The Green Book

Posted by & filed under Drawing, Writing.

HarperCollins India announces the release on Dec 5, 2024 of The Green Book, the final volume in my trilogy of drawing books-plus-diaries. My eternal thanks to Udayan Mitra of HarperCollins India and to Hemali Sodhi of A Suitable Agency. 

An excerpt:

Many of the drawings and paintings in this book are the result of the walks I have undertaken. Don’t stop walking! And keep a journal. What you draw is a way of keeping a diary, of course, but also write words to record what you see.

On a fast-heating planet, it has become more important than ever to hold on to every vestige of hope. We must save every drop of creativity to imagine new futures. We must remember that like leafy trees, art also offers us shade, and that literature quenches our thirst for finding the right words for every emotion.

Please watch this fun reel put out by my publishers. (And this one, showing the book’s arrival at my home!)

My first book-event is at The Bookshop, Inc. in Jor Bagh, Delhi, where I’ll be in conversation with Ravish Kumar. Use this link for tickets.

What If Trump Wins

Posted by & filed under Writing.

 

The terrible prospect of a second Trump presidency raises in my mind several questions, and one of them concerns our survival as artists and writers. How will we respond? I have been thinking of my 2021 novel A Time Outside This Time that was written during the years of the Trump rule. It was a novel about Trump and the pandemic, about fake news and the infodemic. Will I write another novel if Trump returns to the White House? (The above note is from the “Briefly Noted” section of the New Yorker, Dec 6, 2021 issue.) If Trump wins, I’ll feel that I’m in a lockdown, that a plague has spread across the country and maybe also the world, that I must focus on survival, and, crucially, that a part of that survival is the ability to write about it.

Update: I wrote the above and then decided to work on a longer piece that has been published by the Indian Express. A slightly different version is available on my free Substack.

Fall Dates

Posted by & filed under Drawing, Media, Writing.

 

Please go here for the complete post on Substack but here are my Fall dates:

 

Sept 13, 2024, Tivoli…………Talk titled “Reading and Writing in the Anthropocene,” A Public Space Weekend Retreat

Sept 21,2024, Seattle………..In conversation with Alka Kurian about My Beloved Life, JLF Seattle

Sept 29, 2024, Brooklyn……….Noon panel on “Writing Our Histories,” Brooklyn Book Festival

Oct 5, 2024, Saratoga……….In conversation with Aatish Taseer about My Beloved Life, Saratoga Book Festival

Oct 18-20, Brattleboro……….Reading from My Beloved Life, details to come, Brattleboro Literary Festival

Nov 14, New York City……….In conversation with Caroline Coleman at the Colony Club about My Beloved Life, Colony Club

Dec 27-29, Wayanad, Kerala……….Presenting The Green Book, Wayanad Literature Festival

Lethal Heat

Posted by & filed under Media, Writing.

I have a piece in The Guardian on the election results asking if we can have democracy if temperatures continue to rise.

The crucial point to be noted here is that the heat did not figure at all among the thundering sentiments delivered from the dais by the candidates. The prominent environmentalist Ashish Kothari told me that the “full dimensions of the climate crisis” had escaped both the BJP’s and Congress’s manifestos. In the face of such silence, it fell on the Delhi High Court to warn of the effects of global warming this past week: The court warned that Delhi could soon turn into “a barren desert.”

More here.

Please check out my Substack “Beat the Heat” where I have also included this lovely document from Ravish:

 

Translation: “With all their remaining strength, the common people have built an opposition and erected our parliament. This creation of the opposition is the people’s mandate. 2024 has given a gift to Bapu’s and Babasaheb Ambedkar’s dreams for our democracy. It has given us an opposition.” Ravish Kumar

 

Without Death, There is No Art

Posted by & filed under Media, Writing.

 

In which I reveal all my secrets. How did I come to write My Beloved Life. For @Scroll.

The last exchange I had with my father was on the morning of March 7 last year. That same morning, I had learned from a phone call that I had been awarded a fellowship at the Cullman Center in the New York Public Library. For the previous twenty-four hours, due to reasons that were not clear to anyone, my father had been unwell.

More

India Votes

Posted by & filed under Media.

 

 

My little paean to current Indian politics is presented during this interview with Al Jazeera.

A few days ago an Indian newspaper asked if I could recommend a literary text that shed light on Indian elections.  I wrote back that in my new novel My Beloved Life, I have put a scene that is a classic in Hindi literature, from Harishankar Parsai’s Inspector Matadeen Chand Par (1994), or Inspector Matadeen on the Moon. The father and daughter duo who narrate my novel are on their way to a restaurant in Atlanta. The father is talking bitterly about politicians in Hindi, his voice growing louder as he quotes Parsai, delivering his lines as if at a kavi-sammelan. Even as I imagined the scene, I felt I was paying homage to a writer whose deft satires gave his readers a small measure of agency. A political system that left them helpless could not take away from them the freedom of laughter. Here is what the father recites: