Full transcript Your Call with Aatish Taseer

New Delhi : Son of well-known Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and Salman Taseer, former Governor of Punjab in Pakistan, who was assassinated earlier this year in January, Aatish Taseer is a young writer who has already written his third book. Speaking on NDTV's Your Call, Aatish Taseer answers questions about writing, his father and his thoughts on the Anna Hazare movement.     

Here's the full transcript of the interview 

NDTV: For a young writer to receive praises from VS Naipaul, to have been short listed for the Costa Award for your last book is a heavy and a daunting feeling I am sure, what has it been like for you?

Aatish: Its' been very quiet, I have been working away and I am glad. I hope the books are making their way but it hasn't sort of, I don't feel that its been too heady.

NDTV: Tell us about your latest novel Noon. How much of the voice of the fictional narrator seems to have a lot in common with you. Is it the circumstances, is it because you are writing about India and Pakistan and some of the commonalities? Of course the young boy who grows up with his mother in Delhi, a father who has abandoned them, do you think about it when you write or you think other people read commonalities into this?
 
Aatish: The creation of a kind of character that helps you access your material. You need it sometime when the material is near to you. You need to create that kind of a character. But once you have created him, then he passes to some kind of a fictional sphere. The material changes once it gets into a fictional world.

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David Davidar: You're a journalist by profession. Which form, fiction or non-fiction, do you enjoy more, which do you find is more rewarding?

NDTV: Do you see yourself as a journalist by profession? You started with Time Magazine?

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Aatish: I was a bad journalist. My mother's a journalist, so I know journalists require a different kind of intelligence. I was too slow. I remember at one time I was covering an English election and I had one question to ask Gordon Brown and I asked the stupidest question in the world. He turned away. I wasn't a good journalist. But there is a certain kind of long form that involves travelling, which I like very much. But to answer David's question, imagination I rank the highest. It's the most taxing but also the most rewarding and absorbing. When that gets going and you are occupied by the narrative it's the best feeling in the world.

NDTV: But it's interesting how you draw the context from those around you. Your last novel The Temple Tigers attracted some controversy when one of the characters you mention to be immortal, a former Rajasthan Chief Minister, and you had many socialites in Delhi saying 'hey that's me, why did you write about me'. Even as they spoke, India Pakistan, people who seem to inhabit your world?

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Aatish: I think that's very good. I think the best kind of writing has come from people who write from deep within them, even our giants of Indian writing. Of course you must use your circumstances to enter new material, to make your journey outwards. You can't stay in that sphere which you have inherited. But I think writing is very good when it's personal in that way when you are looking hard at your own world. 

NDTV: You weren't fazed by all the criticism you got, especially from Vasundhara Raje?

Aatish: No, there was no criticism like that, they were very kind about it and as I told you there might be models for my character that people recognise but then you go very far away from those models, those characters think very different from people who they were based on. 

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NDTV: Aatish for a young person, you have already written three books and already people want to ask questions

Questioner from Bangalore: In your article "Why my father hated India", when you talk about the bitterness Pakistan has about the fortune of India, you say, "these wounds can heal when the wounds of 1947 heal", how do you propose to do that?

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Aatish: I will answer the Partition question, the wounds of 1947. I think what I had in mind that Pakistan would probably make peace with the kind of country it set out to be. The country was set up on a false basis. I thought the kind of glue that they thought could hold the nation was too thin a glue. The religious glue that they thought, when a country has to answer itself about what kind of country it needs to in difficult times like this; to re-examine that, to make its peace with that history. At the moment the reaction has been to put everything away, to not look into the past, to not look how the country went wrong. So I suppose this has to happen within Pakistan, and I don't think it happens through 'aman ki asha', all those are romantic programs. It happens when society finds itself at rock bottom and tries to get back.

NDTV: It's interesting you said you wouldn't have made a very good journalist, that article created lot of controversy. In many ways your most insightful writings are when you write about Pakistan. That's interesting because you're not a practicing Muslim. Do you think there you bring a unique perspective to it?

Aatish: Pakistan for some reason was a country where I came to with fresh eyes, came to the relationships within Pakistan, they were relationships with brothers and sisters, with a father. But because I came to them with fresh eyes, I could look at it with a distance. And Pakistan held a fearful lesson for India because India had managed in a very loose way to have this Indian idea floating above the surface. And in my mind it was a very gentle and attractive idea. I sort of realized how valuable it was, the idea of a nation being based on ideas of dress, of customs and songs, literature, that this thing must be celebrated. You must realize what a wonderful diversity it is and what a valuable thing it is. When I saw Pakistan for the first time and it had a kind of a ethnic cleansing that it had lost its diversity, a kind of surgery had gone on in the society, it had been dismembered in some way.

NDTV: It's interesting you didn't shy away from it from expressing what you felt even though it lead to an estranged relationship with your father. Your family in Pakistan has cut you away after this article. Why was it so necessary for you to write that?

Aatish: If you are starting out as a writer and the only thing that you've got working on your side is your clarity and your ability to try and speak truthfully about something as much as possible. I don't know a way to write other than that. I don't know how to turn away from difficult things and write about things that won't offend anyone. I had very different kinds of people growing up around me so I was aware that no matter what you say, there will be someone who will get offended, so you better not rely on that reaction

NDTV: Personally how do you deal with that?

