‘Threat to literature: Illiterate reviewers, illiterate editors’

Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s first book of non-fiction, The Butterfly Generation, is an interesting collection of personal essays on young, urban Indians. He tells DNA what gets him up, what pulls him down and what keeps him going.

Q: Why do you write?
A: I write because I love words and sentences, and I have stories to tell. There’s a story running in my head all the time. There’s a thrill in hunting for the right word and finally nailing it. Writing, for me, is uncovering the truth, seeing things as they are.

Q: What was your big breakthrough?
A: When Diya Hazra, then an editor with Penguin, offered me a contract to write Eunuch Park:15 Stories of Love and Destruction, based on four stories that she had read. Also, when Michael Ondaatje’s and Michael Redhill’s exclusive literary magazine, Brick, carried a story of mine. It was the first serious magazine to carry a work of fiction that I’d written. Redhill wrote a long adulatory email, which I still treasure.

Q: Is literature elitist?
A: In a poor country like ours, all literature, in any language, is elitist. This is so because anyone who can read and write in our country belongs to a minority, and therefore an elite. Generally speaking, though, literature is less elitist than physics or maths because it is accessible, and can be read and understood by all.

Q: What’s the greatest threat to literature today?
A: Illiterate reviewers, and illiterate editors who try and shape books according to what they think the market wants.

Q: Name a book you wish you’d written.
A: Upamanyu Chattterjee’s English, August. It captured the neuroses of a generation like few Indian books have.

Q: Is fame important to you?
A: Not at all. Anyway, in the world we live in now, notoriety has displaced fame.

Q: What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?
A: To have unerring faith in one’s voice. To be sensitive to the right things—things that matter to one’s writing—and ignore the rest.

Q: What’s the worst thing anyone has ever said about you?
A: Too many to mention.

Q: Is there anything about your career you regret?
A: No regrets. I’d write each book and each chapter the same way if I was given another chance.

Q: Give us some myths about writing.
A: That writing is about glamour and money. The truth is that writing is exhausting work, both physically and emotionally, and pays very little, sometimes nothing at all.