YouSaid · the spoken record

Vikram Seth

lines on the record: 46
first: 2012-01-22
most recent: 2012-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And what I should also take along is what's called a shutg, which is a young lad to stretch the paper to I can see you're not going to allow me that. Let's not even bother. All right, all right. So basically the materials for calligraphy, that's my luxury. You may have the materials for calligraphy. And if I were to ask you to pick just one of the eight discs, which one disc would you save? I think it'll be the nightingales and the Lancaster Balmer. It'll remind me of the very fraught and painful, as well as lively world that I've been exiled from, and if I am to do my singing and calligraphing and wool gathering, they would be nice to have a happy bird who sings of pain to be there. It's yours, Frequense, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, Kirsti.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religious discrimination, but you won't. I wouldn't dare stop you. So now let's see how far I can stretch this. Well, I'll take a book that sounds a bit strange, but I think would give me a lot of sustenance, and that's a collection, an anthology of poems. It's called Thang Sha San by Shal, and it's got a whole lot of different poems, including Dufu, whose thoughts while travelling at night we've heard. You will have that book then. And the luxury too, of course, we allow you. What would you like to take the luxury? After having read a few poems of the Tang Dynasty poetry, what I will do is take my calligraphy materials along. I'll take via the brushes and I'll take the paper sufficient quantity, and then the seal, the red seal, and”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Amir Khan and part of the Ragua Marwa, so we come to the point, Nivikram, where I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you may take one other book along to this island. What are you going to take? Well, I assume I'll be allowed to take free the Bhagavad Gita. You can do that sort of thing. I'll swap that around. That's fine. And since the Bhagavad Gita is like a small pamphlet embedded in the vastness of the Mahabharata, I'm going to take that around. And if you stop me, I'll have you up for...”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I might dwell yes Let's then go to our final piece of music. It's your eighth disc of the day of course Vicker and what is it? When I was writing a suitable boy, I found that there were a number of Indian musicians in the book. I'd sink back into the world of the Thanpura and Rags and North Indian classical music. Amirka is one of the greatest singers of the last century of Indian classical music. The piece that we'll be listening to now is him singing an evening rag, Rag Marwa, which is a very contemplative rug. I can almost listen to anything that Amirka sings. At every minute I feel that I am in the presence of a musician who singing for himself as if the world were. were no more than the world of sound.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“already I mean they're very very good they love all the intricacies of the game I think with kids if it's a game then they can learn all sorts of stuff also of course it's taken pressure off my sister and off me because my parents now have grandchildren. They had to wait for fifty years and four days from their wedding day because my brother was quite dilatory in his own way. Not that they were counting. And how often you say obviously your family is very important to you. Obviously you are very close to them. How much time do you actually spend with them given that you live where you live and they live in India? It varies a lot. It's very difficult for me to predict how much time I'll spend in a particular place. I went to Venice for three days and stay there for six months. I tend not to want to move when I'm in a particular place. I don't have a nomad's last. I really am quite sedentary. You might quite like this desert island then. I might well.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way back when you decided to come home and write the big fat book she described that as something of an indulgence, how does she look upon it now? She's delighted. I think she told my younger brother, look, you know, when we're gone, you've got to take care of your sort of absent minded elder brother when she found that I could stand on my feet, she was very happy, and of course she was even happier by the fact that I've been able to follow my mind and heart, and I suppose at least in India and to some extent elsewhere we recognise for it. And what about as an uncle then to these nieces? Are you very indulgent? I don't know about very indulgent. I love them enormously, and then they me, I can say that pretty confidently. And the last project we had together was my teaching them bridge. Now one of them is seven and the other ten. And the killer players.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was Mark Padmore singing thoughts while travelling at night from songs in time of war, composed by Alec Roth and translated from the Chinese by My Castaway. So Vickram, your mother and father are both still alive. They celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary. Absolutely, and she described”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the last few years I was involved in a project to bring out a libretto each year which would be set to music by Alec Roth where there would always be voice or voices and also where Philippe Honore would be playing the violin. What you're going to hear now is from the first year that is a libretto set in China translations of a poet called Dufu from the Tang Dynasty is an eighth century poet, and the poems that he wrote here were written for the most part in time of war. This is called Thoughts While Travelling at Night, when he is reflecting about his life while floating down the Great River, the Yangtze.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm just going to be happy to be buffeted by whatever comes along, and then seize some things, and try to work on them. But we live for such a ridiculously short time in this life, even those of us who are fortunate to have health and, you know, all that sort of stuff, that I think to not add being with people that one loves and spending time with them. You know, my parents are now in their eighties, to spend some time with them and with my nieces and with my friends, with myself, and I hope with someone whom I can make life with. This is as important to me as a literary inspiration or Welsh or Pottery.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's It's gone very fast. I don't know how I spent my time, and there are plenty of things I want to do. But who knows if I'm going to be given another few decades or not?”