There are perhaps no two ways of describing Manu Joseph. He is as he is or as one would imagine him to be after reading his works – unpretentious and to the point with a trademark humour that he slips in subtly in conversations and his styles of writing.
It was his disarming style of speaking that struck a chord with the audience who filled up the main hall of The American College and prolonged the interactive session at the Meet the Author programme. Joseph’s 45-minute crisp talk deconstructed his memories of Chennai – the city he grew up in – his journey to Mumbai and Delhi as a journalist and an author. The question-answer session followed and continued well beyond an hour-and-a-half, a rarity at such programmes here.
But Joseph, with two novels behind him -- Serious Men (2010) that won him the inaugural The Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN Open Book Award and The Illicit Happiness of Other People published in 2012 – clearly moved his audience with stories of his Loyola College days, his life in Tam Brahm colony, as a Kamal Haasan fan and even trying to become a Tamil actor by standing in a long queue for auditions and soon abandoning the idea when he felt all the others in waiting looked so depressed and dejected. And how he even collaborated with a milkman on a Tamil film script though he did not find Tamil commercial films creative and art films did not impress him till Mani Ratnam and his film Nayakan happened!
Basically Joseph drove the importance of not abandoning one’s native language and thinking. While language influences behaviour and concepts give birth to ideas, Joseph said only when young people are exposed to global intellect in their own language, their language becomes powerful. And words? They are meant to be collected by a reader but used limitedly by a writer. “I don’t write what I don’t know,” he asserted and cited the example of unnecessarily describing a meadow to make an article read beautiful when one has actually not seen one! He would rather proffer cultural influences in writing and in being subtle. Joseph recalled as a boy when he was asked the opposite of Ram, he replied Sita because he had grown up hearing and reading about Rama as the superhero. And the word ewe was alien to him because he had seen only cows on Chennai streets and not a ram!
When reading in English appealed more to him intellectually, Joseph started thinking in English and that helped him look at things as an outsider. Though English is a rich language, there is lot of crap with words for everything. “It has words that define specific ideas like socialism/chauvinism and all other isms that trap us in other peoples’ ideologies. How can multi-tasking be a word?” he asked. It is good as a concept but actually an excuse for doing something badly. Likewise ‘quality time’ is also an idea which English language introduces as a word and leaves it open to embrace a lot of nonsense. “Life is marinating in time and parents cannot improve their children by spending ‘quality time’ with them. You can only intellectually improve yourself,” he said.
To Joseph, writing is not a moral act but about observations and telling a story and leaving it open to multiple layers of meanings. He disagrees with journalists writing conclusively about farmers committing suicide due to financial problems. “So many other people have financial problems too but not all commit suicide. It has to do with psychiatric problem and copy cat syndrome that follows.”
In his writings, Joseph is guided by his own experiences as a vernacular person. But he often wonders whether the way he thinks and his emotions have the same impact on his readers. He is clear that as a novelist he only wants to tell an entertaining story and not necessarily bring a change in community but as a journalist he tends to take on people and issues.
Joseph’s quintessential quality of knowing just what and how much he has to say or write is enough for an image and curiosity to emerge. He explained why his two novels are different. The first was written when he was younger, angrier and emerging from his urban poverty and while writing the second he was more confident and self-assured. “When opportunity grows, everything changes and for a writer it becomes a true reflection. Fiction is neither an academic’s analysis nor an exaggeration. Sometimes reality is crazier,” he said.
Joseph believes humour does not stem from a language. The idea is to report accurately and because reality is so rare that people are bemused. “I get worried when people actually laugh at what I think I wrote seriously,” said the accomplished author whose third novel Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous , is slated for release next month.
