9.9 Can Fiction Tell the Truth Better Than Journalism? ft. Rahul Pandita

What does it mean to feel at home? And what do you do when that feeling never quite arrives?

In the latest episode of Books & Beyond, Tara Khandelwal sits down with journalist and author Rahul Pandita to discuss his novel Our Friends in Good Houses, a story about searching for home and a sense of belonging in a world where both can feel elusive.

Drawing from decades of reporting in war zones, Rahul reflects on his journey as a journalist, the emotional weight of witnessing a conflict, and why he turned to fiction to express experiences that were perhaps too close to home. He shares stories from the field, from travelling with Maoist guerrillas in the forests of Bastar to reporting during the chaos of the Iraq war.

Rahul explains the concept of “Ungrund”, or groundlessness, which became the seed of the novel. Along the way, he reflects on the craft of writing his novels and how fiction can reveal what journalism can’t.

Tune in, and find out what “home” means to someone who is always on the move. 

Books mentioned in the episode:

1. Murphy by Samuel Beckett

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

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Suddenly this 13-14 year old kid comes, he suddenly appears and he has a pistol in his hands and he just aims at me from outside the car and I'm thinking that you know this is the end, I was 27 years old. What is home? Is it a place of feeling? Is it a person or habit? Well, that's something that we're going to be exploring today. We have with us Rahul Pandita who's written his debut novel, Our Friends and Good Houses and the novel is very interesting. It follows a man named Neel who's always on the move. He's a reporter, he covers wars so his life is a bit of a contradiction because in the middle of that external kiosk, it's only in that external kiosk that his own feeling of not fitting in finally goes away and then he leaves the front lines, he's back to searching for solid ground. His journey takes him from the US to Delhi through short-term relationships, apartments filled with temporary things and the book is really about trying to understand why he feels like a stranger even in his own life and I think that's something that all of us would have experienced at some place or another and Rahul Pandita is also a very well-known journalist who was awarded the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting in 2010 so I'd love to find out more about that as well. Welcome Rahul. Thanks Tara, I'm glad to be here. So yeah, as I mentioned, the novel opens with a man who's always on the move. You have Neel, he leaves home in Delhi for a fellowship at Yale, then he returns to India, travels through many conflict zones and what's striking is that you also began writing the first passages of the novel in 2013 which means that this character has been with you for a really, really long time. So how did Neel first emerge for you? So I began writing the first passages in 2014. In 2013, my book had just come out, my Kashmir memoir called Our Moon Has Blood Clots. So in 2014, I was away from India, I was in the United States on a fellowship for a short while and that is where the novel started coming together. Sometimes you need a little distance from your geography in order to understand certain things about your own life, about things you've seen. Now the larger question is why did I start writing this novel? I think I've been a journalist for a long, long time and I've covered some of the most vicious regions in terms of reporting, conflict reporting, politically volatile areas and when you're in the thick of it, sometimes you do not have the time to even think about how these things are unfolding because you're absolutely actively looking at the things that are unfolding around you. So I think it's only later in the later years when I felt this really acute need and desire to make sense of some of the things I had seen out there in the field as we journalists call it. And then I also realised that even when I was fortunate to work with editors here in India, who understand the concept of good writing or have done long-form journalism or what we roughly call the reported essays, the genre of reported essays, I've done it for a very, very long time. But even then I felt that there was a little inadequacy, little is an understatement, actually a bigger inadequacy between what I was experiencing out there on the field and what I was able to write in my journalistic dispatches. So I think to add to that one additional layer of meaning as we call it, I think I had to go back to fiction and I had never done it before. So in 2014, it's for the first time when I started writing a few passages, but then I can kind of gave up. It is not as if I've been working on it since 2014. So I wrote, some things came to me in 2017, but it's actually in 2022 and 23, when the novel really came together, it came to fruition. And that is the novel which is in your hands now. So what do you call this novel, a