Terms of enjoyment

A few renowned personalities and their guilty pleasures

Let’s admit it. Everybody has a guilty pleasure. Even Barack Obama does. In an interview with Bill Simmons, he said he liked to watch the “silly” show Big Break on Golf Channel! Sometimes, even as you are busy strutting along life’s path, soaking up all that helps you reach the pinnacle of your career, there are times you want to stop, diverge a bit, and read a comic that cracks you up. It’s fun, it’s human. And as they say, a person is a cumulative product of what he or she reads, watches and experiences. The diversity probably helps add some colour too. NAVEENA VIJAYAN attempts to crack the mystery behind what makes a few renowned personalities as entertaining as they are

Anita Ratnam

 

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he has over 1,300 performances in 37 countries over the last 40 years, specialises in Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam and Kathakali, and has blended all three styles to bring out what she calls the neo-Bharatam. Steeped in the study of dance, the better part of her year is dedicated to serving as a visiting professor at several American universities, and as the vice-president of the Association of Bharatanatyam Artistes of India (ABHAI).

 

But there is also a side to the dancer that digs into Billy Bunter stories! For those who do not know about the overweight, greedy and obnoxious character, Bunter featured in a weekly story paper called The Magnet in the early 1900s, and was later adapted into novels, comic strips, TV and radio shows. Besides Billy, Anita is a fan of Amar Chitra Katha , science fiction comics and Japanese anime.

Jerry Pinto

 

H e is one among 24 authors named for the Sahitya Akademi Award, which he will be receiving for his first work of fiction, Em and the Big Hoom. The book, published in 2012, had also won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize.

 

The journalist and author’s Em and the Big Hoom brings out mental illness with a rare clarity. But surprisingly, one of his favourites in the past was a scurrilous magazine called Film Mirror, published in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the author’s own words, “there could be nothing more despicable than that”. And yet, he enjoyed reading it . “There was this one sentence in which they quoted actress Bindu as saying in one of her interviews that her husband is ‘high on her hurdies’. Till date, I do not know what that means. But the other day, I was editing an anthology of Bollywood writing for Penguin Publishers, and I used one of the phrases that I had come across in the magazine!”

Sudeep Sen

 

H is prize-winning books include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain and Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award) to mention a few. Sen is the editorial director of Aark Arts and the editor of Atlas, and his works have been translated into 25 languages.

Google his name and you might find volumes about him being the first Asian honoured to speak and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival and also an awardee of senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature” by the Government of India.

 

What he goes back to repeatedly is Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s two book-length poems, Tiepolo’s Hound and Omeros , for “his high lyric style, intellect, rhythm and the sheer beauty and translucence.” But what Sen is also a big fan of is the adventures of Asterix and Obelix, in the classic hilarious French comic series Asterix .

Arunava Sinha

Arunava Sinha

 

H e translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English, and has won the Crossword Translation Award twice — for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right.

 

Arunava is obsessed with photographing trees, scratching puppies on their necks and watching Barcelona play. But ask him about his guilty pleasure, and he says “watching superhero movies. My favourite from the (fairly) recent lot is The Avengers from 2012, which was so full of impossible situations, stupendous feats, childlike characters and cheesy lines that there was no question of not loving it from beginning to end. It all got too serious once the sequels began.”

Ravinder Singh

C onsidered the king of romance in Indian publishing, Ravinder is well-known for his love stories, and has written five books (I Too Had A Love Story and Can Love Happen Twice? are a few to mention) and compiled two crowd-sourced anthologies.

Ravinder, known for his subtle romance in books, as it turns out, is a fan of a certain erotica called Play with Me — the debut novel of Anantha Padmanabhan (who is now HarperCollins India CEO).

 

“I loved the girl Cara in it and almost had the pleasure of visualising every bit of her through Anantha’s words. I found her breathtakingly seductive,” says the author, who has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad), and is the founder of a publishing venture called Black Ink — a platform for debut authors. Prior to turning full-time writer, he worked with multiple IT companies.