Satchi's Sach

‘Why do you write’ is a question that every writer must have been called upon to answer not one but many times and it is even likely that he/she has given different answers each time since it can be read as a philosophical question, a political question and an autobiographical question.The question itself can be posed with different emphases: like, WHY do you write,why do YOU write and why do you WRITE where the first is a general question about the the reasons for writing (differently intoned it can also imply contempt), the second is an existential question about the choice you have personally made while the third suggests , of the many options you had for self-expression or even for a career, why did you choose this mode or career called writing. I take it that the question posed here is the first one, about the raison d’etre of writing.

So, one can safely say without any fear of contradiction that I write to converse with history; I write to address the society, I write to explore the mystery of existence and the universe, I write to record my responses to my natural and human environment, I write to celebrate the richness and diversity of life; I write to articulate my personal pains and anxieties, I write to innovate and rejuvenate my language, I write to challenge death.


-Excerpts from In Place of an Answer (A Talk made in the Symposium , "Why Do I Write, How Do I Write" held at the Sahitya Akademi, 2010)


I cannot tell from where poetry came to me; I had hardly any poet- predecessors. Whenever I try to think about it, I hear the diverse strains of the incessant rains of my village in Kerala and recall too, the luminous lines of the Malayalam Ramayana I had read as a schoolboy where the poet prays to the Goddess of the Word to keep on bringing the apt words to his mind without a pause like the endless waves of the sea. My mother taught me to talk to cats and crows and trees; from my pious father I learnt to communicate with gods and spirits. My insane grandmother taught me to create a parallel world in order to escape the vile ordinariness of the tiringly humdrum everyday world ; the dead taught me to be one with the soil ; the wind taught me to move and shake without ever being seen and the rain trained my voice in a thousand modulations. With such teachers, perhaps it was impossible for me not to be a poet , of sorts.

Excerpts from About Poetry , About Life (A Speech at the Sahitya Akademi - Meet the Author)

K Satchidanandan served as the Editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Literature) and the executive head of the Sahitya Akademi for a decade (1996–2006)