Aatish: I hold on to hope that if you have written without malice, without trying to settle a score, then if you have written in a bold and truthful way, then somewhere along the line, people will realise that you didn't mean any harm in that sense

NDTV: Leaving aside your family, the article you wrote for the Wall Street Journal, why my father hated India', it created a great furor in Pakistan. You had many columnists writing angrily how you mixed up personal feelings, personal animosity or grudges against your family with the view of a country. How would you react to that?

Aatish: I think probably the reason why they were upset is they have not tried to discuss this side of Pakistan and the editor who wanted me to write it, it's an editor firstly who makes an provocative headline. It was not mine. He told me, can you tell us we in America don't understand what is this obsession that Pakistan has with India, because it seems to us from a distance that India is quite a benign power, and I felt I could write very easily about that. I didn't feel that I had to manipulate any thing. I had known that obsession first hand and I think Pakistanis are very uncomfortable because it's a bad time, everyone has their back up, they are very defensive. For there to be a real spirit of intellectual enquiry, which is only in my opinion just to come in India, you have to feel a bit easy in your skin, you have to feel confident. Otherwise it can seem very threatening and the article attracted a lot of attention, so people immediately felt that I was trying to rubbish Pakistan but I wasn't. I was writing out of great concern for Pakistan.

NDTV: Aatish I do have a voice from Pakistan, Mr Tanvir Khan

Tanvir: Greetings to Aatish. Briefly mention I first met Salman Taseer when I was a young Associate Professor of English Literature, and I interviewed him for his first ever admission to the Government College, Lahore. That interview became the beginning of a life long friendship. I should have thought that his tragic assassination would unite us all in grief, but I find that in your case Aatish that your sense of loss at a terrible event has expressed so differently from Salman Taseer's other children. More specifically the daughters have very aptly exposed the demons that lurk in the Pakistani society. But you seem to have decided to use this tragedy as a way to voice a kind of literal hatred to Pakistan, the very idea of Pakistan. Is that a fair question? And if so what would be your response?

Aatish: Let me say to that, that I have to make a separation here. I reject out of hand the premise of Pakistan. I think that it was a false premise. Having said that as far as the people of Pakistan go, I have no hatred, I have affection for them. I never felt for one second that being in Pakistan I have felt out of place. I don't accept that, but I feel that I saw a sequence with my father's death. I saw there was first the assassination and then there was the celebration of the killer. Parliament couldn't pass, the same Parliament which had a prayer to say to Osama bin Laden, couldn't pass a simple motion to condemn a killing. And I know very well that there were posters around the city of Lahore celebrating my father's killing. I think when that happens in the society, when a society in a sense encounters that kind of religious darkness, you have to speak out against it. You can't say 'oh we are fine, we are really kind of a moderate society, there are only a few extremists. I'll tell you it would be an incredible surprise if they are able to try that killer to bring him to justice. I would like to shake the hand of the judge who has the courage to do that. In India it would be the equivalent of Nathuram Godse having been celebrated and eventually freed, because he felt that Gandhi's view of Hinduism did not match his. So when a country is into such an ugly place and people are afraid to speak or they in some ways kind of explaining what the country is going through, then I think it is pretty negative. I don't feel I am doing my father's legacy a disservice, even though he wouldn't have agreed with me. I feel that my way of looking at Pakistan is not unfair.

NDTV: Mr Khan thanks for joining us.

Caller from Bangalore: Taking in consideration the ban French government has imposed on burqa, what do you think of the hardcore Islamic concepts such as the burqa and fatwa?

Sonia: It's interesting you have travelled across Europe, you have written about second generation Muslims.
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Aatish: Those Islamic notions have no place in today's society. I have seen in my father's case, tried to use history against my father to get his killer and inching towards the conclusion that my father is not the kind of Muslim which they wanted, he deserved to die and I think the notion goes with the idea of Wajib ul Kat, the idea of someone being fit to die, and that any good Muslim can kill him, this notion takes ugly shapes. I would not like to live in that society. I support the Anglo-Saxon idea of letting people be and deal with the problems in other way

Caller from Srinagar, Junaid: I was really impressed and inspired by your perceptiveness and your keen interest in history. I have read your article recently  'Why I hated my father' What would you think, because Kashmir has the same baggage of misrepresented, morphed history in the perspective of Indo-Pak perspective towards each other and your grandfather has a political legacy in Kashmir, our grandfathers were contemporaries, how do you think about it? My second question is, I know you have been inspired by Faiz. What would be your favourite couplet from Faiz and why?

Aatish: I'll answer the second question first. 'Raat yui teri khy.ohi huey raat aye' and the last image 'jaise bimar ko karar aa jaye'. An ill man should unexpectedly feel relief it brings so much to mind. It's very powerful poetry for me. That's probably what I would say.

NDTV: And his question?

