Gently nudging writers to put pen to paper, comes rather easily to Suresh Menon. It isn’t an easy task though as creative people can be whimsical and tend to push the deadline-envelope as much as they could.
However Menon, has mastered this difficult art of goading the entire galaxy that straddles the written word - authors, scribes, essayists and poets - into delivering fine prose and that too on time.
It helps that he is a fine writer himself, dabbling in sport and arts, is an author and an efficient editor of varied anthologies that have sprung up in bookshops over the years.
In her book Goodnight and God Bless , Anita Nair writes: “One December morning in 2000, Suresh Menon, then the Editor of The New Sunday Express invited me to write a fortnightly column in the magazine section. It was an open brief: Write what you wish. But somewhere in the ambiguity was a gauntlet thrown: Surprise me. Surprise the reader.”
The last bit that delves into the ‘surprise-quotient,’ in a sense overwhelmingly drives Menon in his editorial garb. It is a facet that is writ large all across Wisden India Almanack - 2014 (the cricketing Bible’s Indian version) that he has edited for the second consecutive year.
It helped that Menon was dealing with a subject that was equally simple and complex, surely an extreme blend that excites wordsmiths to let themselves loose on paper and on laptops.
“Cricket at a fundamental level is an individual game - it is about one batsman facing one bowler and what emerges from that defines the sport,” he says adding, “Cricket and to a certain extent boxing have varied layers and this I say without meaning any disrespect to other sports. These layers lend themselves to literature.”
Conversing at Koshys, Menon might stick to his staple - rotis and palak chicken - but when it comes to writing, he prefers diversity. It is a preamble that defined his approach to editing the almanack. “The moment a pattern emerges, I want to break it, the key is to surprise the reader,” Menon says.
And surprise he does because besides Wisden India's respected voices such as R. Kaushik, Anand Vasu and Dileep Premachandran or senior statesmen such as R. Mohan from other publications, Menon has also featured writers as varied as Narendar Pani and Pico Iyer. Yes, you heard that right, Pico Iyer.
The man, who wrote Falling off the Map , and is the modern age’s high-priest of travel writing, has penned a charming piece on partaking in cricket, both as an observer and as a reluctant player, during his childhood in England. “I was keen that he (Pico) write for the almanack. He was reluctant and I kept at it and we exchanged mails, it is an exchange that can even be made into a book! Finally he agreed and he said that the 1500 words he wrote on cricket were perhaps all that he had about the game,” Menon says.
Besides the essays and the retrospective gaze at last year's cricket with its medley of score-sheets, Menon has also incorporated cricket-fiction written by Tariq Ali and Jayanth Kodkani.
All these textured writings fit into Menon’s recurring editorial principle: “It should be a good read.”
