So, I wore pink. I had planned to wear black but an ironing disaster got in the way. Maybe it was a good thing because the book is black and white and it would have looked like I don’t know any other colours. The launch went as launches go–I read for about half an hour. Then Sridala and I conversed, which means she asked intelligent questions and I tried to answer the questions and I remembered to ask one question back between saying lots of things about my writing, half of which I don’t remember and half of which, I will change my mind about. I’m always envious of people who work out a theory around their writing and seem like they will stick to it forever. I will get very bored if I have to stick to any theory forever. So the writing will come as it comes. And I’ll say different things about it at different times.
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Picture:
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As of now, the books are available at Sahitya Akademi outlets in major cities and in Crossword at Residency Road in Bangalore.
Also, in Bombay, People’s Book House at Fort will apparently source it from SA if you ask. Phone: (022) 22873768 , (022) 24362474. Address: 15, Ground Floor, Meher House, Cawasjit Patel Street, Fort. Landmark: Near Meher House.
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One more picture:
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I was badly prepared for the signing. I had left my pen in my bag so I had to use other people’s pens. And they were not interesting ink colours like pink or green which I generally use at home. I must remember to keep my pens ready next time. I am hoping there will be a next time in another city some time soon.
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The most difficult question Sridala asked me was to do a Kolatkar-style telling of influences. This is Kolatkar’s list:
Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, C, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller … Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.
I had real trouble with this because any list like this has got to be flippant and fun like Kolatkar’s and I wasn’t really in that sort of mood. I named some eclectic things like Ghalib, Bollywood and Neil Gaiman besides various poets–Ramanujan, Rilke, Plath, Kolatkar, D’Souza. In related news, see Aditi’s post on mood boards which I thought was a cool way to keep track of influences. I think it makes more sense than a definitive, immutable list of influences. At the moment, my mood board has Anne Carson, WG Sebald, Selima Hill, Arun Kolatkar, The Single Man (though I thought the movie was just so-so), Edward Said, heat, rain, the smell of fresh dung, Hanuman, various travel stories, a Scottish loch, some sculptures from the Louvre, some scientific concepts. Or at least, these are the things I’m conscious of.
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