Ep 265: Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life
The Seen and the Unseen - hosted by Amit Varma
The Most Powerful Thing in the World Is Story, Reality Doesn't Matter
The most powerful thing in the world is really story, reality doesn't matter. We live in an age of competing narratives. The truth is completely irrelevant. And at another level, I feel that there is no difference between fiction and nonfiction also. So I think of the blue book, for example, as an attempt to preserve my humanity.
Life is beautiful, but we are too busy to notice. Writing is one way to capture the world, and to make our journey memorable. Amitava Kumar joins Amit Varma in episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe his journey as an author, journalist, artist, Instagrammer -- and to explain the joys of slow-jamming the news. Also check out:1. Amitava Kumar on Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, Vassar and his own website. 2. The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal -- Amitava Kumar. 3. Husband Of A Fanatic -- Amitava Kumar. 4. A Matter of Rats -- Amitava Kumar. 5. Writing Badly is Easy -- Amitava Kumar. 6. Pyre -- Amitava Kumar. 7. Beautiful World, Where Are You -- Sally Rooney. 8. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Susan Sontag and Joan Didion on Amazon. 10. Dom Moraes, Khushwant Singh and Suketu Mehta on Amazon. 11. Despatches 15: A World of Stopped Watches -- Amit Varma. 12. A Picture of Hell, and No Kerosene -- Amit Varma. 13. Why I Write -- George Orwell. 14. John Berger and William Maxwell on Amazon. 15. Austerlitz -- WG Sebald. 16. The Art of Translation -- Episode 168 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arunava Sinha). 17. Jejuri -- Arun Kolatkar. 18. Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures — Episode 17 of Conversations With Tyler. 19. The Notebook Trilogy — Agota Kristof. 20. Ved Mehta and VS Naipaul on Amazon. 21. India: A Million Mutinies Now -- VS Naipaul. 22. JM Coetzee, Janet Malcolm, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri on Amazon. 23. Chandrahas Choudhury at The Middle Stage and Instagram.. 24. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 25. Why Are My Episodes so Long? -- Amit Varma. 26. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. 27. Letters from a Father to his Daughter -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 28. The Mahatma and the Poet — The letters between Gandhi and Tagore, compiled by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 29. Zadie Smith and Teju Cole on Amazon. 30. Symphony No.3, Op.36 -- Henryk Gorecki. 31. Nehru’s Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 32. Nehru: The Debates that Defined India — Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain. 33. Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Thomas Hardy. 34. Martin Amis on Amazon. 35. The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro. 36. Court -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 37. The Disciple -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 38. Ted Hughes and Colm Toibin on Amazon. 39. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy -- Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 40. How Social Media Threatens Society — Episode 8 of Brave New World (Jonathan Haidt speaking to host Vasant Dhar). 41. Memories and Things -- Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 42. Rahul Roy (documentary filmmaker) on IMDb. 43. Most of Amit Varma’s writing on Demonetisation, collected in one Twitter thread. 44. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman -- Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 45. The Odd Woman and the City — Vivian Gornick. 46. Private Truths, Public Lies — Timur Kuran. 47. Amit Varma's tweet thread about AI writing fiction. 48. I Vitelloni and Amarcord by Federico Fellini. 49. Eho -- Dren Zherka. 50. Charulata and Aranyer Din Ratri by Satyajit Ray. 51. Ashis Nandy on Amazon. 52. The Prem Panicker Files -- Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. Prem Panicker in The Windowpane Sessions. 54. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal and Nishant Jain. 55. Hermit in Paris -- Italo Calvino. 56. Sophie Calle on Wikipedia. 57. Sophie Calle and the Art of Leaving a Trace -- Lili Owen Rowlands. 58. Sankarshan Thakur on Amazon and Twitter. 59. Penelope Fitzgerald on Amazon. 60. So Long, See You Tomorrow -- William Maxwell. 61. Citizen: An American Lyric -- Claudia Rankine. 62. Waiting for the Barbarians -- JM Coetzee. 63. Disgrace -- JM Coetzee. 64. Voices From Chernobyl -- Svetlana Alexievich. 65. A Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth. 66. English, August: An Indian Story -- Upamanyu Chatterjee. 67. Raag Darbari -- Shrilal Shukla. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit’s online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It’s free!
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