semi-autobiographical novel? You know, this is a question I get asked many, many times. And there's not a yes or no answer to this really, Tara. First of all, every piece of fiction, you know, comes from your own experiences of your own life or of the people who live around you. You know, one of the greatest Hindi writers has just passed away, Vinod Kumar Shuklaji. And, you know, in one of his novels, there's this character who, you know, goes to office every day, taking a lift from a sadhu who is atop an elephant. In one of the later interviews, we realised that when he was in Raipur, he used to live in Raipur, he used to do that quite often himself. You know, he used to go to office on an elephant. You know, some of these things are autobiographical. You look at Samuel Beckett's first novel, for example, Murphy. So Murphy, the character has a murmur in his heart. So did Samuel Beckett. So some things you really take from the life around you. But, you know, it's not completely autobiographical. In the first novel, especially what you try to do is you only try to deal with territories which are familiar to you, because you have a certain comfort with those territories. Like, you know, I know Kashmir very well, for example. So, you know, Neel is from Kashmir, and he's a refugee from Kashmir. And then he, as a war reporter, he moves on to Chhattisgarh, Dandakarani, as we call it, Bastar. You know, as a war reporter, I've covered Bastar quite extensively. But having said that, you know, so both Neel, my protagonist, and Rahul Pandita as a writer of this novel, you know, they come from these familiar territories. But of course, you know, there's fiction, you know, it's woven around fiction. But having said that, you know, there's this, I mean, your question brings to mind this wonderful thing, which one of my favourite authors, V S Naipaul, once said, I think he said that a beautiful creation of novel means that it should be indistinguishable from truth. So I think, if we go by that maxim, then I think that is what I try to do in my novel. Yeah. And you've spent your career reporting from some of the most intense and challenging environments in the world that also show up, you know, in the character's trajectory. And also, over the years, you've held senior editorial roles at major publications like The Hindu, you're one of the founding members of The Open Magazine. So your work as a journalist has required you to observe very closely, report facts. And now you're writing fiction. And obviously, writing a novel is a very different process. So how did you flip that switch between being a reporter and being a writer, being an author of fiction? And do you find that those two worlds ever collide? How does one play into each other? I think as a journalist, my writing has, you know, my journalistic writing has always kind of stood at the cusp of writing and journalism. You know, the late American novelist, David Foster Wallace used to call it because, you know, he's done some pieces, nonfiction. He used to call this writing from a position of being a non-journalist journalist. So I think in my career, I've done, you know, my career, if I kind of try and place it, it is at the cusp where, you know, the idea of good writing is very important for me. The other thing which I've tried to do in my writing, it came very early to me is, you know, I've tried not to think in terms of language. When I deal with the topic, if I'm out there in the field, for example, if I'm travelling with Maoist guerrillas, when a journalist is on an assignment, what he or she first tries to do, it comes from training, right? What you try to do is the moment you are in the field, you start thinking in terms of what is going to be my first paragraph. You know, this particular conversation, I think this forms a wonderful quote. This is perhaps going to be my ending. So, you know, you already started thinking in terms of language. So if you're writing for a, you know, for an English daily, for example, you start thinking in English, you know, those words come to you. If you're writing in, say, Telugu or Marathi or Hindi, you know, so your vocabulary will start automatically thinking in terms of that language. In my journalistic career, I try to avoid that. So what I do is I try to think in terms of what is essentially called a thought image. The Germans call it which is basically, you know, you go somewhere and it's like a moving picture in front of you. And you try to soak in all the details of that moving picture. I think Georges Barak, one of these wonderful cultural critics, French cultural critics, he used to, you know, he had devised this method of what he called infraordinary. You know, there are so many things which you see and you're missing it. You know, you're walking on a road, but how many times do you soak in the entire detail of that road? You know, you walk the same road or you're taking the same route to your office for 15 years. And then suddenly, one day, you know, you look up and you suddenly realise that you never looked at this beautiful