Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Prashant Yadav

By Aminah Sheikh

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

I write because I love writing. It makes me feel great, perhaps even releases Serotonin in me. Maybe, Oxytocin even. And, why? Can’t pinpoint the precise reason. It’s like being in love – only feelings, no reasons.

Tell us about your most recent book or writing project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

The Jeera Packer (published by Finger Print). It takes up the internal struggle of a man who thinks he has missed the greatest opportunities of life and is now cursed to a limited, confined, boring life sans achievement. And that angst pushes him on a dangerous journey to build his own Taj Mahal, fulfil what he feels is his mission in life. And then, closely meshed is this story of deadly gangsters and goofing politicians, who he was once a part of and into whose company he is dragged in again.

The ultimate point being – we are microscopic in this giant game of cosmos and we get very little time here and spend a bulk of that in hate and regret against equally microscopic others.

Describe your writing aesthetic.

Writing to me must move, evoke a reaction. The job of the writer is to break thought and speech boundaries – to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable. Find perspectives that are hidden in plain sight. Show what we generally miss. That’s why you need a writer.

Who are your favorite authors?

Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, Khushwant Singh, Jerry Pinto, N.N. Taleb, Haruki Murakami. Granddaddy Shakespeare. Stephen King. Hemingway. Charles Bukowski.