BE yourself. Know yourself. Write what you feel absolutely compelled to write. Don’t examine too closely what comes to you naturally.
If you were to distill acclaimed Indian novelist-poet-translator Vikram Seth’s thoughts on being a writer in 50-odd words, these sentences would pretty much sum them up.
In the Indian city of Chandigarh recently for the second Prof. Urmi Kessar Memorial Oration at Panjab University (PU), Seth was at his charming best as he parried interlocutor Dr. Pushpinder Syal and the audience, which had come to the event in the hope of learning the secret to becoming a successful writer.
But first, Seth talked about his three ties to Chandigarh. The first, he said, proved to be “ashubh” (bad): He suffered from jaundice soon after pedalling down from the city of Dehradun to Chandigarh at 13 years old. The second was his mother, the late Justice Leela Seth, who led the three-person committee tasked with choosing current PU Vice Chancellor Arun Grover.
“Your VC was chosen by my mother, so partly by me,” Seth said as he impishly grinned.
Chandigarh, Seth said, is also home to his housemaster Gurdial Singh.
“He is my guru. His house is like a shrine for me,” he said, striking a chord with the gathering of gurus as he praised his geography teacher for his integrity and his explanation of the Tropic of Cancer in Urdu.
On poetry and prose
When Syal gently steered Seth to his poetry and poetic translations, he said he was satisfied if his translations could capture even 10 percent of the original. Rhyme, he said, came to him naturally.
“Writing poetry without rhyme and meter is like playing tennis without a net,” the author added.
When Syal suggested that his poetry had an elegiac tone, Seth said, “When you write a poem, the idea is not to console yourself…You tend to write poetry when you are alone, when you are sad [or]melancholy.”
According to him, his collection “Beastly Tales” were written in a lighter vein, though four out of the 10 poems in it deal with death or violence.
“As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Life doesn’t cease to be a comedy if people die, and nor does it cease to be a tragedy if people laugh,’” he said.
On the state of literature at present, and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro‘s view that good writing and reading breaks down barriers, Seth said his view of literature wasn’t as didactic or “teachy-preachy.”
The author, who read out his English translations of three Chinese poets, admitted that writing in regional languages was not doing as well as in English.
“Writers in other languages not only have a hard time in getting heard, but also find it difficult to stay afloat,” he said.
Ever sensitive to the occasion—a family’s tribute to a wife and mother, Prof. Urmi Kessar—Seth spoke at length about his mother, the first woman chief justice of an Indian state, who decided to pen her autobiography at 78.
“It was a bit irritating to be bounced off the bestseller list by your mother,” he said, smiling.
Later, when a member of the audience pointed out how behind every successful man was a surprised woman, he recounted how his mother feared for his future when he decided to quit economics at Oxford University to start writing.
“She used to tell my younger brother to look out for me. And then, my book got this huge advance,” Seth said.
On writing
On writer’s block, he said: “Get out of it by writing something completely different.”
“I also suffer from writer’s cramp and fear of the audience,” he confessed, telling the gathering how he’d fortified himself with a drink before the oration.
On being original, he declared, “Nothing is original under the sun, except your way of saying it.”
Telling aspiring writers to not bother too much about trends, he said literature will take care of itself in the future, as well.
His only advice was Zen-like: “Don’t do anything for an hour every day. Switch off your phone, your mind, your family. Know yourself.”
That is the key.
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