door or this beautiful window, right? So that is a dark build or what Georges Barak used to call the infraordinary. So I think I've tried to build in that infraordinary or this thought image in my writing. So writing fiction came slightly easy to me. But having said that, you know, the grass is always greener on the other side, right? So normally how I, you know, my previous books have been books of nonfiction. You know, they're essentially extensions of my journalistic work from my dispatches. So my working style, as far as those books are concerned, is totally fixed. You know, I completely cut off and I go somewhere with a bag full of notebooks with my notes of the field. And then I start writing it, you know, gradually putting structure to the book. And sometimes, you know, when you're dealing with so much, so many notes, you know, there are 8 to 10, 15 notebooks sometimes open in front of you. And, you know, there's an economic and political weekly open in front of you. And, you know, you're looking at 50 references. Sometimes, you know, it just tyres you out and you say to yourself, I have definitely said this to myself. Oh, I wish I was writing fiction because, you know, I would just keep these notes aside and I would just think in my imagination. And it would be so easy. Right. That is what you think. But when I started writing fiction, there were times when I thought to myself, oh, my God, I wish I had those notebooks in front of me, which, you know, which I could really look at and then complete my today's quote of say 2000 words or 1500 words. So I think both genres are challenging. But I think at a deeper level, what this book has done, many people thought that this would happen when I finished writing my Kashmir memoir, because it's a deeply personal story. Right. And many people ask me this question, whether writing that book was cathartic for you or not. And I also, you know, thought that after I write that book, you know, it will be a cathartic experience for me. But I remember when I, you know, when I when I received the first copy of that book in 2013, just before it was launched in January 2013, I started reading a couple of pages and I just could not read them. I just threw the book away in my living room. So in that way, it was not a cathartic experience at all. But strangely, something happened after I finished this book, this this this novel. And my my editor Dharni Bhaskar from HarperCollins, she asked me this question. You know, she's a friend. And after we finished and you know, the book went to the press and she said, how do you feel? And till that time, you know, I had not really thought about this question. And I gave it a thought for a moment. And I said to her, I said, Dharni, I feel completely emptied out. So I think writing this book strangely where I was not expecting this at all. It was truly a cathartic experience for me. But like I was telling Dharni and she was very happy about it, you know, between that time and this time, I think thankfully, the bowl of my, you know, the bowl from which writing emerges, your future work emerges has started, you know, some water has started trickling it in again. And, you know, I showed myself that, you know, I have some other things to say, which I will see in the next few years. I love that story. And do you know why this was so much more cathartic? Could you explain that? I wish I knew. But, you know, at a at a larger level, I think I dealt with that. I started looking at my material in words, which I was mentioning to you earlier, you know, when you're in the thick of things, you sometimes do not have the time to process what you've experienced in the field. And, you know, you experience some terrible, terrible things in the field. You know, there's this one little anecdote, which I mentioned in the book, which Neil goes through, right? It's an anecdote from from my own life. And, you know, I was once many, many years ago, I was in the heart of Bastar in this absolutely cut off area called Jagar Gunda. You know, it's the back of beyond. At one point in time, nobody used to go there. You know, chopper had to be sent for the CRPF to receive its ration, etc. So I'm there once and I'm in this training centre of the CRPF and I'm not supposed to be there. But somehow I land there and I'm just roaming around and for a few minutes, nobody has kind of discovered me or nobody has thought about what this man is really doing inside. And, you know, I suddenly land in this little thatched hut of sorts. It's basically a very sparse room. And in one corner of the room, there's this one CRPF jawan, the soldier who's lying down on a bench. It's a wooden bench, the kind of bench we have in classrooms. And he is suffering from a terrible bout of malaria because it's a malaria endemic area. And he's shivering terribly. And I think he has high fever. And by this time, he is delirious with fever. So he's extremely restless. What he's doing is he's getting up, shivering, then lying down again, then getting up, lying down again. And this cycle continues. And I'm