(From Lit Hub. Link to the complete post given below) As an art director for the Simon & […]
reading
(From The Paris Review. Link to the complete article given below) One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old […]
(From The Paris Review. Link to the complete article given below) One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old […]
I remember the time the first Penguin India books came out. I stood in Mumbai’s now-defunct Strand Book […]
Very early on, my eight-year-old self understood that spoken words were not the same as those written. Spoken words hurt, made noise, sounded ugly, were sometimes false. Written words, when spoken aloud, sounded beautiful; even when improbable, like the antics of the ‘vanar sena’ from Ramcharitmanas recited aloud by my nani, they rang true. What makes words on paper different? Perhaps their ability to be of life, from life, while simultaneously being away from it. Maybe the reflection and thought that goes into it. I can articulate this at forty-seven. But I always knew it.
As I saw it, words, stories, poetry, writing, made up one big stew pot. You chose beautiful, sparkling words. You stirred the pot. You strung them together. They made beauty, made sense, made happiness. All the things that I thought my life lacked: grace and culture, glamour, laughter, excitement, fun, could be picked and savoured from assorted jars of words: books. Reading and writing were ideal pastimes for a lonely small-town girl like me. It let me be at once docile and dutiful; rebellious and willful. My mother and father would peep in to see me furiously scribbling or poring over a book, and feel comforted that I was a good, studious child, even if I was penning mean tirades about them or hiding yet another Agatha Christie inside my physics textbook.
Writing words cleansed me. After I wrote about what people did or said in my diary, it ceased to matter. I could smile serenely and move on.
Half of the fun in reading a book lies in going to a bookshop and browsing through the […]
“I try to read omnivorously, because I never know what’s going to spark a new idea. Often the […]
Amitava Kumar’s latest collection of essays throws a bright light on cinema and politics, life and death: The Hindu BusinessLine
Amitava Kumar is the kind of writer you get to know a bit better with every book. Here is a person who engages deeply and fully with all that is around him, whether it is the rats of Patna or the taxi drivers of New York. The words of Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author, who passed away recently, come to mind when one reads Kumar: “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal…” Lunch With a Bigot, Kumar’s most recent collection of essays — divided into Reading, Writing, Places and People — moves from literary criticism to the political, from memoir to reportage: a thinking man’s collection. While the genres might change, they are all characterised by a robust engagement with, and an examination of what is within and what is beyond. He writes with equal passion about a vast cast of characters, from Manoj Bajpai to Arundhati Roy to his own family. Even while he might delve into the political and ideological, the book ends with the most moving and acutely observed essay on the death of his mother.With five non-fiction books and a novel behind him, the professor of English at Vassar College in New York spends a night answering questions sent by email. Here he reveals the times he gasps, ‘yeh sahi cheez hai (this is the right thing), the role of writers and reporters and the Booker wins that he finds laughable. Excerpts from the interview.
The relationship of Indians with the English language is of special interest to you. In which ways do Indians use it best and in which ways do we mangle it?
I have often seen signs in Bihar, but also elsewhere in India, saying ‘Child Beer Sold Here’. I was delighted when Siddhartha Chowdhury used that in a novel. There is no pleasure in being prescriptive about language. I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning. But even as I say this, I have to acknowledge that I often get mails from people in India who want advice about writing. And while reading their letters, my first impulse, quite often, is to ask them to read George Orwell.
Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children. As […]
Stop beating yourself over not reading the “right” books. Fiction is about two things: curiosity and pleasure, says Malcolm Jones in The Daily Beast
I am a bad reader. I don’t mean that I don’t know how to read or that I don’t understand what I have read. And I’m about average when it comes to speed (no, I’ve never taken an Evelyn Woods course, but I once took their test and that’s what it said: I was smack in the middle of the pack).
No, by bad reader, I mean someone who doesn’t finish books he doesn’t like, rereads old favorites at the expense of discovering something new, doesn’t worry about being broadminded, and prefers detective stories to Hemingway or Mary McCarthy.
