An evening with Vikas Swarup

Vikas Swarup, author of "Q&A", came across as a rather typical educated middle-class Indian, fond of reading books and soaking up the daily newspaper. Very earnest looking and leaning forward frequently to make a forceful point. Quite engaged & involved in his own line of thought. He was casually dressed in trousers and a shirt, with a jacket. No Tie. Grey hair. A lot of them. He strolled in with the interviewer for the evening, a fellow author & teacher of creative writing courses, called Kate Mosse. So there was the obligatory joke about the eager audience waiting to see her, made mercifully at the very outset and got out of the way with.

Today was Friday, the weekend, and I was expecting to see a much larger crowd, considering that it was the prime evening slot and that here was the author of what became "Slumdog Millionaire", that multicultural phenomenon winning a slew of Oscars and Grammies.

Well, I was quite surprised then to discover that the auditorium was not even a third as full as had been the previous day, for Alexander McCall Smith's session. The audience today comprised largely of Asians (let's just be honest and say, Indians!), and a rather sparse count of Europeans. There had been a much larger headcount earlier in the day at 2pm for the session of William Dalrymple, the famed author and Indophile. Personally, I think that though his books are really interesting and full of fascinating details, Dalrymple himself came across as a bit of a stuffed shirt. But since I wasn't able to attend his session and our interaction had been limited to him scrawling his name on a couple of hefty tomes I had been carrying, we will not discuss him further in this blog.

And so, onto Vikas Swarup.

As I did previously with McCall Smith, I will try to capture the main points he made during the hour-long conversation with Mosse.

"I wrote Q&A in 2 months flat. (Kate Mosse interrupts him here to say that she didn't like him all that much anymore, and that she herself took up to 2 years to write a book!) I am a diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service, and was posted at London at the time. I had got to know that a few colleagues of mine were writing a book, so I thought to myself that if *that* person can write a book, then so can I. My wife and son had already gone off to India for a vacation, and I had 2 months to myself. So without telling anyone, including my wife, I started writing the novel. I would come back from work at 5pm every day and then write. In a way, it was just fate that I had all that much time to write, because my next posting wad to Pakistan where normally a diplomat's work continues on after office till late into the night and there's hardly any time to think about writing a book."


Where he got the idea for the book
"This book came to me full blown and ready. It was not as if I thought of a part of the book first. I have always been very interested in quizzing, and hence the "Who wants to be a millionaire" game show was a favourite of mine. The Indian version of show was hosted by Amitabh Bachchan and it was so popular in India that entire families would gather around the TV set at 9pm every Sunday to watch. There would be hardly any shop open at that time, since all of India would be watching. The participants in the show would be ordinary people from all walks of life. At that time, the case of Major Ingram, the guy who was caught having cheated to win the UK version of the program, was making headlines. And I thought to myself, if a UK Army major can be suspected of having cheated on the program and is then imprisoned, then what about if a person from the lower classes, like a waiter or a domestic servant somehow wins on the program? They will definitely suspect him of having cheated. Now most of us are educated people from the middle and upper class, with university education. But we somehow always feel that the lower working class that has never studied or gone to school is somehow less clever than us. So how can we believe that such a person can be cleverer than us, and go all the way in this program? But then the question remains: How can such a person then give all correct answers? Can each question then link up to some episode in his life, where he then got to know the answer? After that, it was a matter of working out episodes which could then be linked to such questions as would be asked in the program. They could of course not be very easy, except a few at the start. Also, what I did was, each chapter started off with the episode from the past first, and then the contest question was revealed. So the reader could also feel part of the story, and then try to work out the answer while reading the past flashback. Had I started the chapter by asking the question and then told the past story, then midway through when the question's answer would have become apparent, the reader would have lost interest in the rest of the chapter."


"I am often asked what advice I would give to budding writers. Frankly, I don't know because I never studied writing formally, I never went to any classes. I was just a voracious reader, and used to read all kinds of books. I didn't know anyone in the book business. I even got my agent off the internet. While choosing an agent, I asked for some advice from someone who told me just that if the agent asked for money to represent you, I should look for another agent. However, recently when I was asked to address a group of students at the University of Tokyo which is where my current posting is, I thought to myself and came up with this list of points as advice and this is what I will tell them when I return.

1. Be Curious. Be curious about everything around you. Be an eclectic reader, and don't limit yourself to just one kind of reading matter. I often tell my son, “Don’t just read the Rolling Stone; read The Economist as well."
2. Be Creative. After the basic plot is there, you need to be creative with that idea.
3. Be Critical. Look at your story with a critical objective eye. Is it readable? Is it interesting to others? Many writers are told, “Write what you know." So they end up writing about their own experiences. But they should think about whether it would be interesting to others as well.
4. Write, Write, Write. Keep writing all the time. (Here the moderator, Kate Mosse, interrupts to say that she often has students coming to her saying that they want to be writers. So she asks them to show her a sample of their writing. And then they say something like, “Well, we haven't written anything yet, but we will! Once you tell us how." So she goes on to say that to be a writer, well you have to write! Vikas Swarup then adds to this by quoting Dorothy Parker,"I hate writing; I love having written.")
5. Keep your manuscript circulating all the time. Send it out constantly to agents and publishers. You never know when someone might take a fancy to it.


Plots
"Every day, an average newspaper in India contains enough news to give more plots than anything else I can think of. So read more newspapers."



On his 2nd novel
"Six Suspects took me almost 18 months to write. It was a much tougher book, because I was trying out something new for myself. A polyphonic novel, where I was speaking through several characters. My publishers had wanted me to do something on the lines of Q&A part 2, like what the waiter did from the age of 18 till 20, or what happened afterwards etc, but I didn't want to do anything with them. Once my books are done, I am done with the characters, and want to try out some new challenge. Out of the six characters in the book, the most difficult one was the Andaman tribal, because there was no way I could get into his head and think what he was thinking. I just didn't know what a person like him would think about. He is in a way the most innocent & pristine of all the characters, and yet the most easily corruptible as well. He comes to the big city and is seduced by its various attractions.

I wrote the entire book as it is published. I did not write out each character's entire story in one go, and then to split it up into separate chapters".

What is next
"I am already working on my next book. I am currently stuck at chapter seven. It is set outside India. It has no Indian characters. (When probed by the moderator further, he reluctantly says, "It could be set in Europe, maybe..")


On the movie adaptation
"The book was mine, but the movie was all Danny Boyle, so all credit to him. Some people in India raised an objection to the word slumdog, but it was coined by the writer Simon Beaufoy to depict the squalid condition of the people living in a slum. At least, the slumdog did have the perseverance to drag himself out of its surroundings. Why didn't the people focus on the second word, "Millionaire"? In fact, when the movie finally released, I believe that some protestors stood outside cinema halls with 2 dogs, one labelled Danny and the other labelled Simon!"

On whether he liked the movie
"There was a Bengali writer called Mani Shankar Mukherjee, commonly known as Shankar, one of whose famous novels was made into a movie by the great Satyajit Ray. When asked his opinion of the movie, Shankar would reply,"A book is like a daughter. Once made into a movie, it's as if the daughter has got married and gone to her husband's place. And in India, one never speaks ill of one's son-in-law!""


Audience Questions

"Why did it take 20 years of service for you to suddenly think about writing a book? You could have written one any time"

"That is true. My posting prior to London had been to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, which was a very quiet time for me, as there was not a single Indian delegation visiting Addis Ababa in the entire 2 years that I was there. So I must say that it was a matter of complete chance that I managed to write a while novel in 2 months. And that too, I finished the novel on 11th Sept, and was on the place to India on the 12th, waiting for my next posting."