Big Bookshelf , livre ebook

The Big Bookshelf

SUNIL SETHI in Conversation with 30 Famous Writers
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Javed Akhtar
Jeffrey Archer
Nadeem Aslam
Chetan Bhagat
Upamanyu Chatterjee
William Dalrymple
Shobhaa D
Anita Desai
Kiran Desai
Mahasweta Devi
Umberto Eco
Ken Follett
Patrick French
Amitav Ghosh
Nadine Gordimer
G nter Grass
Ramachandra Guha
Mohsin Hamid
Suketu Mehta
Ved Mehta
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Orhan Pamuk
Salman Rushdie
Amartya Sen
Vikram Seth
Bapsi Sidhwa
Khushwant Singh
Alexander McCall Smith
Paul Theroux
Mark Tully
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
To all those who regard books as enduring companions in life
Introduction
In late 2004, Radhika and Prannoy Roy of NDTV held a series of meetings to decide on programming for the network s new business channel, NDTV Profit. A considerable amount of business channels daily news is devoted to analysing stock market behaviour. But since markets close on Friday afternoon and reopen on Monday morning, a range of strong television features would be required to cover the weekend.
That afternoon, smart ideas were being tossed around like market indices. I had come out of presenting a weekly arts and entertainment omnibus for some years. Should it be revived or tweaked in a new avatar? Radhika Roy, an avid reader and book buyer, interrupted to ask why there was no quality literary programme to be seen anywhere, but no one in the room seemed enthused. I was bemused by the idea. Books are difficult to put across week after week on what is, after all, a visual medium-no film clips, no performances, no colourful art. Besides, I pointed out that writers, or the few I had interviewed, were cagey and not very forthcoming about their art. Who would watch, I wondered, unless it was Salman Rushdie revisiting the fatwa? Would conversations end up with long pauses, like an Atal Bihari Vajpayee speech?
But Radhika was convinced it was worth a shot. No, I think the show should only be about books. We shouldn t mix it up. It should be just books. In fact, there you are-let s call it Just Books . Sunil, I think you should give it a shot.
Mainly as a way of organizing my own sparse thoughts, I began tapping out a few ideas on what the segments of the show might focus on- Book Pills for short takes on literary happenings of the week; My Bedside Book in which well-known people talk about their favourite books; the week s best-seller list; and My Pick , a list of new titles in bookshops. The last segment, I thought, should be the show s main strength-an interview with a writer on a book that was just out. But where were the authors? I had to bank a few interviews before the show was due to go on air in a few weeks.
Just Books went on air on 5 February 2005. But the murmurs of approval were not enough to quell my apprehensions about being able to sustain the show. I discovered that I needed to do a couple of things to move ahead. The first was to net a few exclusives with big international names for the show to be noticed. The trouble with opportunities is not that they don t come, the English writer E.M. Forster once observed. It is that they are not punctual. Persistence, however, can beat the waywardness of opportunity. The first star author I managed to corner was the Italian novelist Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose , between a lecture and dinner at the Italian embassy, brazenly bundling him into the ambassador s study, where the cameras and lights were set up. He turned out to be a figure so captivating in his ideas, wit and expansive personality that we decided to run the full half-hour with him. But persistence, too, needs a little help from friends-for instance, when all attempts to reach the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer failed, I found a resourceful hotel manager to smuggle in a fervent handwritten plea.
The challenge was, and remains, for the show to reach out to new viewers, to break away from the notion of being an exclusive literary club and include those who are not necessarily professional writers. There are many among the great and the good who write and are published, even if it is just the one book, because they have something original to say about their lives or their subjects. It is a fact of our times that many people in the public orbit become hyphenates. You have the actor-memoirist, the civil-servant-novelist, the politican-poet and the corporate-honcho-turned-soothsayer on India s future. These began to alternate with Booker Prize winners and first-timers, thriller writers and unstoppable best-sellers, historians, journalists, jurists and crusaders-if they had a book that was talked about, then they had a booked space, though rights of admission are reserved. Eventually, I came to think of Just Books as a kind of literary adda , a place where writers, of whatever persuasion, open up about their work, their lives, their causes. But I also recognized the limitations of certain categories of writers. Lofty punditry and God-like voices (spiritual, business and self-help gurus) are best avoided. Some titles spell their own exclusion: Bharatanatyam Mudras Explained and Illustrated , or 101 Positions-The Story of Ecstasy. And there are writers so plainly derivative that I could set up a pavement stall of campus capers, chick-lit dramas and a farrago of look-alike thrillers.

