Kiran Nagarkar had quite a bad reputation among the mothers of his friends.
He was the one their mothers warned them about, to be kept away from. He was “a subversive even as a 6-year- old,” as journalist Suresh Menon described him in an interaction at the VJT Hall here on Saturday, at the Kovalam Literary Festival.
A few years later, when he went to another school, it was his usage of English language in conversations which drove his classmates at a Pune College to avoid him.
“After I failed in all subjects at St. Xavier’s, except moral science, I was sent to this college in Pune. When the students there realised that I was talking only in English, they completely avoided talking to me. So, I was forced to go to the library. I used to pick up a book every single day. That was the only time I have done any reading in my life,” he says.
Even as the questions in the interaction veered towards the more serious and conventional, Nagarkar kept going on a different tangent with his quick and, at times, wicked wit. When asked about which of his characters are more biographical and closer to the real him, he lamented that people almost always tend to identify him with the not-so-good characters.
“Come on, I have written about princes and royal families. No one asks me which royal family I belong to,” he said, to roaring laughter from the audience.
On his few writings in Marathi, he said that he “had enough of Marathi for one novel and two plays.” On his celebrated book Cuckold , he said he “tried hard not to write as I could not stand the leading lady who was perpetually missing her lover.”
For readers’ attention
Speaking about the challenges of writing in the new era, he said that to get the readers’ attention, writers need to strive for stuff which is impossible to ignore.
“At the park opposite to where I live, I see the young and old thumbing through facebook everyday. Minute by minute, every moment of your life goes on facebook. Where is the time to read? I think it’s a kind of disease,” he said.
Digressions were the one of the things which stood out in the interaction that at the end Nagarkar said, “Maybe, I should write a book on digressions.”
