"It is harder now for readers to concentrate on a book without looking at their mobiles to check whether there is a new alert notification. Now it is a task to acquire a greater discipline to read a novel but before it was purely a pleasure." Says Chandrahas Choudhury, the author of Arzee the Dwarf, and Clouds. 

The young novelist was speaking to mathrubhumi.com at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters 2020 (MBIFL20) at Kanakakkunnu Palace in Thiruvananthapuram.

After your first novel Arzee the Dwarf you took a long gap of eight years to write the second one Clouds. Was that a deliberate decision?

Sometimes you know what you want to write in a book. But before you write the book, the book in a way has to write you, as a human being. I found that many questions I wanted to answer in the book which I didn't have the language as a writer. I knew what I wanted to do but don't know how to do it. In that case you just have to hold up your hands and say it will take as long as it’s going to take. But in the end it doesn't feel like I wasted eight years, as it gives a genuine direction to my life in which I am travelling even after the book was finished. In the end obviously it was worth it.

While reading 'Clouds' I felt that you are obsessed with the word 'clouds' as you have used the same many times...is obsession the right term?

The term obsession is very correct. You know, in a way there are so many kinds of riches in the world and most of these riches were associated with money. But I think clouds of all these pleasures are available to all if they have the eyes to enjoy them. And in particular, I have always found that when I am stuck in my life, I like just sitting around and looking up to the clouds and it really works. We are the first people in the history to be able to see the clouds from above and not from below, to see the clouds against the world and not against the sky. So for all these things I think clouds are beautiful metaphors and in some way when you think human thought itself you must see your own thoughts are drifting and you don't exactly know to what direction these clouds are going. They will drift again and disappear. So in that way I thought it would be a nice way to do a story about the same thing, with in the same book in two different ways. On one side, there is a cloud religion and a set of people who love clouds and on the other side clouds are metaphors for what goes on in the human mind.

What is your take on technology over reading?

It is harder now for readers to concentrate on a book without looking at the mobile to check whether there is a new alert notification. So now it is a task to acquire a greater discipline to read a novel but before it was purely a pleasure. It is when You finish some novels, that you realise how much beauty and value there is in it. 

I am too far from my own youth to be able to sense what a twenty-year-old today likes. But I would say reading novels offers a good way of learning on how to become Indian in the biggest way possible. As an Indian in a diverse society we need before we are 25 or 30 to have an education in empathy for different kinds of positions. And I can’t think of a better way than novels. It's a way of telling stories from someone else's point of view such that the reader becomes the character. It is the best way of educating people in a diversity of positions there is in this world. For that reason I feel very proud of working on Indian novels because I feel like I work in a room where all are wonderful people .

What Is Your opinion about the so called Social media writers? 

Writing is one kind of art form. Writing shares a currency which is called language with everything else in the world. You can't stop anybody from writing . As long as people realise that there is only one facet of writing nothing else is important even social media. In the end there is nothing like sustained performance, it's like a music concert or film. Novel or story is like where you go out of yourself to construct a world in  which every sentence, every word is important. It is a very serious act. Even comic books are very serious in that sense, where everything is very carefully put together, it’s a craft it’s an art.

This will be a cliche term to ask "The Dilemma of Indian Writer In English"?

For a while it looks strange to be an Indian writer in english. Because so few people in the country still spoke english very well. Therefor you look like one of those white crows or black swans in a pond. It was odd. But I think the last twenty or twenty five years young india people have developed an english entirely on self conscious, like the language you and i were speaking. Maybe it's not entirely correct in terms of grammar. But, we don’t find it as an alien task. So the gap between spoken indian  english and indian english writing has become much smaller now. My generation of writers don't even think about it. It's just a language We are using. We are very keen to learn all the other books that exists in other languages of indian literature. And that's what indian nature is. We are a very multilingual society. I think english is privileged in the sense that it is often spoken, it is the language of the so-called elite class. And can easily devolve in the question of class and privilege. But seperate from that english is also a language of indian democracy as the constitution was written in english. It’s not a better way to barricade English from the rest of Indian life. There should be a room for give and take from English and other Indian languages.

What is the role of indulging politics in writings?

We are the luckiest human beings in all of Indian history. Because I always feel when someone is living in the present you look back at the past, 14th century 15th century what was a life like that and u make pictures by reading books about that. What will the Indians 500 years from now will think about us. And probably in those centuries they will look at us as very lucky Indian who were part of the first century of indian democracy, the first century when we made a huge vision of how we can be  a society how we can make a room for people from different gender, people from a different caste,and equal platform for everybody. That is what I am excited about as an Indian writer. To write stories of that first century. Stories of high and low, put them together with some things that people can't make in real life, I like to make them meeting in my book. But there is some negetive aspect, as there are lot more important topics in politics rather than discussing who is hindu who is cristian and who is muslim. it is a wrong turn for our country which is in the last six years.

What are your thoughts on literature festivals like MBIFL?

For any Indian writer it shows you how big your world is and how much you don’t know. I am coming to Kerala for the first time in eight years. During a session I heard Madhusodhanan Nair reading his poetry. I don't understand the language but that was not required to know that he is a real poet who loves his work and who can project it with his amazing musicality and confidence and that’s what you wanted to do as a writer to possess language, to make sure that pleasure is communicated to people. And in that sense Iam always grateful to literature festivals. They are just about people meeting each other and learning some stuff. My best friends in this world are people I met at literature festival. The best thing about literature which is separated from the rest of Indian life is mostly literary society is not hierarchical. In the society of writers there is nothing like seniority, being senior and junior. Hierarchy is taken away and you just live on a common platform where there are people who love books and love language. This is an endlessly expanding world. I think festivals play a big part in bringing writers and readers together and having the genuine conversation about books, a genuine conversation about words, a genuine conversation about what it is to be an Indian. It is a very successful coming together. It is a small society that shows you how to live in a big society.