Ruskin Bond Live

Delhi’s wintry chill this year was more brutal than it normally is.  Or so the locals and the media said.  I could not disagree as I huddled and shivered sitting amidst the patricians and the literary cognoscenti of Delhi on the open air lawns of the rarefied precincts of India Habitat Centre. 

I guess none of us quite sensed the numbness that was slowly enveloping our nerves as we were totally lost in the words of the man himself:  Ruskin Bond.  Which child who has been to an English medium school in India would not have read his ghost stories?  Even a semi-literate fellow like me has gone beyond those ghost stories and read other short stories or the Blue Umbrella, Flight of Pigeons, the last of which the pompous Sunil Sethi who was interviewing him described as a “lascivious” story.  Clearly the man did not seem to have read Harold Robbins or Irwing Wallace’s Fan Club.  If he had, he would know the true meaning of the word!

At eighty Ruskin Bond’s brain-mind complex are as sharp as they must always have been. His humour was just as rasping in an agreeable and engaging way.  Even his flippance was just as endearing.  When Sunil Sethi asked him why he was so successful in being elusive, he responded spontaneously:  I am a fiction writer you know.  And so I am entitled to tell an occasional lie.   

Or, when he explained that he was not one of the many lovers that his editor had had because she was many years older than him.  Quite like him, I thought, leaving one wondering if he really had been in love with her or not!  After all we know that one could be in love without being a lover, right?

Totally weather beaten and half frozen at the end of the hour that I spent on that lawn I asked myself how much of all that engaging stuff that I heard there did I remember.  Not an awful lot I am afraid, thanks to the degenerating brain.  But here are some of the thoughts that I still remember. 

RB describes himself as lazy.  But then here what he confessed.  He feels guilty if he does not write at least a few hundred words every day.  Now contrast that with my idea of laziness which is doing nothing at all for days together and not feel anything about it as I often do!

He urges that all writers must read a lot.  Their preferred genre of writing does not matter.  Reading helps writers learn about how other writers develop their ideas.  But every writer must eventually develop a “voice of his own”, or what he also describes as a “tone of writing”. 

Equally aspiring writers must respect the language in which they wish to write.  A corollary to that is that aspiring writers also ought to pay attention to their grammar lessons in school.

Writers must continue to write, even if publishers reject their writings.  He exhorted in an interesting manner.  He said:  Writers must never despair when their manuscript is not accepted for publication.   

And if they must despair they should continue to write, even if they are in despair.

Eventually a writer should go by how he feels about his own writing.  RB put it across beautifully.  You know have written something nice when the words ring true.

And finally, here was the most touching of all his words of counsel:  Look at everything in life as though you are going to be looking at it for the last time.  That in itself enhances the beauty of the object and the joy you get from looking at it. 

It reminded me of one of the few useful ideas I came across in Robin Sharma’s book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.  He notes that the sadhus in the Himalayas are so efficient and effective because they live each day as if it would be the last day of their lives.  And so they never put anything off.  OK fine, I should not be talking of Robin Sharma and Ruskin Bond in the same breath.  But then isn’t eclecticism all about picking up the most interesting bits from everything?

As I hobbled back to my hotel room, trying to thaw my stiff limbs I kept pondering over a question that I often ask myself: Do writers really matter to a society?  After we all know why we need a doctor or different kinds of engineers, educators, hair stylists and so on.  I have asked myself if the world would have been any more a difficult place if we did not have writers.

I will perhaps find a convincing answer to that question.  But I did recall that the few hours that I had read some of RB’s books and short stories, I had been transported to another world.  I must have felt like a junkie who had just had his fix.

Is it good to be doped?  Perhaps not.  But then does it really matter if it did give you those few moments of vacation from the humdrum or the occasionally harrowing realities of life?  Think about it. 

Nanni….Namaskaaram…