.
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When he died about a few years ago, his poetry collection ended up on the road and I bought
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the majority of it just as a salam to him.
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But there wasn't any poetry available and I could see now why it wasn't available because
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of these limited runs, no reprints etc. etc.
#
So that's how the second book came out.
#
But in all this, there was the sense that this is your shot, it's not happening again
#
and when that asylum came out and I was very happy, also a little dejected that I had paid
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for it and I was at pains all the time whenever I did poetry readings and all to tell people
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I had paid for it so that they should not think that it had passed through some huge
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screening process and gone through the gatekeeping of publishing etc. etc.
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I would say I paid for this book and I'm happy for you to buy it if you like it.
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I don't even know why I did that but I felt that was my ethical stand about having paid
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for it, to keep saying that I had paid for it and of course, I have two copies maybe
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of that print run, the rest have all gone out into the world.
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So each time there was that sense that surviving women happened because Shobha De wrote surviving
#
men otherwise that wouldn't have happened and asylum happened because I had 10,000 rupees
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spare to give allied press and so otherwise that wouldn't have happened.
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So I seemed like an otherwise writer that it was all going to be otherwise and then
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the third book came and this was another very peculiar thing.
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I think the first of those books was of the city anthologies was Improbable City or something
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like that, the name on Delhi edited by Khushwant Singh.
#
The honest truth is that Khushwant Singh probably had approval on it but that the work was done
#
by Ravi Singh and many of the other editors at Penguin all working together and Khushwant
#
also would suggest some pieces and that's how those books were done and he asked me
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whether I would like to do the Bombay book and again it seemed like you know otherwise
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if it had not been for Khushwant Singh doing that one.
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So I said of course I'd like to do it and then oddly enough a month later Naresh Fernandez
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who was in America wrote to me and said that he had been asked to do a Bombay book as well.
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So I thought okay there's one way to do this is to call Ravi and say what the fuck is going
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on why did you, sorry what is that allowed?
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What is going on why and the other way to do it is to say hey let's combine forces.
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So I wrote a narration and said why don't we do it together because I have also been
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asked and Naresh said yeah that sounds like a plan.
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By this time he had come back to India from working in the Wall Street Journal and other
#
such great successes and we settled down together.
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There was a fundamental disagreement in our attitudes.
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Mine was like I wanted history, I wanted narratives and he wanted hardcore new journalism.
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So you'll see that about 50% of the pieces are like my choices you know.
#
There's J. Jarsand Akunia writing in the 19th century that Bombay is as beautiful as Paris
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and there are there's I think Andrejid talking about Elephanta you know those things and
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there's his pieces which he his famous jazz piece morning you play different evening you
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play different and then there was the Parumitavora piece.
#
Now I wanted to get on with my life and I wanted to close the doors on this anthology
#
and finish it and Naresh kept saying no Parumitavora is writing Parumitavora is writing Parumitavora
#
is writing and I kept saying like I mean really do we have to wait all this time I just tired
#
of this that I mean what can what benefit can it bring forget it okay but he hung on
#
he's a loyal friend in that sense he kept saying no no we've got to wait we've got
#
Finally one day he rang up I think I was working in man's world at the time he rang up and
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he said Paro's piece is in so I said what because there's a but in your voice he said
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it's fabulous but it's very long so I said how long is it he said 10,000 words I said
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you're kidding our outside limit for people was 5,000 words you don't do 10,000 words
#
he said just read it Pinto so I said okay send it to me and I started reading it and
#
I fell in I fell into that piece and I rang Paro up immediately and I said all is forgiven
#
I mean I've been cursing you under my breath because you know you've been delaying this
#
book and I wanted it out of the door but this is fabulous but take it away from us double
#
it up triple it make it into a short novel this is Oprah Winfrey territory Oprah was
#
big at that time you know like Oprah was doing books and I said this is the kind of book
#
that will get Oprah's eye it is so good we'll manage without it and I sincerely meant it
#
I really wanted the piece I thought it unbalances the book I don't mind an unbalanced book
#
okay but this is a great piece but I wanted her to do a big she said that's very sweet
#
and very and so kind and all of them but I think it's at the peak and I think I'd like
#
you to have it so we put it in and the rest is history even today when when you know anyone's
#
buying it and after this thing I'll say hey keep that piece for the last okay that's the
#
good piece in the book that you keep that one for the last they look at me slightly
#
puzzled because maybe not everybody keeps the best for the last that's my way of eating
#
food also like one piece of good something good has to be at the end yeah so I I just
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had a I mean I I learned from Naresh the trust in waiting like waiting for people to to fetch
#
up with what they need to write and when they need to write it that was one big learning
#
there sorry am I going on too long no no this is nothing is too long okay yeah this is for
#
posterity no no I mean I've done episodes with both Urvashi Botalia and Paro Mita Vohra
#
and all of these are news to me you know what the Urvashi's revelation about the economics
#
and this great anecdote about Paro so so kind of I think Paro is a great writer yeah and
#
I wish she would write more so I think I have seen like two or three pieces by her all of
#
which have been great and of course she's a filmmaker and a great film and her columns
#
are great as well but I'm saying I just wish she would write like she would I think there
#
are stories inside Paro which are bubbling to come out and there's so much that she's
#
doing that she's not writing those stories but you know we can't live other people's
#
lives I keep telling myself that maybe she'll listen to this do something about that and
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I'm also you know like one theme that I kind of keep exploring in all of my shows and in
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this case you brought it up is just a role of contingency in our lives like you pointed
#
about Rashmi taking you towards writing Shanta taking you towards translating with that masterful
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exclamation mark right yeah and all her writing is just so immaculate and just you know it
#
takes something special to even do this exclamation mark I think no no and also because it's an
#
exclamation mark from her yeah I mean you feel like I mean on my back there is an exclamation
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mark by Shanta who dares stand it's very empowering yeah and and all these otherwise moments here's
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a question that came up that one of the lessons I have learned in my life is that you will
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go through life thinking of stuff as big deal that it will be a big deal when I do this
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it will be a big deal it will be a big deal when my book is out it will be a big deal
#
when I win this award and blah blah blah and whatever happened and some of that shit happens
#
and it's never a big deal it's a whimper yeah you know it's you've thrown a stone into
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the ocean and it's like skipped a couple of times and then it's gone forever even by the
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time I won the Wyndham campbell I had served on juries for awards that's a freaking big
#
deal though that there was a lot of money yeah yeah but I had served on juries as of
#
four awards and I have often known that the winner of the award is sometimes the default
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choice to break the the impasse between the between the two other people like everyone
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just says okay please y'all stop fighting we'll give it to a third person I believe
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very strongly that I'm in the big home or something that I'm proud of and I stand by
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I stand by it and I believe it is a it's a great piece of writing even if I say so myself
#
I do believe that but I also know how awards are given okay so as you said it's not a big
#
deal when it happens you're happy it happened you're grateful it happened but you know that
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it is contingent it is really contingent if that woman had not quit if that Ravi Singh
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had not joined if that letter had not been fired anything could have happened why would
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he have come to meet someone who said no he wouldn't have come yeah but you know the award
#
is not the Wyndham Campbell prize here what is a book existing yeah and you know you got
#
that down and I agree with you it's a great book it's it's a lovely book in fact after
#
I had bought my first copy a friend of mine gifted me a copy which is on the shelf somewhere
#
over there with a handwritten note because it meant so much to him that he just felt
#
that he has to share it with as many people as he can so it's it's it's a book that's
#
really resonated in that sense so I want to you know in along this theme of what you thought
#
was a big deal not mattering I want to also ask you about the things that we want like
#
a like one book that I've often mentioned on the show which I read last year and made
#
an impression on me in conceptual terms is this book by Luke Burgess called Wanting and
#
Burgess was a disciple of the philosopher Rene Girard and Rene Girard a few decades
#
ago was asked to teach a course on literature even though he's a philosopher and it wasn't
#
his subject but he agreed because he needed the money and as he developed a reading list
#
and went through all the great books he came to the conclusion that in all of those books
#
that he read everybody who the protagonist who wanted something wanted it because somebody
#
else wanted it it wasn't intrinsic and therefore he came up with the term mimetic desire for
#
it and from this from Burgess I learned the frame of thick and thin desires now mimetic
#
desires is you want something because somebody else wants it and the frame of thick and thin
#
desires is that thin desires are desires which don't emanate from within you but you know
#
like I might for example want a Mercedes because status and all of that or if I'm a young person
#
growing up in India I might say that okay I should get married and have kids just because
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that's expected that's a thing not thinking about whether I really want it and those are
#
thin desires like I think validation often is a sort of thin desire and the thick desires
#
is stuff that's deep within but often so submerged you may not know it yourself but those are
#
sort of thick desires and for a writer wanting to be a writer can be a combination of a thin
#
and a thick desire the thin desire can be I'll win awards I'll be cool I'll wear these
#
fancy glasses and you know get invited to literary festivals which seems to happen to
#
you a lot and the thick desire could just be that I have stories to tell I want to tell
#
stories and blah blah blah all of that and looking back on my life I can see those sin
#
desires in retrospect where I can look back and say that I don't even know why I was chasing
#
that and in some cases I might have gotten there but found that you know as we just discussed
#
what seemed a big deal wasn't really a big deal and in some cases I never got there and
#
thank God I didn't and that process about wanting so I'll ask you to look back on the
#
things that you have wanted in your life like that whole thing keep surviving women book
#
will come out your initial thing book will come out it'll have my name on it that's kind
#
of thin I guess even that quote about show them your ear before you show them your fool
#
is also kind of thin is driven by vanity right so what are the thin desires that you have
#
that you can recognize in retrospect and today when you kind of look at life you know what
#
are the thick desires and I realized that your thick desires will no longer be goals
#
but just perhaps ways of living or ways of being you know maybe just being mindful or
#
whatever how does it all play out for you this is a lovely question and seriously like
#
a man beginning to feel naked again okay to answer it I will have to be naked but let
#
me try there's no harm in being naked so begin with I think the thin desires are almost all
#
the fleshly desires like I I would have wanted I wanted for instance I wanted to be to be
#
a foreign return in the sense I wanted to have gone off to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard
#
or Stanford or wherever and come back with that degree in hand to say to people that
#
you know I matter right even I peeled that away when you peel that and looked at it you
#
saw that it was actually about your inadequacy that this was going to be some it was going
#
to be some way of throwing a rock into that abyss of of insecurity and now you know that
#
you know that it is a fairly deep abyss one rock is not going to fill it so that turned
#
out to be a thin desire I was saying to myself that it was about the liberty to do physics
#
and philosophy at the same in the same course or it was about ranging freely and thinking
#
freely which the Indian system did not allow you to do because we were into you know giving
#
you a model and asking you to replicate it regularly I mean even experiments in the science
#
laboratory you knew what your answer had to be you know you knew what the say refractive
#
index of air or water is and you you found that and presented it to your teacher it's
#
really like it makes a joke of experiments anyway so I kept saying this to myself but
#
the actual thin desire was I would like to be able to to hide behind my little my degree
#
from Oxford I wanted to be a published published author for the same reason and there is the
#
rub I wanted to be published author right but I think actually I wanted my thick desire
#
was self-expression was something inside that and I think this is actually the the universal
#
desire that we all have to be attended to so the delight everybody has on your podcast
#
Amit is that you bring such attentive readings to their work so it is it is almost like a
#
like like a deal an absolute joy to live to to engage with you because you've engaged
#
with me you've engaged with me like completely and you're bringing really interesting questions
#
to the table so that I think is a very is the thick desire that almost fuels all of
#
us and explains the great success of social media that everybody as you said gets a chance
#
at self-expression everybody gets a chance to be someone who is producing opinion okay
#
and all the bad things that come with it also and all the good things that come with it
#
also like none nothing's free no such thing as a free lunch and no such thing as a totally
#
good lunch it's always going to be like that so I think that is a really thick desire the
#
other I think is okay it's going around to sound very sad but more and more I think that
#
if the writing does not come from a good place then even if it is good writing it fails okay
#
so and that place is the rag and bone shop of the heart you know that flow which is really
#
filled with old the broken down remnants of of everything that you used to be because
#
I think we are in this in the process of constantly recycling ourselves you know the the things
#
that come up and get worked on and fall back into the heart and come up again I worked
#
on in a different way so that often you recognize an old desire in a new form and you think
#
to yourself like I can't possibly be going around this again and I remember my friend
#
H Masood Taj once said something very interesting to me he said yes in the Indian we were talking
#
about time as a spike at that time we thought was such a new idea time as a cycle and time
#
as a as an arrow and such lovely ideas all 1980s and he said yeah but you know you have
#
to consider cyclical time as spiral time so you may find yourself in the same place but
#
you're at a certain other level so the same place but in different level means you there
#
is some change even in that so you don't look on it as completely like you're stuck in the
#
same place you're not so I've always held on to that as like as something that that
#
makes sense to me so the rest I think it would be lovely really lovely and this may be a
#
thick desire because it's an impossible desire to have companionship along the way of writing
#
but it is fundamentally a lonely way this is the great attraction of it also because
#
you know in all the times when there have been collaborative things that I have done
#
it has been at some cost to collaborate you're actually working very hard at saying don't
#
be stupid okay you're trying not to say that you're trying to say okay I'm trying to understand
#
what you're getting at here but you're you're just wondering why people are like that and
#
of course there is collaboration in in writing I'm not denying that but much of your work
#
is done on your own so you're not as abraded as say if you're a filmmaker and you know
#
you have 70 voices shouting in your ears all the time so I think it would be lovely to
#
have companionship but this is the fundamental constraint you want companionship on your
#
own terms you don't want companionship on mutually said terms and so therefore that's
#
something that you you sort of begin to understand it's not it's not going to be something that
#
will happen in this lifetime or in at this stage of your evolution maybe a little later
#
you'll be able to find that I'm often very impressed by dual writers you were talking
#
about those brothers or say Kalpish Ratna, Kalpana Swaminathan and Nishrat Syed who worked
#
together seeming seamlessly effortlessly book after book Siowal and Balu that great series
#
that great and to write like that level of detective fiction together whoa such an achievement
#
so those are things that I think it must be nice to have that kind of of companionship
#
but it would I think also have have some downsides to it which I think you know maybe Goskini
#
and Uderzo would tell us if they were around.
#
So I want to you know you mentioned broken down remnants of what you used to be and I
#
want to talk about memory a little bit like one of the the mind-blowing realizations
#
about memory that I learned while you know researching for an episode that I did with
#
Achal Malhotra and that I keep bringing up because it is so it just blows me away when
#
I think about it is that the nature of memory is such that when something happens for the
#
first time and we remember it we are remembering the event but the next time we remember it
#
we are remembering the remembering of the event and so on in this game of Chinese and
#
each time that protein is changing each time it's changing and what you said about spiral
#
time is also this you are in the same place but you're not quite in the same place so
#
like a spiral yeah sort of memory loop as it were and a lot of your writing in a sense
#
is about memory like at one point for example in M in the Big Home the narrator is musing
#
about M's memory of Burma and you think aloud was this how people remembered things in patches
#
and images or was this a repression of a painful memory and you know then with regard to her
#
he's leaving Burma there is that thing about how they threw a piano of the ship and then
#
you realize that many people have that memory of throwing a piano of the ship and like how
#
many pianos were there and then at one point you write quote the pianos were a metaphor
#
a tribal way of expressing loss it did not matter if the pianos were real or had never
#
existed the story was their farewell to Rangoon stop quote and at another point you wrote
#
something which spoke to me in a different context where of that of a chocolate wrapper
#
inside a book again something that I miss doing and I think these are her words in the
#
book where she writes quote no not as a bookmark as remembrance that should you never get chocolate
#
again you would know that you had once eaten this bar and that struck me because I remember
#
you know my father had Parkinson's when he passed away and I remember his memory was
#
fading in the middle you know typically like memory how it is as sharp as the edges you
#
remember what happened 10 minutes ago you remember what happened when you were 10 years
#
old yeah but it fades in the middle and at one point he asked me that tell me something
#
about your childhood because I don't remember right which is of course very poignant and
#
it got me to thinking in that selfish way in which we make everything about ourselves
#
it got me to thinking that one day that will happen to me you know if I live long enough
#
it's a law of truly you know if the sample size of my life is long enough one day it
#
will happen to me that I will forget and then perhaps I will need that chocolate wrapper
#
in a book to kind of remember and what you said earlier in the conversation struck me
#
because you said that you know a lot of the stuff you made that effort of remembering
#
and therefore things came to you when you were actually writing and I know you must
#
have thought a lot about this about your sort of engagement with memory with the act of
#
remembering because every act of remembering in a sense is also an act of storytelling
#
an act of construction an act of trying to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless
#
you know and the book is brutal because the book like for me it would have been incomplete
#
if not for that chapter called disgusting bitch you know which I totally get where
#
you're looking inwards at your own sort of or the the narrator is looking inwards at
#
his own sort of ugly behavior and there's no putting a sheen to it that this is there's
#
no victimhood this is just the messiness of human nature and all of that what was it like
#
to sit down and try to remember what that just that whole process see I think one of
#
the reasons why I made it into a novel eventually is because when remembering became very sharp
#
I have many people have told me that I have a very good memory and I think I remember
#
very clearly only where there is an emotional component there is a strong emotional connect
#
with that moment or with the person so I'm often surprised when people feel and people
#
often feel overwhelmed by the fact that I remember these things and that you remember
#
the name of my aunt who came and saw me that day or whatever it is because I think it's
#
like a kind of a compliment I care about you therefore I remember these things about you
#
so having a good memory and having those journals is like a two-edged sword because there is
#
no escape from them but it is a gift because all of it is there you just have to go and
#
look at it the looking can be sharp and painful so sometimes I would have to say to myself
#
Jerry this is about the Mendis family it is not about your family write the page write
#
that page and but there is in writing disgusting bitch it was I think something that you grit
#
your teeth and do because it is finally self-implication it is saying that this is not easy and it's
#
not just not easy it's easy maybe even to get through if you allow yourself the wrong
#
responses right so one response is to walk away you walk away from the situation as so
#
many men do and which is why we have that constant trope of the man who walks away suddenly
#
because I think in every man's head the messiness of the family situation makes you
#
think if I just left something would be recovered in me it may well be like that so I don't
#
know but when you stay inevitably something will go very badly wrong and you will call
#
your mother disgusting bitch and you know precipitate another attack that will need
#
her to go to hospital but you live with that and then the value of that memory the value
#
of the of going back to that place of hurt and that memory is that many people come and
#
tell you that this mattered to me that you said it this was because that's what I did
#
that's what I felt at the same time and it mattered that you said it so as I said
#
no the other the reader makes it a book so the reader response is like central in that
#
chapter that you know that this was a lot of I mean there's a lot of just energy and
#
fun and and celebration there's also like moments when things could get really bleak
#
so going back was not not easy but it had to be done in a way.
#
When we live our lives and I hold myself culpable in this also and perhaps as a human condition
#
and all of us are like this.
#
No I want to but I don't really.
