A Beautiful Language

Q. To kick things off, what’s new in Vikram Chandra’s world? There is some buzz in town that your new book is releasing very soon. Is that true?

A. Actually, I am making a new kind of word processor with a friend. In February 2016, we co-founded a software startup, and we are developing a word processor for writers.

Q. Could you talk about some of the main features of this word processor?

A. When you are writing a book, you need to keep track of people, places and dates. Writers always face this problem. When I wrote Sacred Games, I understood pretty early that it was going to be a very large book. It had a 60-year timeline; it’s got more than a hundred named characters; many, many locations. Writers have always traditionally dealt with this using index cards: you have your notes, write a timeline on the wall and need to keep track of who is where at any given time. And I thought, surely someone must have written a software for it, not just for fiction writers but also for people who write history, and for journalists who are constructing very complex journalistic stories, and for legal writers. But nobody had.

So I thought and thought about it for 10-12 years, did a lot of research and figured out a way to make it work, so that we can actually build one piece of software which is essentially a word processor for writers. As you type, you are not just putting together strings of characters and words; you are actually creating the logic of the universe that you are describing. For instance, when you write Jaya met Raj at a party in Jaipur, the software will recognise that Jaya and Raj are people, that party is an event, and that Jaipur is a location. Then you can assign a date to that event. In other words, you are building meaning, not just text. We then will be able to help the writer, to enable the writer to avoid contradictions, to avoid mistakes — and writers make mistakes all the time. Harry Potter, for instance, is full of errors, continuity mistakes. J.K. Rowling has herself acknowledged this. In Homer’s Illiad, there is a king that dies very early in the poem and about two-thirds of the way in the poem, when his son dies, the dead king shows up at his son’s funeral! Because Homer just forgot that he was a minor character and just killed him off [laughs]. So keeping the logic of whatever you are trying to describe, be it fiction or non-fiction, is a very difficult problem. And that’s what we are doing with this software — it is called Granthika. Granthika is Sanskrit for narrator.

Q. In your book Geek Sublime, you have explored the connections between art and technology. What were the initial thoughts that set you on this journey?

A. When I was writing my first book, I supported myself by doing computer programming. I am not a very trained computer scientist at all. I just took one or two classes in the subject as an undergraduate and then as a hobbyist. You know, some people get obsessed — so I was like one of those people. I taught myself computer program, and very luckily that enabled me to support myself. And then, once I started publishing and started teaching, I stopped doing it professionally, but I’ve followed it ever since. And it always seemed to me that we now live in a world which is profoundly transformed by software. You are taping me right now on this thing, but not many people outside the tech industry actually understand what it is that programmers actually do. And programming also has its own little strange subculture — of mythologies, of values, of what people think is good/bad. So I thought I would write for the general reader a kind of ethnography of programmers, especially in reference to Silicon Valley. I was trying to figure out a way to do that, and one thing that occurred to me was that like writers, the other tribe of people who deal with language everyday in a very focused way are programmers, because what you are doing when you are programming is actually constructing language. Programmers, too, work with language, and they like to make beautiful programmes. It is not just that you are doing it for functional reasons; you are trying to make it elegant in the same way that physicists or mathematicians talk about a certain equation as beautiful.  So there is such a thing within the programming community as a beautiful programme. I thought that might be an interesting way to enter this. I work with language, another kind of language, but I am also trying to make that language beautiful. And as soon as I thought that, a question occurred to me: Who are those other people who have tried to think of beauty in reference to formal languages? And the obvious answer, very close to home, is the scholars of Sanskrit. Sanskrit, in some sense, is a formal language because Panini’s grammar, which defines how Sanskrit works, is not a traditional grammar. When I was growing up, we had this horrible English grammar where they would teach you how to conjugate English verbs and all of that, and you had to cram all of that. So Sanskrit’s is not a grammar like that. Panini’s grammar is an algorithm. It is a machine. In a space of 40 pages it generates Sanskrit, in an infinite kind of way. So Sanskrit, in a very direct way, is both a natural spoken tongue and a formal language. There has been a very long tradition in India, within this system, of trying to think what it is that makes some kind of language beautiful. So, then, all these ideas came together — and that’s how the book happened.               