just watching him. And I'm completely mesmerised with what I am watching. And in the middle of this, his eyes fall on me suddenly. And I think by this time, he started hallucinating because, you know, fever can do that to you, high fever can do that to you. And he breaks into a grin suddenly and he asks me in Hindi, kuch laana to nahi? Now, you know, there could be any meaning to it. But to my mind, you know, I thought a lot about this. So the closest meaning I can derive from the statement is, you know, what essentially happens in mid-class homes, you know, you go out, you know, the man of the house suddenly goes out, even if he has fought with his wife. But when he goes out, he will ask his wife once, kuch laana to nahi hai, market se kuch laana to nahi hai. So I think, you know, in my head, what I felt was that in his head, he was hallucinating about being at home and, you know, speaking to his wife to whom he asked, essentially asked me, but in his head, he could not make the difference. He asked me kuch laana to nahi hai. Now, you know, in the limitation of journalism is such that it cannot address something like this. So to address something like this, you need that additional layer of meaning, which no matter how hard you try, it cannot be brought to journalism. That is why you need fiction. And sometimes, you know, I think there are some truths you come closer to in fiction than in nonfiction, especially the kind of times we are living in now. It is completely dystopian times, things are happening around us. I agree. And I think that even the character Neil, I mean, his first experience of this conflict zone, it's a very physical experience. You know, he notices people speaking very little, he feels different, his own worries feel very small, you know, there's no electricity, there's only insects, birds, it's completely dark at night. So all of those things, which you said the moving picture that those visceral feelings, they come across really well in the book. And it's very interesting. I mean, you know, for all of us city people to sort of get a view into this. So I want to actually ask you also, you know, a little bit about your own journey as well. How did you sort of, you know, venture into this field? And what was it like for you the first time you sort of encountered a place like this? So I think my life trajectory was very clear. I wanted to be a journalist. When I was in college, I was like Neil, I was fortunate enough to meet wise people at different points in my life. And, you know, there's a little dialogue I see in the book, where I say that, you know, sometimes life throws a rope at you and, you know, it's up to you to kind of hold on to it. Or, you know, sometimes we just don't realise how important you know, holding this rope is. In my case, I was lucky to find that all these ropes, which these wise men and women had thrown at me at different points in time, they were not essentially my teachers or, you know, you know, they're not my professors from whom I learned. But there were random people in my life who came to my life at different intervals in time. And I was fortunate enough because the rope, the different ropes, they threw at me at different points in time led to the same trajectory, which is what led me to Delhi. And then I became a journalist. So my story is not one of those countless stories, you know, in newsrooms, you often, at least in the old times, you often met, you know, some of my colleagues who came from small towns like I did to Delhi. And, you know, they used to live in one small room somewhere preparing for civil services. And then they tried civil services for a couple of times. And, you know, they couldn't crack it. And then they thought, okay, let me be a journalist. But in my case, you know, I was absolutely clear about the fact that, you know, I wanted to be a journalist. And that is what brought me to Delhi. But once I came to Delhi, I also realised a couple of things. And, you know, this was completely, it was, I had very little exposure to larger things, right? I came from a small town. I became a refugee at the age of 14. Destiny, like it helped Neil, you know, it took me to Punjab University, Chandigarh, where I met some wise people like Neil does. And then I come to Delhi. But what I realised is that I was very certain about one thing. And it did not come from any deeper theoretical books or from any journalism school. I made a covenant with myself that I'm not going to write about anything unless I see it for myself. You know, journalism can be done in different forms. You know, you are here and, you know, you're in the thick of things, you're in the national capital. And sometimes a bureaucrat, you know, from the Home Ministry will call you and he'll give you a ready-made dossier of what they think is the truth. And sometimes out of sheer laziness, you know, you think, okay, you know, this source has given you this, this quote-unquote source has given you this little dossier. So this must be, this must be truth. So I kind of refused to do it. When I started