#
I will yeah so you know one thing that I think all of us are culpable of as part of the human
#
condition is that it's the whole main character syndrome as it were in the sense that it's
#
like we live life as if there's a play and we're the main character and everyone else
#
is a side character if not a prop entirely right so we are always in that and I think
#
what happens sometimes with the act of memory when you force yourself to be harsh when it's
#
not convenient when you're looking back at you know stuff like this is that you you're
#
not the main character anymore you might have lived through a particular point in time where
#
you were the main character and you reacted accordingly you know I have also been harsh
#
with my parents at different times and of course you there's nothing to do about that
#
regret and which is possibly why that kind of spoke to me and you were the main character
#
then and then you look back and you say like what the fuck you know I'm nothing it's it's
#
just so you know you you kind of get that sort of picture now one of the things that
#
I try to do and it's theoretical and it would be nice to do is if you can live your life
#
as if you're not the main character right but it's very hard to do because I think our
#
default mode is you're the main character everything else is instrumental you could
#
be in a video game where you're the player and every everything else is sort of there
#
and that also thinking aloud might explain why so many men like you said might want to
#
walk away because what they are walking away for what they want to walk away from is to
#
maintain their main character ness rather than subsume it to a role that they suddenly
#
have to play where you know which intrudes upon or which they consider unfair that you
#
know why is this happening to me and so on and so forth especially for someone who's
#
you know withdrawn and introverted as I have been you know that whole satra saying hell
#
is other people you know it's sort of a temptation but as a writer and as someone who has journaled
#
from a very young age as you have as a writer who's written about other people and possibly
#
you know done the self-reflection and looked at other people and seen them make mistakes
#
partly because they think they are the main character you know how has your gaze evolved
#
through all of this I'd just like to say one thing about your process if I may I think
#
one of the most important things that you're doing in decentering yourself from the main
#
characters to listen and as soon as you listen in some senses you're giving the other person
#
primacy even in your auditory space even and you listen with the peculiar intensity which
#
means that you're there and you're engaged right and so that is very also very very I
#
think it's a great exercise in decentering that you're listening carefully and attentively
#
at all times and I think that to make that into a weekly habit literally is a huge thing
#
but there's also they could because we delude ourselves all the time right even if that
#
is my conscious intention it could just be self-aggrandizement like when you walk out
#
of here and this episode is done I could think yeah I got a great episode with Jerry you
#
know and there is that ego there there is that self-aggrandizement and how it's hard
#
to disentangle like one thing that I realized is that we should never pretend that we're
#
telling the truth to ourselves it's totally and but you know okay this is it I mean I
#
think fundamentally I believe there is no such thing as the pure motive there is all
#
there are always mixed motives okay but in that mix if the majority of the mixes is is
#
good then that actually excuses the minority of them there is no I don't think there has
#
ever been a human being I have a cousin whose favorite line is I don't have 25 paisa worth
#
of pride he says okay with such pride that everybody looks at each other and kind of
#
like you know trolls there's but that's his belief in himself now should I puncture that
#
by saying how much pride do you have when you say that or should I just recognize it
#
still internally a little and move on that's my call right so I think in general we're
#
never going to actually be free of the desire to be in the spotlight right but there are
#
two things at work here one is I think what my friend Arun Natti Subrahmanyam calls adakam
#
which is the word that Tamil is used to mean the self withdrawal in which you know you
#
come in and you say to your mother maybe I stood first in class and your mother says
#
oh yes and wonderful and has the dhobi come so your achievement is put in place you're
#
not supposed to put yourself forward now that can have certain damaging impact on if you
#
suddenly find yourself in the middle of self-promotional people who think that your withdrawal is
#
is well that's your choice you don't want a spotlight hey give me the spotlight I'm
#
enjoying this right so and there is also the point at which you you devalue everything
#
so systematically that you're devaluing yourself also so that comes with that one and the other
#
one is the is the is the hey I listen beautifully man right so and I get these great podcasts
#
man now if there is a 10% possibility that 10% of the of your motive is that it's forgivable
#
but to be able to recognize it and to laugh at it and to forgive yourself this is what
#
the bouquet of humanity is about it's like you know we're not all we're never going
#
to be saints thank heavens it would be a very boring word and but we can sort of strive
#
for self-awareness and say okay you know why you did that right do you think the process
#
of writing like if I think of a Siri and this is very simplistic but if I think of a series
#
of Jerry Pinto's as a kind of a Russian doll a matryoshka one inside the other and outside
#
you have layers and inside there is something and the question there is of course the self
#
is contingent because we're all shaped by a genes and B circumstances and nature and
#
nurture come together and whatever all that is fine but there is perhaps somewhere down
#
a hypothetical court Jerry looking out at all of these layers do you think writing has
#
helped you peel back some of those layers take off some of those outer skins as it were
#
I think so I think you see I think no act of writing is anything but an act of self
#
revelation okay and this is even the Ghatia writing the bad writing is also an act of
#
self-revelation so you're revealing yourself whether you like it or not it is happening
#
okay if you have a certain degree of self-awareness one of the things that you can see happening
#
in front of you is your worst possible self is also laying itself out on the page right
#
now some of the excitement of creating an interesting work is to let that bad self out
#
onto the page as well okay but often one manicures it you want to be as evil but you want to
#
be evil within the acceptable limits but those limits are so flexible you know in the 19th
#
century you could use the n-word without thinking about it if you were a white writer today
#
you just not but every black writer can and that's just one simple example you know the
#
word Harijan in the 1940s when upper castes used it was a way of them virtue signaling
#
their you know that the fact that they they were on the right side of the equation today
#
that would be would seem really offensive and condescending and the shifting of those
#
names is the right of I mean I have the right to be named the way I want to be named right
#
so we can't take that right away and say but yesterday you said that you wanted to be called
#
this today why are you saying that that's just ridiculous that's that's us playing
#
the ease card over the hurt card I mean it doesn't work that way so we leave it at that
#
but I'm saying each time you choose to lay out a word or two you're going to reveal some
#
of yourself you have to get used to that that moment when I read out that first poem okay
#
it just gets easier and easier after that because you realize that even when you're
#
writing something as simple as a I don't know an an argumentative piece for the for the
#
you know for the newspaper that is going to have validity for about half an hour before
#
it moves into into history you're still revealing something of yourself even if you choose to
#
play a role the choices of choosing that role is again revelatory I'm not actually speaking
#
so much about the choice of revealing that side of you I'm speaking about changing because
#
you saw that side of you and you hadn't noticed it before and it was kind of normalized and
#
has that sort of I think you know there are many parts to the self that you can you recognize
#
as being things that need work and in in bad fiction it just takes that recognition for
#
you to change that part of yourself and it happens actually I don't think it happens
#
that way it like for instance say I believe that every man has a hidden patriarch inside
#
him however feminist he tries to be he has a hidden patriarch so my sister is nearly
#
60 years old but if she says she's going to come home late I'm immediately thinking who
#
are you going with what are you doing well you know it's just and I have to talk to that
#
patriarch down off his pedestal and say hey okay I know what you're feeling I know why
#
you're feeling it don't go there right it's that that kind of thing there's an old-fashioned
#
man inside me who when someone requests pronouns which I don't think are the right pronoun
#
I want to respond but again I have to talk to myself and say hey you don't get a say
#
in their pronouns you get a say in your pronoun you stick with that and be happy but many
#
people don't seem to want to do this work because this is work and it is important work
#
in a certain way I think the conversations you have with yourself are seriously always
#
going to be the most important or among the most important conversations you have but
#
most people I think are very happy with with you know this for instance one of the things
#
that I keep I kept hearing forever was Bombay versus Mumbai you know there was a Bombay
#
and that Bombay wasn't and this Bombay this Mumbai is and I keep thinking what is this
#
exactly about is this about privilege that the old Bombay privileged a certain anglophone
#
elite and the new Mumbai privileges or is trying to privilege a new set of elites and
#
you're feeling challenged right and I don't have to take sides I can watch and listen
#
to both sides of the equation but I don't have to take sides in that and in that debate
#
so I often feel that that recognition of some of a prejudice or a way of thinking that you're
#
not comfortable with is a first step but those grooves are very deep so to step out of the
#
groove requires almost near constant policing and then you know you have to be open to that
#
correction and we are not we hate being corrected.
#
On that note I think I've kept you without AC for a long enough time and you've been
#
kind enough to agree to come back tomorrow so let's take a break for the day and there
#
is still so much I want to talk to you about so we'll address that tomorrow.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love
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#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen this is day two with Jerry Pinto where we get back
#
to talking about your life Jerry so thank you for coming back again.
#
This is saying that I think there's this famous line in literature which I think is a false
#
line which is the Anna Karenina line about happy families all being alike and unhappy
#
families being unhappy I'm told that Tolstoy never wrote that oh yeah Constance Garnet
#
thought that it was a good way to start a book and she added it you kidding me wow imagine
#
like the most famous of Tolstoy's lines yeah it's not a Tolstoy line at all that's tragic
#
that's like that's the opposite of what I guess the Gordon Lish would do covers what
#
a thing to do wow okay but it is so okay that I mean whoever's life it is separating line
#
from artist as it were it strikes me in a sense as false that I think you know certain
#
strains of unhappiness come about for such similar reasons that that's why literature
#
sort of hits so many of us that we read something and there is that spark of recognition and
#
that can really affect people as I'm in the big home did so you know in since you have
#
been so naked in your book in a sense even though it's fiction I think I should also
#
kind of talk about something I haven't really spoken about before my mother died in 2008
#
but before that from perhaps the 90s she began to have different kinds of delusions and at
#
first one would not see them as delusions it was just a very overt religiosity you know
#
extremely religious very elaborate prayer room and all of that all of that stuff but
#
later on it was all about how ghosts are talking to her she wrote an entire book which was
#
a transliteration of Tagore's poems guided by Tagore himself who was sitting with her
#
and guiding her through that and she became convinced that she was an enlightened soul
#
and there were spirits out to harm her and at one point she had these severe pains and
#
she said there are spirits inside me I must do tapasya to get them out and those pains
#
weren't spirits it was pancreatic cancer detected too late shortly after a detection then she
#
kind of went and your book I realized was less a book perhaps about the mental illness
#
and the mother but more a book about how the protagonist is dealing with it you know the
#
love and the conflicts and all of that like for a significant period of that time before
#
it got worse and it got worse gradually I didn't give it that term like even today like
#
no one in my family ever acknowledged that I could see it by the end but no one acknowledged
#
that there was a problem at all and for me all that I noticed is that oh my god she's
#
become such an unpleasant person and you know she isn't what she used to be and and all
#
of that and it's interesting and I think right towards the end she you know one could sense
#
a fragility that had returned maybe somewhere in there there was maybe some there was a
#
part of her which could go outside of it and see what was happening and I think throughout
#
that period I was in a sense clueless I couldn't step out of my own body and really figure
#
out what's going on even at a point where I sort of knew it was mental illness and you
#
know one imagines things like oh everybody else's family is so happy my family is dysfunctional
#
right and the point is that's not true you know that nobody from the outside sees this
#
stuff you kind of have to sort of live with it and figure shit out and and I guess that's
#
why your book struck such a wide chord among so many people there's no such term as wide
#
chord what am I even doing I can I'm not picturing a piano with two hands like spread out madly
#
octopusian hands playing a white chord so tell me a little bit about your sort of coming
#
to terms with it because a book is written at a point where I'm guessing has gone through
#
so many rewrites and all that that it is processed but in the middle of it you know and which
#
is why I love that chapter where you get angry with her I love that you know I should say
#
you your narrator and where your narrators confusion and doubts and just that basic primal
#
stress of when I go home today who will open the door you know is so powerful so you know
#
to take you outside of the book and leave that aside tell me a bit more about you know
#
this aspect of your childhood I think let's just start with something you said which I
#
thought was very interesting and thank you for sharing that I'm really honored in a way
#
and I think it's kind of like one of the things that I think I mean the big whom did was to
#
catalyze this kind of conversation it will make it possible and to make it I mean I don't
#
think this kind of conversation would ever be easy but to make it a little less of an
#
effort because the ground has in some ways been broken but something that you said was
#
very interesting and I often feel when you're asking a question that I should say stop now
#
I want to talk about that but you go on and then I see where you're heading so I follow
#
you but this one very interesting line which I insist I will go back to was I could not
#
step out of my body you said you know and I think it's very important it's a very important
#
and beautiful line because it talks about empathy in a certain way but more than empathy
#
I think the physicality of what people are going through is often also so powerful that
#
you perhaps need you might need another body in order to be able to understand it and especially
#
across a gender divide especially across an age divide and especially across all the barriers
#
that family puts up and the abyss of love as well because you know I think underneath
#
the anger and the hurt and the and the just incomprehension like what like dude what happened
#
to my mother you know that's the question that you keep you must have been asking because
#
this seems like late onset I think I feel that there is a there that for all of us dealing
#
with someone who is not who has not who has a different mind at that point in time or
#
is neurodivergent or whatever you want to call it is really about witness there is nothing
#
else that you can do you know in most cases I feel that when we talk about illness to
#
the people a certain competitive spirit enters the proceedings so that you know you say yes
#
I know I understand because when I had this pain you know 10 years ago I was completely
#
flat out and I needed to take so many analgesics or whatever it is it's all main character
#
energy yeah exactly the main character feeling that you know suddenly I'm being sidelined
#
in my own show I feel that coming to terms with someone who is mentally ill requires
#
you to allow the oxygen to be sucked out of the room by that person's sometimes not even
#
by the person but by the person's manifestation of illness so I often felt as a young person
#
growing up that one way to deal with it was to try and say okay it's the mania speaking
#
it's not my mother it's the madness speaking it's not my mother but you didn't know where
#
the line was to be drawn because if there was a big and tremendous compliment being
#
paid one day you know you'll make a wonderful writer you think who is speaking now you learn
#
to mistrust also the good stuff that's coming out of that so it becomes a difficult it's
#
a constant negotiation it's a very tiring negotiation because you're you're never in
#
a place where you can relax and accept what is happening at its face value and so much
#
of what we do through the day is just that is face value stuff and I think this may well
#
be the problem because we have been taught in India that we do not have to actually say
#
we should not say no we should never say no and when we say yes we actually mean no so
#
you know the result is complicated maneuvers have to be made to make the person admit that
#
they are saying no so even if it is something else to give you a stupid example it's your
#
carpenter who's redoing your space and you say will this be done by Diwali and he says
#
yes because he can't say no so you say okay how much time will it take to get the word
#
and he says about two weeks and you say how much time will the kari gari take and he says
#
setting it up and polishing but that's already Christmas he says now you've come to like
#
I mean the point but he's not been he's told you're the sahab and if you want it by Diwali
#
he has to say yes to Diwali this is the problem I think with with all of us we are so intent
#
on on second-guessing the interlocutors preferences that we never actually answer a question we
#
choose the answer which we think that the the person would like I think it's it's really
#
at the bottom of so much of the messes that we we are confronted with in every life you
#
know the the standard male female thing where the male says can I go out to drink you with
#
my buddies tonight and the female says of course you can and you know of course but
#
if you want to obviously like so you don't want me to no I do not want you to you know
#
you must decide and all of this seems to like play with everybody guessing each other you
#
have to guess these things so I don't know whether that's very healthy so sometimes you
#
know the the it's very odd we have a very I think the word Mufat when you say it about
#
somebody it is very respectful in a way but it's also like I mean there's a kind of wondering
#
at how someone can be so can be like that so there's a hint of disrespect as well you
#
know it's not all entirely it's kind of my goodness how how outspoken this person is
#
but and I would never be that way because I was brought up better this is the kind of
#
subtext of this whole thing and a mental illness can give you a pass it can give you allowance
#
to cut through the bullshit and to say your mind to speak your mind without without filters
#
this can be savage at a certain point in time and therefore again you're asking yourself
#
am I hurt because this is the truth or am I hurt because this is this is this is part
#
of the mental illness so it can be very wearing that that sort of thing when it comes when
#
you know you have an added component of say the religious sphere and you may not and presumably
#
Amit Verma the atheist was not particularly receptive to the idea that you know the gods
#
were speaking or and then the mix-up between god and ghost and you feel you know these
#
are categories that need to be separated but but they can't often so I completely understand
#
that it must have been a time that stressed everybody out to add to that then comes the
#
physical the physical illness it's like that's savage that's really savage I think it is
#
it's and this I agree with you this is what most families go through but we are somehow
#
so stuck in a in a Suraj Bharjatyayash Chopra mode of present presentation of the family
#
that we want a happy complacent unit to be presented you know back to back to the world
#
we all we all be together for each other and we we look out unitedly at the world it doesn't
#
happen it doesn't happen because we are so afraid of the ordinariness of uniqueness you
#
know like I mean this the free the phrase unique I mean the word unique itself is is
#
ridiculous we are all unique so there is no unique right so I mean uniqueness is so ordinary
#
that it is a challenge all the time because you're not bringing up carbon copies of yourself
#
you're not bringing home a carbon copy of yourself or your mother you're not nothing
#
is ever going to be replicated and therefore yesterday's learnings have to be refreshed
#
and renewed for today and may even have to be reinvented entirely and that's the cost
#
of being human I think and you know you mentioned the Suraj Bharjatyayar film and it strikes
#
me that many men would be happy being the man in a Suraj Bharjatyayar film but for women
#
it's a completely different thing like I was struck by M's words where in the book where
#
the narrator and his sister asked her if she wanted children and she says quote oh god
#
no I saw what children do they turn a good respectable woman into a mother I hope I'm
#
pronouncing that right I didn't want to be a mother I didn't want to be turned inside
#
out I didn't want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the center of it this
#
is what you have to be careful about which is what she called the girl in the book it
#
never happens to men they just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you've pushed
#
a football through your badge for the next hundred years of your life you're stuck with
#
being someone whose definition isn't even herself you are now someone's mother right
#
stop code and this is again you know being a mother for so many women for so many girls
#
must be like a thin desire is what you're supposed to be and you'll see little children
#
at gatherings and you'll be like oh how cute I'll be a mother and it seems like so romantic
#
and nice it is horrible like I was I was recording an episode with Menal Pandey and Menalji was
#
talking about how she and a bunch of her women friends got together one day and somebody
#
pointed out this thing in the news of a mother who had killed her own child and the first
#
reaction was how could she possibly do that and then one by one every one of them admitted
#
that they also had thought about it at some point in time you know to be a woman in India
#
in a sense you are asked to eviscerate your soul you know men are not asked to do that
#
men can get by you know but women are asked to eviscerate their soul and I imagine that
#
could so easily exacerbate any other problem that there is like then of course you fucking
#
need escape you need release you know you know it's you can find it in religion you
#
can find it in your you know I mean two things where I think that it's dangerous to speak
#
in absolute terms because it's not absolute and one of them is delusions where we can
#
look at a person who might believe that ghosts are talking to her or whatever and say that
#
person is delusional but the truth is to get by in the complexity of the world and the
#
unfacable truth of our mortality we all in a sense choose some delusion or the other
#
even if that delusion is to be in the present even if that delusion is a version of the
#
world that allows us to come to peace with it and it might not be something overt but
#
is there and the other thing that I think about that we you know not something different
#
but something that arises out of this is that you can look at a mentally ill person and
#
say that I should be empathetic because it's a disease it's you know chemicals have gone
#
wrong part of whatever you know there's a reason for this and this is not that person's
#
fault but the point is that for each and every one of us chemicals go wrong character and
#
personality are contingent right you know Chris Cornell took pills for some random thing
#
felt suicidal killed himself it was a pills that changed something Phineas Gage had a
#
rod go through his brain and you know that famous story became a completely different
#
person and so you know it's again like yesterday we were talking about probability and saying
#
that everything in the past we look at it as hundred percent or zero percent whereas
#
the world is probabilistic and similarly I think that there is complexity here in the
#
sense that everybody is mentally not quite there everybody is kind of making these compromises
#
and yet you know we can be empathetic towards someone in our family or a character in a
#
book who is clearly much easier much easier yeah or someone in your family after the fact
#
when it's too late perhaps and but you're severely judgmental of everybody around you
#
because you are main character and they're just bad people and I think it is really about
#
you know at the end of the day it's how much they discomfort us it's this is the central
#
thing if if the person is for many people mental illness is spectacle right so they
#
watch it and it is almost as if there was it is entertainment so I remember there used
#
to be a girl called Honimo Sulakshana I think so she was called Sulu and then from that
#
she became began to be called silly because she was developmentally challenged and she
#
lived across the road my mother and she had a good rapport they smiled and waved and chatted
#
to each other no one knew what there was my mother speaking English Sulu was speaking
#
Kannada I think and nobody knew what what there was neither of them knew what the other
#
was saying but they were fine but as soon as silly appeared in the in the veranda a
#
lot of people would come out and you know they would sort of like the older ladies would
#
be cleaning some rice or shelling peas and watching her she would she had a little imaginary
#
world of her own so she danced she sang she talked to people etc etc and this was just
#
spectacle for them silly was doing her thing literally and I think even in when you have
#
someone who's got a problem or whatever I remember there was a young reporter who it
#
was just in the times who it was discovered could not take a pee if there was someone
#
else in the toilet okay this apparently later was I discovered is one of the of homeopathy's
#
symptoms it's in the materiomedicum it's wild so it became almost like a challenge to keep
#
him out of the toilet for many of the young men in the office they're just like as soon
#
as they could see him heading to the to absolute they'd go and wow yeah just to see how long
#
he could actually hold out without actually being and I think the you know he never actually
#
plead in public with anybody else so I don't know whether we gave I mean everybody gave
#
him kidney disease you know or some kind of UTI because he's he was holding it back all
#
the time so that's one level of it where you make it into spectacle the second is when
#
it actually I think interrupts or disrupts your life and then it is really it's really
#
not it's that not on you know this is not on this is not the behavior this is this is
#
not expected of you and you know this is a X setting and that X setting can be this is
#
a professional setting you can't behave like this this is a family gathering and you can't
#
behave like this so where do you go to behave like that this is a question because you can't
#
do it either way presumably only the mental hospital that I mean to the you know the tiny
#
mental hospitals or the or the psychiatric wards that we that you know the psychiatric
#
wards in India are such catch-all places so the anorexic is lying next to the to the drug
#
addict who's lying next to the recovering alcoholic because you know when you're when
#
you're if you are found to be an alcoholic the government is quite has a sort of understanding
#
policy in the sense that you have to go and get rehab and show the paper that you've got
#
rehab that you've spent 21 days in in a ward and then you can return to work because this
#
happened with an uncle of mine and my uncle had to go and you know do his 21 days in the
#
hospital when I visited him there I was visiting the same ward that my mother used to be in
#
you know the same kind of place and he kept saying I don't belong here this is not the
#
place so I said yes but the only other places for rehab are out of your budget like you
#
can't afford that on a teacher's salary so would you please just sit here and get this
#
done and so you can go back to work and of course he went back to work and of course
#
he relapsed in 10 days naturally those are things that happen many when rehab is is mandated
#
on you so the the therapeutic setting for of the mental hospital is simply not not conducive
#
to therapeutic I mean that word is just wrong there's because it's just like completely
#
I mean the young psychiatric I mean most of of the the work the heavy lifting on the ward
#
is done by the nurses the ward boys and by the psychiatric social workers the psychiatrist
#
is a visiting superstar who comes in and says how you feeling person manages to find continued
#
medication next visit even next bed next bed next bed it just like that and and where's
#
the manic depressive oh okay that is that the one okay over there so people are not
#
even known by their names they are known by their by their by their diagnosis the whole
#
of it are in you know I see all that is happening I mean a lot of conversations about mental
#
health a lot of openness about mental health young people talking frequently and sometimes
#
a little possessively about their mental health issues I see all this is very very very hopeful
#
but we have huge amounts of work to do because I think where is the barefoot psychologist
#
where is the barefoot psychiatrist in the village you know if you have and so in the
#
village it is always possession it's always possession when I translated baluta there
#
is there are there's a case study he gives you a little almost like a short case study
#
young woman who got married husband left her went to the city in the normal way of things
#
and then apparently news came back that he was living with another woman there and that
#
this was you know he had no intention of ever coming back to this woman so she then began
#
to wonder about offering herself sexually to people etc and so then she was beaten and
#
you know exorcised and the spirit was driven out of her for a while but then it came back
#
again now I have a young friend whose father did exactly that he left the family and went
#
to the city and married another woman and that other woman being sort of I think like
#
I am not really interested in motherhood she got pregnant she came and delivered the child
#
to my friend's mother and said look after her and went back to the city with the man
#
and continued to live her life happily my friend was brought up with this other young
#
with his half sister and grew very fond of her they have a very good relationship her
#
mother has their mother has a good relationship with them so mother was not really interested
#
in the husband as long as the money kept coming for and it did from the city it came regularly
#
that was all that was required so these two such divergent stories you know one where
#
there is a complete breakdown a social a mental breakdown and a threat because an available
#
young woman who is wondering about offering herself sexually to people is a threat to
#
the whole of the patriarchy right so that's Baluta's story and here is the story that
#
and my friend is of the same community the Mahars the same story plays out completely
#
differently here right and so I think often what would have happened if that woman had
#
someone she could talk to the one who you know who broke down if she had someone who
#
would sit her down and say okay listen this is pretty bad but maybe there's a way out
#
you know just let's talk about it I don't know so I think we have such a fear of the
#
word of the word of the spoken word of and if it's power that we tend to stop off top
#
off the words don't talk about that now why bring that up that's all old history let
#
it go now it's okay it's over and finished he's dead if the perpetrator is dead you
#
know we won't invite that uncle over again we just keep on silencing people and the result
#
is is more and more distress more and more distress that erupts over these things one
#
of my episodes which has really resonated the most with people is an episode called
#
the loneliness of the Indian man with Nikhil Taneja so we speak a lot about mental health
#
and that so I'll put that in the show notes so I'm sure listeners have probably already
#
heard it it's a seven-hour episode here's another thought and again I'm thinking aloud
#
you know it's commonly I think understood by anyone who thinks about it for 30 seconds
#
that schools are so great not because they educate children but because they're a daycare
#
center right so you can't tackle it you want to be a parent and with all the benefits and
#
all that but you can't actually look after them the whole freaking day so they're out
#
of the way they're gone right and in a similar sense it strikes me that it could be the case
#
that when somebody is a little off like institutions like these then also become a convenience
#
in the sense that with this Suraj Barjatiya main character energy you know all of us want
#
to kind of live that facade live that dream as long as everyone else around us is corresponding
#
to the part that they're supposed to play but if they deviate from that or if it becomes
#
difficult for us like having children on our hands all day what do we do so school is one
#
solution and something like this is one solution and it strikes me that when there is extreme
#
variance like perhaps during covid when the kids are home all day or when you have a mentally
#
ill parent for example then it strikes me that you can no longer maintain the facade
#
that I'm a good son and this is a mother and this is you can't maintain the facade but
#
you have to come to terms in a sense with the truth of it and and come to terms in a
#
sense with the way that you feel about it which can be so conflicting because you know
#
the one temptation could be to just go and denial yourself and look at it as a spectacle
#
and oh it's just a disease and whatever or you can start to question where your own feelings
#
on the matter which are changing all the time where do they arise from what does it say
#
about you what does it say about us you know so the book is so profound because it kind
#
of covers all of this territory perhaps not overtly but it covers all of this territory
#
but that's a book that's a writing of it in hindsight in the living of the time like
#
how was it for you like were you able to take that step out of your own body as it were
#
to go back to the phrase and see what is happening and figure out a strategy of dealing with
#
it and yourself and all of that or.
