22 November,2009 07:56 AM IST | | Janaki Viswanathan
Author of To The Elephant Graveyard, Tarquin Hall, talks hunts, elephants and his trips to the subcontinent
Did you always "abhor"u00a0 hunting like you've mentioned in your book?
Yes, I never liked hunting. My father did it though the rest of the world would blush if they realised that in England, we once hunted silly little foxes. My grandfather enjoyed it as a sport... it was a part of life then, you fought wars, you went hunting. These days, the idea of killing anything is out of question. There's a certain political correctness about it.
To The Elephant Graveyard is about your experience on a hunt for a mad trampling elephant. What was the scariest bit?
The end when the hunter, Dinesh Choudhary, shot the elephant. It seems long drawn out in the book, but in reality, it was very quick. The elephant came tearing down at us and he shot it. More than scary, the entire episode was sad. I saw the remains of the people the elephant had killedu2026 it's something I'd never want to experience again. There was nothing poetic about it.
Does being a journalist bring more to the table as a writer?
Yes, it's one of the best professions. You can knock on anyone's door and they'll open up to you, except maybe for some who might kill you (Laughs). When I'd started out, my writing was terrible, my grammar appalling. But journalism is a great teacher, you learn how to write in a punchy manner and how to gather information.
You've set your latest novel, The Case of The Missing Servant, in Delhi. How do you think England perceives India today?
The youngsters today are mostly busy Twittering away. I doubt they know much about anything. I can speak for my father's generation who still have a romantic view of India, including Partition. The reality, we know, was nothing short of horrific.
It was a disaster, but the Brits managed to get good PR out of it. So yeah, my father's generation would have a tough time picturing the urban side of India. For them it's still about the Himalayas, the palaces and Gandhi. It is, but it's also about overpopulation, multinational companies and democracy.
What was your first trip to the Asian subcontinent like?
It was bizarre. I was 19, it was in 1989 and my flight landed at 2 am in Karachi. I took a taxi to this seedy hotel. The roads were dead quiet and dark. The next morning I wake up at nine and there's this sea of thousands of people, towers of mosques, buildings, chaos all around me (Laughs). For someone like me who's grown up on the grey quiet streets of London, it was a shocker.