travelling in the hinterland of my own, you know, without any, without any journalistic support from bigger organisations, you know, I went on a journey, I went on a journey on our own, like a Bharatiya Khoj kind of journey. And when I looked at the hinterland, which I was, you know, which I was experiencing for the first time, I felt deeply, I had this revolution in my head, that when I looked at the marginalisation of people or the poverty they've suffered, right, or the kind of difficulties they are going through, and how they're bearing green through these difficulties, right, it made my own little suffering pale in comparison. And in those days, you know, in the early days, I'm talking about the late 90s, you know, this was also a time when many career-orientated journalists would prefer going to Kashmir, because, you know, Kashmir was, as I often call it, quote-unquote, the sexy insurgency, where careers are made, you know, everyone is going there and doing these little piece to cameras as, you know, TV reporters often do, or, you know, they write these little dispatches from Kashmir. Because, you know, I was an affected party, I did not go to Kashmir for a long, long time, I started going slightly later. But what really attracted me is the hinterland, the hinterland where I spent most of my journalistic career, you know, the Bastar and thereabouts. I felt, you know, I felt a sense of belonging there. I felt a deep affinity with that place and with the people around it. In those days, it was, you know, the area and its problems were not as well known as they are today. You know, in those days, I remember when you used to go to editors and say that, you know, this is something you want to say, oh, come on, this is nothing, you know, you come back again from these issues, nothing is going to happen in these areas, you know, these are, you know, completely, they were cut off from your consciousness. But of course, from mid 2000s onwards, you know, it became so big that, you know, everyone started going there. But even then, when journalists were going there, they went there, you know, they were always paradropped there, you know, you go there, some big event has happened, some big ambush has happened, probably CRPF personnel have died and suddenly, you know, you have the resources and the wherewithal to send your journalist there. But when a journalist wants to go there on his or her own, look at what is happening there, what the state is doing or what the state is failing to do, then, you know, no newsroom had any revenue in those days. But, you know, you kind of struggle that and you kind of try and create your own trajectories from it, you struggle with it. And I did that. And I spent a hell lot of time there. Yes. Oh, wow. You were, I think, also very ahead of your time in terms of thinking, you know, especially in today's area of misinformation. The fact that you said that, and with the internet, it's gotten even worse, but you said, I want to see things with my own eyes. I think that's a very powerful thing, actually, and should be done a lot more. And you spent, you know, you mentioned a few of these challenges of the years you spent reporting from areas affected by the Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India. So what were some of those biggest challenges of reporting from these regions for you? And is there any incident from your time there? You've mentioned the Malaira incident. Is there any other incident from your time of reporting there that has stayed with you all of those years? So let's leave external incidents, you know, aside. But it's really difficult to report from these areas to begin with, right? At the time when I started going to Bastar, a journey from the state capital of Chhattisgarh, Raipur, to a place called Dantewada, which is the gateway to Mao's affected territory really, used to take 14 hours. You know, now it can be done in five hours on very good motorable road, right? But it's also, the main struggle was the struggle to deal with what you were seeing. It's an extremely depressive place to report from. When you look at poverty, poverty, you know, firsthand, you look at people who have not been outside the 20 kilometres of radius from the place they were born in. They've never seen a town or a market or some of them do not even know that there's something called the government of India, which is supposed to take care of them. They had absolutely no idea about these things. And before I went and even after I went, you know, there were townspeople who took advantage of this. You know, the businessmen used to go there and take advantage of the poor Adivasis, the tribals. So that in itself was very challenging. Then to spend, you know, I call it the phenomenon of clean bedsheet journalism. I sometimes speak to young journalists, which is to say that, you know, once you're, once you are parachuted to a particular place, what journalists essentially do is, you know, they get the colour and quote of the story and then it's 4 o'clock. So they say, oh, you know, let me