#
I think one did it from time to time you know it would I suppose be fair to that young Jerry
#
Pinto also he had a life to live as well he was not he was not seeing himself as a carer
#
for his mother you know he had his dreams and his plans and his ideas but there were
#
times when he had to come back to the to the house I must say that that that Jerry Pinto
#
from the age of 14 who started working was also running away from the house so that he
#
but if you are running away to earn money it's very respectable you can rationalize
#
it yeah you can rationalize it because you know I'm I'm a working person now and I need
#
to be going and doing this and once at one point my mother said but for how much money
#
are you going what are you earning that was also a kind of blow but now I think again
#
to focus on the time that one was back home say one got home by about eight o'clock on
#
some days and ten o'clock on other days and then one had to confront this and most of
#
the time there was minor annoyance okay with epic rage and flashes in between deep self
#
pity you know trenches and also that the general feeling that that of resignation more than
#
anything else there was a great resignation sometimes that was the worst of it because
#
that was sort of terrifying as though this is never going to end this is always going
#
to be this way and of course I knew that she was 30 years older than me so obviously at
#
some point she was going to die but and and I would say sometimes I don't just go and
#
I mean you keep wanting to kill yourself why don't you just die you know you just it would
#
the rage would be so much that you'd say that and she'd said not on your life I'm not doing
#
that not letting you go so easily strange things like that and then six three months
#
later we'd be begging her not to like I mean to just like hold on for another day you know
#
don't do this who who is this person who can have these two two moods one mood to say like
#
just go die somewhere and the other mood to say no no no hold on I'm with you we are all
#
here for you and it doesn't even sound reasonable you know or rational so while I agree with
#
you when you say that we almost all of us in some ways suffering I think I don't remember
#
who said it man has called himself a rational animal in a characteristic fit of self promotion
#
or something a very nice line but I'm saying I think the rational self is the self we would
#
like to be all the time and the irrational self is is the response to the fact that love
#
and hate and anger just mess with your reason right all the time and they are our normal
#
state I think what makes us human is the fact that we have all these complex and and strange
#
emotions I look at the emoticon range keep trying guys you'll get there you know as you
#
get there we'll have another set of of emotions and feelings and so often I think when I'm
#
writing something should I send an emoticon because it seems like a way of like everybody
#
seems to be and then I can't figure the exact one I want even the smileys you know the ordinary
#
smileys you want the one that where like he's a tears coming out of the eye with so much
#
laughter or the nasty one so I just give it up because I can't find an emoticon that actually
#
represents my state okay so I and in some ways I think this is this is inevitable also
#
because we are we are so manifestly different from each other that even when I say I'm feeling
#
a little lost this morning I have no assurance that you know what I mean and that when you
#
are feeling a little lost in the morning if you ever were to say that to me whether it
#
would be a reflection of what I was feeling or it would be another feeling altogether
#
what is our lostness our lostness is completely different but we can we actually push that
#
aside we push that aside and we say okay I'm sharing in the tonality of this and I think
#
I know what this tonality is and from that stems the response and that I think is is
#
kind of the role of empathy that empathy has to transcend understanding understanding forces
#
us to to be the hyper rational human beings that of of the Western imagination in a way
#
you know when you say rational it is a rational decision it may be the wrong decision also
#
it may be rational but it may be wrong I think that's also a possible.
#
We were talking yesterday about writers churning out books and I thought of George Simonon
#
one of my favorite writers who wrote like 400 books and he had this lovely quote which
#
reflects what you're saying that the biggest tragedy in the world and he said it was a
#
central theme of all his books the biggest tragedy in the world is that no two people
#
can ever understand each other or talk to each other and get across what they're feeling
#
so exactly the same thing about kind of being lost and I think that that's partly a tragedy
#
of language I think in the same way that we are so different and unique we are also in
#
another sense exactly the same that you know that that feeling of lostness is something
#
you will feel and I will feel but we may have different words for it or different ways of
#
dealing with it you know I don't think there's anything called the rational man I think there's
#
something called the rationalizing man like have you heard of Michael Gazzaniga and his
#
the split-brain epilepsy experiments I'll just put a link to that in the show notes
#
to not have to explain it now another sort of fascinating part of MN the big whom which
#
spoke to me was when you talk about sort of the facades that we put on for each other's
#
sake like at one point about M the narrator writes she makes it worse by smiling bravely
#
by telling you to go on to leave her there the man with the broken leg on the arctic
#
expedition who says come back for me it's my best chance because the lie allows everyone
#
to believe that they are not abandoning him to die stop quote and later you speak about
#
how the narrator speaks about how when M is in hospital he goes and he sits with her and
#
his words now quote my motives were mixed I wanted to help but I had also written the
#
stage directions for myself enter sun stage left he looks at her for a moment and then
#
goes and sits by her side he takes her hand in his and offers her what consolation he
#
can for a while her hand lay limp in mine and she stopped twitching and she stopped
#
gasping and she looked at me and she rearranged her face into a smile but this was her my
#
sensitive and civilized mother allowing herself to be part of my script and so we did not
#
sit like that for long because she was acknowledging the gesture of being comforted by pretending
#
to be comforted the effort was too great and finally she took her hand away and said go
#
Baba go do your work and then exhaled her relief and the great tragedy here and the
#
great you know M's tragedy in so much of the book is that there is a part of her which
#
is outside of her and can see this and knows what is happening and knows and knows and
#
understands and feels empathy for the little kid like even when she is in the middle of
#
this kind of fit where the narrator calls her the disgusting bitch she registers she
#
holds it it's like you know something that is said in the real world in one kind of Rasa
#
but it's constantly coming back and you know tell me about the non mentally ill mother
#
like what was she like otherwise like you've got a very I mean the love story between sort
#
of M and the big whom when they are young is again so beautiful it's a lovely story
#
on its own and tells you so much about the times and the people but otherwise what was
#
that relationship like what was it you know did you have to like I think at one point
#
with my mother communication became difficult she wasn't always in that state but communication
#
became a difficult it became difficult there was a little bit of a distance you know with
#
both my parents for different reasons and I can see that as a way of coping and again
#
like you're saying if I'm in my 20s and I am like ultra rationalist and I am like you
#
know atheist and whatever and here's someone telling me that spirits talk to me and I'm
#
an enlightened soul my natural arrogance will make me react to it in a way that then makes
#
sort of communication in a different kind of space almost impossible.
#
See I think it is you know you put it very well this problem I think requires a certain
#
bracketing of ourselves also you know when you act when you enter into communication
#
with somebody else okay so right now I have a cousin who had gets dictation direct dictation
#
from Jesus right and Jesus dictates and he fills book after book after book with with
#
this writing and once in a while he will say to me you know you're a writer and I'm not
#
a writer but look at how much I've done and at other times he will suggest that I should
#
go through this and see so I did go through the thing and my response my feeling was if
#
Jesus is saying these things these days he's rather boring he wasn't this boring 2000
#
years ago he's quite boring now but another part of me says you have no idea whether this
#
is happening or not actually really you cannot tell whether you know Jesus just wants to
#
dictate to this guy if there is someone this is actually happening so there is no no way
#
to punk there is no wish in my heart to puncture this but 20 years ago I would have been out
#
for him I would have certainly been out for him I've said doesn't Jesus know how to spell
#
spiritual can't he correct your spelling why do you spell it S-P-R-I-T-U-A-L just because
#
you say spiritual one is a stupid shit at a certain point in time right now I'm comfortable
#
with with dealing with this I only feel that there is a an element again of the again there
#
is a great silence around this automatic writing the family is very uncomfortable with it and
#
doesn't want to acknowledge it doesn't want to acknowledge it that anything is wrong and
#
otherwise the cousin is functional he does his stuff so is one in again in hindsight
#
right one will say if something happens in the future one will say something like I knew
#
all along because this was happening right but what did you do nothing you helped you
#
allowed the holding pattern to stay because it was really not discomforting anybody right
#
there's no nothing other than this need to have like four or five hours a day or three
#
or four hours a day or when there's work a couple of hours a day to do his writing that's
#
all he's asking of the universe it's a small ask right so my my thing is we are constantly
#
watching for signs of that will damage the picture if the signs won't damage the picture
#
then we are fine so it is really not even about you know you were talking about how
#
one examines the self and the self is a moving target and so that examination literally becomes
#
constant and you're examining the self in relationship to the to the other that is the
#
ailing parent or the ailing family member I think also there is a one eye is on how
#
does this all look to the outside world okay then and that that awareness of the of the
#
outside world is the greatest pressure because the outside world is a is a panopticon everybody
#
seeing everything in our imagination that's quite frankly most people are not interested
#
you know so again they've got other things to do but we are so concerned with this image
#
of what it will be like what it will be seen like that we we kind of ignore just that the
#
human need that is present at that moment what is the human need a lot of this is about
#
loneliness that we are also alone in general that we bump into the walls of our loneliness
#
and hurt ourselves and being with someone requires also a lot of work and sometimes
#
we're not willing to do that work but we want to be with someone we don't want to be alone
#
but we like would like it on our own terms not going to happen does the recognition of
#
the loneliness help like of course one kind of recognition is I think one of your characters
#
either Yuri or the narrator of him you know writes this early thing I think when they're
#
13 or something saying I'm alone I will always be alone and blah blah which is yeah Yuri
#
does that which at a banal level is of course true of everyone right so and and that's one
#
kind of acknowledgement of aloneness but that is tinged with self-pity which is always an
#
act of ego and you're not really examining yourself and so on but the other is when you
#
kind of come to terms with that does it then make it easier to sort of deal with it I think
#
it makes it easier to deal with it once you give up the special pleading for yourself
#
and you give up the this sense of exceptionalism like everybody's got this problem but mine
#
is specially terrible because so if you just acknowledge that everybody's alone and we
#
all live in this cell called the self and they're desperately building these fragile
#
bridges between each other and trying to make connections some people do better than others
#
this is true always though I often suspect that at some cost you know the you have it's
#
a high psychic cost to be very well connected and very well loved and very well very few
#
people I think can be confident self-sufficient and widely and naturally and organically linked
#
in a way so that's a difficult task and it requires certain amount of work on the self
#
that has to be done regularly which I think again we'd like to magic into it into we'd
#
like to magic the tribe into happening you know like I think all of us go out into the
#
world with this sense that I was born into the wrong family these are not my peeps none
#
of them I mean not my immediate family but my extended family there are not too many
#
readers there were not too many people who were you know sort of interested in the kind
#
of things I was interested in so going out into the world meant I want to find people
#
for whom it matters books matter words matter it's not just about communication but doing
#
it right it's not just that art was was serious business and and required you to to put some
#
energy and effort into understanding it this is not my family I so I went out to find that
#
tribe or I and of course you develop you begin to put that tribe together and around your
#
twenties the tribe dissolves again because you know one's gone off to America to study
#
and the others moved cities and someone's got married and the tribe is dissolving again
#
and you realize that you will never actually put it together you can only sort of work
#
with what with the human material that is available because sometimes you're not going
#
to be available you know so I think my tribe my gang all these things are so important
#
to us and this you know when people say I'm going to have a night out with the boys or
#
I'm going on with out with my girl gang it is a really special thing that happens maybe
#
once every year which is why I think things like book clubs work because then there's
#
a regularity there's something that you have to talk about there's something that you so
#
you meet and you do that and that becomes kind of like a pattern and slowly it settles
#
into other heads around you that that night is your night you know so you can go off and
#
sit and talk about other things or even about books so I think this is it's a lot of the
#
new patterns that we are seeing you know almost every one of social media tries to build a
#
community they say community I the rise of Pinterest and Reddit and Quora and all these
#
things are just more and more attempts to say look you can find a tribe look it's okay
#
to find a tribe and social media's attempt to denature its denaturedness to say like
#
you know yeah there's no connection this person who's calling whose Monica says they're
#
sexy at 29 might well be 55 and not sexy to you but still you might have community here
#
it's it requires some suspension of disbelief which is why routinely people who have met
#
online will tell you how unwilling they were to meet offline just because they didn't want
#
the illusion punctured but I think you in the in the face to face there's always going
#
to be that revelation as you're speaking you're watching the person's face change and you
#
can then even modify what you are saying and change it to restore the face of the other
#
person to the status quo anti whatever what like I mean if there was receptivity and that
#
it's shading out you can try and change what you're saying but once you've hit send okay
#
you know you're committed you're in that speak you've sent that message out difficult
#
to unsay or difficult even to modify perhaps but and I think it's very odd how it seems
#
as if because there's no presence listening becomes very difficult even in the sense listening
#
actively reading the whole comment if you send a long comment in the middle of a conversation
#
you're trying to explain a position you'll find that the response almost always takes
#
off from either the first words of the comment or the last word the middle has just been
#
left out also in random key phrase and when you say this I hope you are aware and that
#
person has just got off to another another tangent so it's it's I wish we would teach
#
you know so many classes teach public speaking no one teaches public listening that's such
#
a beautiful quote I wish they would you know that that you're supposed to actually be listening
#
to people I've now sat on literary panels where people look at their mobile phones on
#
stage wow yes sitting next to me and you're thinking okay just because the person is not
#
asking you a question or someone else is speaking on stage doesn't give you a pass to do this
#
you've asked these 250 people who are sitting in the audience to take some time out of their
#
lives to listen to you you won't even stop to listen to the next person how does that
#
work but and the inevitable offender is an Indian I've never seen you know a Lebanese
#
person or a Congolese person rip out their phone when they're sitting on stage and start
#
sending text messages or you know checking and once I sort of put it back and looked
#
over it the person next to me was on Facebook okay so not even looking at notes yeah not
#
looking at notes certainly not you know arguing up or typing up something to respond to it
#
something just on Facebook because hey someone else is speaking I have a slight counterpoint
#
to like I agree with everything you say this is how a lot of the internet is and how a
#
lot of communities quote-unquote are but there's also a beautiful positive side to it that
#
I have perhaps in a sense I have witnessed in the context of friendships where you know
#
I did an episode with Abhinandan Sekri where he said I haven't made a single friend after
#
25 and I was like all my friends are after 25 because it's after 25 that the internet
#
kind of really came into my life and I was able to form those communities of choice rather
#
than communities of circumstance to find people interested in the vague things I might be
#
interested in and even perhaps to be better formed myself as a result of everything that
#
I find so that's one aspect of it and the other aspect is that you know since I started
#
teaching my course everyone who does my course and becomes part of this larger clear writing
#
community that we have we have a whatsapp group which is full up and a second whatsapp
#
group because they have this limit of 512 people so one group doesn't suffice and I
#
think that you know that's a good space where everyone's happy for everybody else and importantly
#
that people have met they want to meet regular offline meets and so many of them say to the
#
community does mean something for them you know I told them I was going to chat with
#
you for this and you know hazard links and quotes and how much your book moved them and
#
how much this interview moved them and all of that was kind of flooding through so a
#
really engaged bunch of people obviously self-selected but nevertheless so I think that's there like
#
I can no no I think especially for your kind Amit okay which is you said introverted yourself
#
so I'm only relying on what you said about yourself that introverted working with being
#
sort of not quite the norm while being the norm so privileged background you know sort
#
of like I don't think anyone in every ever in your family would question the possibility
#
that you should go to college you know or no one would say don't be reading you know
#
my family a lot of many many of my elder relatives would tell me that my mother's mental problem
#
came out of too much reading oh god because she was reading all the time and that you
#
know you're in another world all the time and it ruins your head and you think you know
#
actually it makes your head or maybe that was just her lifeline also just to keep you
#
all at bay but I'm saying for a certain kind of person the internet is almost like it was
#
a gift to introverts because you can modify and manage the imposition the sweaty imposition
#
of humanity which for outgoing people for people who are who have been told that they
#
are charming and so have become charming may not work as well so I think certainly internet
#
has so much it in fact has become so omnipresent so totally so totally available to us and
#
so yes we've it's penetrated our lives so much that we forget that 80% of it is really
#
just helping us all the time I get to your house on google maps now I just like follow
#
it blindly and I'm here I look up and think oh my goodness and earlier it would have been
#
by sab rookie hit the auto you'd be asking along the way etc so many different things
#
booking the tickets you know fan coke exhibition is coming in immersive exhibition you you've
#
done it all on the net so because I think it it's almost like the 90 things that every
#
day the internet allows you to do right are so now part and parcel of our of our everyday
#
existence that the 10 horrors of the internet suddenly become really huge in front of you
#
but if it were all to go we'd be back we'd have to rebuild 70% of our civilization I
#
think really I I don't know how people would communicate like imagine now typing out and
#
running to the to to the Times of India building and handing in your copy and someone else
#
typing it out there and then someone putting the type onto it's just not possible I mean
#
you know we're gonna have to invest a lot in keeping it going but that's that's one
#
thing I think about a lot and I managed to be mindful of that all these wonders of modern
#
technology we take for granted like Arthur C. Clarke once said that a sufficiently advanced
#
technology is indistinguishable from magic like the life that we are living 20 years
#
ago it's like freaking magic it's unimaginable totally I mean I I've lived through the time
#
when you are you booked a trunk call yeah because your father was very ill and you needed
#
to tell his brother in America you could not just pick up the phone and do it you had to
#
call up someone and say please and please brother is very sick please do something and
#
please compassionate grounds and then you sat by the call by the phone and you waited
#
for the phone to ring and they would say putting your call through now hello hello you would
#
be shouting and then you know time up three minutes do you want to continue suddenly someone
#
would interpose whatsapp facetime I mean zoom it's incredible how much how much you know
#
we could possibly be doing and don't just a magic of the internet like any one who grew
#
up in the 90s will realize the early days of dial-up internet where you have downloaded
#
Samantha Fox's face and then there's a disconnection and you're getting that sound and waiting
#
for the rest of it to happen and all the while you're saying I'm so grateful this is magic
#
absolutely I remember early days the split screen like we had the you know that white
#
and the black and green yeah and I remember sitting in someone's office in TIFR and talking
#
to my friend in Cambridge you know and actually there were two split screens and I was emailing
#
him from here and he was emailing answers it was real time and at one point I remember
#
writing Rahul is that really you this is so magical already perhaps it could be somebody
#
else perhaps it could be this machine doing this I didn't know I had to just make sure
#
that it was Rahul Srivastava was actually in Cambridge Jerry Pinto actually in Colaba
#
and talking to each other at that point in time how interesting and we've complete like
#
I mean one email that goes into spam can set us off one of the interesting things about
#
the change that has happened in our generation is that our digital footprint now is vast
#
there are many many selfies of me more than the world needs for sure but when it comes
#
to an earlier generation there is very little and I got to thinking about this after my
#
dad passed and I was trying to kind of mop up memories looking for photographs looking
#
for whatever I could get and there's a lovely passage in the education of Yuri where you
#
write Yuri had a single photograph of his parents a black and white picture which hung
#
in his bedroom it was a wedding portrait he in black she in white against a backdrop of
#
stage clouds they looked into the camera unsmiling and serious and Yuri often wondered whether
#
it was a premonition he had studied the photograph for years he tried to imagine his mother
#
smiling or laughing or walking in a garden his father moving turning lifting something
#
but they remained just as he saw them static images emptied of life when he tried to make
#
them speak their mouth strange clumsy lives lines we loved you son or we are praying for
#
you son he turned away in horror then know his beginnings could not be so embarrassing
#
stock could in the context for this of course is his parents died right after him you know
#
when he was just a child so he has no memory of them but I came across this interesting
#
photograph which I'll look at once in a while which is my parents and me and they are in
#
their early 40s and they're younger than I am today right and I try to kind of imagine
#
ki kya tha what was the interior life what was going on in there and I subsequently discovered
#
correspondence between them when they weren't getting along which indicates that in different
#
tragic ways they were both imprisoned by just the whole thing you know perhaps my mother
#
also was imprisoned by motherhood and I never asked her that but I'm sure that could have
#
been a part of it but what it kind of made me do after they were gone is you know look
#
at them not in as a single point somewhere where this is my father this is my mother
#
and you always think of it like that you always think of your father as 30 years older than
#
you but there's a time when he's younger than me and he's fucking insecure and he doesn't
#
want this shit and he doesn't like where he is and he's writing that stuff in his diary
#
and I have that diary and I can read that you know and you know the first thing that
#
comes to my mind is ki yeah he's writing when he was young is as bad as mine when I
#
was young so you know were you sort of is that something that you experienced with them
#
or after them like could you like for example the big home in the book comes across as such
#
a lovely man but such a lovely man defined by the central tragedy that is in the book
#
and defined by that shaped by that and it could be that that's the side that was relevant
#
to the book so it's there but it could also be that that one big thing just becomes so
#
big that he just in response to that he becomes something and he doesn't become anything else
#
yeah I think the one of the things that often when people spoke of my father to me they
#
would often talk about his sacrifice you know and once I remember going home and telling
#
him and we were I was angry and I shouted about your sacrifice or something and he said
#
have you ever heard me talk about a sacrifice so then I was thrown back on myself and I
#
had to think about it and I said no so he said what I did at any time I did because
#
I wanted to so you also he told me if you ever want to go you go right and you don't
#
you do what you want to do but be sure you know what you want to do think about it first