Aatish: About Kashmir. You know I think it had an incredible syncretic culture. It's because of its strange history, because many Indians feel the loss of Kashmir as nothing less than a kind of a decapitation that it's become insignificant of what happened from 1947 till now. But at the moment what Kashmir needs the most is a kind of stability. It reminds me of Cambodia, after a long period of conflict, where the society had experienced trauma and I felt nothing more was important for Kashmir than normalcy.  India and Pakistan could solve their problems later. Pakistan has enough problems of its own but Kashmir needs stability the most.

NDTV: One of your more controversial thoughts has been the space for moderate Muslims has been very limited, if you take the literal interpretation and the literal words in the Koran. Now that's a controversial thought again, coming from you. Do you find that not just in Pakistan, but in the Muslim world also, those thoughts have no place?

Aatish: See the funny thing about this moderate business is that it's very interpreted. People are like if someone wears western clothes, if they have a drink or two, and they use cell phones, they are moderate Muslims. But that's not the kind of moderation we are talking about. And funnily enough most of what the fault lines are between the Islamic and or Muslim political opinion and a non-Muslim opinion, occur in an area totally outside the faith. They have to do with the ideas of history with politics. Those are things that you can't find in the Koran. They are a part of cultural Muslim identity and it's in those areas that the tension arises and so this notion of being a moderate Muslim. Often I would see that in the areas that counted there was not much difference between moderate and extreme opinions.

I think two things have happened in the lives of Indian Muslims that have been very positive. One the calamity that Pakistan has turned out to be has made many Indian Muslims, if there was a thought that we should have gone to Pakistan, has been completely extinguished.  No Indian Muslims live with that double sense, whether we should have gone or we should have stayed. The other thing is this privatization. They did experience a very serious kind of discrimination when it was the old state economy. They were cut out of jobs; they were made into a kind of underclass that benefited from privatization. They are richer and more prosperous for the first time in the last 20 years. So I think it was incredibly positive. An Indian Muslim's perspective was to develop independence from Muslim consensus as it were would be a great thing for India. It would be a great thing for the world because this is the real country of mixed society, the plurality to get on with your neighbour, even though he might be a different religion, you can't beat India for that diversity.

Caller from Kolkata, Anwesha: Is there any religion that you follow? If yes, what is it and why?

Aatish: I don't, I feel myself completely free not just from all religious belief but the side of religious belief that is culture. I don't have a kind of my view about the struggle in Palestine and Kashmir. It is not a Muslim political view. My view is India is not kind of a Hindu nationalist view that has its origin in faith. I feel free of those things.

Caller from Kolkata, Aritry: This question is a little sensitive but I have to ask it. Just as you were getting to know your father, he was brutally killed. What did you feel? I mean losing a parent is bad enough. Losing one so violently must have been devastating?

NDTV: That's a great question. You've talked so much about your father, your relationship. We haven't talked about the sense of grief that somebody who always had the your father's absence as presence in a way

Aatish: I have said that I don't have, like a way to deal with it intellectually, but it has a side of it that perhaps the passage of time perhaps makes okay. There was a day I spent in New York when I found out that he had been killed. The NY Times is very well displayed there and spent a day seeing my father's killers displayed on the newspapers. I don't know if I will ever be able to assimilate that. It's there as a kind of a wound, it doesn't mean that it should cripple one but it's there

NDTV: We talked so much about your father and his absence as being the reality of his life. We don't talk that much about your mother, as a very strong rock throughout, who has been there in your growing up years. Your large extended family in India, how important was that presence?

Aatish: She was a wonderful support to me and still is and I think the lessons, there was a sense in India, bechanra iska baap nahin hai and my mother was fiercely against that. She made sure that I was never to grow up with some sense that the world had done me wrong, and it was an empowering lesson. It was a feeling that the business of living has something to do with your contribution rather than the cards that life deals you, and that was an incredible lesson. She was very successful in not colouring the view of my father. I went in to meet him I was free of resentment and that was a wonderful thing.

Caller from Kolkata, Sreejita: I'm Sreejita, a student of comparative literature at Jadavpur University. This question is a little frivolous but everyone wants to know, is there a woman in your life?

NDTV: And the young girl who wanted to know about the woman in your life. We have read those headlines when you were dating Ella Windsor

Aatish: It's a buried life

NDTV: It's the one I am sure they will search on Google and those pictures will come up.

Aatish: I have a pretty solitary life. There's no long-term relationship at the moment

NDTV: Those were different times. You were a different person then. What was it like dating British royalty?

Aatish: I think that Ella's family was, in the sense they weren't distantly related, but they were able to make a private life. They were glamorous moments and most of the time it was pretty quite and low key. We were on our own a lot and we were abroad a lot, so it was interesting

NDTV: We spoke about the turbulence in Pakistan. We have our own turbulence, Anna Hazare.

Aatish: Very happy to see the faces I am seeing, very happy to see the outrage and I think fundamentally that anger is a pretty noble anger. What I don't like is the way it manifested itself through Anna Hazare, holding a state by blackmail, for certain terms. I don't think the terms are that good. I hope people will get away with that, the outrage the people awaking is the most important part that I like

NDTV: And the fact that it's been non-violent so far. Aatish, thank you so much