We are delighted to present an exclusive interview with the bestselling author Mr. R. Chandrasekar, who was kind enough to sit down with our Secretary, Niyati Venkatesan, and answer all our impertinent questions.
Mr. R. Chandrasekar was born in Madras and studied at Mayo College, Vivekananda College Madras, the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Chicago. He has researched and priced commodities and derivatives, traded bonds, managed portfolios, taught, and run a financial research centre.
Mr Chandrasekar lives with his family in Madras. ‘The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami’ is his first novel. His second novel, ‘The School of Core Incompetence,’ will be out soon.
Please click here to watch the interview.
Transcript of the interview:
NV
A few years back, it seemed like the Indian writers’ market was split into two factions – the faction considered intellectual and the faction that wrote what the public wanted. But these days, the gap seems less conspicuous. We do come across books that are both intellectual and readable. Many readers felt that ‘The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami’ was both a very relevant satire and great fun to read. Do you think the gulf is being bridged?
R Chandrasekar
Yes, I think what has happened now is – previously a lot of the writers whom we thought of as good writers – like Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra and all those people – they were published abroad first and then the books came here. Even though they might have been writing about Indian subjects, the books were published there and then came here.
And then you had the mass market books – you know, people like Chetan Bhagat – their books were published here. These are very Indian books.
I think what we’re beginning to see now is books which are in between the two – not quite literary books, but definitely a cut above the mass market books – which are being published in India. So yes, that’s beginning to happen. Maybe not as quickly as we’d like, but we are seeing that happen.
NV
Could you tell us something about your next book?
R Chandrasekar
My next book is a satire on management education in India.
You see, there are more than two thousand schools offering the equivalent of an MBA degree, and probably about fifty or seventy five of them are good. In the sense that they have a decent faculty and a library and all of that. A lot of the rest are definitely not very good!
So I’ve set my second novel in one of those not very good places. It’s one of those places which are, say, ranked 800 or 900 in India. So you have people who don’t really know how to teach, and students who are not really there to learn, and the management of the school is basically there to make money. I’ve set the novel in that sort of setting, and had a bit of fun doing that!
NV
Your next book deals with the Indian education system…
R Chandrasekar
…well, one part of the Indian education system. It deals with management education.
NV
So in general, what do you think of the Indian education system?
R Chandrasekar
I think there are huge contrasts.
There are certain bits and pieces which are very good, and huge bits which are not very good – where you’ve got numbers, very large numbers, but the teaching is not very inspiring – the students are not really inspired to learn.
So in a sense it’s a waste of everybody’s time. People are going through the motions, but there is no joy of learning, so to speak.
NV
One of the things I enjoyed most about ‘The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami’ was the dialogue, because it so closely resembled the way we all speak! We often do say things like ‘Shimla is a rubbish place’ and ‘too many twos you are doing’. We’ve also enjoyed the colloquialisms in Salman Rushdie’s books, and Amitav Ghosh’s books. But many readers found it interesting that you, Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh don’t actually speak that way! How hard is it to write realistic colloquial dialogue if you actually speak perfect English?
R Chandrasekar
The thing is that when you write a book, you’re writing about a different character. Most of the time, you’re not writing about yourself. So if you take ‘The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami,’ the book is told in the voice of Mr Swami.
So I have to think to myself, ‘who is Swami?’
Swami is several things – he’s an IAS officer, he’s probably forty something years old, he’s probably quite bright because he got into the IAS, but he’s also rather full of himself. So I have to think how somebody with all those characteristics would talk. And that language – his language – you have to reflect that.
And you have the other characters, you have the Indian Prime Minister who’s from the heartland of U.P., an elderly politician. Now he’s not going to speak English the way Swami speaks. In all likelihood, he would speak Hindi. But I can’t have all the dialogue in Hindi. So I have to somehow create a language where you understand that this man is not a native English speaker, and throw in some of the colloquialisms which you might expect somebody like him to use. So when you’re writing dialogues, you have to put yourself in the mind of the person who is speaking.
