The life of the writer as a life of reading
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 forty-five or fifty dollars. I could live very comfortably on that. The day began at five o’clock when the sun hit my windows. The whole day was there ahead of me with nothing to do except read and write. I wrote reviews— I loved reading books anyway, and I was happy to write a few words about them and get paid. There was no television, no telephone. I started on various drafts of a novel, which eventually became The Romantics, but I mostly read, about a book a day. I was able to finish a medium-size, 350-page book in five or six hours.
For full interview check the url given below
Comments