Readers buy books because they want to be gripped by a story, engaged by an author s ideas or be better informed about the world they inhabit. But they also want to know more about the books they read, and in the process, about the lives of those who write, their motivations, and the labours of the writer s craft. How is a writer made and what is the nature of the writing impulse? Are writers born with a burning creative drive or do they steadily hone their art? How do they shape their characters and stories in fiction, or develop their subjects and themes in non-fiction? The advent of Just Books also coincided with-and gained from-the progress of the writer-celebrity. Writers like Shobhaa D and Chetan Bhagat have become pop-culture icons, with a vast fan following and staggering book sales.
Just Books has soldiered on for 300 interviews over six years. But TV shows don t easily lend themselves to the kind of documentation and instant access we are used to in our web-driven age. Many of the writers I interviewed had so much of value to say on life, letters and the human condition in general that they deserved the more permanent home that a book provides, rather than the ephemeral TV screen. The thirty interviews reproduced here, about one in every ten recorded, are a representative but not random selection. Many of the questions recur time and again. But the answers are diverse, complex and often surprising.
Several of the writers featured in this book did not set out to be writers or poets at all; they found their vocations by accident. The Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wanted to be an artist and studied architecture. The poet and novelist Vikram Seth wrote incredibly unskilful poetry as an undergraduate at Oxford and his first book, an account of an overland journey from China to India, was produced while researching his PhD in Chinese demography. It was written at the behest of his father who suggested that he put down his adventures in a book. Khushwant Singh trained as a lawyer and worked as a diplomat before starting to write fiction, and he was forty-one before his first novel was published. I flopped at everything I did in my early years. I threw up job after job. I became a writer because my generous and remarkable father stood by me. I lived off his bounty for years, he admits candidly. The immensely popular film lyricist Javed Akhtar took to writing poetry at an age, thirty-two or thirty-three, when people generally stop writing poetry . He was so busy pursuing a successful career as a screenwriter that he had to be coerced by the movie mogul Yash Chopra to write his first songs for the film Silsila in 1981.
Others were writing from an early age, privately filling up notebooks. The novelist Anita Desai, nominated three times for the Booker Prize, wrote from as far back as she could remember but came to think of writing as a secret activity . As a wife and mother raising four children, she would write in hiding. My children always remark that they never saw me writing. And the book would one day appear, as though it just happened; it came from somewhere else. In contrast, her daughter Kiran Desai, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, although inspired by her mother s example, was propelled by no such early desire: I was twenty years old when I started writing. My mother fought for her art and she fought to be able to write. I didn t have to fight that fight.
Early or late, single-minded or circuitous, every writer s journey begins with the pursuit of a particular idea or subject. This was more apparent in the case of writers of non-fiction. A person, a place or even a line embedded in a poem could trigger off the creative process and ineluctably change the course of their lives. The Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi felt the urgency to explore the oral legends surrounding the life of the Rani of Jhansi for her first book, a biography of the warrior-queen, with such intensity that I borrowed money from relatives, got into a train, left behind a small baby with his father and went to Jhansi. Similarly, the British biographer Patrick French s lodestar led him to follow in the footsteps of Sir Francis Young husband, the nineteenth-century Victorian explorer whose expeditionary invasion of Tibet in 1903-04 led to one of the worst colonial massacres in the subcontinent. The result was a compelling historical narrative shot through with the bizarre truths of a strange and secret life. Often, the need to investigate such stories was bolstered by a writer s ne