Several of the well-known Indian writers writing in English were born in June. Today (June 19) is the 67th birthday of Salman Rushdie. And very soon will arrive Anita Desai's birthday.
Exactly a month ago, on May 19, was the eightieth birthday of renowned writer Ruskin Bond who has immortalized the Doon valley and Mussoorie in his works and is our own "author in residence". June 20 (tomorrow) is also special for the Doon valley as the author who was born on this day in 1952 remained a student of the Doon School. He is Vikram Seth.
The Doon valley and writers have had a long love affair. A large number of names come to mind when one talks of writers who live in Doon or lived here at some point of their lives. Though it is well-known now that Seth while he was at the Doon School here, he was not quite happy and faced loneliness, it cannot be denied that he had a long association with Dehradun and his years here contributed to his emotional and mental make-up.
Doon School has produced wonderful writers like Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Ramchandra Guha. Vikram Seth was born on June 20, 1952 at Kolkata. His father was an employee of the Bata India limited Shoe company who migrated to post-partition India from West Punjab in Pakistan. Vikram Seth's early childhood was spent in the town of Batanagar near Kolkata, Patna, and london. His teenage interests in school — learning shorthand by the age of 13, writing backwards, sitting in the lotus position — were seen by his contemporaries as attempts to escape the conformist culture of boarding school
Seth passed out from the school in 1968 and during his speech at the founder's day in 1992 , he remembered walking past the "tennis courts with their bel trees ...and the lichi trees which I remember having raided from the balcony of my dorm". He also spoke about his "terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation" while studying at the school.
However, he also talked of the advantages the school conferred on him and offered words of encouragement and inspiration to the students.
Noted journalist Karan Thapar was Seth's junior at school and has fondly narrated memories of his association with him in his article titled "Random Thoughts" in the collection Once Upon a Time in the Doon.
He recalls that when he was eleven, he was the youngest member of the debating team of which Seth was the captain. Seth asked him to speak with authority, without shouting. "I wasn't sure what he meant. At eleven, the difference between authority and a loud voice is not obvious."
"Vikram was sitting cross-legged on his chair .He resembled a petite Buddha with sculpted feet and a small round head .His hair kept falling across his forehead." Thapar goes on to talk about the play (Winslow Boy) practice in school where Seth was directing. "It was 1971, my last year at school and it was his year off between A levels and Oxbridge. I was playing a British lawyer. It was the scene where the lawyer cross-examines the young boy. Vikram wanted me to pretend to be angry".
He remembers that after the rehearsal, when they both walked back, Seth said to him, "The funny thing about anger is that its not the shouting that communicates it. It comes from deeper inside. It's like love and hate. You have to feel it to sense it."
Seth made a splash with his 1986 novel in verse, The Golden Gate. A Suitable Boy (1993) was his second novel where he abandoned the compression of poetry to produce an enormous work that enthralled most readers. Set in the post-colonial India of the 1950s, this sprawling saga involves four families -- the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis and the Khans -- whose domestic crises illuminate the historical and social events of the era. Seth's panoramic scenes take the reader into law courts, religious processions, bloody riots, academia -- even the shoe trade. Readers are now looking forward with great curiosity to the sequel which is titled A Suitable Girl and is due for publication in 2016. Seth has stated that the book will be set in the present, rather than in 1952 where A Suitable Boy finished, and will therefore be what Seth calls a "jump sequel".
For all the young 'Doscos' (Doon School Boys), now or in the coming years, who aspire to be writers, Seth will always remain a role model, an impressive idol, an eternal inspiration.