She also spoke to a therapist “to see if I was trying to hide from something or mediate my relationship to his dying, and she actually, to my surprise, said: ‘If you feel like you need to film, you should film.’” “My family, therefore, is very used to being documented by me, so they didn’t think the multi-camera setup was really anything.” “I just document everything all the time,” she says. I realise that most stories are complex, but if you take the effort to explain something as straightforwardly as you can, your friend, your enemy, the stranger, may turn around and say, "You know, that's exactly how I felt." There is no greater achievement.As the extended family gathered in her parents’ Pasadena home, Timoner set up cameras and kept them running. Any advice/pearls of wisdom to aspiring writers? It took me a long time to learn that the key to good writing - at least for me - is simplicity, to try to tell a story as honestly as I can. And so many others! The writing bug has hit many an Indian, and how!. Etger Keret for his humanity, Haruki Murakami for his language. Tony Judt, who just passed away last year, China Mieville and Terry Pratchett for their willingness to take on immense questions of morality and politics. Authors that you look up to? Too many to count, some I've mentioned above, but also Jim Corbett and George Orwell, who I consider Indian writers because this is where they were born and grew up. It is on Bhutan, and if I could tell you in a sentence I wouldn't be writing a book! :) It's arrogant to write about a whole country, and there is frankly too much to explain easily. Are you already on to your next novel? What is it on? Next book, which is non-fiction, and which I have been working on for years. The hunger for knowledge among the 800 million or so Indians below the age of 30 is what is driving this trend, and much of the rest of what is happening in the country. But I think the most important thing is the number of young Indians who know very little about their country - myself included, though I'm not so young now - and desperately want to know more. Suddenly, there’s a spurt of successful Indian writers who’re writing on a diverse range of subjects from campus life, and mythology to train journeys and small-town romances? Is it a boom time for writers, is it a passing phase, or is it more lucrative now, therefore more people are drawn to it? I am not sure you can disconnect the financial part from the larger one, although writing, except for the stars, is not a paying profession. The second was largely ignored when it was published, but the last two have done very well. The first manuscript I worked on took me more than ten years to finish, and I doubt it will ever be published. Having heard so many stories made me feel like telling one from my own perspective. I read a lot as a child, and still try to read as much as I can. How did you get into writing, and how has this journey been so far? For me writing is kind of like conversation. I can just say that it feels good to win. You could say that it is a modern phenomenon, which it is, but literature is an older thing, and maybe it is too early to tell - only the test of time can really validate literature and none of us live long enough to see that. Premchand, Manto or Iqbal received very little in the way of awards. Some of our greatest writers were never awarded. How do awards validate your work? Again, hard to say. I may not accept all that they say, but I listen. I ask for their opinion, and they are kind enough to extend that sort of time and effort to helping me out. I do not know how others deal with it, but I have a core group of people whose opinion I deeply respect. As Edward Said showed in his work "Orientalism', the persistent negative imagery about non-Western countries made the job of colonialism easier, casteist, misogynist and racist stories have real consequences, but so does the failure to examine sensitive issues. Given that these are sensitive times we’re living in, how careful were you to confine your writing to a certain degree of political correctness and sensitivity if you will? Do writers have the patience or temperament to be bogged down by niceties or concerns such as these? That is a difficult question, with no easy answer. No, because many people are just making a point rather than engaging in a conversation. Yes, because the issues of small town India, the lives that are invisible in the usual writing or on TV, are important to me and so it is good to hear them discussed. did you somewhere want to set off a debate/discourse with this work? Or, this is a spin-off you’re happy with but one that you hadn’t thought of while penning this book? When you write about contemporary politics, in any manner, you have to be prepared that people will simply use your writing as a way to express their own opinions, rather than engage with the story.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |