Ruskin Bond On The Authors Who Influenced Him And What He's Reading These Days
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00:00 And once I went into a hotel near the airport in Delhi and the reception people asked me,
00:07 and when did you arrive in India Mr. Bond?
00:11 And I said 19th May 1934 by stock.
00:24 Welcome to Bibliophile.
00:25 I am Saad, Assistant Editor with Outlook.
00:28 So we went to Lando to meet Ruskin Bond who is 85 now and we talked to him about the authors
00:33 who had a huge influence on him when he started out writing and we also talked to him about
00:37 what he is reading these days.
00:51 Hi, I am Saad from Outlook and we are talking to Mr. Ruskin Bond.
01:04 You have talked about Charles Dickens, Emily Bront and Somerset Alman being some of the
01:10 writers who have influenced you.
01:12 But when you were starting out writing, at that time who were the people you looked up
01:16 to work on your career?
01:19 When I started writing, a writer who was well thought of then and who I enjoyed writing,
01:29 whose writing I enjoyed was William Saroyan, an American writer.
01:34 Now you don't hear much of him today but he wrote in a very personal way and his best
01:41 known works were The Daring Young Man on the Flying Tropees and The Human Comedy and several
01:52 others, short novels.
01:53 I have always preferred the novella.
01:57 So also at that time I read a lot of Andre Gide, The Immoralist and other works of his
02:08 and I would read the popular writers too.
02:11 I have always been a pretty prolific reader but I would never go for the obvious or the
02:21 current best seller.
02:22 I would rather wait for it to be and to see if it was still around after five years or
02:31 more.
02:34 And although I did read a lot of fiction as a boy, including the classics, I don't
02:40 read much now in novels and fiction.
02:44 I prefer reading biography, history if it's readable and not too academic, and memoirs
02:55 and even crime fiction and detective stories.
03:00 But serious novels I find I'm plodding through them rather.
03:06 So I guess it's just a question of taste changing over the years.
03:14 So what are you reading right now?
03:17 Right now I just finished reading a fat book on the French Revolution and then I was reading
03:30 a couple of recent anthologies.
03:38 One was Locked Room Mysteries and also some crime writers who were very popular in the
03:48 fifties and sixties.
03:51 Patricia Highsmith, who was famous for the novel that was filmed as Strangers on a Train.
03:59 That I'll put you in touch.
04:03 Then I've been reading, apart from my Oxford English Dictionary, which I dip into every
04:09 day, well there are all those books that I've got, Amitabh Ghosh's Gun Island too, which
04:16 I've started.
04:17 So I will hope to read that.
04:24 So that is fiction of course.
04:27 Many books come to me from authors who've written self-published books and want maybe
04:40 my opinion on them.
04:41 I don't get time, a chance to read all of them.
04:48 But do you read them sometimes?
04:52 Very rarely.
04:53 After all, time is limited.
04:56 You want to read what you enjoy most.
04:59 And do you read the newspapers and magazines also?
05:02 If I can get a newspaper, I'll read it from beginning to end.
05:05 I'm a great newspaper reader, but it doesn't get delivered here regularly.
05:12 So if somebody goes to town, they bring me a paper.
05:20 I remember last year when we went to Puri and Rakesh and Veena went into the temple
05:30 I wasn't allowed in, because they're very strict there.
05:36 So I waited outside in the car, and I had with me two newspapers, I remember one was
05:43 the Statesman and I think the other was the Telegraph.
05:47 And I had to wait two or three hours, and I read right through from beginning to end,
05:54 including the matrimonials.
05:55 So yeah, I enjoy reading.
06:01 I even like the comic strips.
06:05 You were a big fan of comics?
06:07 Yeah, well, not a big fan, but I read everything.
06:13 I mean, anything that comes my way.
06:17 Sometimes even leaflets, advertising, various things, just for fun.
06:30 So Puri, and this reminds me, I remember reading in Konark, you were being charged a foreigner
06:36 fee.
06:37 Oh, that's right, I was.
06:38 So I went to Konark, and they charge as an entry fee twice as much from foreigners as
06:46 from Indian nationals.
06:51 And the funny thing, not that I objected to it, but they insisted that I was a foreigner,
06:58 and of course I didn't have my passport with me.
