A few days ago, I happened to watch a video on YouTube.  It was in Istanbul 2010, a literary get-together of sorts.  V.S.  Naipaul was sitting in a chair on a raised platform alongside the host of the evening.  She was trying to draw him out to talk about his lifetime of work as a writer and what drove him to be so utterly consumed by the craft of writing.  I could detect an undertone of humor in Sir Vidia Naipaul’s responses.  Maybe it was my imagination, I’m not sure, but the passage of time and age (he would have been 77 at that time) had certainly mellowed him down.  The asperity of temperament was missing.

   I relate this because I had just finished reading his 600-page book ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’.  This was his third and final book on India during the course of his extensive travels across this vast land, meeting and listening to all kinds of people from every stratum of society between 1962 and 1988.  I don’t intend to do any kind of review for I am hardly up to the task.  The imagination would not support the effort.  Every time I read anything written by Naipaul, it impels me to examine and come face to face with my deepest emotions.  I think when the integrity of the writer shines through and the personality of the writer recedes humbly into the background, what you are left with is the most distilled aspect of the human condition.  Coming back to that interaction in Istanbul, the video which I referred to, I couldn’t help noticing a distinct lack of articulation.  Some obscure inability to give verbal direction to the life of the mind.  Sometimes it does happen in life that you cannot clearly express what you’ve been doing so diligently all your life.  There was a question about the shift from fiction from early years to the nonfiction in the latter part of his writings.

  Growing up on the small island of Trinidad in the Caribbean of the 30s and late 40s, the despairing feeling of having come to the end of the ‘material’, as he put it, there was this realization that he was not equipped to accurately and truthfully write about other societies whose soil he was not properly rooted in, the inner dynamics he could only feel superficially.  Then, what does he do?  He knows only one fact, that he’s not equipped to do anything but writing.  The passion is all consuming, the burden of ambition is pressing down upon him.  Leaving that small island and the people there with no sense of history or ambition was more than relief; it was also a kind of release.  More than 50 years of relentless travel, undertaking the searing examination of the making and unmaking of post-colonial society, the genius of Naipaul perhaps lies in his great success in overflying the limitations of his own social mornings and turning it into a moment of renewal and liberation.  You take the dark soil of tradition and transmute its energy into arguably the most vigorous and challenging voices of our time, or as he put it ever so simply, ‘’ making my way into the world’’.

   Vidia Naipaul is a master of clean cut prose.  He doesn’t use big words in his neat sentences, and yet he can express the most complicated of ideas, the most profound of human emotions in the simplest of ways.  If you have the ears for it, you can hear the authentic voice of the writer.  You can only know him through his words, there is no other way.  I feel a strong kinship with him.