![]() I was visiting my parents in India at that time it was winter, and I went to the Tehelka office to talk to the editors. About a decade ago, soon after I had received tenure, Tehelka asked me to come aboard as a writer. Almost writing ‘the cat sat on the mat.’ I almost began like that.”Īnd I did that too, almost. ![]() I abandoned everything and began to write like a child at school. In the beginning I had to forget everything I had written by the age of 22. The sentence I had quoted had mattered to me, yes, and so had the book, but what had really helped was Naipaul’s telling an interviewer that in an effort to write clearly he had turned himself into a beginner: “It took a lot of work to do it. Every time I start to write, I am reminded of Naipaul’s book.īut that wasn’t the whole truth, neither about Naipaul, nor about beginnings. The ambition and the anxiety of the beginner is there at the beginning of each book. It has lasted through the twenty years of my writing life. Its very first sentence established in my mind the idea of writing as an opening in time or a beginning: that sentence conveyed to me, with its movement and rhythm, a history of repeated striving, and of things coming together, at last, in the achievement of the printed word: “It is now nearly thirty years since, in a bbc room in London, on an old bbc typewriter, and on smooth, ‘non-rustle’ bbc script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book.” This first sentence-about a first sentence-created an echo in my head. This was one of the first literary autobiographies that I read. The library then purchased a copy, which was duly displayed in one of its rooms, with a statement I had written about the book: ![]() ![]() When I was promoted to the rank of professor, the library at the university where I was then employed asked me to send them the name of a book that had been useful to me in my career. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, these essays explore how Kumar, a Professor of English at Vassar College, practices being a ‘writer in the world.’ The following is from Amitava Kumar’s essay collection Lunch with a Bigot. ![]()
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