Q. Do you ever feel the urge to re-read the books you published long ago?

A. I don’t think many writers read their stuff written long ago because you end up finding flaws. You read a sentence and you think you could have made it slightly better: “Oh, look! There is a misplaced comma right here.” “We didn’t need this thing here.” And so on. Also, it is kind of boring, even for filmmakers. I have a lot of friends who are filmmakers, and they never watch films they made years ago. You kind of leave it behind, and then, whatever lessons you learned during the making of one book, you save it for the next one. But I have to say that recently, I had to read some part of Sacred Games again because it is being into a series by Netflix. I am not working on the screenplay — there is a bunch of talented writers that Phantom films have put together in Bombay who are developing it. I am working with them as a consultant. Sometimes they ask me questions from the book that I wrote so long ago. I myself can’t remember things like what happened in some specific part of the plot. So I have to go back and re-read. Again, when I do that I say to myself, “This could have been much better; I could have changed it into this way.”

Q: Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

A: Touchwood — and I have to touch lots of wood — and thank God that it has never happened to me in a serious way. But I believe it’s real. I have seen it happen to people and it’s horrible. It’s really, really nasty. For me, what happens is not that kind of psychological block; instead when I am writing, it sometimes happens that I won’t quite know what’s going to happen next in the narrative. For instance, I’ll have a scene, location and characters but I can’t quite figure out what is the next moment. And I know from experience now how to deal with that. I tell myself, “Okay, take a holiday for two weeks.” I tell myself, “You are not going to think about this at all.” And then I go on to watch movies and read and listen to music and have fun. All this allows your subconscious to work on the problem. I think this happens not only in writing fiction. I have heard about this from programmers, mathematicians and physicists that if you are trying to attack a problem too forwardly, sometimes you get stuck. So if you walk away from it and then one day, when you are not thinking about it, suddenly in the shower the answer will pop into your head. And then you think, “Oh! It’s been so simple all along.” So I think that the human mind is a very curious thing, that there are parts of your mind that are always working , which you don’t have access to. You’ve got to give yourself time to allow all those parts of your body to also participate in the act of creation.

Q. Your mother Kamna Chandra has been a screenwriter. Your sisters, Tanuja and Anupama are filmmaker and film critic respectively. Could you give us an insight into the average dinner-table conversation at your home? There must be a lot of talk about cinema.

A. It’s not quite as concentratedly professional as you might think but often it does happen. You know, we would all see one movie and we will discuss about it. Things like, “You like it? Why did you like it? I hated it.” We will talk about the flaws in it and the then the other person will argue back… So those kinds of things do happen. Sometimes in reference to my own writing. My wife is also a novelist, and that really helps. You are stuck and you are sitting at your computer. So I can yell across the house, “Melanie, help me! I need help!” We show each other the stuff we’ve written, and it goes back and forth. I have now two daughters and the older one is a very precocious writer as well — she is also growing up in the same environment. The funny thing is, when I used to tell her bedtime stories, she started becoming a critic at, like, age two-and-a-half. She would say: “Daddy, that was a very boring story. Nothing happened in it.”

Q. There is a lot of debate these days about the pros and cons of creative writing courses. We keep on seeing newspaper and magazine articles for and against a creating writing degree. What are your thoughts on this, given that you teach creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley?

A. I am all for it. There are two sides of the question. It is absolutely not necessary to take up a creative writing course to become a writer. You will find thousands of examples throughout history of people who have become writers without going to a creative writing school. People always say you can’t teach writing. And my response always is: “How, then can you teach painting or acting?’ I think what you can’t each is talent — you can’t give someone talent. What you can give is craft. You can give them the vocabulary and tools which allow them to think about their talent and about the craft; you can teach them how to use those tools to mobilise their talent. In a writing workshop, I as a teacher will start talking about the elements of fiction —  very simple things like plot, character development, landscape, mood, conflict, sentence structure, rhythm and so on. You read certain stories and then you take examples like, say, James Joyce and Mahashweta Devi — you think of how they deployed these elements of fiction in their work that has a certain effect on you. Then, what cultivates is an awareness of your own deployment of those tools and that’s the true value of a writing program.  People always have this weird thinking that this [creative writing courses] is a new-fangled kind of American thing, but we have an ancient tradition in India which is exactly the same thing. The guru-shishya or ustad-shagird tradition. What did the ustad do? The shagird came and stayed in the gharana and learnt the milieu, learnt the craft and at a certain time presented one’s work when he or she was ready. This is exactly the same model. We have legends about Kalidasa giving critiques to people bringing their manuscript to him and asking him, “Sir, what do you think of this work?” This is what we are doing except that it has become institutionalised and, in some sense, become commercial.

Q. And finally, what about that next book of yours? How long before we see the new one hit the shelves?

A. It is too early to talk about that, but what I can tell you is that it is going to be a work of fiction, and that it is set in three different cities around the world at three different times — with one section set in India.