You know, we talk to a lot of people in our day to day lives. You’ve travelled through India – I’ve also travelled through India – I’ve lived in Delhi, I’ve lived here and in Bombay. You hear a lot of people speak, and then you try to remember some of that and put it in the dialogue. So when a book is written in the first person, it’s not me talking. Ideally, it’s somebody else, the character, who’s doing the talking. And when we have conversation between people, we’re trying to use the conversation to heighten who the characters are, the way they think, their personality and so on.
NV
Your books are very humorous. What do you think of the level of humour of other Indian writers in English?
R Chandrasekar
I have to say that I haven’t read too many Indian English books [of this type]. I’ve read a few, of course – there are some which are very, very funny.
There’s this book called ‘Raag Darbari’ by a gentleman called Shrilal Shukla, which came out, I think, in 1968. He wrote it in Hindi. I don’t know Hindi, so I read it in the English translation. It’s set in a village in U.P., and it’s all about village life, the government officials in village life, and it’s very, very funny. The book has become a cult classic.
Then you have Upamanyu Chatterji’s ‘English August,’ which also, I thought, was a nice, funny book. Again, the subject matter being government.
But apart from these two, I’m not too familiar with Indian English humorous books. There might be a bunch of humorous books written in Indian languages, but I’m not aware of them.
But I think most books written in English in India are self consciously serious.
NV
What do you think of the approach of Indian publishers these days? What are their main objectives? Do you think they’re getting the best out of our writers?
R Chandrasekar
That’s a loaded question! The thing is – ultimately a publisher is there to make money. A publisher is trying to figure out which books will sell.
Now when you look around, and see which books have sold well, and which books haven’t sold well, it’s really difficult to see a pattern. If you have a Chetan Bhagat who comes up and is a phenomenon – all of a sudden, there’s a whole bunch of imitators coming in and trying to do what he did. There’s an Amish Tripati who wrote a book which has also become a bestseller – nobody expected it to be a bestseller – but now you suddenly find a lot of people following in his footsteps.
As a publisher, you’re trying to balance a whole bunch of things – on the one hand, you want to say that ‘the stuff I’m publishing is fairly good,’ but on the other hand you want to make money. Actually, it’s a tough situation for them.
There are some publishers who have very consciously decided to go downmarket.
For example, Penguin has got something called ‘Metro Reads.’ These are fairly low priced books – these are meant to be quick reads – you buy them in the station or the airport, you don’t pay very much. There’s not much depth to the story; you know what you’re getting – there’s a certain market for that. And they’ve kept that separate from their main line, so you’ve got two different things there.
Rupa, once again, seems to have two different things. So I guess every publisher is trying to hedge his bets by doing both types of books – books which have literary qualities, and books which are distinctly downmarket.
And it’s not just India – if you look at the US and the UK markets, you have Mills & Boon, and the Harlequin Romances, and you have chick lit – it’s become a big thing!
Once again, I don’t think these things are meant to be fancy literature, or anything like that – it’s just a publisher trying to figure out what might sell, and come out with something to meet the need.
NV
Who are your favourite writers? Did any of them influence your writing style?
R Chandrasekar
Yes, I can tell you who some of my favourite writers are – I’m a big fan of P G Wodehouse, and a big fan of Graham Greene. There’s a Canadian writer called Mordecai Richler, whose books I like very much.
I like reading, and there are a number of authors I’ve read and liked.
As to whether they’ve influenced me – I think, if you read ‘Goat,’ there is a teeny bit of Wodehouse that has come in there. It wasn’t intentional, but now that I read it after the fact, it seems to be there, so obviously he’s influenced me to some extent.
Other than that, Graham Greene is a serious writer and I haven’t written anything that serious so I cannot say that he’s directly influenced me.
And the other people – Richler, for instance, writes Jewish humour, and there’s no way I can write like that. His humour and his writing are specific to a particular people and a particular region. But yes, I like his stuff, and if I’ve learned something from people like that, it’s good!
NV
Thank you for giving us this interview.
R Chandrasekar
Thank you for coming here to talk to me.
Bhavan's Literary Society 