The Lightness in All Things | Outlook's Editor Chinki Sinha in Conversation with Vikram Seth from kaifi azmi poem Watch Video

⏲ Duration: 31:3
👁 View: 995K times
✓ Published: 28-Jun-2024

Description:
Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile. <br/>You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead. <br/>No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll <br/>Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead. <br/>The world is too opaque, distressing and profound. <br/>This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day: <br/>To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around, <br/>Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away. <br/><br/>- Sit by Vikram Seth <br/><br/>We both laughed. We drank coffee. I am not twenty-six. But there is a lot of time ahead. Outside, the world continued being profound and distressing. A red book glowed in the lamplight. It is poet Vikram Seth’s translation of the Hanuman Chalisa that’s recently been published by Speaking Tiger Publications. <br/><br/>After some point, the poet picked up the mango and smelled it. <br/><br/>“Ripe,” he announced. <br/><br/>There was the implied sense of smell and touch and taste of the Digha Malda in the notebook and in the camera that recorded the interview. <br/><br/>He had jokingly said the entry fee would be five Digha Malda mangoes. He had spent some years in Patna in Bihar long ago and had first recited a part of his translation of the Hanuman Chalisa almost a decade ago at the first edition of the Patna Literature Festival. <br/><br/>“To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman,” Seth had written in his novel A Suitable Boy. <br/><br/>Mangoes arrived. Strangers from Bihar sent them. They know the longing for that taste of those mangoes from home. <br/><br/>Seth is a wanderer accumulating material for future nostalgias. That’s what he said in one his books. Mangoes are nostalgia. <br/><br/>We sat on little stools surrounded by hundreds of books about thousands of people and places and emotions and animals and birds. <br/><br/>We spoke about translating the most beloved poem of Indians, the rising intolerance and how Seth started writing. <br/><br/>\