Your name: Koral Dasgupta
You are: People watcher and pre-midlife critic
You can be found at: http://koraldasgupta.com/
Your rituals: One of my unfailing rituals adapted with care during lockdown has been, to sleep till late. There is something poetic about sleep and I am waiting for intellectuals to discover that. I look my charming best during those moments of deep, uninterrupted detachment, till I am woken up lovingly by my husband with the breakfast tray in hand and the ginger tea steaming over it. With great delight we sit together (after I have brushed, in case you are wondering), discussing poetry and philosophy, literature and music, as the buttery aroma of warm toasts and eggs and slices of home-made cakes fill our mouths and senses. We happily watch our son, the little genius, obediently absorbed in the reading list I prepared for him and graduating into the revisions of his subjects thereafter. There’s sunlight and air in abundance, when I dig into the books I intend to read in leisure or open my laptop to write my own books in absolute peace. Few calls coming in from various top magazines tell me that they are delighted to review my books. I switch off the mobile to escape from the unwarranted fanfare! They are so much not my types.
I hit the kitchen and take out the wonderfully coloured vegetables that almost seduce. Oh their freshness, having delivered by online merchants and delightfully stacked up in the refrigerator. They talk to me, as I chop them into pieces, tossing them into the hot pan readied with olive oil. My culinary experiments and the little infusions are to die for. The lunch table is soon ready with a five course meal, waiting for the family to make a Bachchanisque pounce (you will understand this reference if you have watched the brothers in the ‘70’s film Satte Pe Satta).
Post lunch, I visit my lit lab, where things are moving steadily with or without my intervention. Leadership, I am told, is largely about dreaming right and I have taken the advice literally. It worked. I see the dream unfold organically, without much strategizing or number crunching.
Towards the end of the day, I talk to my mother. She blesses me for being perfection personified. I switch on my mobile only to be greeted by a bunch of alluring tags on social media, none of which are out of context, not a single one on how other people are taming their cats. Bliss!
Sigh!
OK since you frown too much, I reluctantly admit that all I have scribbled above is everything that my life is not.
What? You want me to rewrite this? No way! Come on, 2020 authors are meant to have model eyebrows; not my groggy eyes that I line in 1.5 seconds with distractive shades before every virtual meeting. You want me to tell you that my melodious voice sounds like the GPS lady’s when I scream instructions at my son any time he veers beyond the parenting radar of his Indian mum?
Come on, I can’t invite the wrath of the author community with such demystification! Authors don’t shout without reason. They get hurt and cry sometimes, and their pains automatically transform into the next bestseller.
What is this pestering for one last question now? Aah ok, it is my moral duty to take that. When do I write? Honestly, I write whenever I get time, generously interrupted by text messages from the bank reminding me of the nonexistent balance, and the intercom buzzing with information like the 16th floor lady is now selling crunchies at double the cost.
Hey, wait! Check the punctuations. I think I used too many exclamation marks!