1. What is your latest book 'The Fifth Gospel' about?
The Fifth Gospel is a collection of five of my earlier books. East End At Your Feet and Come to Mecca are stories about young Indian, Bangladeshi and West Indians growing up in England. They were, as some critics have acknowledged, probably the first books to address the subject. Then The Siege of Babylon is really a short novel derived from a real experience when I was in a political group called the Black Panther Movement in the UK.
Trip Trap is a collection of stories for young adults which play on an element of mathematical fantasy—ideas such as infinite regress, each with a twist in the tail of tale. The fifth book Janaky and the Giant is a collection of stories for six to eight-year olds and so has ingredients of fairy tale magic, thinking and talking animals , moral hints and the other traditional elements which appeal to that age group.
2. Do you think that short stories have a quicker impact on the readers than a novel?
Yes, they do have a quicker impact! The best example of the form, though transformed into a different medium is the feature film. It lasts two hours, more or less and does the things short stories do on the page.
3. You have also written some very strong scripts for Bollywood. What aroused your interest in script writing?
I was invited by the BBC to transform my short stories into a series for TV. Almost at the same time, after I had written a couple of stage plays for a theatre company, a TV producer asked me to write a situation comedy. Other situation comedies followed the success of the first one and I wrote, for example Tandoori Nights. Feature films followed.
(Farrukh Dhondy has been the script writer for The Rising: The Ballad of Mangal Pandey and Kisna: The Warrior Poet)
4. What interests you more now - writing books or writing scripts?
They are quite different. It really isn't like asking a sportsman if he prefers football to running a marathon. Scripts for TV or film, or for the stage are co-operative efforts in so far as directors, actors, designers, editors and very many others play their part in producing them. Writing a book is a solitary experience and much easier on the ego - till the critics get at it of course!
5. From Shakespeare to Shobha De, you have a liking for a wide range of writings. Are you a nomad reader? And what do you enjoy reading more?
I read modern novels to have a laugh or feel superior. I read Shakespeare and some classics because they are the furniture of the civilisation I have tried to acquire. I don't read blogs, self-improvement books, crime, comics, novels that prove that the descendant of Jesus Christ is a French policewoman and other trash.
6. Romance or rather 'Sex' holds a special place in your writings - whether a book or a screenplay. Any comments?
A short story for this one: My mother who lived with my married sister in India at the time, but didn't share her surname was invited to dinner by my sister's friends. The hosts and guests didn't know my mother's surname. the talk as the table turned to Bombay Duck, a novel I'd just published and the guests began to discuss it and mentioned its 'romantic' or sexual content (though there is very little of it). One of them turned to my mother and asked her if she had read it. "Yes," she said, "It's written by my son, but he told me it's not based on his experience, it's all from his imagination!"
7. Anything interesting that you would like to state about your friendship with Sir V.S. Naipaul?
I think friendships and their contents should remain between friends -- until they become the stuff of fiction. Of course I have a hundred incidents and stories, some of them mischievous, but none of them for public access. He is a good and constantly stimulating friend and he even laughs at my jokes.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=writer,V.S. Naipaul,Shobha De,script writer,Mangal Pandey
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