Vikram Chandra speaks at the Lit Fest
Patrick Brzeski
The 2010 Man Hong Kong Literary Festival is underway! We attended our first event this afternoon: an open discussion with Indian novelist Vikram Chandra moderated by Chris Wood, editor of the Asian Literary Review. The Fringe Club theatre was sold out and alive with that warmth and reverberatory sense of collective rumination that only a public arts talk provides. Chandra was as genial, witty, and an eminently articulate as one could possibly expect.
Some observations:
Vikram Chandra holds himself to a regimen of writing roughly 600 words per day. He usually writes in the morning and if he breezes through 600 words and feels that he has another thousand in him, he abstains, knowing from past experience that exceeding his daily limit will leave him with an inspiration hangover that will make the following few days a struggle.
Bombay has an energy that he finds both invigorating and exhausting - like nowhere else he's ever been. While getting away regularly is something that he feels is, if not necessary, very sensible, he soon finds himself missing the city terribly.
In researching Sacred Games, his sprawling critically acclaimed novel of 2006, Chandra befriended a great variety of Bombay gangsters and policemen. Occasionally while writing he would contact a gangster with a specific procedural question, such as how one actually goes about rigging an election, and would receive startlingly detailed instructions regarding cost, man hours, and the various itemised requirements of the job, all of which knowledge obviously derived from regular practice.
Chandra acknowledged that corruption at every level of Indian civic life is so thoroughly institutionalised that it will take decades, if not hundreds of years to eradicate. Or perhaps in some form or another, he said, corruption is simply an ugly attendant of our humanity, impossible to ever truly expunge from the realms of politics and power. He also noted that he's interested in what distinguishes "corruption" from "lobbying", other than legal definition, and went on to illuminate whole fields of grey zone in western political practice.
When asked to give a reading from his book, he admitted with a laugh that his 900 page novel is too big even for him to bother lugging around, and casually unsheathed a Kindle from his backpack and read the opening pages of his book from the device. Hopefully no one in the audience was cynical enough to assume that he had been persuaded/lobbied/greased by Amazon into making public appearances with their flagship e-reader.
The talk closed with a warm round of applause and all left smiling.
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