Gurcharan Das: Writing has given me a purpose in life

In a literary extravaganza as star-studded as the Jaipur Literature Festival, it is difficult for any author to stand out. Unless you’re Gurcharan Das. With a trailblazing writing career spanning over 50 years, he has some much-loved titles to his name including India Unbound (2002), The Difficulty of Being Good (2009), and India Grows at Night (2012).

In this exclusive interview, the veteran discusses his new book Another Sort of Freedom, his memories of the Indo-Pak partition, the dangers of writing a memoir, what makes a bestseller, why he thinks reliving one’s life is better than living it, and what keeps him going at 80.

Writing a memoir means reliving your life. And I have discovered that reliving your life is better than living it. Very simply, because you can play God, you decide what happened to you, which incidents you want to keep, and what you want to keep out. And secondly, the memory of an event is better than the event itself because, after 50 years, you have infused that event with all your experience.

Because when it happened to you, too much was going on, you were sleepwalking through life. But now you reflect on it. There is a difference between a memoir and an autobiography. An autobiography is a chronological narration of the events—I was born here, I went to school here, I met my wife here, and then I got married. But a memoir tries to find a theme in your life and connect the dots. It may deal with only one part of your life and reflect on a particular theme. That’s what makes a memoir a richer experience than an autobiography.

Well, the biggest challenge is memory. You can’t remember so much and memory is also unreliable. You are never quite sure what happened to you. Moreover, the reality is that no one quite knows what happened. Have you watched that 1950 film Rashomon? It is a Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa. There is a murder and then there are five witnesses and they all tell a completely different story and the judge at the end is totally confused. He does not know what happened. Who is the killer? It is of course an extreme example, but it is not easy to talk about your childhood. Are you the same person at 75 as you were at 5?

It is very difficult but luckily, I had my mother’s diary. I had it all documented. In my mother’s diary, the first reference to me is when I am three months old and she says this is a restless baby. Then a year later she is calling me a difficult child. Another year later she is calling me a troublemaker. And then when I go to school, I keep asking questions and raising my hand. It helps to have something like a mother’s diary to remind you of what happened to you.

I wrote what I saw. In August 1947, we were in Lahore. It had gone to Pakistan. We had to flee for our lives. We crossed the border. We were waiting at Jalandhar station. We were in the train compartment. Nobody knew when it was leaving. I remember seeing a handsome policeman through the train window. He was guarding that stretch of the platform. And suddenly, two Sikh boys come and they stab him with a kirpan. Two strangers, why would they want to kill him? And they say, Muslim man. So in the name of religion, they killed him. Cheerfully.

So, I asked myself, what did this mean? The only thing I could come up with was temporary insanity. The whole nation went insane. At least the state of Punjab did. The reason why I keep coming back to that event is because of something that happened to me in kindergarten. In the class, we all had pencil boxes. But the kid next to me didn't have any. He was a Muslim boy, he was poor, his name was Ayan. Now the kid who sat in front of me had two. He was the richest kid in class. He was the only one who came in a car to school. We all walked to school. And so what did I do?

At recess, I took the extra pencil box from the rich kid’s table and put it on Ayan’s table. Maybe I was looking for some sort of symmetry. Everybody should have a pencil box, I thought. But after recess, the rich boy screamed, who stole my pencil box? The teacher gets worried, he is the richest kid in class. So we stand up, everybody says they don’t know. When it comes to Ayan’s turn, he says there is a pencil box on my table, but I don’t know who put it there. Nobody believes him. Then comes my turn. Now I should have saved this boy. But I was frozen in fear. Temporary insanity. Ayan was taken to the front of the class and punished and I didn't say anything. I think of both these incidents as examples of temporary insanity.

The danger in writing a memoir is the temptation to want to look good. Everybody wants to look good, right? So if you look too good, meaning if you include only your triumphs and all, people will say, he is a pompous ass, why should I read this book? Because every page is full of how great he is. But if you make the opposite mistake and try to be too humble and write only about the bad things about you, then somebody will say he is a loser, why should I read it? So it is best to be yourself and write both the good and the bad. The only thing you should be careful about and try not to do is hurt someone. Either don't include that incident or change the name of the person or find some way to protect them. That would be my advice.

The secret of writing any good book is to write it in your own voice. You should write as you speak and use active voice. These are just basic rules of writing well. Your book becoming a bestseller is a matter of luck.

Both require hard work. After being both a writer and a corporate person, I have concluded that business people are better human beings than writers. Why? A business person instinctively knows that he depends on other people. He has to be nice to his customers, fair to his suppliers, and treat his employees with respect. So a businessman instinctively understands the interdependence and the need for other human beings is always on his mind.

Meanwhile, a writer is in a bubble. They don’t need anybody. Being a good person is to be aware of another person, to be aware to be kind to another person. A writer doesn’t have to be kind to anyone. So that's why I say that I think business people are nicer people.

I started writing plays and then I wrote a novel. The reason I stopped writing plays is because I realized that to write a play, you need to understand theatre. One false line and you’ve lost your audience. I don’t have a theatre background, so I stopped writing plays. Then I wrote a partition novel, which did well. Shyam Benegal bought the rights to make a film on it but he never got the money to back it.

When I became a full-time writer, I was very concerned about the reforms. I was very ambivalent about it. So I began by writing a column in the Times of India, telling people that pro-market is different from pro-business. Slowly, that became India Unbound. I got into writing and found my voice in that book.

Writing has given me a purpose in life. I feel lucky to have found it. Otherwise, most people just sleep-walk through life. So I just use the time. I’m pulled like a magnet in the morning to my table, to my desk from my bedroom. I sit in front of the computer and I see fingers start clicking the keys and text starts appearing on the screen and I am on my way, not even aware of myself. It just happens.