Pulitzer winner deeply rooted to his Indianness

If Stephen King and Isaac Asimov are to be believed, then writing is a lonely job but the same philosophy does not hold good for the 60-year-old Bengaluru-born 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri who won the Pulitzer in the Poetry category for his collection called 3 Sections.

“You tend to do it alone, but I don’t feel lonely when I am writing,” says Vijay in an American accent and it is hard to trace his roots through his assertive yet polite voice. He further adds, “It is more solitary than lonely.

Depends on the writer, for example Jane Austen, she wrote such classics while she was surrounded by family, she did not lock herself up in a room. Some writers just require the environment to be right for them.”

Even though his association with Bengaluru has almost been cut off, as his parents migrated to America in 1954 when he was only five years old, yet the writer feels associated with the city where he was born and reminiscences, “I have unbelievably vivid memories of my childhood years spent in the city from the time I was two years old and we lived in Malleshwaram. I remember clearly the time when my grandmother died in 1956, soon after which my father left for the West to get his PhD.”

Reliving his journey he says that the moments spent at Kumara Park at Race Course road where they lived right across the railway bridge is stamped clearly in his memory and it is hard to get those images out. The last time Vijay came to the city was in 2003, and he says, “Bengaluru has changed so much from what I left it with.”

It was not easy for the man of “words” and his family to fit into the strange American culture at that time. “There were small communities clustered around who were a part of the brain drain and so we had this long curative time simulating to strange culture which was totally different from ours,” says Vijay.

“Mother longed for Bengaluru, but dad wanted a career, so it was hard and I am happy that my winning has brought a happy end to the immigrant journey of that time.”

“After my mother heard that I won the Pulitzer she called up my wife and asked her what did she think of me now as if she thought something otherwise,” laughs the poet. “My sister thinks I’ll be unbearably conceited for a while.”

The poet’s journey with words began when he was sixteen. “When I was about sixteen and first encountered contemporary American poetry, the poetry of the sixties and early seventies, and there was revolution in verse and dominance of free verse and poetry took over. I sort of started to imitate contemporary poets, and wrote the way they did. It was inseparable in my mind from the transformations and the energy of that period.”

The voracious reader who used to read philosophy and at a certain point in his life imagined himself to be a philosopher, currently is reading books by a host of other writers and says, “David Brownwitch, Janet Malcolm and Mark Strand are some of the great writers right now and I just love their work.”

Speaking on writers and the paucity of great works when compared to 20th century writers, he says, “There are more and more writers coming up with great work and luckily now it is easier to be a writer than it was in my time. More and more publishers are opening up to new ideas and works.”

For writers he has a few lines of advice: “Read everything, so that it feeds the linguistic capacity. One should make a large place for canonical works of literature covering various genres.”
Speaking about the Pulitzer he smiles and says, “It is a tremendous honour, and I am enjoying the moment and will not let it go.”