Wordsmiths reveal craft of penning success

The second day of the Pune International Literary Festival (PILF) 2013 maintained the momentum of day one, pulling in a sizeable number of the literature-loving junta. Stars authors such as Kiran Nagarkar, Jerry Pinto, Ashwin Sanghi, Shobhaa De and others, along with celebrated documentary film-maker Neil Hollander registered their presence at the festival. Here are some highlights of the day:

A date with De
Shobhaa De’s session titled ‘Life of De’, centered on De’s journey as a magazine editor, author and columnist, and saw her in conversation with well-known film critic Bhawana Somaaya. Ever irreverent and candid, the lady was in her element as she spoke about her novel Socialite Evenings being the book with the worse reviews in Asia, and compared writing to lovemaking “because it is thrilling and addictive since it involves all your senses”.
When asked if editors had ever dictated topics or tried to censor her columns, De replied that there were only two occasions in her 40-year career when she had been asked to tone down or censor her content. “These occasions were when the subject of my columns was Sonia Gandhi.” During the session, De also called women the most marginalised minority in the country, adding, “political parties haven’t even addressed narrative about women in the upcoming elections”.

Lost in translation
An entertaining session on the art of translations saw noted translator and journalist Shanta Gokhale, writer Jerry Pinto and playwright/writer Makarand Sathe in conversation with each other. Gokhale reminisced about how her tryst with literature began with a request from noted film-maker Satyadev Dubey. “I was based outside Mumbai at that time. Satyadev send me a copy of a play and told me, ‘You are vegetating. I want you to translate this and send it back to me within 10 days’.”

Makarand Sathe talked about how every language had its own vision, and while a lot was often lost in translation, sometimes, a lot was gained too. He cited an example – “When my play Te Pudhe Gele was translated from Marathi into Hindi, the characters started appearing quite bureaucratic, since Hindi is a bureaucratic language. Also, the duration of the act extended by 15 minutes, because the language is spoken slowly, with respect to Marathi or English.”

Meanwhile, Jerry Pinto addressed how, putting words in a book denuded them of culture, since a book was asynchronous communication, and translating led to ‘doubled asynchronicity’, further denuding the work of culture.

Desi Dan Brown
Ashwin Sanghi, author of bestsellers such as Chanakya’s Chant and The Krishna Key, was in conversation with writer Meghna Pant, about how an entrepreneur like himself became a best-selling author. “The manuscript of my first book, The Rozabal Line, was rejected 46 times by different publishers. Despite that, I self-published it and sent a copy to them again. As a businessman, I had heard ‘no’ so many times, that I didn’t fear rejection,” said Sanghi, whose book then went on to become a critical and commercial success.

He added that authors needed to become more ‘shameless’ when it came to marketing themselves. “I would often go to bookstores and request them to place my books at the front, because one publisher had told me, ‘jo dikhta hai who bikta hai’. You need to be less self-conscious and go ahead and do these things. If you have friends in the media, there is nothing wrong with requesting them to write about you. The worst that could happen, is that they’d say ‘no’ to you,” the author said.
Sanghi is also collaborating with internationally best-selling author James Patterson on his new book. “My previous novels involved a lot of research. Now, for the first time, I’m concentrating more on the craft than I am on the research,” he said.

Documenting a tale
The session conducted by Neil Hollander, creator of acclaimed documentaries like H For Hunger and First Flights with Neil Armstrong, was a godsend for aspiring film-makers. Strewing his talk with interesting anecdotes and providing insightful information about the nuances of documentary film-making, Hollander opined that the script is the most important part of the process. “You must clearly conceptualise how you’ll be shooting. Your shooting style and what you’re going to be shooting should become a part of your script,” he said, adding that he always wrote the first minutes of a documentary in great detail.

Hollander also addressed one very important concern that all documentary film-makers face – how to go about conveying one’s passion through their film. “To aptly convey that, you need to decide where you must be in the film. Should you get a professional voice artiste to convey that passion with the right intonation of voice, or should you be a moving character in the film by means of a moving camera?” The subject matter must dictate how the film-maker appears in the documentary film, according to Hollander.