Neel Mukherjee
Neel Mukherjee
centre family given indian lives political politics writer
To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.
caste eat familiar indian meal meat reasons religious seemed upbringing
Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me.
cook germ good head sit state suddenly writers
To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.
elsewhere lives movement provides strand
The Naxalite revolution - an ultra-left Maoist movement - in Bengal, and elsewhere in India, in the late 1960s provides one strand of 'The Lives of Others.'
bestseller both copies frequency indicator money public relentless sure
The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?
affliction aware good hate immigrant led nostalgia particular politics
Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.
good writers
It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much.
revisit
Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' or, for that matter, Greene's 'The Quiet American' to find out how destructive it can be.
alight atavistic dinner dishes failure meat moral party please view
In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.
novels people rather sit theory
I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
ate grew meat rare
I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that.
business defines given itself lives odd rest talk wealth work written
Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work.
work
Work defines our lives and our place in the world.
When a book is going well, it tells you where to go.