#
and I used to have this I sorted that out in my head and I remember by the morning thinking
#
yes I have a choice I can go I can leave this situation and I will be guilty that I left
#
or I can stay in this situation and I will be bitter that I stayed and I didn't go abroad
#
to study or whatever the this for a while is that kind of bitter vetch that 15 year
#
old likes to drink because this is how you think of yourself as becoming an adult because
#
you face the truth of life I have realized since then that you don't need to choose
#
these two you know you can you can stay and not necessarily be bitter you can stay and
#
say these are there are certain things that are happening here which are which would not
#
have happened if I had gone abroad and whatever might have happened again is so probabilistic
#
that it doesn't matter you know I might have been desperately unhappy it doesn't matter
#
whether it was or it wasn't it did happen or it didn't this is what I chose and I chose
#
also not to be bitter about it but looking at the at once at the big home especially
#
the figure of the big home being defined by this this moment in his life that the woman
#
he loves turns out to have a mental illness and he chooses not to stop loving her or he
#
chooses perhaps not to to change the behavior of a man in love while not being in love because
#
at some level he became a carer and a carer's relationship to the cared is one of its there
#
has to be some warmth some human warmth for it to be for it to be viable but it doesn't
#
necessarily conform to that romantic notion of love that the two of them probably shared
#
because they were big readers so they probably read their share of books which told them
#
what love was supposed to feel like and that I often think about you know the pollution
#
of literature in our emotional lives because we often find ourselves saying oh am I as
#
desperate at this moment as Emma Bovary was is this as much as much disenchantment and
#
disconnection from the world as Marcel has felt it at that point you're constantly looking
#
at yourself through the lens of the the refracting lens of literature and you perhaps the portrait
#
that you're seeing of yourself is not quite accurate I'm sure they both had an idea of
#
what love constituted I'm sure they both had an idea what marriage constituted the early
#
the early phase was they were they were an upwardly mobile couple she was doing well
#
he was you know he got his degree he was also earning well as an engineer and you know was
#
going went abroad and to East Europe and there are pictures one more picture of the two of
#
them is when she's garlanding him at the airport you know as he's going off to to this long
#
tour of of Eastern Europe because presumably there was some tie-up between the government
#
and Eastern Europe was easier too so there is her garlanding him and the garland has
#
obviously been provided by one of the Hindu friends that that came along because I don't
#
think our tradition we would have garlanded but it looks very strangely like an Indian
#
couple getting married at the airport with every beer behind them except that the woman
#
is wearing a dress and you know not a sari so it's just like the the constant state of
#
of their being your parents that constancy is challenged by the fact that they had other
#
lives sexual lives for instance I think the reason why young people find it so difficult
#
to believe that like you know they weren't products of immaculate conception is because
#
then you have to imagine your parents in a state of rut and this is not is not something
#
you want you know you just don't want to confront that that idea that your parents
#
might have sex lives so the intellectual life I think is easier to understand as long as
#
that intellectual life is slightly acceptable I mean it's not like your your dad's a new
#
Nazi and your mother's you know I don't know doing home science not to dis home science
#
but we have hierarchies in our head so if your mother was reading you find in your diary
#
that your mother's reading Turgenev you know that's nice that's a mental life that you
#
want her to have but if you find your mother's written an extensive paragraph on how lovely
#
Barbara Cartland novels are you're not going to be very happy with it so I'm thinking we
#
are naturally unforgiving of our parents we are naturally snobbish with our parents and
#
we always I think one of the most it seems a universal thing is like to turn one's gaze
#
upon the parent and say are you really my parents or did like did you pick me up from
#
like the real parents who must be much more intelligent than you are and much more I mean
#
you're grimy you're grimy you're just like grimy middle-class Bombay parents and I belong
#
somewhere bigger it's because I think maybe you're just preparing your yourself to open
#
out that you want to imagine bigger antecedents for yourself and then in much later life you
#
think my goodness it is your parents were your gift because a lot of even the rebellion
#
or even the becoming of Amit Verma from the Mrs. and Mr. and Mrs. Verma is a reaction
#
that you had to them you know so I think a lot of that has to do with many of my tribe
#
I must say are looked upon by their parents with slight bewilderment like what is it exactly
#
you are doing could you tell me again it's what the parents seem to feel you know yeah
#
and and this reminds me of the lovely poem by A.K. Ramanujan self-portrait where he writes
#
I resemble everyone but myself and sometimes see in shop windows despite the well-known
#
laws of optics the portrait of a stranger date unknown often signed in a corner by my
#
father such a brilliant life such a great poem such a great poem and so let's sort
#
of talk about the reception to the book because the writing of the book is sort of one process
#
and it's happened and you're coming to terms with stuff and you're in a sense learning
#
how to write a novel and all of that is happening and it's great and we'll go back to the writing
#
process also after this but then but then the reception happens where you know time
#
after time you speak of reading groups almost as encounter groups where you are met both
#
with a little bit of hostility but also a lot of that this book really spoke to me and
#
and a lot of stories coming at you so much so that eventually you end up sort of compiling
#
a book a book of light which is a lovely book again of other people writing about their
#
similar sort of grief and i love this sort of metaphor in it about how to deal with grief
#
so i'll just read this paragraph out where you say the only thing i can offer is some
#
kind of answer is an image you are on a long hike and your haversack is cutting into your
#
shoulders you ease your thumbs under the straps peel the straps away and move them to another
#
spot for a moment there is a huge feeling of relief a rush of physical well-being and
#
having eased the load but soon the pressure begins somewhere else and the weight begins
#
to tear down again that doesn't mean it's something you live with every moment of your
#
life you can often set down your bag and dance and then it's as as if you soar the burden
#
will be back on your shoulder again but for now you soar but one thing i think i can go
#
out on a limb and say it doesn't get any easier or more bearable from not talking about it
#
stop quote and yet and yet i think in the responses that you would have got and which
#
would again be a self-selected group because they are choosing to respond but there would
#
have been that sense of a relief and acknowledgement just having read the story and b also relief
#
and release at being able to tell their story now so you know tell me about your experience
#
of like coming across those kind of stories and how the book took on that life i think
#
one of the about 20% of the responses have been i have your book now but i won't read
#
it right now will you please i mean i can't talk about why i'm not reading it right now
#
but i can't read it right and i'd say don't worry the book will find you at the time that
#
you need it because you will find the book when you need it so don't don't don't don't
#
get hassled about it and then a few years later sometimes some of them would write back
#
and say do you remember i said that i couldn't read it but i just read it and it was a great
#
experience and i feel i should have read it earlier and the response again to that is
#
you read it when you needed it don't worry at that point that and then they say i can't
#
imagine why i didn't want to read it i thought would depress me more but it didn't depress
#
me it elevated me it exhilarated me but why did why did she have to die in the end so
#
very strange questions as if and you say whatever else is happening is wonderful but the cumulative
#
effect of the book is also the fact that the door opens for everyone you know and a huge
#
with the erasure of m a huge emptiness comes in but that emptiness will allow these three
#
people to rediscover themselves and redefine themselves it is also it was probably important
#
for me to do it in the book that's not the way how how it broke down in real life in
#
real life my father died first my mother continued for another nine or ten years they were terrible
#
years for all of us and to have actually set those years down would have been to disrupt
#
m's character which i think i had built quite well up to that so m is as much real as she
#
is fiction she it is also a work of fiction i keep trying to remind people and i try to
#
remind myself that also because i i read it once again many years later and i thought
#
well done jerry nice book you know in in that sense but what relationship did it have to
#
the to the life that you led really and clearly it did have some relationship but any life
#
is deeper than a book however lightly and and cheerfully and non-chalantly you choose
#
to live your life it is going to be deeper than turgenev it is because that's how what
#
life is like so the when people respond to the book i'm always honored because i i feel
#
okay there's been people who have said that i was terribly depressed recently in i was
#
sitting in in in a corner somewhere in ahmedabad and a woman came up and said your book scarred
#
me and i thought that was very strong uh so i said i'm i really am sorry that it scarred
#
you but you know at any time the good thing about a book is you can put it down close
#
it and walk away she said no i couldn't do that either but i read it through and i am
#
i was terribly terribly hurt by it like my the legal side of my head said well empty
#
non-fitting jury from the law the legal maximum the human part of me said i want to apologize
#
again and again i don't know what else to say and the slightly cynical part said are
#
you sure you mean scarred are you sure you just don't don't mean that this disturbed
#
you highly and that is what literature is supposed to do its function is all as you
#
said no mindless reading is great and uh and you know sort of like bad literature is also
#
great for you at some time there's just genre fiction is brilliant if if it's well done
#
nothing like it simenon woodhouse these are masters christy masters of craft you just
#
you know what you're getting but you love it and you can do it again and again this
#
is rare and brilliant also i'm completely in accord with you on those on those matters
#
but there is also a section of books that you are going to handle with care because
#
they're going to like clockwork orange for instance for me highly disturbing for a couple
#
of days after that i i i just had to i could not read anything else i just wanted to keep
#
on writing down what i thought what i thought about violence and why i towards the end of
#
a clockwork orange i wanted uh that young man to be able to go back and beat up some
#
old people you know how and i was jealous to my bones that anthony burges could have
#
done this to me in this this seemed like such an act of of literary magnificence i think
#
i had the same response to lolita how do you construct something so compelling every time
#
i read my my book collection lolita comes up and i think okay it is time to say you
#
know like okay that was something that you read at a certain point in time and it struck
#
you because and then i start reading it again and i think oh no i can see what he's doing
#
this is also it is it is strong stuff it's really strong stuff but it is important in
#
a way you know so he's not he survived the purge so far nabokov have you read rio murakami
#
not haruki rio murakami yeah yeah yeah piercing for example yeah monstrous almost monstrous
#
i think at uh uh there was another woman called uh patricia forgotten her name high smith
#
high smith replies yeah replies and beyond the replies also i think the replies were
#
you know sort of like what i would say they were highly talented replies and once she'd
#
done the first replie i can imagine her not thinking he's too good to let him go yeah
#
but dada patricia high smith dark curled into each other's patricia you know where uh and
#
you are you are actually reading the dark and curling in the tone is extreme liberation
#
very elegantly like it's just it's just magic so i think literature is not supposed to always
#
be a zone of comfort it can be and it should be and we should all read comforting books
#
from time to time but we also need to understand that there are times when you will be you
#
will be um forced to re-examine what you what you've been thinking and the ones that may
#
force you to re-examine what you think is is the given right are the ones that are sometimes
#
the most important so in the responses the fact that many people have said uh things
#
like it's almost what i was going through it's almost what i went through i can't believe
#
you said this you said all the things that i want i wanted to say but i couldn't uh they're
#
very very satisfying because they you know at just before i mean the big whom came out
#
i was lying in bed and thinking okay uh this must be a big one this is an important book
#
for me and i thought why didn't i make them hindus middle-class hindus what what who is
#
going to respond to roman catholic goans i mean when i go to delhi no one knows the
#
name pinto i become pintu oh yeah i pintuji is what i am called okay because that's the
#
name that they've heard they just think that you know i'm bablu pintu i'm pintuji you
#
don't look like a pintu but presumably i just think they're they're flailing they've never
#
heard that desuja they say desuja when desusas turn up you know it bombay madras calcutta
#
pintos are like i mean everyone knows a pinto and people will ask you are you related to
#
fednaan pinto that kind of thing but delhi not much so i kept thinking what does but
#
something broke through something just broke through and and people got it i mean you know
#
from all communities and all kinds of people have been saying this to me so i think you
#
know so kiran nagarkar was the one person who came up to me and said very good extremely
#
good i know you're going to tell the truth so i said kiran as far as i could that's the
#
literary truth he said yes but there's a truth beyond it i suspect it please write that down
#
i'm waiting for that one i thought yeah there's i mean i think someone one of those great
#
clever french philosophers said that the role of the writer is literally the sieve right
#
we choose out of all that experiences we shake out and we keep what what we think is is valuable
#
so i thought that's what i had done but obviously kiran was pointing to a larger enterprise
#
perhaps like you know the the autobiography the this is what it was like this is what
#
actually happened this is not fiction now i'm not ever i would never deny myself like
#
anything i would never say i'm never going to be able to do that or i will not do that
#
but right now i can't see it on the horizon that's what happens yeah no it was interesting
#
and i can't imagine what he meant by that i loved the book as it was but this goes back
#
to what we were talking about yesterday about you know you have the 800 000 words and you
#
distill these 65 000 from it but maybe in a different time in a different place in a
#
different frame of mind it's another 65 or it's 55 of these and 10 of something else
#
so you write something else and it becomes something else i think where you write and
#
when you write can kind of make a difference and and i've struck by that lovely line about
#
how every life is deeper than a book you know and i i think you like saying turginev because
#
it just sounds so great and that you know that reminds me of what borges says about
#
the perfect map of the world would have to be as big as the world itself absolutely and
#
it would immediately be inaccurate because the world is changing correct and i think
#
that the the dictionary that could contain and name every single emotion that one human
#
being felt would be larger than the world exactly yeah so because i think you know when
#
when you say to someone are you sad they say yeah but i mean or they say yeah which means
#
yeah that word is very close but there's shades of other things in here and i don't have
#
a word you don't have a word we don't language doesn't have a word for my my deep unique
#
feeling at this point and i don't know whether five minutes later will be different and i'll
#
just be sad but that yeah that kind of like reluctant admission is not because i think
#
many people don't want to say that they're feeling sad they want to say i need another
#
word can you find me another word that tells that says this all this that i'm feeling and
#
perhaps even noticing that you're sad the act of noticing changes the nature of the
#
sadness maybe even makes it a kind of happiness because we all revel in sort of the uncertainty
#
principle of human emotion so a couple of days someone remarked a fan of the show but
#
someone remarked that oh your episode with shanta go clay is eight hours long so i said
#
listen yeah it's eight and something i gave an hour for every decade of her life and i
#
think is ridiculously inadequate so what are you talking about do not complain about the
#
length you know and what a life that life what a life yeah really and and there's so
#
much we didn't cover like she's written a great book playwright at the center history
#
of marathi theater we didn't speak about that at all maybe some other day uh we'll go in
#
for a lunch break but since you mentioned sadness there's this lovely uh poem by you
#
from one of your children's books so i'll just read that out because it's so sweet it's
#
okay to feel sad from time to time it's okay to feel blue it's not a crime why not have
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a little cry cuddle it up in bed or let go and really ball fit to wake the dead it works
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for me and i'm quite old it will for you so i've been told let's hope it does
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have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well i'd love to help
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you since april 2020 i've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course here out of
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clear writing and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have
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workshops a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction
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in the course itself through four webinars spread over four weekends i share all i know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction
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and a lovely and lively community at the end of it the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst
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or about 150 dollars if you're interested head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash
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clear writing that's india uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require
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god-given talent just 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 and the unseen i'm still with jerry pinto
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he hasn't left thankfully such legendary uh patients so you know let's let's talk about
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the process of writing you know at one point you talk about how um i and i forget where i read you
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saying this perhaps an interview or whatever but you know you mentioned how kolarich was writing
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his gubla khan and then someone knocked on the door and he could not continue because his magical
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flow was broken and he had to absolutely stop over there but uh at another place you've drawn
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what i find is a lovely analogy with cooking where you wrote you know in the context of writers
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blog that writers should not speak of writers block any more than cooks speak of cooks block
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like no cook will enter the kitchen and say ki yaar pyaas mein aaj vibe nahi tha
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ya matar se feel nahi aayi you know you just get you know get it done and this is sort of what
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i keep reminding myself and my writing students and whatever that in life you will always have
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that trade-off between getting it done and getting it right and when you sit down to write just get
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it done the only way you get it right is by getting it done again and again at least the
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first draft it doesn't matter what it is no one else is reading it you know it's like that old
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anxiety you spoke about before the break of what does the world think of me yeah everybody's got
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their heads up their own ass no one gives a shit yeah yeah so tell me about your sort of processes
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of writing and and how you arrived at it uh you know yeah i think i don't i started as a
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journalist right i mean so it was a very clear uh a very clear set of rules uh by thursday at 8 p.m
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700 words on subject x please deliver and please have sufficient uh words inside inverted commas
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that was like the whole of the brief okay it was easy to do that mainly because i think i'm
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interested in people fundamentally i didn't make myself interested in people i'm interested in
#
them and so someone said i remember once mr anil dharkar was the editor and he said my friend
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perky mirchandnani has come down from australia he's the head of of some section of of australian
#
broadcasting corporation go and interview him so i turned right around and went out those were the
#
days before google so i couldn't google him or find out anything about him but i sat down and
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i said mr mirchandnani i'm here completely cold right i don't know anything about you
#
but let's just chat and i came back with the 800 words and the inverted commas and mr dharkar
#
later when i left i was told by the others irritably that he said that's a journalist that's
#
a real job so i thought no that's a journalist that you that's something you've inflicted on a
#
journalist you sent him out cold and but he came back with the story that's that's about all i
#
thought and for a for the longest time there wasn't that much happening in my world that made me feel
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that one needed to do anything more than this right i mean i told you that the byline was a
#
great excitement so the fact that my name was appearing in the times of india in illustrated
#
weekly in femina and all these in the indian express midday all these places made me very
#
happy and sometimes i wondered whether i was really worried about what i had written or whether it was
#
just the byline but slowly one made a lot of very good friends and they've i think all my friends
#
challenged me naresh fanandes with riga arunvati with the kind of insistence on the undercurrents
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of writing of subtexts ranjeet with with just being ranjeet and knowing practically everything
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like all of you i just keep thinking how how do they know as much as they know then i reassure
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myself that when i'm talking i'm controlling the discourse and i probably sound like i know
#
like shit loads as well i can answer for one of them but amit is winging it and we'll discuss
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that also but girish and ranjeet are truly amazing yeah anyway so we all i think you know
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i think in some senses anyway so these were people who actually kind of
#
they forced me into another level of discourse i mean they they challenged me in some ways
#
and the fact that girish was reading everything that i was writing was very terrifying at a certain
#
level because come monday and if i bumped into him he had something to say about a piece that
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i'd written for the free press journal right and he read me in the free press journal this is pre
#
google so i i in that sense i felt the pressure of their eyes on me and it was very very salutary
#
pressure i enjoyed it tremendously and i i benefited from it terrifically i i remember once asking
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naresh for something you know just a detail and i got a book you know he sent me a book on the
#
subject i think it was about coffee or something i called him up and said you're a coffee drinker
#
i'm working on the story on coffee he said ah i'm sending a book on coffee houses in the 19th
#
century in america i'm just writing a piece just tell me about your coffee drinking habits
#
but no i got it and of course i read it and of course it was very helpful and it changed what
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i was writing so that kind of like generosity of spirit also was was very beautiful and you know
#
like uh calling up people and saying um hey jerry pinto wants to talk to you i don't know if you
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know him but he's a good guy he's my friend they did this for me and that was also very helpful
#
but the so the journalism i had largely come to the point where i could do it without tremendous
#
strain or pressure or anything and it was my 10 000 hours i suppose in a way because i was doing
#
a piece a day it was part of the the way my economy was we had nurses for my mother i had
#
to pay for the nurses the journalism paid for the nurses the mathematics tutions paid for the rest
#
of the of the of the running house running expenses of the house so i did i worked all out and um but
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when it came to uh to writing okay so the the story is this um at one point i thought i would
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like to write a book i would like to give some time to m and the big home and i had been discussing
#
this with narish with girish with ranjit with arundhati with all of them all the friends
#
and finally narish said okay you're going to jaipur this year helen had just come out
