The write place

Avadhoot Dongare

There is a glaring uncertainty in the first paragraph of Avadhoot Dongare's The Story of Being Useless. The first line is evidence enough - "Can't quite say exactly when I began to know him."

The novella is dedicated to American novelist Jack Kerouac who invented spontaneous prose. The story revolves around a young sub-editor interning with a Marathi newspaper in Pune. And although it details the monotony of newsroom work, it also brings Pune to life with vivid details of its lingo and lifestyle. But, there's also the crisis of what constitutes as news. With succinct sentences, it's easy to see why the novella, originally titled Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta, won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2014. Along with Dongare's Three Contexts of Being a Writer that delves into the act of writing itself, it has now been translated into English by Nadeem Khan. Both novellas will launch in the city this week at a SoBo bookstore.

Dongare doesn't dwell too much on his own work. "I'm not capable enough to make observations about my own work. It is for others to observe," he says.

The translation was a smooth process. "Khan is a friend. We'd talk about the novellas occasionally but all the credit goes to him as he completed it all by himself," he shares. But what's truly interesting about the writer is that he states no inspiration throughout the conversation. As Dongare explains, "My stories are just a means of expression. When I speak, I am attempting to say something, just like you are right now attempting to understand whatever I'm talking about and putting it into a context. But translation tries to transcend this and that's the beauty of it."

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