start returning from the place where I can at least go back to a semi-decent hotel, you know, where I can sleep in the night. But in my experience, I mean, no truth will reveal itself to you by conversation of a couple of hours, you know, you go somewhere and these areas, you know, in insurgency, the level of intrigue is absolutely very deep. You know, you are at a tea shack and sometimes someone will come to you and say, oh, you are a journalist, you say, yes. And they say, you say, yes. And then he has his cup of tea and then he leaves. Then another man comes. He says, you say, I'm from, you know, I'm a journalist. Then he said, I'm from police. And, you know, the person you were speaking to, he was an axolotl. So, you know, stuff like this is already, it's very intriguing. But I think the sheer exhaustion, the physical exhaustion of travel to begin with, you know, I described some of that through Neal's life trajectory also, you know, when you're embedded with Marvel's gorillas, for example, and you're travelling with them from one forest to another, you're crossing rivers, you're going there, you were there, and you have absolutely no idea where they're taking you. You know, the jungles are dense, they're Amazon-like jungles, you know, you do not dare venture 50 feet away from the camp they've set you up in. And these camps are not, you know, I was speaking to a young friend of mine who has absolutely no idea about these places. And, but he's very curious about the kind of life I've lived. And, you know, he's Gen Z, he has absolutely, you know, no idea about these things. So he was like, so where did you stay while you were embedded with these mouse gorillas? So did they have rooms? Was there AC? So, you know, now, you know, it's very difficult to even make him understand where you've lived. You have lived for weeks in the middle of nowhere, on a tarpaulin sheet, with a tarpaulin sheet over your head. I mean, there are, you know, there's a poison snake there, your entire body is covered with this South African insect repellent called Tabard. And you're hoping that, you know, you do not get the falciparum strains of malaria, you know, at least a couple of, you know, one journalist lost his life and two others almost lost their life, you know, people known to me who suffered this malaria. So these are, you know, difficult. And then, of course, you know, like Adivasis, if you get stuck in this war between the Maoist gorillas and the Indian state, sometimes you don't know, I mean, if you're embedded with Maoist gorillas, and suppose there's a police ambush, there's an attack. Now, you cannot make a phone call to anyone and say, hey, I'm not a Maoist gorilla, I'm a reporter travelling with Maoist gorillas. When the rockets hit you, when the machine gun fire hits you, it hits everyone, right? So, you know, so this is occupational hazard. But this hazard, you know, it's not only unique to Bastar, you know, I was in Iraq in March, April of 2003. And, you know, I had dead bodies all around me. And, you know, we used to live in this hotel called Hotel Palestine, which is in the middle of Baghdad, which used to be a snake pit in those times. And in the night alarms would go on, and you know, you'd be sleeping with your combat boots on, you would walk down 14 floors of stairs and go and hide in a bunker. I remember the time when I kind of entered Baghdad for the first time, and there was this one place where the car came to a stop because there was looting happening in a petrol pump in front of us. And there was this huge crowd of people who was trying to cross, and the car could not cross. And suddenly, you know, I'm sitting on the right side of the car, and suddenly this 14, you know, 13, 14 year old kid comes, he suddenly appears, and he has a pistol in his hands. And he just aims at me from outside the car. And I'm like, you know, it's a complete chaos. You know, there's no government, no state in control. The crowd is the government. You know, everyone is armed with AK-47s and pistols. And suddenly, he aimed at me and, you know, what can you do? You're in a car. And I did just like this, you know, I covered down. And I'm thinking that, you know, this is the end. I was 27 years old. And suddenly, you know, start counting one, two, and entire life moves in front of you. You know, you think of your father, you think of your mother, you think of the food you just had, a cup of tea you just had. And you're thinking like, oh my God, I wish I had a cigarette. You know, this is just happening in like one, two, three seconds. And then suddenly, I looked up and he had just disappeared. He had chosen not to shoot at me. So, you know, stuff like that. And, you know, when I came back from Baghdad to Jordan to Amman, I realised I was stressed so much that I had forgotten the pin number of my ATM card, you know, which is a big deal for me because, you know, I really, really remember my numbers. But I was so stressed out from my experience in Baghdad that I forgot the pin number, which is a four digit pin number. I completely forgotten