KD: You have been documenting stories for quite a long period. What is the basic change in the dynamics of literature you get to see in the stories of the current period? 

JP:  I don’t know whether I am well read enough to answer that question. On the positive side, there is a positive efflorescence of texts that we see. There are more writers, more poets, more translators, more editors. Or were they always there and were invisible? Can it be that the democratisation of the media via social media handles and the ‘likes’ culture has made what was invisible, visible? There are also more institutions: more publishing houses, more literary agents, more prizes. These are tangible presences and their contribution—or lack of it—will be ready for study as soon as a suitable period of time has elapsed. What is that suitable period of time? I have no idea. Books cast long shadows. And the ones whose shadows seem stunted at noon suddenly seem much longer in the evening.

Since our academic scene seems intent on reinventing the North American wheel, borrowing everything from the US including student indebtedness, no doubt we will see the rise of the Master of Fine Arts (Literary Writing) in the future. Then there will be PhDs awarded when the candidate has finished a novel. This should have another series of domino effects. 

Beyond the binary of good and bad, there is change. It is inevitable, it is uncomfortable and it is what drives literature. 

KD: What is the process that you maintained while preparing projects like Em and The Big Hoom and The Education of Yuri?

JP: We have now a well-established binary between living and creating. And yet these are not hermetically sealed compartments. They leak into each other. On some fundamental level, the body must be willing to make peace with the brain and follow its commands. On another level, there must be a space and a time cleared from living to make creating possible. On yet another level, there is the administrative work that is essential for all creation. All this is preparation for the artefact called a book. I don’t prepare for writing. I live and as I live, I experience. As I experience, I make meaning. As I make meaning, I discard it and invent other meanings, these can be impersonal or personal, distant from reality or rooted in it. Then I bring this back into the realm of the now and the realm of the interpersonal, the imagined relationship with the reader being some kind of lamp. And finally, there is the revelation of othered meaning. How does the book seem to the reader? What does the reader make of it? I think what I have learned to trust is the cyclical nature of the entire enterprise. 

KD: Borges writes, let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written. I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read. Similarly, in the case of acting, listening becomes primary. Amidst so many writers, agencies and constant marketing, has the reading picturesque changed? How should a writer deal with this influx of marketing and a rising urge of staying relevant?

JP: I recently heard a student at a university claim that he was suffering from Readers’ Block, a cognate, I suppose of writers’ block. I imagine there is such a phenomenon, compounded by the Dopamine Addiction Pandemic. I imagine that the delayed release effects of reading have been overshadowed by the 15-second hit, some of these reels now coming with a warning/plea: ‘Wait until the end’. But I also think that there is equally a dangerous desire to read X number of books a year, to set oneself a goal and then speed-read books. In an age of constant surveillance and constant attention seeking, reading is a subversive act. It demands attention. It demands quiet. It demands responsiveness. I think we will always have readers and reading but despite the growth of literacy, the percentage will always remain a small but significant one.  

KD: In your book The Education of Yuri, you prepared the readers for a complete picture of the life that Yuri lives. The detailing happens to go in parallel with the city and its various societal changes. The sense of loneliness, loss and identity becomes evident in the process. This is in contrast to Em and The Big Hoom, where situations build-up to keep the characters without making the world extensive before the readers. How do you approach the aspect of detailing while writing a story and what makes it strong in one book while redundant in the other?

JP: Is God in the details? Is the devil? Are the details hollow? Are they full and sumptuous? Don’t hollow things resonate more than full things? Does truth go thunk and falsity go plink? What is the sound you are looking for? Is Mrs Arnolfini pregnant or is that the fashion? Are those flower pots hiding skeletons? What colour are Madame Bovary’s eyes? There are no easy answers to the question of details. You develop a sense for them, I think, as you go along. And perhaps it is journalism that helps. I came of age in a world where the number of words allotted to journalists was being cut down. Gone were the palmy days in which Ivan Fera could take fifty pages or more to do justice to a natural disaster; gone were the reviews that spilled over two pages of a broad sheet, see Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the Oxford English Dictionary. Articles that once ran into a thousand five hundred words were now to be reduced to seven hundred words. Of these restraints are born new strategies. And choosing your details seems to be one of the wins.