Write approach

Surendra Mohan Pathak is an eminent Hindi novelist, who has written over 250 Hindi novels. Now, a techie-turned part-time writer, Sudarshan Purohit has translated one of his famous novels from the Vimal series into English. The novel has been titled Daylight Robbery, which is the English version of Din Dahade Dakoti. But this is not Sudarshan’s first translated work. “This is my second translation. The first was The 65 Lakh Heist (Painsath Lakh ki Dakaiti), also of the Vimal series by Surendra. It was published last year in March.”
The author was approached by Blaft, a new publishing house, based in Chennai to translate Hindi fiction. “Their first release, about two years ago, was The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. I bought this book on a whim. It was very well translated. I posted a review of it on my blog, and in passing, mentioned that someone should do something like this for Hindi pulp. The next day, there was a comment on the blog from Rakesh Khanna of Blaft. He’d read my blog and liked my writing style and asked me to translate Hindi novels.”
But Sudarshan wasn’t into Hindi fiction. So he decided to do some research on popular Hindi novelists. He discovered that author Surendra Mohan Pathak’s works would make for very appealing copy. “So I decided to translate his works,” he says.
Sudarshan who works as a techie by day, usually writes for two to three hours every evening and often during the weekends too. “During the editing stage, it gets really hectic since I co-ordinate over the phone and net with the folks at Blaft too,” he adds. He is currently working on the third Pathak book, Fortune’s Ransom (Karamjale) which will be ready the end of the year.

(As told to Our Correspondent)