“Writers are more egotistical than film stars. To be able to talk to them week after week and also get them to talk about the ruminative and reflective qualities of their work is a feat,” observed historian Ramachandra Guha, during the launch of “The Big Book Shelf” at the Landmark book store. The book, by veteran journalist Sunil Sethi, is a compilation of 30 interviews with famous writers done for NDTV's weekend literary show, Just Books. It draws attention to the famous Paris Review Interviews, a remarkable enterprise of the journal Paris Review that started in the early 50s. The series was “lauded for groundbreaking insights into the life and craft of the writer”, and Sunil Sethi's work is a step in that direction.
“I knew him long before I met him; as a brilliant-sensitive reporter of India Today of the Seventies and Eighties,” said Guha in his glowing introduction to the writer. At a time when the print media played a vital role and captured the tumult, horror and anxiety that the country was going through, journalists like Sunil Sethi made significant contributions. “He cut his teeth on many important issues and I particularly remember his story on Richard Attenborough,” recalled Guha.
But the shift is rarely easy, from the world of politics to literature. Sunil Sethi is among the few who have bridged the two worlds with élan. Guha further observed that to have a sensitive understanding of literature, a mere engagement with words will take one only half the distance, only with an immersion into life can that completeness be achieved. “The Big Book Shelf” is a testimony to Sethi's “understanding and sensitivity” and is a combination of many characters that makes the book special, he added. Guha doffed his hat to the rare balance the book achieves between fiction and non-fiction writers. “Hence you find that it packs an entire range of genres – novel, poetry, travel, history and biography.”
“With India of the Seventies and Eighties having gone by, and the magazine that I worked for undergoing a sea change, I could hardly recognise myself,” said Sunil Sethi, tracing his role as a television journalist/interviewer. His entry into television was accidental, but after a decade, Sethi was struck by the “element of sameness to the buzzing omnipotent life of the newsroom”. It was in those introspective moments that Just Books was born: an author made an appearance every week in the studios. This was an enormous challenge that left Sethi nervous. In his initial months he was busy chasing extremely elusive, hard-to-pin-down authors. He regaled the audience with stories of the unending phone calls and equally endless waits at hotel lobbies, and how some were whisked away between the lecture and dinner. “Umberto Eco was extremely funny, witty, erudite and complex. Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri said they just couldn't speak before a camera, and I let them be.” Sethi wanted the show to be a literary adda where his viewers could get as much as possible.
The enthusiastic audience had plenty of questions for the writer; summing up the interaction Guha said that it was Sethi's “rooted cosmopolitanism” which gave the book its balance, without making it an overdose of Western writers.
