The big picture

It’s ironical when an English writer with a surname — French — does a literary portrait of India. But Patrick French, who was in the city to release his book India: A Portrait, started off on a lucky note as a ladybird settled on him just before the launch of his book.
After travelling across the length and breadth of the country, he says that it was only recently that he felt ready to write the book.“It is not a book that I would have felt ready to write until recently. I got diverted by the biography of Naipaul and after that, I realized that unless I did it now, I was going to lose the moment. When I started the research, I came to Chennai and came across several remarkable stories,” he starts out.
On what gave him the confidence that as a foreigner, he could present a fair portrait of the country, he says, “I suppose that the confidence came from having written Liberty Or Death: India’s Journey To Independence and Division. Coming from outside, it took me some time to get to understand the country. This realisation came over time, after talking at length about subjects that I wanted to write about, I then had the feeling that I was ready to tackle them,” he smiles.
Having written the book for young Indians — those for whom Ambedkar and Indira Gandhi are merely names from school text books, he says that he tried to make the book intelligible for Americans and Europeans as well. “Indian journalism is so full of acronyms. I tried to remove the acronyms as much as possible to make it appealing to readers outside the country.”
After travelling to various metros to launch his book, he gives a portrait of the audiences in various cities: “As a generalization, I find that people in Chennai tend to be polite and ask thoughtful questions, while people in Calcutta ask complicated philosophical questions and in Mumbai, people are always ready to party; they can’t wait to get to the drinks that follow a book reading.”
Before signing off, he says that although his book depicts colossal affluence on one hand and utter poverty on the other, he is optimistic about the country’s future. “Looking at the nation’s growth trajectory, there is many a reason to be optimistic. The disasters and inequalities are also certainly present and vast, but people can now aspire for things in ways that their parents or grandparents could never imagine,” he ends on a positive note.
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