#
you're going to jaipur this year right so he said suketu mehta will be there and salman will be
#
there so i'll tell suketu uh to get to get you at a table with salman and with david godwin
#
and you have to tell a story because i tell these baroque stories of my family and you know
#
the triplets who were joined at the head and appeared on the on cow and gate milk powder
#
in burma and things like that you know one of them gave a year away if i remember correctly
#
okay so um and i said that'll be very kind so there was that table i was there sitting enjoying
#
my drink there was giri there was suketu there was david godwin there was kiran desai there was
#
and salman at the same table and at one point suketu who had been diving deep on free alcohol
#
slammed the table and said gerry will now tell a story and i thought suketu not like this
#
this is not but i thought you know uh there is an old conkani phrase called katorre bhaji
#
okay which is cut that those vegetables and it comes from the abhifaria uh the one who invented
#
hypnotism as a way of looking yeah and who appears in in the count of monte cristo and he's
#
actually a goan priest who was born or his father was a priest and his mother was a nun but not
#
quite as racy as it sounds they had him and when he was of a certain age they decided that they
#
would dissolve the marriage and one would become a priest and one would become a nun but father
#
and son abhifaria and uh and his father traveled to france and arrived there in the middle of the
#
french revolution and then they go to rome to talk to the pope about the casteism and the racism
#
of the roman catholic church which did not allow indians to get any further than bishops or to get
#
only they couldn't even become bishops they could become monsignor and then they peaked so they
#
wanted a change in that so they were and at one point the abhifaria is actually going to deliver
#
his first sermon in front of all the dignitaries of portugal in goa and he freezes and his father
#
from beneath the pulpit says to him katorre bhaji which means cut those vegetables what are you
#
doing it's just vegetables cut them do your job if you're a cook you have to cook if you're a
#
preacher in a pulpit preach and so he preaches so i thought katorre bhaji and i told the story
#
and david godwin made the exact response required david godwin said if you ever write this book
#
i will represent you as an agent okay so on the way home i thought from jaipur i thought it's all
#
lined up now you know you had salman rushdie laughing he later said very sweetly in in some
#
conversation he said unless it's jerry pinto who can make uh reading the the telephone directory
#
sound amusing otherwise i'm not going he said something like that so i was very chuffed by all
#
of this and i went home and i thought okay in some ways this is like working out okay right you you've
#
got david godwin lined up you've got like you've told this story you had them laughing now it's
#
time is to katorre bhaji in reality now you've got to write that book so i went and i told
#
narish was my boss at the time and he employed me at time out i said you know i'm quitting at
#
the end of the month and i have discovered this summit that when i join a place there's general
#
jubilation hey jerry's coming there'll be lots of ideas and lots of fun and lots of energy
#
when i leave the place there's lots of relief why i don't know but i think uh one of the things
#
that i looking back i at myself i discovered that i have reformatory zeal so when i enter a an
#
organization i want to put it right okay and the organization says but you've been hired for a
#
particular job why can't you just do that job please why must you try and rewrite the entire
#
organization so i think that's the like the the tucker becomes between the fact that i'm delivering
#
on the job which is fine but i'm going beyond the brief and saying hey but this doesn't make sense
#
to me why do you do it that way let's can't you try doing it this way and everyone's thinking like
#
you know why don't you just pipe down and go back to your desk and write your pieces or whatever
#
i'm supposed to be so i left uh time out and i settled down to write and it then occurred to
#
me that i was i had no idea how i was going to make any money right so i talked to my sister
#
who's a librarian in bombay university and i said you know it's like i just want to not work and
#
you know do this write this book and she was very pragmatic she said yeah but you know you can't
#
then go out and keep buying books and taking taxis which were my two large expenses for books and
#
taxis so i said yeah taxis i can i can give up easily because if if you have time public transport
#
will take you anywhere in bombay and actually if you have no time then taxis aren't going to get
#
you there faster ends up much faster exactly but it's just that jump into a taxi and you think
#
you'll get the fact it's psychological more than anything else uh and i said i'll curtail the books
#
at least i'll buy uh i'll buy you know things on the road i won't buy any i won't go to any
#
bookshops and we'll manage we managed fine and it took me the next three or four years to sit down
#
and so i also thought okay a lot of people are going out of their way to allow this to happen
#
like my sister so i've got to uphold my side of the bargain my side of the bargain is i'm a writer
#
and i want time to write so i must write okay i cannot use any excuse not to write so the first
#
five or six days that went really well and then on the seventh day i thought hey i have done it
#
for six days running and even god took a break on the seventh day and then i thought no no no
#
that's not how it is so i decided i at that point i made a pact with myself i said i will not brush
#
my teeth and i get up with very foul breath so i will not brush my teeth until i've got my 1000
#
words down on the page i will simply not do it and i i just held to that for the next three three and
#
a half years until i finished the book and then you know the story the i left it for a couple of
#
months through this time i was enjoying myself as as soon as i had finished my 1000 words i goofed
#
off i would lie on the floor in my boxers and i would watch world cinema on pirated dvds that's
#
what i did i enjoyed myself tremendously and there because cinema is something i i truly love but if
#
i'm watching a hindi film i feel that there's a slightly analytical side of me that you know
#
that starts working but world cinema i was not going to ever review or write about i could just
#
be a consumer so it was really uh what do you call it uh mindless mindless yeah it was mindless
#
viewing but engaged because it was challenging and and often like wow that was something else you
#
know my first almodovar my first ozu all these were really exciting and then suddenly my sister
#
started watching them with me so we had to re-watch all the ones that i had done before which was good
#
fun so then up after about six months i thought now there are 7000 words there and i've got to
#
find the novel inside them actually at that point i was thinking that there was a like there were
#
five three or four novels like three or four good solid novels must be in there it was very very
#
very shaming to discover that there was one novel in there but it was m and the big home so i was
#
no i didn't have a problem with that but i cobbled it together from all that 700 000 words that took
#
another uh three or four months at least and and then i sent it off so my uh my process is really
#
to write without control i have nothing there is no will of the wisp that i will not pursue
#
there is no character whom i will not delineate in laborious and painful detail you know like
#
sometimes 9000 words for a minor character you know just setting up why she responds that way
#
and then erasing it all late in a later draft but i just let myself go i have no restraints okay
#
so i think there's i think uh i think brendan behind said uh write like you're drunk at its
#
stone cold sober okay so that's what i do i write like i mean just i pour the words out and she's
#
like uh and every day i have a certain limit a certain amount of words that i feel is part of
#
my duty to that tag that i have claimed now for myself writer so i do those words the complication
#
arise arose when i started translating okay because that at one point i decided okay translating
#
is also in some ways a work of writing so work of creation and then about one week of
#
doing only translation as my thousand words a day and i thought no jerry you're faking this
#
this is this is it's not easy it's different but it's not you challenging yourself as a writer
#
this is you being a translator you've got to learn to do the writing and then do the translation
#
and both have to be have to happen you cannot pretend one is the other that's not serving
#
anybody not actually like it was just okay that's what i i said to myself at the time then later
#
a little self-reflection and i thought you know what's happening here jerry is that you're
#
feeling upstaged by the translation okay this is now uh sachin kundalkar because that's what i was
#
cobalt blue this is cobalt blue and sachin kundalkar and whenever people talk about this
#
they will talk about sachin kundalkar's work they will enlightened reader sensible reader
#
a mature reader will say something like and and you know jerry's translation really helped because
#
i can't read marathi but otherwise you know when we read marques or when we read tintin or we read
#
asterix and obelix we don't say anything about who the translators are you know they did their work
#
and they faded into the background so i think it was an ego thing that made me uh double up in the
#
sense i had to have some time when when when i was translating and but i had to have some time when
#
i was writing as well that was very important the only time i make an exception to the thousand
#
word rule is if a poem happens if a poem happens even if it's a 30 word poem and i can be fairly
#
sure of it by the at the end of like the seven or eight hours that it sometimes takes to like just
#
get it the first draft right uh then i knock off i've done work for the day i see that as solid work
#
but the other other like large segment of time that i spend is with my teaching the teaching with
#
at scm when i joined the social communications media department at the at the sapphire polytechnic
#
it was because siddharth bhatia had been given i think a posting in johannesburg and from johannesburg
#
i think he went to washington and he could no longer teach this course that he had been teaching
#
and so they needed somebody to come in so i came in and i i wasn't very much older than the young
#
women that i was teaching i must have been about 26 they were all in their early 20s but we learned
#
together and what i did was i went to all my friends who'd been abroad samira khan nadesh
#
fernandez whoever studied abroad and i asked what worked what didn't work in the way uh you were
#
taught in columbia so i wanted to know i felt that many of these young people would have been like me
#
not been allowed to go abroad because first of all they were women so their brothers probably
#
went abroad they were made to do a postgrad in india and i wanted them to have as like sharp
#
and transformative and an education as columbia can be so i was told so many i mean narish gave
#
me the idea of beats you know they everybody gets a beat in columbia and you go out and produce
#
stories from that so i divided up the class and i i took all my my little south bombay uh you know
#
uh babies from their cocoons and said go to panvel for the next six weeks every week you
#
will do a story from panvel and you will do them in these particular areas and the last story will
#
be a mla mp interview of the area that's where you've got to build up to and all those problems
#
and issues have to be presented to that mla mp and he's got to tell you about it was uh it was great
#
but and i was doing a very i thought a very good job and you know the i think the mandate was about
#
that they should do eight assignments in journalism for the year they were doing about 140 yeah and
#
that means i was connecting 140 scripts as well editing etc etc when one day on the way to uh you
#
know i was in the department and people were talking about gynamnesia the erasure of women
#
the erasure of women's histories and i felt a faint you know sort of like it's an irritation
#
that you would never express openly but i felt it that we were talking about this but not doing it
#
and between the department and the class i got this bright idea that the way we could fight
#
gynamnesia is to get each student to write a five thousand word essay on her mother
#
wow okay and i went into class and i said you know okay this can't be next week's assignment
#
you will be doing next week's assignment but one month from now you will give me a five thousand
#
word assignment on your mother you will not talk about mothers are there because god could not be
#
everywhere don't verbal at me i want your mother front and center i want her story i want her
#
friends i want interviews with her friends interviews with her interviews with your father
#
your father with her mother anyone who's available who can talk about your neighbors your siblings
#
you bring it all to the and make a five thousand word story and suddenly occurred to me there were
#
40 in the class that you'd have to read all of them yeah five thousand into 40 is 200,000 words
#
which is about the size of war and peace and the other commitment i had made because indian teachers
#
i have noticed were very insistent that students deliver assignments on time but would never give
#
them back on time you know which was not fair so i had told my students you will not have to deliver
#
an assignment to me if i have not delivered to you so i will bring your assignments back you will
#
know what what you did you will know what you're not supposed to do the next time before you start
#
when you're before you're writing that last draft of my of my next assignment so i that week used
#
to be really mad and then but i loved it and what i found was that the students hated it while they
#
were doing it really just didn't want but when they finished it they were one triumphant and
#
second for many of them it was a transformative moment in their relationship with their mothers
#
so they heard stories that they'd they sat and talked to their mothers they made them that mother
#
sit down and tell them stories and they just and one of them you know was being harassed by her
#
her whole family to get married she was already 27 she'd come late to this course
#
her mother told her you know how i married your father because i kept saying to myself
#
there's always divorce there's always divorce and she thought she said to me i i adopted that
#
principle that when and when they said to me we had married i said okay i'll get married there's
#
always divorce i thought whatever works for you you know move on so that was it was wonderful and
#
then we opened the course to males because we found that women that the young the young women of
#
the noughties wanted didn't did not do well in or did not want to be in all women classes they wanted
#
men so we we opened a year to the admission process to men seems to have had mixed results
#
because men can be dominating of the discourse but we've we work on them with that but what
#
happened that year was we got a really bright group of students and i was encouraged to expand the
#
the demand a little further to push it a little further and i started an assignment called lives
#
of the women okay lives of the poets had just had around that time come out so i thought lives of
#
the women the student the groups the students divided into about four groups each of each
#
group would choose a woman they would choose the woman the year one year that we inflicted women
#
on them that we said these are the people you should it didn't work they didn't finish the
#
assignment which was not nice but i learned a lesson from that that you know you've got to let
#
them choose so they the first group that they chose was Shanta Gokhale and it's really odd
#
Dolly Thakor Meera Devi Dayal and Jhelum Paranspe they're very different women but all i thought
#
okay all of these will bring back stories and we would edit we would work together the group and
#
i would work together to construct a 10 000 word essay on each woman and we put it together and
#
at the end of the year we'd have a book called lives of the women now lives the women is in
#
seventh edition yeah yeah so we've had like really interesting and exciting and different
#
women you know sometimes it's a designer LC Nanji was interviewed by one year sometimes it's a woman
#
who the woman who set up Som you know the uh the restaurant in in south Bombay across from
#
Babul Nath so it's a variety what i've learned is to respect the choices of the students because
#
once they've made the choice the investment becomes much easier and they they see it through
#
so i've i enjoyed doing that but that means a lot of work also and a lot of hand holding
#
because they often upset the the person whom they're interviewing they're young so eventually they
#
will turn up late and they think 20 minutes late is not a problem but uh for us old fogies it's
#
intolerable you tell me you're going to be late you say i'm running late i'm fine
#
but tell me and they didn't and this was Shabana Azmi on the other side she refused to be interviewed
#
she said no i mean this is disrespectful please go home and don't bother to call me again it's
#
fine i said you've learned an invaluable lesson on punctuality just suck it up you know totally
#
suck it up and they did and moved on so i think you know teaching is was a very heavy investment
#
profession for me as i suspect it is for you with your with your see one doesn't start and may have
#
started it lightly as this idea that wow i'm being asked to teach you know must be mean that
#
i have something to give and i'm i'm mana hua shucks or whatever but as soon as you begin to
#
realize what the what the dynamic is and that there is a terrible power structure at work here
#
you're working on dismantling that power structure you're trying as honestly to dismantle it as
#
possible you're trying to re-jig the class so that you know we have every class every one of
#
my classes starts with dj time which is 10 minutes one student has to play dj and everyone has to
#
dance okay just dance for 10 minutes because the class is eight in the morning most of them are
#
groggy with lack of sleep they've dragged themselves to class and they just settle down
#
and they just want to to be tin pots for a little while and i'm supposed to pour into the heads
#
so dancing is a good way to start off some energy yeah 10 minutes of that and then we have 10 minutes
#
of i care about which is you stand up and you talk about what you care about so this year's topics
#
have included when a stand-up comic makes fun of himself how does his family respond how does he
#
respond because they're often mocking their families their mothers their children as well
#
and is it okay to mock children i worry about this and even if it's a baby nice person another
#
one talked about anemia because you know she'd suffered from it it's good like 20 minutes is
#
off and the rest of the class the two hours of the class is an ama ask me anything i will not set up
#
the discourse value i will not set up the trajectory you know what class you're in you ask me the
#
question so that's my way of of shifting the power so that the dynamic isn't about what i know and
#
what i can tell you but you tell me so one very sweet question that i haven't been able to answer
#
yet last week which young man said but this government hasn't it done something good like
#
in all this hasn't it done something good i said i will get back to you i've been trying to find
#
like a you know a list of of the government's achievements and there are things that have
#
happened which have happened naturally i think which were made were going to happen but and maybe
#
it's just bias my bias but when i look at the government's claims of what they have done i
#
find them untenable so i'm but i'm still working on on this it's a difficult question i hope no
#
one ever asked me that in an ama i mean you can look at technical things and say bankruptcy act
#
kia but the point is bankruptcy act was designed by friends of mine and it was in the thing for a
#
long time yes exactly the digital uh the you know another friend of mine once it said because i
#
started asked like i decided to ask the hive mind ask a friend of mine who runs an agency ask a
#
friend of mine who runs um who actually works it not works but owns a mill ask friend of mine who
#
is a professional ask all these people and say tell me tell me if there's anything one said yes you
#
know he owns a little plantation outside uh gujarat and he said there was a cyclone and the money for
#
my insurance came straight into my account i didn't have to ask anybody for it another one said my
#
income tax refunds are now automatic because there's some guy in chandigarh before it used
#
to be like you know you have to go and pound somebody etc etc but all these are things that
#
have been that sam petroda started yeah the digital revolution started then right there when it was
#
possible to make anyone laugh by saying rajiv gandhi 21st century computer because it was seemed so
#
unlikely that these computers would run everything but those young men there knew that they were
#
going to well i wouldn't give too much credit to them also no i'm saying but i think any change
#
in india can't be one government's doing it is so multifactorial that uh you know you you no no so
#
i don't know whether this is all uh relevant but i'm saying in in uh the process of teaching also
#
because ama requires uh me to be to be able to because often there'll be a little puzzlement
#
about an editorial that they've read in the morning and why someone so hit up about something
#
that seems so small and insignificant sometimes sometimes it is how come this really big thing
#
that happened has not been paid attention to how come the indian express has carried this but
#
no one else has carried it or how come you know uh scroll says but no one else says or what exactly
#
went down at the wire could you tell us that i will never do i will never tell anybody anything
#
but what i will say is why don't you have a little presentation for me next next week where you tell
#
me what happened to the wire research it and tell me so you you end up with a dialogue with a
#
dialogue model as a class but that dialogue model takes a lot more work than just doing a syllabus
#
now i mean you teach the year round i just i just do like four webinars and as far less involvement
#
and i don't think i'd be a fraction as uh good as you if you were to do something like this
#
you you mentioned what has this government done and you mentioned your friend in gujarat right and
#
i thought about this interesting anecdote that i have repeated on the show two three times but
#
i think i should tell you because it's about reading i did in a column in toi about it also
#
about how a friend of mr modi who knew him in the uh auties circa 2006 2007 when he was
#
cm of gujarat told me that she along with five or six others who were in the friend category
#
um you know not for work not in politics were hanging out with modi at his house and at one
#
point he started telling them a story about how when he was a boy his mother was ill and she had
#
fever and she was feeling very hot suddenly and she wanted you know and he went to turn on the fan
#
and then he realized there's no electricity and as modi told these people the story he started
#
crying right genuinely still hurt by it after all these years and the point my friend was making
#
and she of course moved away from modi and has nothing to do with him but the point she was
#
making was that his understanding of the world because he's not someone who's read books i mean
#
he wasn't privileged enough to read books his understanding of the world is very experiential
#
he saw the sort of the importance of electricity so when he became cm in gujarat he said i will
#
electrify every village and apparently he did he knew the importance of roads because they are
#
under his feet as it were so pay attention to roads and it is fine at a limited kind of level
#
of local governance or whatever but beyond the point it doesn't work because you have to deal
#
with the abstractions in the world many of which like the nature of language and society and markets
#
you know being more spontaneous order and not being able to be not directable top down i'm
#
mangling words but they're all counterintuitive and then the question arises that how does someone
#
who has not had the privilege of being a voracious reader have you know deal with this and the two
#
answers is one is that you always keep reading no matter how late you start and the other one is
#
that you have the humility to recognize the limits of your knowledge and you look for experts in
#
each of these fields and then you trust them and you listen to them which he did not do which is
#
a massive failing his failing is not that he did not read but that that humility wasn't there so
#
you know i thought of electricity and roads when you you know with reference to that question in
#
that limited context of gujarat and i thought you would like this anecdote and and and the
#
the term i coined for him because of what my friend said about him being an experiential man
#
was he aakho dekhi prime minister and i think this is this is the great thing about reading
#
that we make sense of the world by connecting dots if we never read a book we have a limited
#
set of dots but the more books we read the more dots we have and the more higher high definition
#
our picture as it were no i'm just thinking i was running my running my mind across the prime
#
ministers to think of and maybe if shastri had been around longer he would have been an aakho
#
dekhi prime minister as well because i don't think it was a privileged upbringing but nehru certainly
#
was and everybody who came after him up to manmohan singh was certainly like you know
#
steven's elite so if not oxbridge yeah so yeah that there's that as a as shastri had great
#
humility though so the ability to to bring people together and to hold i think you know
#
it does help if you've had a family because you realize that it's difficult to be the dictator
#
even of a family like if you've had like two young people and a wife and or a spouse and
#
and a couple of others hanging around which inevitably in an indian situation you do you
#
realize that your power may be the power of of the person who brings home the you know the money
#
that's a great point but your your everything is shifting otherwise and so you then learn to share
#
power and otherwise you just like you you find that it's all collapsing around so the prescription
#
that comes from this is adityanath ki shaadi karbao that's that's where we've arrived at so i'll i'll
#
go back to writing later and i'll go back to other things i want to double click on but since we are
#
at journalism and teaching and teaching journalism i want to um i have a couple of questions about
#
that as well and one of them is this that in the modern age if someone is becoming a journalist
#
they can have a fair sense of best practices they can see the best journalism across the world they
#
can go to you know a new yorker and blah blah blah and they can read books on journalism online
#
they can download them for free if they can't afford it all of that is there but when you're
#
becoming a journalist in the 80s for example you know you all you have to rely on to learn
#
journalism is really the akho de ki stuff the people around you and what they are telling you
#
and your immediate peers where i think you seem to have gotten very lucky but we'll talk about
#
that also in terms of the company you were fortunate to keep but to my understanding there
#
is no systematic institutional way of kind of teaching values that this is how we approach
