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Showing posts from July, 2008

The life of the writer as a life of reading

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Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is not someone who likes to give interviews. So, it was a surprise for me when I came across this interview of him in the literary magazine The Believer . This interview provides an insight into Pankaj’s rise as a writer and his writings. THE BELIEVER: When you were twenty-three, you went to live in the Himalayan mountains to read and write in the hope of someday becoming a writer. Did you have a clear idea about what you were doing? PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, I had a basic idea that I would go to the mountains, where it would be cheap to live and there would be lots of silence, lots of solitude. In retrospect, this was a completely romantic idea. I wasn’t making a living at that point—only a few hundred rupees from writing reviews and articles for different magazines and newspapers in India—but this was in 1992 and the economy in rural India was on a different scale altogether. It only cost me two thousand rupees a month to live, with my rent included—that’s