I came to know of V.S. Naipaul through a profile done by Tarun Tejpal in Outlook magazine, The Last Emperor. Tejpal wrote it like a man possessed — it certainly cast a spell on me — and it still is the best piece I have read on Naipaul. There was also an interview in which Naipaul said that he got the writing ambition from his father: “Or rather, I took up his example; I took up his example”. I immediately went to a library to get A House for Mr Biswas.
Another article on Naipaul appeared soon, this time by T.G. Vaidyanathan in The Hindu Literary Review, titled The Writer’s Writer. And then, suddenly, I started seeing Naipaul’s name everywhere. Those were days when cyber cafes were few, TV channels were few, but newspapers and magazines were aplenty. I wonder if that was the time when the Indian media started celebrating Naipaul. It was the year 1998.
I was a young man in Lucknow with dreams of becoming a literary writer. The more I read of Naipaul, the more I identified with him. I had grown up in a similar maternal grandparents’ household, I had a similar father who wished to do extraordinary things, and I had a similar ambition — of not pursuing any profession except writing. I, too, disdained most of the world; I was born almost on the same date; and I was also a Brahmin with a father from east U.P. Besides, so much of Naipaul’s character, his attitude, was in me. Like him, I felt marked — “I am going to be either a big success or an unheard-of failure.”
Like Eklavya, I chose Naipaul as my guru. The Nobel may have been given to him for being an annalist of the destiny of empires and narrator of the history of the vanquished, to me his distinction lay in that he wrote about the writer. No one else has written so insightfully about the process of writing, the struggle and ambition to be a writer, the experience of being a writer. He stood for not what a writer does but what a writer is. Naipaul’s devotion to literature is heroic; his chronicling of the devotion inspiring. I did not really choose to be his disciple; if you wished to be a writer and if you read Naipaul, you just fell at his feet.