#
subjects this is how we talk to them this is a kind of rigor required like you've spoken and i
#
think in the acknowledgments of a couple of your books you've mentioned naresh for bringing rigor
#
to your writing and i'm guessing part of that is the columbia training he's come from abroad and
#
he's uh this thing but in india if you're like a local journalist you join somewhere
#
there's no one really giving you those values everything is an instrumental thing
#
you know so how did you get your sense of journalistic values was it through friends
#
like these were there stuff that you had to learn by doing and you know make your own mistakes tell
#
me a little bit about i'm glad you said values here because a lot of our journalism now seems
#
to be skills people seem to be thinking about the skill more than the values and i think skills are
#
very important because a skillful journalist is is a valuable asset a skillful anything is a
#
valuable asset but a skillful journalist without values is dangerous is really dangerous and i
#
think um you know okay again now values becomes a highly subjective and highly personalized thing
#
because when we talk about the right values we want the journalists to have our values but i
#
think when you have a journalist with values if you are a engaged reader you will tell the values
#
very soon you will be able to tell what the what the values are you may not be able to name them
#
you may not be able to say oh this must be a neo-capitalist but right neo-capitalist but
#
left-leaning liberal in the aesthetic sphere but neo-capitalist in the economic sphere you won't be
#
able to go that far but you just know how this is a match or that is not a match but a lot of
#
because so much of journalism now is being truncated it's being reduced to manageable bites
#
it's being reduced to need to know it's being reduced to news you can use as i hate that term
#
hate that term because all news is something you can use and news you can use is not a subset of
#
that but anyway never mind that the little hobby horse that i could ride off into the sunset on
#
but i'm saying i think since all these pressures are being put on on young journalists the sense
#
of where do you stand in the universe and what are the lenses because okay when i think in in
#
the 1980s and 90s one was reading Arun Shourie for instance or one was reading MV Kamath or one was
#
reading Darrell de Monte you knew where they came from about three pieces in okay you you were very
#
sure that there were some you would be able to have a conversation with and some you wouldn't
#
and i had put MV Kamath in in the bracket of i would not be able to have a conversation with
#
him then i met him and found him very charming which is always how the human being kind of just
#
throws everything off gear and i met Shourie and found him challenging which again is how
#
how things are thrown off gear so i think the now i when i read journalism i'm at least
#
Indian journalism a lot of it and a lot of the front page news i'm horrified at how lacking
#
in context everything seems to be and i don't know whether it is because of the huge pressures i'm
#
sure there you know newspapers have been probably cutting staff for putting people onto onto you
#
know per piece i don't know what other things get must be going on inside newspapers i shudder to
#
think also but the the pressure of ads or the pressure the political pressures all the pressures
#
that's that newspapers are subject to which makes it makes one wonder how they're still around you
#
know at at some level it just seems incredible that you guys are still here but i think it is
#
at another inflection point and the journalist as we knew her is an endangered species
#
is really an endangered species one of the okay the other thing that changed i think the other
#
really drastic thing that changed was the was the fact that when we became journalists in the 1980s
#
there was a lot of power involved okay people if they whatever kind of journalist you were and i
#
was largely a journalist of the culture i was not a news journalist or a there were much more
#
defined sports journalist news journalist beat journalist i was a journalist of culture but
#
very often people would come up to you and saying you know please just talk to my landlord tell him
#
that he's that you're a journalist and see he'll he'll change he'll stop doing this to me and you
#
say really and one or two cases i've actually gone and said you know i'm a journalist why are
#
you doing this to this woman and that landlord has actually said no no no i'll tell you i'm i was
#
today only i'm going to solve it really this actually works this sort of thing works it seemed
#
like like bad script writing you know or you know you put my please put this in the papers
#
you were told regularly and now that everybody can put you know like i mean just tweet and
#
and hashtag Ratan Tata because you're you're you were late for a flight on Vistara and
#
you know they didn't give you a seat so hashtag Ratan Tata
#
really get real you know but this is also in some ways journalists have been let off that hook
#
but their power has diminished and their their real-time validity has diminished so a lot of
#
that a lot of that is uh i remember at one point you know talking to Pradeep Guha of the Times of
#
India and asking why journalists were paid so badly compared to the marketing staff and he said
#
the marketing staff take a lot of abuse every day from me for not meeting targets and they take
#
so they get paid for that humiliation that is inflicted on them every day and you guys
#
are not paid because you get psychic gratification from the power that you have yeah
#
there's a most bizarre explanation i can imagine my goodness where the Bengali turns capitalist
#
this is not a capitalist explanation also there is a good capitalist explanation and it lies in
#
supply demand and there is a social tragedy there that journalists are not valued enough
#
this is just yes man but i also thought it was the the corruptness of this argument was symptomatic
#
of the whole Times of India how it could actually think up these things no i think i think he was
#
he was bullshitting in the harry frankfurt sense right that
#
i i want to double click on a lot of things because it's very fascinating and the first
#
of them is a general question of values first in a broader context and then narrow it down to
#
journalism one of the things that has disillusioned me in the last few years is realizing that many
#
people who claim to hold certain values actually were posturing and they only sort of cited those
#
values as what they stood for because they wanted to be part of a tribe or it was convenient or
#
whatever and we have seen this in politics repeatedly for example the way the republican
#
party was decimated in a sense by trump where trump does not stand for any of the values of
#
the republican party the conservatism the you know the the whole free trade thing you know in
#
economics he's like almost identical to Bernie Sanders the complete opposite of what republicans
#
would be on family values you know and yet what we realized was that a lot of the stated values of
#
the people who then suddenly turned around and became supporters of him were just stated values
#
there was something else going on in the background and i i've seen that in india as well for example
#
where in 2014 with modi one there were a lot of sensible people i still respect including salman
#
sos who was then in the congress who came on my show and said that even though i was in the
#
congress when modi won i was kind of hopeful because of the rhetoric about markets and everything
#
right so there were a bunch of people who were cautiously optimistic that good things will
#
happen in terms of markets and he went the complete other way he went the complete other way
#
complete statism and yet despite the fact that he went against the values they claim to you know
#
this thing they became useful idiots in in lennon's famous phrase i mean i still remember when
#
demonetization happened and i of course wrote a bunch of pieces criticizing it and i know for
#
a fact that house intellectuals as it were quote unquote were sent my piece and told to write
#
against it in some cases i i know reputed people whose books i have read whom i have respected
#
enormously who knew demonetization was nonsense but they wrote pieces supporting it you know
#
and that was disillusioning and that made me think again about values in the public sphere
#
where my thinking now is keep boss and your actions have to speak you know words are cheap
#
actions have to speak now in the context of journalism therefore what i see is that there
#
is this dichotomy that on on the one hand uh you know it's a business
#
you know the question of newsworthy however one defines it is secondary to what is good content
#
right and that is one imperative that's driving the machine another imperative is just a political
#
imperative that i may run a broadsheet newspaper but i also have a chemical factory if that is
#
getting raided i better be careful right plus there is of course the incentive that our money
#
the money you and i pay in taxes is going into government advertising for all of these and
#
it's you know that's how the machine is run right and so that's one aspect of it the rational aspect
#
but the other aspect is key values here truth to power karna hai truth ka value hai you know it's
#
it's an extension of my role as a citizen if i want to be a journalist to pursue that truth
#
and to write about it and we see independent people with not much to lose and it's you know
#
if you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose so that's part of the game so you'll have your
#
alt news and your news minutes and news laundries of the world kind of and scroll of course going
#
down that road where they are still fighting but what does one do with this because you would want
#
the next generation you won't want all the people that you teach to go in there with those values
#
but the point is if you enter the belly of the beast is going to swallow you up
#
right just the same way that politics corrodes character you can get into politics with the
#
best intentions but the incentives will make you someone else because you gotta do what you gotta
#
do is kind of the same here and often it seems that then a journalist simultaneously in in this
#
day and age simultaneously becomes like an activist and it should not be like that sure
#
I completely agree because that muddies the waters tremendously for journalists also so
#
fundamentally I think you know the terrible corrupting power of fear is what we are watching
#
that and okay again fear unrecognized is fear that cannot be diagnosed and it cannot then be helped
#
okay so you think about like a young man from Kerala going to cover a story in in in
#
Uttar Pradesh and being in jail for two years yeah and now when this is brought up in class
#
what answer do you give because we've been talking constitutionalism we've been talking
#
the protection of a beautiful constitution we've been talking about Kesavananda Bharti the case
#
the famous case which is now again being questioned we've been talking about a lot of these things as
#
standards so the only thing I can say is do it afraid okay like that but what is even more
#
important I think is where is the possibility that you when you have an when you have a training
#
when you have an induction process you know corporates will talk about values really then
#
the value the central value of a corporate of a good corporate is make a lot of money
#
right and let's all figure this out but they'll start by talking human values and we also make
#
steel and you know the joy of of working together is what we need to experience the journalist
#
comes sits down and opens a file and is told that this is the this is what you've got to be doing
#
from tomorrow I don't know that any the induction process is a systemic process this is where HR is
#
that's where the toilet is this is the the canteen you can get samosa for 20 paisa on Thursday this
#
is a this is the editor that's the editor this is the system login here what is your inventor
#
password while they're looking away that kind of shit happens no one says okay you know we are left
#
kneeling liberal but we are going to have a very strong conservative input don't get freaked by
#
that because we've got to play both sides against the middle no one actually ever says this so the
#
journalist is actually like tripping and falling and stumbling through like even reading one issue
#
of a paper of a newspaper these days can leave the journalists very confused about like what are
#
the values this paper espouses and so this most you sort of like practical thing to do is to say
#
my values then is what I will have to bring here now the problem is most of the time if you're
#
if you're in your early 20s you haven't worked those out you think you have but you haven't
#
worked those out mainly because there's never been a temptation no one has challenged you and
#
asked you whether you know whether two lakhs a month will make you give up those values
#
so you it's coming in in the in the future it's like about six months not six months six years
#
down the line there'll be a moment when you know someone will be asking you whether you'd like to
#
write a piece I remember very beautiful pitches made to me like I mean a very noted PR agency
#
the head of the PR agency I had to do some story on Miss World and how the how the Miss World was
#
being you know it was in Bangalore that year and there were lots of feminist activists who
#
out to get it and trying to stop it and whatnot so I thought talking to the PR agency would be a
#
good idea so I rang up the PR agency and when I was told that when that young person was told that
#
this is Jerry Pinto speaking she said hold on hold on I have a flag here that if you call I have to
#
send it off to the head of the of of the company so I thought okay maybe this is a big account so
#
he wants to make sure that all the PR is really controlled so he came on the phone and he said
#
Mr Pinto how wonderful to talk to you when can we go out for lunch I said I just need you he said
#
I'll talk to you about that right now but we must go out for lunch so I said okay and this beautiful
#
pitch was made about being a resource for the PR company you know and how much and he gave me names
#
of other journalists who also resources in other newspapers and it wasn't you know that we would
#
never require you to try anything that you are uncomfortable with but we'd really be comfortable
#
knowing that there's a resource inside where you are so that came about like six or eight years into
#
my in I must have been about 35 or 36 but it's coming in and what is your answer going to be to
#
that you know but more than that I think the central problem is we don't tell our young people
#
that this is that journalism is also going to be often very tough it's going to be a challenge
#
or going to be a challenge just to even to simply tell the story as you see it you know just
#
as simply as that as holding on to bare facts and and saying what happened can be your biggest
#
challenge you know and I think this is a huge failing in the entire industry
#
and you start a crime beat reporter off and you don't you don't have a sensitization program about
#
how you would you deal with a rape then how is that if it's a young man on the crime beat and
#
tomorrow the big story and often like I mean I remember that when I joined the Times it seemed
#
that there was one crime reporter and maybe one and a half crime reporter because someone could be
#
seconded in a big in a big story now and a big story had to be like you know Raman Raghavan
#
was the big story nothing was but these days a single middle-class girl gets raped and there are
#
14 resources as they are called trained on getting on getting stories around it which means these are
#
actually gladiatorial now the it's a gladiatorial contest among the 14 young people to see who can
#
who can dig up dirt and the idea is dig up details and whether those details compromise the
#
the survivor's identity or not is of no of no consequence you just go photograph buildings
#
schools anything she studied here these were her friends anything that you can get and I think
#
if you can't you can't deal with does anyone talk about about the fact that you know bribery is not
#
only the exchange of money but you know when when someone calls from a reputed company and says
#
it is a it is a fully chartered flight you won't mind sitting in in economy, would you like to go
#
that this is a bribe I don't get it I don't I don't know how you can't how can you can be
#
I don't know how you can't how can you can be talking about truth and you can be talking about
#
the reader comes first and you can be talking you can have these very high-minded slogans
#
and you never actually talk about practical ethics to anybody I don't know how that works
#
do you in your classes oh yes all the time like we have we have a gedankan each time like you know
#
your best friend is working in a company where which has been in the news recently she invites
#
you over to the office there's a file on the table if you read that file you'll get some dope on
#
what's happening in the story would you read the dope when she steps out to go to the loop
#
yes or no and then discuss so there is no leading on on ethics you can't lead but you can smell
#
you know I often believe like with the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him that might that they
#
will not uh when they are discussing it together that you will come to some conclusion that works
#
for you and that works for your time and whatnot and they generally do okay so I'm saying if you
#
have to actually talk you know confront this possibility and talk about it and say yeah but
#
the greater good what is the greater good who is this is what about my friend and what about
#
the possibility that she might lose her job whatever comes to your mind and you're talking
#
about it you're actually trying to work out a solution to when it comes up yeah I completely
#
get that you know the pressure of being in the real world and the pressure of a thought experiment
#
are totally different things here you're just showing off and maybe even just posturing a little
#
you know what the right answer is because you're saying you know you've done enough moral science
#
and religion classes you've read enough of the of your holy books to know that you know what the
#
right answer is but I'm still saying it works to say this is important to think about that this is
#
an important as it's not just how many inverted commas how many you know whether you've got all
#
the all the elements of the story in whether you've answered all the questions but you also
#
answered that central question why am I doing this as a journalist why you are doing this is
#
a hugely important thing I think another sort of aspect of this is that look you know when you
#
present a problem in a classroom like this and this is an excellent question it's still laid out
#
in front of you and you can make your choices and you can give reasoned arguments for either side
#
right but what often happens in the field when you're doing stories is that there are dilemmas
#
which aren't even dilemmas for example you know you might be doing a profile on someone and you
#
might have decided in advance that you're going to destroy this person and therefore you might
#
speak to 30 people and take the five people who say the worst things and ignore the other 25 and
#
this is also an ethical problem it's a journalist right to shape the narrative but these choices
#
that you make matter and there are reputed magazines even in the left who do exactly this
#
who are everybody yeah who are conducting uh regular hit jobs of this sort and this is also
#
wrong and the thing is here's where you can't expect the individual journalists no matter what
#
they're training to recognize what is going on when they know that their bosses want a story
#
on this person who might be a clearly despicable person and clearly bad for society but there is
#
still nevertheless a right way of doing a story and uh and and just as an aside one thing that
#
i often say is that one thing that i think journalists today should do and data journalists
#
like rukmini and pramit who have been on the show have actually done it i think is that whatever
#
stories you do whatever your notes for it are whatever the material you gathered are as long
#
as you're not compromising sources you put it out in a data dump and let the reader you know then
#
biases become obvious other angles become obvious but it's a public good to just have
#
all of it out there but that's besides the point i don't think that will happen though the other
#
thing that really worries me is innumeracy in the in the yeah in the newsroom you know the
#
inability to tell what numbers are actually doing yeah yeah and often uh the journalists have come
#
from that you know the in the two cultures as the as i said when i was talking about teaching
#
there's the ones who liked english history geography french and the ones who liked physics
#
chemistry biology maths now those physics chemistry biology maths people have gone off
#
to become engineers doctors or whatever else it is or maybe even mbas you know there's a lot of
#
engineers seem to become mbas or you know end up in my media class mimetic desire exactly yeah so
#
that's all of them already dealt with so it's these guys who are now coming along because they
#
like to write they like to africa create stories they like to meet people they said they were people
#
people and a people person etc etc etc they've come in there and they they can't crack the numbers
#
they don't and i don't think that they need to be uh kind of reading trying to solve fermat's last
#
theorem i'm just saying that you should be able to tell you should have some hold of economics
#
you should have some hold on statistics you should be able to tell a little about like
#
you should know what a billion and a million is and you know should know that the billion is
#
different on both sides of the of the sea of the english-speaking sea the pond here so you need to
#
i think it's not it's not that it's not a skill set that is that anyone worries about
#
so i often think like a little training in basic math and mathematics and statistics would be very
#
good for everybody no as an aside one of the side projects i keep thinking about is getting together
#
with some people and putting together a core of basic life skills which includes things like
#
probabilistic thinking basic statistics econ 101 communication basics you know just planning your
#
money yeah yeah just you know take seven eight things which are fundamental which you otherwise
#
don't really learn and put them together in a package and then you at least have that but
#
but to get back to what is politeness social media people what are you talking like what is it like
#
granny was polite once in 1972 yeah so my question here is is that in this sort of
#
environment where are the editors because typically that kind of judgment that is this
#
is a story this is a process the means matter as much as the ends this is you know these are all
#
the boxes you have to tick while doing the story and blah blah blah blah blah you know do you think
#
that there is also an editorial lacunae there which speaks to a certain poverty in the ecosystem
#
like my sense of the 80s and the 90s is look we can all take big names like like i said you were
#
lucky with your friends and you know naresh gireesh ranjit arundhati all of them shantaji uh very lucky
#
with them but by and large if you ignore the outliers and that's just selection bias uh the
#
field seemed incredibly mediocre to me it seemed that if you fail in everything else you get into
#
journalism i also have to say that all the editors are sitting doing podcasts like right in front of
#
me and right in front of you so both of us at this age would have probably been very close to
#
being editors naresh i mean naresh still is but gireesh ranjit and arundhati certainly would have
#
been assistant editors or above in some newspaper the other one would have been doing culture one
#
would have been doing economics and politics and you can tell that they would have been there they
#
all we all stepped away so in some senses we left these people bereft but the truth is and
#
nature and i mean i think even uh whatever corporates abhor a vacuum so they put in people
#
whom they wanted to but my my point is you should never depend on individuals you should have a
#
system from which people come out and they get trained and you should have a thousand ranjits
#
and a thousand narrations uh or many narrations no i'm saying but the uh the problem is there's
#
no system also there's no system okay i think even more fright or okay not as frightening but
#
less frightening than that is the complete absence across the nation of any
#
long-term full-on course for publishing so i feel when you hire an ma student from ma english
#
because they all ma english right their ma english literature what has their training been
#
their training has been a syllabus has been set up and someone has walked into the class and said
#
here is a great book please now tell me why it is a great book while telling me what i told you
#
about this great book that's your job as soon as you have finished that and you've added a quote
#
by david lodge and another quote from say ania lumba or whoever it is you have done your job
#
and you've come out now they come into the into the publishing industry they sit behind a desk and
#
10 manuscripts are put in front of them and they and someone says to them what is the novel that
#
we should publish now how are they to tell okay so basically the lineaments of the novel they
#
should know because they have read presumably several novels through the course of their
#
ba and ma but they haven't they've read notes you know the indian student really is an animal
#
in pursuit of last year's notes wow great what a good quote that's all they're interested in
#
i have a very telling anecdote i have a very good friend whose daughter who rang me up once and said
#
listen i'm at a in a tight spot here because the daughter is doing a paper on dalit autobiographies
#
and can't find the notes for this and i said friend send your daughter over and i will talk
#
her through this dalit autobiographies i had translated three by then right so who's better
#
who's in a better position just send her over and you know she'll go back at the i'll do a download
#
i'm not going to make her read all three of them but i'll i'll just talk her through but she should
#
but she should read all three of them which of course she should but you know exam is three days
#
from now he said oh fabulous that's just like that's that's wonderful why don't you you come
#
over and we'll give you dinner etc etc i said no no no my expertise my time my space said you know
#
about an about two hours later he rang up and said i i don't know what to say it's not what she wants
#
so i said not what she wants means what so he said you know she wants notes and then he got notes
#
i don't know where he got notes from but he got notes and she got through the exam now i'm
#
i'm thinking this is the top five percent of the of the country top 0.5 percent of the country
#
of the country a highly privileged girl in uh naac graded a plus university it is and it isn't
#
because uh you know i don't think 20 years later she's someone like this i mean one hopes but
#
individual in question evolves and whatever but people like this don't go too too far like what
#
i see is you know i see hunger coming from small towns totally i see hunger coming from people with
#
humble backgrounds and there's a little bit of selection bias there also because they are the
#
ones you see the people who are stepping forward and saying i have no preconceptions i have no
#
biases i'm just hungry i'll read those three novels in one night give it to me yeah yeah yeah i agree
#
i think so but i just felt uh in my time and in that space i would have known not to say i want