it. I mean, I can't even imagine all of these experiences and what you've gone through. It does really sound like, I mean, it sounds like fiction, honestly. And, you know, what kept you going? I mean, through all of these things, you know, what was that one thing that said, okay, you know, like, because there's so many risks involved, what is it that propelled you forward? For young people, really, what kind of advice would you give them about pursuing this kind of a journalism? I think the only thing that kept me going at it was that at least the initial years, it's very tough to say now, but in the initial years, I thought that the stories I was bringing out was making a slight difference. Or if not difference, it was at least giving a vent to people who had remained unheard for a very, very long time. Sometimes, you know, it's and it's not only about, you know, ordinary life is not about sometimes about very big changes or very big developments. Ordinary life sometimes is about just listening to somebody. I remember, you know, sometimes you're in a village and where, you know, there's this old woman and she has some issue with the jackfruit tree or, you know, some minor problem she has. And you just happen, you know, you just met the district collector a day before, and you just want to give it a try. And you call him, you know, he's a young person. You say, so, you know, I just met yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened? So, you say, you know, this village, this woman I met, you know, she has a little problem. So, and, you know, the DC is a very important person. He or she can do anything in that particular district. And, you know, it's just, it's just a signature he or she requires or a phone call away. And the woes of that old lady are gone. Now, she's absolutely happy. And you're happy about the fact that, you know, you've made such a, I mean, it's just one phone call, but it has made such a remarkable, remarkable difference in your life. I think at this time, the only advice I would like to give to young people is because, you know, in these times, not that it was different in my time, you know, sometimes we add too much value to it. And you say, you know, now that we have smartphones, our attention span has gone. I mean, I know a time when there were absolutely no smartphones in picture. And still, you know, if you spoke to a person, his or her attention span wavered so much. It's just a human condition. And I think, but especially in today's time with, you know, with the smartphone and, you know, this doom scrolling, I think, I think attention is completely lacking from our lives. Attention towards each other, attention at things around you. You know, there's this beautiful, wonderful writer who's one of my role models. Her name is Simone Weil. She was a French philosopher. And she used to say that attention is the highest form of love. And vice versa, you could also say that love is the highest form of attention. So I think my advice to young person, young people would be to have bring back that attention in their lives and have a little humility at things around you. Sometimes, you know, the lives of people around you are so difficult that you can't even imagine that in your little fancy car, which your father has given you or this little smartphone world you live in. It's so small. But once you start travelling, you know, the horizons widen so much. And then you, like it happened to me many, many years ago, when you realise that you're, you know, these small things that my father is not paying me attention and he's not spoke to me, these are so small things and they just fail in comparison to what a majority of people are facing outside. And coming back to the book, you know, you described in the book, Neil comes across this idea of ungrunt, is that how to pronounce it? Ungrunt, yes. Ungrunt, yeah. So when a professor gives him a book, and it's basically described as this feeling of groundlessness, of not having a stable base to stand on. And this is a sense that Neil has realised that he's carried since his childhood. And then, you know, this feeling has sort of followed him everywhere he's gone through different houses, cities, relationships, etc. So I found this concept very interesting. How did you come across this concept? And what does it mean for you? I think the seed of this novel was sown by that word, you know, I came that across, I came across that word in 2014, in that little visiting scholars apartment in the US. And sometimes, you know, you, you are thinking a lot of things, but you do not have one word to describe it. And when, when this word, you know, it almost revealed as God's Word to me, you know, when I when I when I heard the sound of this word, you know, a particular vision came to me and, you know, in the, in the Indic traditions, it's sometimes called Shabd Ki Chod in the Kabir tradition, you sometimes you know, you're singing a song, you know, there's this one line, which you, you know, you think that this particular line or this particular phase was just meant