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do have it, but it doesn't do any good to dwell on it. Someone isn't going to swim into your life through a lonely heart's sort of feeling. In fact, it's not particularly attractive as a feeling to find someone moping around. And I have interests, lots of different interests, and I have a very loving family, my parents, my brother, my sister, nieces and such like, and a wonderful circle of friends. So these are all huge blessings, and obviously I do long for someone to complete my life, so to speak, but it's not something I think I can easily go out and search. I don't think it's easy, though, for people who are well known to start advertising about.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Bach is getting two helpings. This is a dear friend of mine, Philippe Honore, playing the prelude from Bach's partita for solo violin, and it's a wonderful sort of dance like energetic prelude, where it really seems as if there's more than one instrument playing because they're different tunes intertwining with each other.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in that regard. I do get seized, and I'm sure this is true of lots of people, with shyness when it comes to expressing yourself In matters of love, intimate matters Of course one has to take the view that it's the one acceptance that matters more than the five rejections. But I I wish I were more courageous in that regard. If I had to put my finger on real shortcoming with regard to my personal life as opposed to my life in the world and what I've done for other people, it would be that.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“uncertainty about myself, uncertainty about acceptance by society, uncertainty about ever finding love, all sorts of things of that nature, but it also perhaps went with my feeling of as a child being lonely. So I think all those things fed into each other in a kind of strange vortex, really.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are going to hear something that comes from the work of Western music that I just consider really the supreme work. Every minute of it moves me and at the same time speaks of genius and beauty. And it's from Bach's Matthew Passion. It's not from an Arya but from a recitative. It's called Am Arbund Diascula Var at evening hour of calm and walking.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, my father doesn't like getting pickled, but a glass or two in the evening after all day. had taken such a hugely perfect with me I was able to buy my mother books for the rest of her life, and I also bought myself a lifetime subscription to the London Library, as well as my father whiskey for life, so to speak.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really know I think it's so difficult to judge I don't want to be seen as a terribly tolerant chap because I'm not, but I can see it from their point of view.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vaguely, vaguely right. I mean, for that, it was an unimaginable amount of money for me at that time. Even after that, I kept thinking, can I take a taxi to go from here to there? My habits, habits were set in that of a person who watches every penny.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, Faber did publish the Golden Gate, which is a pretty, pretty bold step for a publisher to do, but But with regard to a suitable boy, I don't think they were that enthusiastic. I did offer it to them, among other publishers, and they only offered me a bit more, of course I would have stayed with them. They're a wonderful publishing house, but it took me by surprise what happened with the book.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think funny enough my mother, who's the more literary person, was against it. She said let the boy stand on his own feet Why doesn't he just get a job say in the World Bank and after five years he'll have a sort of pension and then he can indulge his hobby? My father said look, you know, he's got a number of scholarships, he hasn't been a charge on us. Surely we can help him out. And I mean basically as I wrote about this world, it became more and more obsessive. It just chewed up a decade of my life.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creed not. What had happened was that I had done all my research in China, I'd done all my coursework at Stanford, I'd returned and fed most of the data into a computer, and I was working out what it was I should do with this data about demography and economics in the post reform Chinese countryside sort of thing. But sort of googly was thrown into the works by Pushkin's Eugene On Yagin, and out went my dissertation, on which I had spent a number of years, and in came the idea to write the Golden Gate. I then got the inspiration to go back home and write a novel set in India which turned out to be the fat book that you referred to a long time ago. If I told the news to go away and come back later, she or he might have gone away forever and not returned, and I could not afford”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Ian Bostridge singing Schubert's Herster Fellust or First Loss, and accompanied by the pianist Julius Drake”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was in two minds in as to whether to write about those things in such sort of intimate detail, but then after all what's the point of writing otherwise? But I mean these are people I loved and love. So I think they should be seen not exactly yes warts and all, but in the round, in the round, because something like that's going to happen to all of us.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I discovered, for example, that I had to have a European language in order to go to university, my aunt took me under her wing and decided that I would have to learn German, and she wouldn't let me eat unless I asked for it in German. She would sing Schubert Leader. We had a very companionable relationship.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was rather grey since I was immediately ensconced in this Indian come German household of mine. She was German, my great aunt. It formed a little cocoon at first.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the mother of a young child she was in England. By then I had joined them, my mother couldn't leave the house because I was there. Law was the only thing where in those days you didn't have to attend any classes at all. And then she passed the exam after my little brother was born. He was only three months old when she sat her exams. Despite that she came first in the bar exam, and that was the start of really a wonderful career, very much encouraged by my father. Now in Indian terms, that says a lot.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am uncomfortable because I don't like the idea of being thought of as a prodigy. I mean, I think it must have been quite difficult to be my parents. I remember guests coming to the house, and my insisting on their giving me sums. Now they came to talk to my parents Who is this little brat who sort of stands at the door and insists on being given things to multiply? And to what end? Why would one want to multiply three digit numbers by three digit numbers? Yes, but I don't.