Writer's block

Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good and India Unbound. His other literary works include a novel, A Fine Family, a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three English Plays.

QYour favourite reading spot?
I am a slouch and I prefer to read in bed.

Q Which books are you reading at present?
I read very little. I am convinced that the world is divided between readers and writers, and thank god for that. But since you ask, I am currently reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a new translation by editor Christopher Prendergast and others. I am fascinated by the role of memory in the novel, beginning with the episode when the author eats a madeleine as a child, which opens up his entire past.

Q Who is your favourite Indian writer?
R.K. Narayan

Q Who are your favourite novelists?
My favourite is Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace always moves me.

Q Which are your favourite children’s books?
E.B. White’s Stuart Little, who had the “shy, pleasant manner of a mouse” and, in fact, is an actual mouse.

Q Which is the most under-rated book?
G.V. Desani’s All about Hatterr.

QWhich classics do you want to read?
I tend to read the old classics anyway because I have begun to feel my mortality. I want to read Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Q Who is your favourite literary character?
Pierre in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Karna in the Mahabharata. They both wrestled with moral dilemmas that I have faced, and indeed, all of us face. Their instincts are almost always deeply moral.

QWhich book changed your life?
For the past six years I have been reading the Mahabharata. The epic’s world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings rather than the narrow and rigid positions that define debate and discussion in our fundamentalist times. I recommend J.A.B. van Buitenen’s translation (Books 1-5) and James L. Fitzgerald’s (Books 11 & 12). W.J. Johnson has a lovely verse translation of Book 10 in a slim Oxford paperback. The battle Books, 6-9, have appeared recently in beautifully produced, parallel text edition in English and Sanskrit (published by Clay/New York University Press, 2005-2008).

QWhich is the funniest book that you have read?
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

QWhich is the most erotic book that you have read?
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, aka Fanny Hill, by John Cleland

QWhich school/college text did you enjoy the most?
Shakespeare’s Henry V.