for you. And the entire experience of life sublimate at that particular word or phrase. So I think the vision for this novel came together with that word. But through this word, what I also wanted to do is I wanted to separate the idea of ungrund or groundlessness from a physical idea of displacement. What I wanted to say that it's not important that for you to be physically displaced, like need to feel that ungrund. There are, you know, in the, in the modern civilisations, you know, we have so many dilemmas. And we are facing so many issues that, you know, this groundlessness can strike anyone, anywhere. So this idea of home, you know, there's this universal theme to it. So I wanted to make it at least a rise to that level, instead of just bringing it down to Kashmir or sometimes what also happens is that a particular place or an area becomes attached to you. In my case, it was Kashmir, for example, because you know, that book did really well, the Kashmir memoir did really well. And suddenly, you know, we had publishers who always thought of Kashmir as my USP. And sometimes, you know, you sometimes you meet an editor or a publisher, why don't you do something about Kashmir? Why don't you do something? So I, and it's true, I, you know, I tell them, and I say this to our audiences today, you know, being a Kashmiri or the fact that I was exiled from Kashmir is a is a is a significant but a very small part of who I am. I think, as a sort of universal citizen, I have other concerns. I think about other things. So through this novel, through this story, you know, I'm also, I mean, I did not set out to do this, but I think it has somehow achieved this, which is also to say that, you know, in these really terrible times of polarisation, all kinds of religious and ideological polarisation, where, you know, nobody seems to be thinking beyond these binaries, nonsensical binaries of left and right, and you know, everything has to be fitted in these two boxes. I also wanted to send a larger message that it is possible for a person, for a thinking person who has had his own personal history, to have a sense of empathy for people whose ideology he may or may not agree with. So I think we need to, literature needs to, it is no longer possible in journalism. Journalism is at its rock bottom right now, and I hope it only rises from there and does not find another cave to go down to. But I think at least through literature, through novels, or through other forms of writing, I think we need to dissolve these binaries, these boxes, to arrive at a universality which will fit all these boxes together. Yeah, and I like what you said about, you know, it reminds me of Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk, where she said, we're not all a single story. Yes. Yeah. So I like that a lot that, because people do tend, and it's human nature, as you said, you know, that, oh, this is your USP or this is your thing. But I think identities are so much more fluid than that. And that's also something that, you know, the character, we see is different, different trajectories, different relationships, which I also found very interesting in the book. What is also interesting, you know, I'd say that on social media, sometimes, and I don't know how to say this to people sometimes who troll me on social media, right? You know, I would like to say to them, I mean, just because you bought a book of mine, it should not occur to you that now you own my body, my soul, and my entire thought process, just because you empathised with a certain leaf or a chapter of my life. Life doesn't work like that. You know, I have other experiences, I have met other people, sometimes, you know, people from my own community, for example, you know, they sometimes troll me, and they say, you're a Maoist. They have absolutely no understanding about Maoism. If I put a map of India in front of them and say, can you point out Basler to me? You know, there's a very high probability that they won't be able to do it. So, you know, let's stop this absolute nonsense about putting everyone and expecting the same kind of response, the same kind of thought process from everybody else. And thank you so much for your insights and, you know, for your insights into the book and also insights into, you know, all of your experience. I think, I don't think I've spoken to a person before who's, you know, actually reported from these conflict zones. So it was very fascinating for me and something completely, as you said, you know, out of the bubble that we all live in, in our cities and everything. So just quite amazing all the work that you're doing. And yeah, thank you for all your insights. Thank you, Tara. It was a pleasure speaking to you. And for our listeners, I have a question for you. How do you define home? Tell me in the comments below. And before you go, don't forget to follow and rate us on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And follow us on Instagram and Bound India for updates behind the scenes and everything that's happening with Bound. See you next time.