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a strange choice. A few years ago I got a CD which had different tracks of nightingales singing. I chose a track of a nightingale with a very different kind of bird, a songless bird really, a bomber, or in fact not a bomber, but a whole lot of bombers flying over the southern countryside of England on their way to a bombing raid in Germany. It's kind of heartbreaking in its counterpoint. So those are the two voices.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. But I'll tell you part of the secret of it was a friend of mine. She was in her seventies when she told me this. She said, well, I think until I was about forty, I was very concerned about what people thought of me, and after that I became much more concerned about what I thought of them.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those days I'm not sure I would have been particularly happy anywhere. I mean slowly as the years pass I become increasingly happy if such a thing can be said but in those days I can't really blame it on anything particular. I think it was loneliness really. I was into books and reading and stuff and school is very much of a sort of sporty place but I don't think I enjoyed people's company very much and I think until my mid thirties I was so terribly shy that I really even in a one to one conversation couldn't really look at people in the eye let alone talk before audiences and so on.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a kind of school party which picked people up as the train went along. And there were senior boys in charge and a master in charge as well in some vague way. But even then it was pretty horrible for me to wake up at about three in the morning not in the care of my parents but in the care of strangers.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was carried on to the train at midnight, sometimes sleeping, so I'd wake up with the jolt of the train and find my parents weren't there. But”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of the reason for that is that was because I was getting terribly spoilt. I just thought at the age of six that I could sort of strut around and boss people about, and my parents quite rightly thought let's send this chap to boarding school.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know about Bright. I mean, I think I knew my mind pretty clearly. Yes, that lively and with interests, let's say.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Calcutta. In Calcutta. Slightly is putting it very charitably. I don't know your mother's huge qualities, but keeping in pitch isn't one of them. Right.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what of this is actually a real memory and what of it is sort of family lore, but one memory is my mother singing to me, singing lullabies, but I tell her to not sing anymore because my mother can't hold a tune. I told her to not sing my aunt would come and she could sing me to sleep.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, Latamangeshkar We wrote a song now from the movie Avara, and Latamangeshkar has been singing now for corners how many decades and this is an actress called Nargis. She's waiting for her lover and missing him and the night is fading into dawn and he hasn't arrived”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you misplaces that you've been to and that you're no longer at I guess I was very cynical, so I suppose they have to sit together.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say so I like travelling kind of freely and unburdened by any future use, so to speak. Do you? But sometimes I think that really what I do when I'm travelling is not so much to gather fodder for future books. but to gather fodder for future nostalgias”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have said perhaps earlier, but I with the years I've grown, I think, more. more sedentary. But here again, since you touched upon California, I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. It was carefully planned out, and then I wandered into a bookstore and read Pushkin's wonderful novel and verse Eugene On Yagin, and out went my dissertation, on which I had spent a number of years, and in came the idea to write the Golden Gate. So I am distracted by places and by things and so on, but different strokes for different folks in the literary world as well as anything else.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny enough I am a planner, but it's more sort of castles in the air, another kind of construction, I suppose wool gathering. But then something comes in from left field and destroys my plans with something quite different. I have to do something that impels me.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we have is the beach boys and fun fun fun. I love the beach boys. I think this is great, except for one thing, which is that for a long time I wasn't sure what a tea bird was. And then I realized that it was underbird. And a friend of mine was confused. He said that for a long time he thought it was till daddy takes your teapot away.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm afraid so it's not a satisfactory way. What I would really like is a muse waking me up in the morning and saying, OK, right, sit down, write so many words on this subject, and close my mind to all these other distracting thoughts that come flooding in.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, quite often the fact is I am not a particularly determined person and not a particularly industrious person. So something has to grip me before I really get into it. The impulse to write has to be very strong. Now if, for example, I am impelled instead to do something at which I'm no particular good like sculpture, but that impulsion is stronger, then I'm afraid writing will take a back seat.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am due to deliver it in twenty thirteen. But of course the sound of deadlines pushing past is one of those sounds that authors are most familiar with”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“part of a quartet basically when a suitable boy came out and did well, I didn't want to write a sequel. Many years later I realized that the way I could interest myself in writing a sequel, and then I became very enthusiastic about it was not to make it a standard sequel but to jump to the present, the sixty year jump. Lata whom I left, the hero of the book, was twenty years old and she'd now be eighty. So it would be A very different view on the world and it would also carry India from its first general election to what would it now be sixteenth, seventeenth by the time the book is written.”
2012-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · Vikram Seth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source