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notes even if i wanted just notes okay i would have known not to say it and i would have said
#
okay this is an opportunity i should go so i i did an episode on education wildly popular with
#
kartik murli tharan and he gave me an insight that has stuck with me and is so true which is
#
that the indian education system is optimized not for teaching but for sorting right and you have
#
your metrics for sorting and the rational thing for anyone to do is to game those metrics and one
#
way of gaming those metrics is to read notes yeah which you know i mean i just read a b.a in english
#
in fergus and pune but i never went to class never studied day before the each exam i would
#
get the notes yeah exactly that learning is elsewhere is central is central to the whole
#
of the of our discourse that and but so if learning is elsewhere is it not odd to expect a system that
#
will throw up editors because nobody is learning where they're supposed to be learning they're
#
learning elsewhere so there is i mean and i feel that our absence of systems is is is accompanied
#
with a dangerous self-regard for our jugad because if you don't have a system then you have a jugad
#
right so now we're so proud that we do jugad that we've constantly been ignoring the cut work that
#
is required to build systems it's really hard work to just keep building systems because they
#
must be responsive otherwise they get they become bureaucracies and they become like you know
#
stultified red tapest bureaucracies so if you want to build a system you're constantly jiggering
#
with it because the world is changing and the output of the system has to suit the world that
#
has changed right so to get an editor of a certain quality or certain caliber means you've got to
#
have a certain system that will produce a thousand narrations and a thousand ranjits and a thousand
#
gurishes yes or many many versions of them even but you've got to have that system but tomorrow
#
you i can't imagine it but you may not need naresh kirish and ranjit you may need other
#
varietals of those now that system has to be responsive we've not even built that system
#
never mind the responsiveness of that and i think in a sense my question itself actually now that i
#
think about it maybe moot for the same reason that i will say i will disagree with you on the one
#
point that you made about we need a publishing course and i would say no we don't need a
#
publishing course and let me explain why i think we don't need a publishing course because across
#
industries the mainstream is crumbling and there will be a lag before something takes
#
its place but the mainstream is crumbling right i can say this in the context of media entertainment
#
nation states even perhaps in this globalized world and so on and so forth now in the 90s for
#
example you had a few mainstream outlets for news you had a consensus broad consensus on the truth
#
you know little variations here and there but a broad consensus on the truth and and there was
#
a sense of certainty and surety that that gave but in a sense great that it collapsed because
#
there were a lot of negatives you had to go through gatekeepers you had you know limiting
#
viewpoints you had limiting form technology changed all of that now everyone has the tools
#
of publishing no one is restricted by form or the demands of the news cycle so someone like me can
#
do what i'm doing right now what you and i are engaged in and that's great but what's also
#
happened is that crumbling of the mainstream means there is no consensus on the truth we are
#
instead engaged in narrative battles and a lot of people are therefore you know you might continue
#
buying physical newspapers out of inertia though i stopped two years ago but many people do but
#
that trust is gone and people are finding their own sources wherever they want sometimes with
#
the full understanding that i don't really care about truth in the world i want to be entertained
#
or i want to know key you know uh what is kareena kapoor's next film or whatever it is uh and
#
you go off in those directions now for the creator economy in that one limited context again if i
#
zoom down this is profoundly exciting because it means i don't have to go to some gatekeeper guy
#
in a big company and tell him ki mai paanch gante ka podcast karunga and he'll just laugh me out
#
of the room and status quo bias and all of that i don't have to think about form today i can do
#
an 8-hour podcast but tomorrow youtube pe jake i can do a one minute video whatever i feel suits
#
the need i can do all of that i had a long episode on media with samarth bansal who you know very
#
thoughtful reflective journalist episode 299 and that was also very revelatory about the rot that
#
is in all the mainstream media institutions today and even in a sense of publishing for example to
#
get down to that specific thing and why i think a publishing course is a bad idea because i think
#
the publishing industry itself is changing in fundamental ways because the way we discover
#
content the way we filter content the way we consume content the forms in which we consume
#
content have changed completely like in one of your great instagram videos you were giving advice
#
to writers and saying that don't be restricted by form key this is only a short story or this is
#
only a whatever and i keep saying that also in the context of how all forms of the past are a
#
response to constraints that a newspaper has to have so many stories and therefore each can be
#
so long that a 45 inch can only fit so much of music and that's why the album length going back
#
earlier you know three minutes is the record because it's a physical response it's a constraint
#
because of a physical response and those are today gone and therefore while writing a book
#
was once a holy grail like for people of yours and my generation it is like
#
yeah that is it yeah you know i and and that's not true today i have to keep reminding myself
#
that remove that hierarchy of arts from your head right that you know if you're creating you're
#
creating in many forms there was a time where the finest creative minds of our generation
#
would have nothing else to do but write a book or that you know think about getting into bollywood
#
and being an apprentice to subhash ghai but today you know you can just make your own youtube video
#
you can go and do all of this so the relevance of that field itself has changed those institutions
#
have changed now i'm not saying nobody will read books i'm not saying that there won't be large
#
disseminators of information but i'm just saying that the old structures are irrelevant but there
#
is a lag and we don't know what new structures will come because it's an unknown unknown and
#
i'm guessing you've thought about this at way more depth than i would have been i completely agree
#
with you i think that's important but i think that you know i'm it's yours is the long-term
#
view mine is the short term my short-term view is that we are not i mean you know these penguin
#
random houses and hashets and and yeah harper collins's are not going away in the next 20 years
#
and after that like i mean i think it would it'll be fun to just be watching to just be watching how
#
quickly everything will be changing oh you're actually actually now that i think about it
#
sounds stupid to even have said this because you do we don't know three months down the line what
#
can happen you know i mean amazon's decision to close uh westland came out of the clear blue sky
#
sky actually there was not a cloud on the horizon and then there was suddenly an apocalyptic no
#
that came out of some complete stranger's mouth you know we don't even know who that stranger was
#
forget about it i'm saying so you're right we i mean to have a publishing course today
#
that predicates itself on the existence of the majors would probably be a very short-sighted
#
thing you're quite right it is probably better to have something that says want to be creative
#
question mark ba want to be creative question mark and like have three years of like lots of
#
creative inputs yeah i mean if there's one thing listeners have learned it's like the importance
#
of exclamation marks and question marks question mark now and the exclamation mark shanta's
#
exclamation mark to your translating journey let's go back to uh sort of your writing uh journey and
#
at one in one of your instagram videos you speak about dealing with criticism where you say quote
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to have a piece of your writing savaged is like having your soul savaged right and all of us
#
writers we put so much of ourselves into our writing that it's tied up with a sense of self
#
and it is natural to instinctively recoil but like i keep telling my writing students that you have
#
to be so open to feedback and criticism because people somebody will look at virat coli and think
#
arrogant guy and the point i make is no boss in the field in which he excels which is batting
#
he has extreme humility you have to be to reach that level where he'll pay his 10 000 hours in the
#
nets focusing on what he's doing wrong to get to where he is now i remember in the late 90s i had
#
a friend who was a journalist then and later became a celebrated novelist i can tell you off
#
list so maybe you can guess and we were really good friends and i thought his approach to writing is
#
kind of like mine he just wants to improve and get better and all of that and at one point he
#
had written a story in a major news magazine and he said why don't you tell me what you think so
#
i said are you sure so he said yeah yeah tell me what you think of it so unfortunately i was very
#
young and i didn't know how to you know frame things properly and you know you begin with praise
#
and then you go wherever so the first thing i said which alas is still true of a lot of what he does
#
today is that you seem to be privileging cleverness over insight and he didn't speak to me for six
#
months right and i understand that i was perhaps too harsh and uh though this is the same friend
#
who had told me uh around the same time that every time a friend of mine does well a part of me dies
#
i i still remember those lines and just being so horrified when i heard that and wondering is he
#
joking i i found that this is a difficult space to negotiate because on the one hand while i am
#
always open and i'm at pains to tell people that yeah i don't take anything personally i have found
#
that others are sensitive so i was struck by what you said earlier about the importance of your
#
friends like a girish who's read you in free press journal somewhere who's reading everything
#
despite there being no internet so human internet human google and uh you know and other friends
#
like narration arun dati bringing their points of view to your work how was that sort of dynamic
#
because i assume that you are giving criticism to each other all the time i also assume that
#
the little group of you realize that you are actually much better writers than most other
#
people around you and this would also lead to a certain sense of arrogance and yeah you know
#
look at how you know so and so on the next desk writes and the cat's whiskers plus you are young
#
which is a time where the ego refuses to so how was this dynamic like and were you always like
#
kind of open from the start or did you kind of begin to get there did you how did you and how
#
did it come to your giving criticism which is uh and i guess once you're teaching and you're with
#
students it's kind of okay because they've put you on a pedestal and you go out of your way to
#
be kind so i guess that takes care of itself but otherwise how is that journey i think even when
#
it is uh inter pairs which is like a between equals when you're actually talking to each other
#
it is difficult to take criticism it is as difficult to take criticism but what makes
#
it easier is the understanding that there is no devious agenda behind the criticism right there
#
is no intention to hurt you there is no intention to maul the work which i think at that level at
#
you know the the protectiveness that you feel about the work becomes paramount like you feel
#
protect like protective that you want to shield this poem or this piece of writing from from
#
the harsh critique of the world but you have to send it out and and let it let it take the
#
take the burden of what has to be said and then over time you begin to value really very deeply
#
the space that is created where you can say what you think and you can you listen to what other
#
people think and okay the other thing is that a critique of any kind right despite the fact that
#
that english teachers would like to believe otherwise is a subjective response so the when
#
so the when you're receiving the critique your responsibility is also to then look at it from
#
your point of view so say i've written a poem okay let me give you an example
#
actual example arundhati had a poem in which the end of the poem was to something that said lines
#
to the effect to write a poem was also an act of faith and i said shouldn't that be is also an act
#
of faith and she said no i wanted to say was an act of faith and i thought okay one minute
#
aren't we still all placing our faith in words and i wanted to say this and i realized okay
#
wherever she's coming from it's the past tense for her it is going to be the present tense for me
#
but it is the past tense for her and the poem went into into its published form its public form
#
with a past tense in it my my objections were almost moral that we need to say as poets we need
#
to affirm our faith in poetry and in words but she wasn't feeling that need at that point in time
#
so it was all right for her to say it so this is an one example of an exchange that one by one
#
might have with with the poet and you also have to get used to the fact that you your point of view
#
when you offer the critique may be wrong for the other person so if you could be wrong when you're
#
responding they could be wrong when they're responding so you're when the critique arrives
#
your knee-jerk response is generally to say yeah yeah i get what you're saying but you
#
you're it you also require to stand your ground often and say no i think i need to say it this
#
way so you but this this selfhood this confidence is hard one it require it is needs to be built
#
one encounter at a time and therefore i think because we met for a period of 10 years in the
#
poetry circle not Girish but the and not Naresh but certainly Ranjit, Arundhati and I we met over 10
#
years that assurance became more and more solid that one we shared terms in a certain way the
#
second that there was there were there was an understanding that of the aesthetic or shared
#
aesthetic in a certain way and the third that there was no devious agenda that was being brought to
#
the table that it was only about about seeing if one could help shape the poem a little better
#
and that i think was what eventually became got spread across other things as well the first
#
thing i think is when you sniff out the other the critique and you see whether it's hanging around
#
it there is some something other than just this need this this working with words this encounter
#
with language and if there is something other than that and often it's an intuitive sense that you
#
have of it then you can reject the critique it's as simple as that. Yeah let's talk about writing
#
for children which i'm really fascinated by because and you've done it in different forms
#
poetry a little bit of prose with illustrations and so on and and it's all enjoyable and it seems
#
you know like earlier when i think i quoted you yesterday from one of your characters saying in
#
a book that weightlessness also takes so much effort right just nothing seems if something seems
#
effortless it obviously almost certainly isn't and your writing for children has that spare simple
#
clear quality to it you know perhaps you know everything distilled just as is so when did you
#
start thinking about writing for kids and what was the sort of approach you took towards it in
#
in the sense who were your models because there are so many traps when it comes to writing for
#
kids that you can condescend to your audience based on what you think a kid might want to read
#
or you can you know dumb things down too much when you absolutely don't need to and so on and
#
so forth so how did your thinking about this evolve and how did the how did the craft evolve
#
okay two things i think one first let's let me talk about my encounter with reading as a child
#
i really i read huge amounts of as a child but i did not read many of the books which i thought
#
i should have been reading which should have been available just because for instance i think i read
#
my first puffin when i was 18 when i went to a friend's house and she had a collection of
#
puffins uh you know and i remember picking out a puffin and opening it and it said for girls under
#
12 or age 12 and sensitive boys i thought who wrote this i mean this is really quite masterly
#
sensitive boys is a very good uh rubric i think because it's not offensive but it is specific i
#
think it's just nice and the macho boys won't even want to read it just fine move on then okay so i
#
remember reading the uh the saturdays by lisbeth enright and uh some of my german soldier and i am
#
david and and books like that which i i remember starting to read uh i am david on the on the train
#
home and falling into the book it's like just vanishing into the book i'd just be completely
#
held by it so many things that i discovered as an adult when and so it became like a very
#
delayed childhood because you you went back the moment role series you know uh
#
tov jansen jansen or whatever the one pronounces that name but i remember reading all these very
#
much later in life so that my education came in in in different registers the second thing is i did
#
not ever want to write for children i didn't think i i didn't i think i thought i didn't have domain
#
knowledge like many people who i talked to would say i've told my son so many stories to put him
#
to bed and you know i think sometimes if i just put those down and have a book or they say i just
#
like you know i keep on having to invent stories for my but my girls and and i don't know how many
#
princesses i've named and so i thought okay so you understand what a child wants to read by having a
#
child not having had a child don't worry about it and then i was uh talking to my friend rachel
#
dwyer who's uh and rachel is uh is not the kind of person to write for children anyway but she told
#
me about her mother being very ill and how they were you know sort of moving her mother into care
#
and when they were sort of dismantling the house and selling everything they came across a teddy
#
bear and that teddy bear was uh was eventually like one of the children of the family said can
#
i have the bear and she said no i think this bear is going to be is quite expensive and it'll help
#
grandma you know with her bills and they sold the bear for six thousand pounds because it was a
#
stif bear which is a german original original teddy bears etc and i and this this figure and
#
this number and this act of selling a a childhood toy stayed with me and i thought what if someone
#
in india had a stif and decided that they wanted to like sell it when the children of the family
#
are still attached to it and a bear for felicia got written and it was called the tale of a very
#
expensive teddy bear to begin with i think it was borrowing again my encounter with beatrix potter
#
happened at the age of 25 or something where you know i first i found my first beatrix potter and
#
i thought this woman is a talented artist never mind the writing which i i could see what she
#
was doing there which seemed a little twee and a little cute sometimes but the art was startling
#
started collecting beatrix potter at the age of 25 which is a bit late in life but you know
#
so when i finished writing uh and again this was supposed to be a short story about what happens
#
if little kids teddy bears taken from i just wanted to explore that law that grief and that
#
pain and whatnot and then suddenly it became a little longer it became 20-25 thousand words
#
so i sent it off to ravi singh who read i think maybe three pages at the beginning and thought
#
well teddy bears and kids and whatnot must be puffin and sent it off to puffin and he said
#
yeah yeah we'll do it it's lovely puffin is doing it and it came out as a book for children and i
#
thought yeah it's fine the large majority of of felicia's readers have been 20 year old to 25
#
year old girls women who carry it around in their handbags and refer to it regularly and say they
#
love it and write to me about it and what and maybe some sensitive men indeed and maybe some
#
sensitive men and i presume a fair number of children so i think that and once you've started
#
once you've done that then the requests start coming like someone says hey uh you know we're
#
doing a grandmother series or series of stories about grandmothers would you like to write about
#
your grandmother for it and then someone else says you know we're doing mischief in the classroom
#
would you like to write about that and sometimes just to get yourself away from the
#
the tough slog of the novel you know which is like you're shaping it out of rock this seems
#
like something you can just like an amuse bouche you know you'll be able to clear your palette and
#
just get on with get shape something about a bunch of boys in a class and a substitute teacher and
#
you know it's just it just like it works that way you can shake it around a bit and figure that out
#
and in between you know long bus rides traffic jams you see a lizard and you think his name is
#
eddie lizard which like ridiculous things like that happen to you and you start scribbling them
#
down then you know i have a uh an idea for a bestiary where there'll be lots of animals
#
talking about themselves so lovely it's just it's the uh but okay
#
i try very hard not to be whimsical because i remember as a child i smelt whimsy and hated it
#
i wanted to be dealt with which is why just uh the hobbit which i read when i i read as a child
#
okay in the lord of the rings series i read as a child i was passionately fond of at the time
#
because there was never a sense that we were anything other than an adult talking to adults
#
like tolkien was a very good buddy he was i didn't know i didn't know anything about the inklings or
#
anything of that i didn't i had no idea of the larger you know tolkien mania that had that
#
seized the world i just knew that this was a very sound voice in my ear was telling me a fabulous
#
story and i was making no concession to me as a child i loved that i absolutely loved that so
#
in some ways i think tolkien kind of was the formative sound that you know you can you can say
#
you can you can create a big quest with apocalyptic proportions and you can aim it as children
#
yeah i mean lord of the rings is like a comfort text for me except that the tom bombadil rhymes
#
are just so bad yeah that is true yeah yeah often but uh as a child again when you're when you're
#
fully caught with it you can you just oh shit this is happening and you jump that and go on
#
and go on yeah yeah so you know yesterday after you had left i had this little thought experiment
#
slash fantasy i said technology will read the reach this point where we can give all of jerry's
#
work to ai feed it in as a learning model perhaps we can even uh when if enough years pass uh
#
simulate a model of his brain inside a thing and we can create a hundred jerry pintos and little
#
vats in little pinto vats and they will all churn out uh and i'm using the phrase just to kind of
#
get your hackles up and they will all churn out books of which the first in the series was murder
#
in mahim and there will be a hundred more in that series and from a selfish perspective as a reader
#
i don't need to then read anything else right so i want to talk about murder in mahim because i
#
enjoyed it so much and i've had my crime fiction phases and all that and there have been occasional
#
crime fiction books in indian literature but it's kind of been my lament that we haven't had a great
#
series of that sort in a manner of speaking and everything about murder and mahim was so much
#
fun and why is it not a series yet by the way have you sold right i think uh no i in the sense that
#
it is going to become a film huh so yeah that that is one of those inevitable things um the big
#
temptation of uh of it becoming a film is then you'd probably just have to write skeletons
#
for the rest of the of any more pita jende interactions so i see i one of the things i
#
think uh but skeletons is easy but it's not the fun right no no of course i wouldn't even do it
#
i really wouldn't do it i just keep saying this because then it's it's something that people
#
will okay i should have known that you'd you'd have you'd catch it but no i would probably end
#
up i remember once there was a moment when homie adijani asked me to write uh uh write something
#
for him but he gave me the story and so it didn't work for me but even when i started writing it i
#
couldn't write an eight page thing like he wanted eight pages that's about as much as you need for
#
a film he said eight pages of text you give it to me and but i started writing it very long and
#
then i thought no i i can't write to his story i can't do this and i didn't do it uh so i can
#
only write the stories that i generate inside my head and that is what i will will do but um at
#
that point in the in the in the airplane from jaipur to bombay coming back from jlf and thinking
#
about about the rest of my life i remember thinking uh this is where i wanted to go all along
#
i wanted to be free everything about about the rest of my life was heading here to this moment
#
when i'm going to jump ship from a job and from regular employment of any kind like even teaching
#
and i want to be free to roll out of bed and decide what i want to do so if tomorrow i want
#
to write a murder mystery i will i will let myself write if i want to write romance i will
#
i will i will write what i want to write because otherwise there's no point being free you know
#
there's no point being free if you're even allowing who you were to be a part of the
#
constriction right the jerry who wrote m in the big home or the jerry wrote murder and mahi or
#
the jerry wrote the education of yuri i'm not going to constrict today's jerry because that's
#
not what i did this for otherwise i could have you know taken a job uh made a lot of money bought a
#
big that big house you know taken a loan had my annual vacation abroad didn't none of the things
#
that that that society mandates enough that an upwardly mobile middle class young man with no
#
encumbrances would want but i decided that i would want what i wanted and stick with my wants
#
and so i'm pretty happy to be here but i will not compromise on the freedom part of it
#
if tomorrow i run out of cash and there's nothing else to do i'll go back to a job because i have
#
to do it as long as i don't have to do it i'm going to run my life on the basis of what jerry
#
pinto wants to do when he gets up in the morning so often people say uh you know i'm so glad you're
#
translating and right now i want to translate and i will as soon as i don't want to translate i won't
#
because that's again my freedom my choices let's talk about translation sure um you know when i was
#
chatting with shanta the susan sontag quote came up and i forget the exact quote but it's to the
#
effect of how there is so much great literature ignored just because it's in languages that it
#
almost becomes a responsibility of sorts to kind of get some of it out there right now like i know
#
translators who'll do like three four books a year and almost like by the numbers and they're
#
kind of uh churning it out but everything that you've translated seems to be much more thought
#
out much more organic coming from a specific uh places like for example you know i have not seen
#
mandu right swadesh deepak's book and there's a process by which you know his son is sharing a
