Writer Uday Prakash has always recoiled from the rich, the powerful and the pompous. He tells Shougat Dasgupta that mockery is the only recourse of the weak in Tehelka.

Uday Prakash is proud of the accent walls in his flat; he painted them himself, without help. He is proud too of his rooftop garden. The upholstery on the outdoor furniture may be fraying, faded by the city’s extreme weather and dusty from the nearby construction but all of it — the plants, the furniture, the manybooks in his study downstairs, the computer — is the fruit of his ceaseless labour. He has considerable pride in his independence, his self-reliance. Now 61, he is perhaps less content by the fact of his hard-won recent success than by the way in which it was attained — without favour, without a leg-up in an industry, indeed a country, oozing with nepotists, flatterers, favour-curriers and mutual backscratchers.