Amitava Kumar
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.
Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
I have to tell you, when I hear the song 'Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,' I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!
Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.
I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you to the past.
In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.
My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
The lives of the young are so tumultuous.
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.
I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.
To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.
For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.
Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?
Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.
What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story?
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
If the 20th century was marked by travel - planes in flight - then the events of 9/11 ushered in the age of the burning aftermath.
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.
My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.
Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.
You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you'll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.
I identify in some measure with each of my characters.
With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.
We take literature too seriously.
Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.
I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter.
The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.