#
story of the mental illness of his dad and that was part the first chapter of that wonderful book
#
the book of light and then you translated this and while reading this i'm thinking that okay
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this is really interesting to me to read and obviously i'm reading your translation and not
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the original because this is someone who hasn't felt perhaps a responsibility to to structure
#
a narrative the way people would expect to tell a story the way people would ask you know he's
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just going like dance like no one's looking yeah right he's just going with it and as an as a
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translator that must both i guess for you be uh exciting but also terrifying because then
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then you know obviously translation is almost an act of creation of its own you know in the sense
#
that you can't ever actually translate anything languages are so different so you're getting the
#
essence of it and you're sort of recreating it and what is that process like because to do that
#
you're necessarily kind of entering the head of his person adopting his rhythms embracing his vibe
#
and kind of going with that what in general or with mandu are you asking both in general i think
#
the act is an act of of kind of mystical ventriloquism is the only way i can put it
#
and i'm saying mystical despite the fact that i know that it is subject to loads of fuzzy
#
interpretation i'm using could use the word mystical but mystical ventriloquism for me is
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uh to begin with the process is uh the recognition that i must i must leave jerry pinto's ego at the
#
door but i must bring all of jerry pinto's learning to the action okay so or everything
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that i have experienced in language everything that i have experienced in in writing must come
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to be and be brought to bear on this act of translation except for my ego that has to be
#
left at the door with most of the of the writing there is of that of the translation that i have
#
done there have been recognizable forms in the sense that the autobiography the memoir the novel
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the interconnected short stories even the poems you know are all part of a trans of a of a corpus
#
now this i have not seen mandu was an outlier because i have not read anything like that before
#
in and i have always said that i have i have an addiction to uh to psychological stuff to reading
#
about the brain the mind the diseased brain the troubled mind the unquiet mind simply because of
#
my history so where other boys you know might consume that pornography in that way i was addicted
#
to reading about these accounts and i would read them everywhere and everywhere i found that there
#
was a uh okay if you take uh darkness visible for instance magnificent book right unquiet minds by
#
k jameson i think excellent book but what you do have is a sense of the returned spirit that that
#
happened to me yes and it was bad yes but now i will tell you about it and i'm really on solid
#
ground right now with mandu i am not on solid ground uh there are lingering traces and odors
#
of the of of the problem uh you don't know how because i didn't know swadesh tipak when he was
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alive i read all the work that i could possibly read before i uh i i started work on on the book
#
and i realized that if i had not read his work i was not going to be able to navigate this book
#
because who is captain suraj singh why is he important i suddenly realized that he's talking
#
to court martial his play in where suraj singh is a is an important character is the man who's being
#
court martial i mean who's running the court martial now if i do not know this i am not going
#
to be able to to uh to get this here who is maya bakshi and why does she turn up in in the
#
fantasies again i have to go back to the short stories and discover the maya bakshi there so
#
eventually that time became swadesh deepak immersion time the constant obsession that he
#
has with men who do not work but still have women who love them is it a running trope through the
#
through the over almost it turns up in the short stories in a play in in flight 50 squadron 54
#
so a novel of his it's yeah it's everywhere uh now this doubles back suddenly into
#
when you have been disabled by mental illness and you no longer can work it's as if that fantasy
#
of being the the stud literally who would be supported the gigolo at a certain level also
#
who would be paid for that fantasy suddenly comes true in a terrible way because he must now he
#
loses his job he can't work anymore and his wife treats him with contempt you know and his sexual
#
drive is also like completely lost because of the tablets that he's taking so he's he's he's got
#
nothing and it's out of that the you know i i think i talked yesterday about finding a space
#
from which to write this is a man writing in free fall wow yeah so there is nothing in this book
#
there are no there are risks taken which are beyond the way he talks about krishna sobhati
#
and how she overheard somebody saying we must do your collective short stories swadesh
#
and the next day called up and said i'm not publishing with you ever again because you're
#
bringing out swadesh's short stories before you brought out mine and and actually terminates that
#
that she krishna sobhati kills his claims kills that project dead because she felt challenged
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challenged by him right so i mean it's it's kind of he is he has as you said if you have nothing
#
to lose then what do you care he has nothing so he's writing out of nothing and what made it
#
plungeant really like more than anything else was the fact that you would want the closing chapter
#
to be the curtains slowly draw the camera withdraws in a golden evening there's swadesh at his table
#
writing his next play with his family gathered around him everything has healed slowly they
#
they're beginning their their journey back and of course the story does not end that way it ends
#
with him vanishing you know and i think nirupama that has done a nice piece on something called 52
#
was there's a long thing 52 about the afterlife of swadesh deepak after the after this this vanishing
#
thing but i have the the whole of this presented together is it's almost beyond my comprehension
#
and i think one of the first things that you bring to a translation is comprehension
#
literally so while i was translating while i was reading it i didn't notice when i started
#
translating it i noticed one in really important thing that like many other writers in indian
#
languages which are not english he was an english teacher and therefore had a very difficult
#
relationship with english and so in in hospital when he begins to speak english it is because
#
he's in a in a state of hymania he calls english the language of liars but he quotes english poetry
#
endlessly right so it is obviously it's it's one of those much beloved but savage mistresses
#
who are hated and loved at this in in the same measure for him and this was i mean it was
#
it was immense as a as a exercise i remember actually beginning to feel the trailing ends
#
of depression also working on the on the project because it was it was deep emotion in in swadesh
#
deepak it was reading uh you know reading like five or two or three short stories every morning
#
then working on on the on the translation then trying reading the play aloud because now the
#
ideas that we'll uh we've put together uh so nirupama and i have translated three of the of
#
the of the full length plays and we're doing a sukanth and i have done but we're also using
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pratik kanjilal's translations and um we're doing the short stories the original idea for this was
#
that i wanted to say let's make a chain okay here's the thing i feel you translate a book
#
by ranal pandey say and you put it out it has lost its um symbiotics it has lost its ecosystem
#
it's now like a baobab standing in the middle of bombay even and it's fascinating to see a baobab
#
but without its context it's just it could just be rendered into exotica right so i had this idea
#
that we should bring out i have not seen mandu with the plays at the same time and the short stories
#
and allow for a three-way conversation to develop to say that if you really are interested when
#
you're reading this this masterwork that is mandu you could also read court martial and the place
#
the saddest poem ever and you could also read the short stories didn't work out that way for various
#
reasons which are related to publishing and you know just boring reasons so but we will bring them
#
out eventually so eventually there will be this i hope that swadesh deepak will be located in
#
in at least the miniature ecosystem of his own writing so that you'll have all some samples of
#
what he did all over the place right have i said this yesterday that i so envy the rachnavali idea
#
which that that hindi publishers do you didn't say this they bring out everything everything the
#
writer ever wrote so there's a parsai rachnavali which is in seven or eight volumes as you know
#
the big writers all have their rachnavatis two hypothetical questions for you think of the writer
#
you most love or the first name that comes to your mind right now you don't even need to tell me
#
you don't even need to tell me think of the writer you most love and then think if somebody offered
#
to put all his all all her his or her unpublished work online so that you can read that and get a
#
full sense of all his writing all his drafts all his whatever uh would you jump for joy yes
#
totally backstories i love backstories right so now if someone is to tell you jerry pinto that
#
the you know you wrote 700 000 words of him in the big home totally after my death do what you want
#
all my after your death no no all my papers have gone to this study center for indian literature
#
and english and translation which is in the american college madurai madurai i went there
#
to do a lecture after paul love died which was a pity because i'd have liked to meet him as well
#
because institution builders are also interested in i'm interested in meeting them i was very
#
impressed by the by the the library and i asked them if they would like to have my papers and
#
they said that they would be honored which was very sweet of them so i send them i send them the
#
paper everything i have sent them everything and eventually my diaries i have not sent because i
#
still feel i might need them at some point of time i i need those they are my slush pile you
#
know like they're also like i think sometimes like they are my my mind i have to have them to
#
hand so i haven't sent them but everything if they want to make everything available they're
#
welcome to and i think the reason why i'm saying after my uh after my death is is let i would like
#
to live with the with the fruit of endeavor saying hey these are the finished products
#
so but i don't mind you know i i think it would be very um it would be a good learning experience
#
for anybody to see that that's 700 000 words and see how much drek i am capable of producing as
#
well i don't think i'm strong enough to let it happen right now but soon sure a couple of days
#
before uh uh recording this and we are record this the 19th of jan right now and a couple of
#
days ago bob dillon released an unreleased version of his song not dark yet from the album time on
#
a mind which is produced by daniel lenois and lenois had often said that there was another
#
version of the same song which he really liked a lot so dillon actually made a video and put
#
that version out and it's fascinating and the original song is one that i love so much that
#
obviously your instant impulse is to not like this so much and i feel that that darkness and
#
the somberness of the original isn't quite here uh this is but but i love that you know even that
#
the documentary film with all the beetles footage and yeah you know i love that i think
#
i think you know false starts humanize us yeah and missteps are also really important and i think
#
i often sometimes read a novel and think
#
isn't this a misstep you know like if you had waited a little while would it have been i really
#
don't think i think what social media has done the most damage it has done after of course the cyber
#
bullying and the and the miseries of trolling and and people you know committing suicide over
#
you know committing suicide over over things that we can't quite understand the depth of that of that sorrow
#
i think it is the impatience for um for validation you want validation soon so you're writing a novel
#
and you want that novel to come out and and i remember a young person sending me a novel
#
i read it and i read about 30 pages then i called him up and i said uh you're you're really sharp
#
you're bright and you will write a very good novel one day but this is not it so just like i mean you
#
know don't don't even like just dump it that's great and very kind advice and i wish someone had
#
given it to me once upon a time but you know so there's a thought i have that deep you know with
#
chat gpt and all that stable diffusion dali all of that people are talking about ai and i am a big
#
ai optimist in the sense that i think people make a couple of fundamental errors when they dis ai
#
and one of them is that they overestimate human consciousness human consciousness is a very messy
#
thing bad at processing stuff the self-delusional and so on and so forth and given the same material
#
uh i think other consciousnesses can emerge and we should have more humility about that
#
about the our own limits and what um what ai could achieve and what i also think is that
#
people are judging ai by the state of it right now you know by gpt3 which tells me jerry pinto
#
has won a padma shri for example and can kind of hallucinate but that is like judging computing
#
in general by looking at one of those early massive mainframes which has two mb of memory
#
and saying this won't do it so i think eventually a time will come and i can't say when
#
because we tend to overestimate the short term underestimate the long term all of that
#
but i think a time will come when you know i can just feed it into a program that
#
good books will come out of it and i don't see that as a threat to humans or to artists or to
#
creators because what i have realized is that for me the joy of art is in the process that i'm
#
sitting i am writing i'm shaping myself in the process of writing and i'm coming up with something
#
that people like and that is kind of joyful and you mentioned false starts and we spoke about
#
those beetle steps and we spoke about those little drafts and in a sense mandu also right
#
any traditional person would say go back and work on it or edit it shape it yeah shape it
#
but it's good that it dealt yeah totally and i think you know hats off to the hindi editors
#
who of Kathadesh and of the i think it was Vani originally who brought it out because they just
#
they respected its odd shape and this i think is the central thing when when in publishing you
#
you know the lineaments of the novel you know what a novel should look like but you should also be
#
able to recognize what the novel could possibly be and then leave it for that so ai i think will
#
always be limited by that because it will have to have the lineaments fed in actually no i think
#
that's a misconception people make that you know we often the mistake we make is we tend to think
#
in terms of computing is limited by input you know we think machine learning models go way
#
beyond that and i really realized this in a different context when alpha zero came out
#
where if you're familiar with what was happening in chess and computing
#
the best computers were way better by the turn of the century than humans were way better
#
so you had a series of computer programs eventually emanating in a version of something
#
called stockfish which could do x number of million calculations and you know if magnus
#
carlson is 2850 stockfish would be 3600 it was kind of like that way beyond any human
#
humans used it for pedagogy and in an interesting way it did not make chess played by humans
#
mechanical and boring it made it more exciting and creative but that's a different subject
#
but what alpha zero did was it didn't go by the input output brute force way it was machine
#
learning alpha zero played played chess with itself for 24 hours and learned from that and
#
then it played stockfish which was the best machine in the world and stockfish did about
#
10x calculations per second and alpha zero it did less calculations but it had figured out the
#
heuristics for the correct play and it destroyed stockfish right and the thing about it is that
#
it doesn't understand itself and we don't understand it you know peter heinie nelson who
#
is magnus carlson's coach once said that i used to wonder what it will be like if an alien comes
#
from a superior intelligence and plays chess and now i think i know so people are kind of
#
guessing at what alpha zero knows by studying the games and figuring out from there that yeah
#
we used to overvalue material versus initiative you know and so on and so forth you kind of
#
figure that stuff out yeah i suspect that anyone who tries to do the crystal ball thing is going
#
to end up looking fairly stupid yeah yeah because we at the end of the day using limited human
#
imagination when we are actually delimiting the computers in a way we're just saying like all of
#
you get together and do the do the stuff i have i do i i i'm thinking also to myself suppose for
#
instance i fed all of pg woodhouse into the game and said game give me a birdie booster story by
#
tomorrow morning and a birdie booster story came out that i really enjoyed reading would i resent
#
the fact that it was not woodhouse would i resent the fact that it was not like the human hand had
#
not touched it but this was and i think not because eventually at the end of the day it's the it's the
#
taste of the pudding it you know if it's good it's good and it is an intelligence i mean if you look
#
at like what is a large learning model a large learning model like what is fair into gpt is you
#
take a humongous amount of material out there and you feed it to it and it goes through all of that
#
and then it becomes predictive about what should come next in a particular context and i believe
#
gpt4 is orders of magnitude more content than gpt3 does and what are we how do our brains work they
#
work on exactly this you know we experience stuff we read stuff and everything we experience and
#
everything we read and listen to is actually so limited and out of that we construct a self and
#
we construct a voice and we construct art and it is incredibly arrogant to say that this is the
#
optimal way of doing it that there cannot be superior consciousness is doing art that is as
#
entertaining i know i agree i think because but only because i think the only impediment to this
#
is is habit yeah that we have the habit of saying the artisanal the individual the one piece type
#
the uniqueness is what gives value and actually perhaps it's just experience that gives value
#
so if the if you can commission five more novels in the in the modern series if you enjoy them
#
that will be the only standard yeah and that's fine i think yeah though honestly to be able to
#
create all of uh to be able to write a new woodhouse novel you wouldn't only need all
#
of woodhouse you'd need everything else from the same period in society and whatever
#
but it's eminently doable but i'm also assuming that if you want a new woodhouse novel by then
#
all the 1920s stuff would already large learning have been fed into yeah exactly so it'll have
#
including the woodhouse i don't you think you'd need to feed it in it would be there
#
somewhere in those big voluminous brains yeah and i'm not scared of being made irrelevant
#
by this because i just think that you know what i get joy from i'll still get joy from
#
you know the one day it is possible that you could just go to an ai and say i want to hear
#
amit varma and jerry pinto have an eight-hour conversation and it could use our voices and
#
come up with something and uh yeah i think so i think it would require a lot of uh i i also
#
have the feeling that eventually you'll be paying for this right now it's free i know i i i think
#
the other way around yeah i i because all technology gets cheaper what are we actually
#
paying for if you think about it are we paying for maps for example which is a magical technology
#
and once upon a time when maps for when gps first came to these really fancy luxury cars
#
the highest end mercedes yeah that's what you had to pay but i think eventually all of it gets
#
much cheaper also yeah also great pass so i've i've taken a lot of your time and i'm so grateful
#
that you you know you chose to do this but uh i'm sort of going to uh end it now in a traditional
#
way uh i ask all my guests before we end the show to recommend books music films which mean a lot
#
to them so not necessarily reading in a prescriptive sense it's good for you but just that these give
#
you joy and you want to share them with the world okay sure uh as far as books go i'd say there's a
#
book by margaret craven called i heard the owl call my name which i read fairly i mean i've read
#
two or three times in my life i've enjoyed very much um then uh other books helen hanf uh 84
#
charring cross because that's an old favorite um i'd say charles dickens uh great expectations
#
little dorrit bleak house oh side um uh middle march by george elliot amazing work uh side
#
shonagon the pillow book of sai shonagon the tale of genji by the lady murasaki oddly enough book
#
that i've read very often is my experiments with truth by gandhiji which i also think is important
#
um uh it's this is lovely a lovely feeling i'm sorting through in my head i'm thinking um let's
#
see ariel by silvia plath uh jezuri by aurun kulhatkar amazing that's i did a uh a little
#
group of people who are kind of spiritual seekers and i read one poem of jezuri every day to them
#
over like the 30 day period great moment for me i think they enjoyed it as well it was very nice
#
lovely feeling um did you know aurun kulhatkar yes yes uh he was uh he was he was difficult to
#
know in the sense that um he was very quiet very very uh uh introverted and often i saw him and
#
and he seemed to be in the in the middle of something and i didn't want to disturb him
#
but many years later when i told him that he said how stupid you should have but i don't know i
#
still think it was it's nice to have uh that he i think great to be left alone
#
missing person adil jasa wala very important to me uh
#
all about hatter jivi desani really important interestingly enough for me it's alman rushdie
#
is represented in my head by the ground beneath her feet maybe because it's a bombay novel
#
a fine balance by roentgen mistri actually very deeply moving a book and strangely enough this
#
uh tales from ferocia bagh as well um clockwork orange definitely by anthony burges then films i
#
think uh a lot of pedro almodovar very important just for the fact that there's color there's
#
texture mala edu cassion i suppose then amorish peroz uh ozu all the time go back to him regularly
#
i like the iranians very much i know this sounds very
#
cliched but i really enjoy the fact that they they do some extraordinary stuff uh samira makmal buff
#
uh samira makmal buff also um i spent uh you know the crack paladar you remember paladar
#
used to bring out dvds in india very vaguely the names are familiar ala upside down they brought
#
out a whole bunch of of ingrid bergman i mean engmar bergman sorry and i found silenced uh some
#
of them autumn sonata and especially the autobiographical films very very strange i
#
mean i remember being very impressed by them when i saw them the first time but in a distant kind
#
of way and maybe because i'm aging now the they're much much more potent now and i want to see them
#
10 years from now to see how how much more potent they get you mentioned aging and i remember a
#
film i used to love as a kid was wild strawberries and perhaps i should see that again for some
#
you know with new eyes yeah music
#
started listening to opera you know uh just because i i feel uh that if you have to be over
#
the top then you have to be opera over the top that's like properly taking but bollywood can
#
also go properly over the top and therefore yeah but uh often with kitsch yeah whereas opera takes
#
itself very seriously and goes over the top seriously and fully expects you to come with it
#
oh and again it sounds like i'm i you know it used to be so natural and easy to say it but
#
the mahabharat you know but i have to say it because it is i have not read anything like it
#
and you know when just surrendering to the text has become central you know because then you
#
just begin to flow through the stories and you're trying to control the narrative and you're trying
#
to say okay i want to know who everyone is and and fit everyone into each other and and make sure
#
that you then you get nowhere because it is just too is there also a problem with reading something
#
like a mahabharata with there being two readers like one is a reader who's read eravati karve
#
yuganta so on and so forth and you're looking at all of that and you're looking at modern society
#
and you're saying that hey the same fault line same whatever and that affects your reading but
#
on the other hand as a story as an epic as all the drama yeah so sham beningal's kalyug was very
#
important to me at one point also i have i think it was because he benegal babu came back to the
#
city after a long while spent spent in the in uh in like village settings and he did the city
#
very well and very intelligently i think i suppose i think hungry tide uh because that uh you know if
#
you if you but if you the way it dealt with the environment the way it dealt with with landscape
#
the way it dealt with with the the imminent collapse of a civilization that is dependent
#
is dependent upon the vagaries of of water and land and very very organic and and under your
#
fingernails i enjoyed it tremendously i remember reading it slowly and and uh when did aniga
#
hinduism and on in both of which are you know for bedside reading because you could just jump in
#
anywhere and and take off and and enjoy the enjoy the love you know um
#
going up and down uh ranjit's lull did that's brilliant that's brilliant i enjoyed that
#
tremendously um i i often feel very tempted to learn kashmiri just to see what he did like
#
are you sure this is staying with the text because it sounds fabulous but then i am you know i i when
#
i started doing my own the and to swallow the sun i realized that it is this is it's just our
#
our old-fashionedness that we expect them to be old-fashioned you know it's just an old-fashioned
#
way of viewing it's just stupid i love the arvind krishnam erotra's kabir also oh yeah oh his absent
#
traveler yeah oh water collection really there's one lovely poem about a mother saying to her
#
daughter yes dear i have married you to an old man but the village in which he lives has tall
#
bamboos by the river where many handsome men come to bathe what an apology brilliant
#
uh these my words unis de susan melanie silgardo's anthology which took in so many languages and so
#
many cultures and must have been a huge effort to do um yeah that's wonderful jerry thank you so
#
much no problem such a pleasure
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
#
pick up as many of jerry's books as you can he's not active on tv but he's not active on tv
#
he's not active on twitter but i am and you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can
#
browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
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