27 February,2011 08:22 AM IST | | Team Sunday Mid Day
Daipayan Halder on old friend and debutant author Samrat, who quit his newspaper job to give birth to Mowgli's grandson in a contemporary take on Kipling's classic
Samrat and I have our ways of surprising each other. We were both rolling stones gathering little moss till I left him open jawed four years ago by getting married. He must have been plotting to get back at me ever since, and more than managed it this time. He quit his job as an editor to promote his first book, Urban Jungle. A man in his mid thirties chucking a well-paying job for sundry book reading sessions? Too Quixotic.
Samrat has his reasons ready. "I did it as I had to. I took up a newspaper job as it gave me a chance to write. But over the years I morphed into a manager from a writer. Which was not what I set out to be. So I quit."
Okay, but couldn't he have led a double life of a full-time hack and a part-time writer? "It was getting too tedious, this last job of mine. They also asked me to head an outstation edition and I wanted to stay back in Delhi. So I was left with little choice."
Like Samrat, Jimmy, the hero of his book, is fascinated by the "maddening urbanscape of turn-of-the-millennium Delhi."u00a0 And somewhat like Samrat many years ago, Jimmy "finds himself in this unfamiliar new world of capitalism perceptually broke and under-appreciated at work."
And though Jimmy's creator was never under-appreciated at work (far from it), the idea of pursuing a book as a full-time occupation came about after Samrat inadvertently deleted the last two paragraphs of a top editor's Sunday column! "I was suspended and I thought that was the end of my career as a journalist. So I sought an appointment with Penguin's Rahul Singh who had wanted to meet me earlier after reading my column Calumnist.
Characters in The Urban Jungle book take after those in Kipling's
original. Jimmy, the protagonist is Mowgli's grandson.
I tried to sell him the idea of a three-part political trilogy of northeast." Singh had smiled and told Samrat to be slightly less ambitious in his first attempt. And that's how the idea of Urban Jungle came about.
"Kipling was an early influence. And we all loved Jungle Book. The story had stayed with me. I thought of taking it forward and doing a contemporary interpretation of Kipling's original tale. I also wanted the story to work at various levels. If you peel off the layers you get a political novel of sorts, a reflection of the world we live in," he says.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0
In the story, Jimmy, the grandson of Mowgli, "learns to deal with complicated bus routes, unscrupulous property brokers and shady local goons" and realises this city is but an urban jungle where the rule of the jungle prevails, pretty much like the world his grandfather inhabited".
After the successful completion of his book and the good reviews he is getting, Samrat has learnt it pays to do what you were meant to do, even if that requires you to let go of the editor's cabin. Maybe, I too will learn my life's lesson soon enough. Hopefully, without chucking my job.u00a0 The Urban Jungle published by Penguin is available at all leading bookstores for Rs 250.
