This is one story I’ve been wanting to share for a very very long time, was waiting for the most opportune moment… and I finally got it.
I had sent my first e-mail to Arundhati Roy in the July of 2008, requesting her to launch Kindle in Kolkata. She was (and always will be) our hero, the most appropriate person to announce the birth of Kindle to the world. After a series of relentless emails, she finally responded,
“Dear Pritha
Sorry I’ve been away. It is absolutely impossible for me to launch your magazine… I don’t do launches and symbolic stuff.
All the best
Arundhati”
Anyways, right after, I kept sending her emails, requesting her for an interview. After sending many e-mails, and not receiving a positive response, I wrote her an acerbic, perhaps misappropriate mail, saying something like she had no right to refuse us, after all we were only giving her a platform to speak and what is it that she meant by symbolic stuff… did an interview also mean “symbolic stuff” to her and some other such things!
And of course, it didn’t go down too well. And she sent me an e-mail back, with the subject line, “Oh No! No! Please Please don’t throw me into the Bramble bush”
And it read,
“Dear Pritha
Thank you for your insulting, peevish letter. You make yourself sound like my employer – as though I’m somehow obliged to write for you or be interviewed by you or, at the very least- launch your magazine. Think again darling. I don’t do commissioned pieces, I don’t agree to be interviewed on request, I don’t launch magazines (if I did, it would be a full-time job). Also, I don’t know who you are and have no reason to believe ‘Kindle’ will be any different from the hundreds of meaningless new glossy magazines flooding the market. If it turns out to be different, great. Anyway, it helps to know that your obsequious regard for me only had to do with how much use I could be to you and your little project. Inspirational politics, I’d call that. Go forth and Kindle.
All the best
Arundhati Roy”
That was then, and today, here she is finally on our cover, looking thoughtfully out of the window…
I did send her a reply back then, but I guess, the magazine spoke for itself in the next three years… it did turn out to be different… and she finally did speak to us.
Here she speaks of many contemporary issues. There’s also a letter from Pakistan, saying what they feel about her
Do read on… and in the mad mad circus that surrounds us today, she is most certainly one of the saner voices.
Two new columns start from this month as well.
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