07:02 So anyway, I paid the extra fee, and then behind me there was a Sikh gentleman who had
07:13 with him his British passport, you see.
07:15 But he was not charged as a foreigner, he was charged as a local.
07:23 So I just made a joke about it.
07:27 I took it humorously, but so that sort of thing does happen occasionally.
07:35 And once I went into a hotel near the airport in Delhi, and the reception people asked me,
07:45 and when did you arrive in India, Mr. Bond?
07:48 And I said, 19th May 1934, by stock.
07:53 That's a lovely story.
08:00 Someone in British ancestry who's lived before Partition and who's living now, what change
08:04 do you see in say people's attitudes to you and how they interact with you?
08:08 I've always had, actually nothing very extraordinary in the change, because I was 12 at the time
08:17 of independence, just a boy.
08:23 So I more or less didn't find it very difficult to adapt to the changing India.
08:29 I was still going to school before and after independence.
08:36 So all these changes that happened, happened gradually, nothing too, I mean, the only dramatic
08:42 events were Partition and Gandhiji's assassination, and a lot of things happened.
08:50 Otherwise, generally through the 50s and 60s, apart from those occasional wars with Pakistan,
09:00 they were periods of a certain degree of tranquility in the country.
09:11 I made friends easily with boys in and out of school and particularly at home in Dehradun,
09:22 whenever I'd come down from school, we lived in a fairly mixed mahala and my stepfather
09:28 was a Punjabi too.
09:29 So I was quite used to living in a more or less Indian household, as more of an Indian
09:41 than an Anglo-Indian household, you could say anyway.
09:49 And so when I did go to England after school, I missed India a great deal, not just friends
09:59 and relationships, but the land itself.
10:05 And I never felt, while I was there in the UK, I never really felt that I belonged there.
10:13 So I always felt that this was home and this was where I belonged.
10:20 And I came back as soon as I thought I could stand on my own feet here and make a go of
10:29 it as a writer, which was a challenge then, because at that time not many people could
10:37 make a living by freelancing or with books and writing.
10:42 We just didn't have the publishers.
10:50 Although we had plenty of magazines and newspapers, that's what kept me going.
10:53 It didn't pay much, but it was enough to get by on.
11:00 There was a little magazine in Madras called My Magazine of India, in what is now Chennai.
11:08 And I used to send them all my rejects, whatever came back from the Weekly and other magazines.
11:16 And they would publish them and send me five rupee money orders in those days.
11:22 Five rupees I could see three films.
11:24 So I never objected until one day they sent me a money order for two rupees eight annas.
11:33 Then I objected.
11:34 I wrote a strong letter saying, "Why have you reduced my fees?"
11:40 And they wrote back and said, "No, we haven't reduced your fees, sir.
11:44 We've simply deducted one year's subscription to the magazine."
11:48 It was two rupees eight annas.
11:52 A good old My Magazine.
11:53 They'd fold it up, of course, a year or two later.
12:00 And it's actually sold on the basis of its ads.
12:05 The printed matter didn't seem to have any importance, but they used to have ads for
12:10 Lucky Gemstones and Aphrodisiacs and all sorts of wonderful things.
12:15 People bought it for that, basically.
12:16 I don't think you ever read my stories.
12:21 But the first story appeared in the Illustrated Weekly in August of 1951, that year before
12:32 I went to England, just out of school.
12:34 There was a skit on one of my teachers.
12:39 And of course, we got the print sleeve sum, I think, of 50 rupees.
12:44 And we all had a party, with all my friends.
12:51 But there was a gap then, before the next one got published.
12:54 Before I got another 50 rupees.
12:58 So what was your first paycheck?
13:01 Do you remember that?
13:02 This was it, yeah.
13:03 This 50 rupees was it.
13:06 Apart from those five rupee money orders.
13:13 Salary check would have been in Jersey, in the general islands, in the public health
13:21 department.
13:22 There you'd get your weekly salary, and it would come in a pay packet, actual cash.
13:29 It wasn't a check.
13:32 In fact, my job was to take around these pay packets, basically into the sewers in Jersey.
13:43 They had quite an intricate sewage system going back a hundred years, which would run
13:49 out into the sea, sort of tunnels going out into the sea.
13:54 And people would be working in them.
13:57 So I'd take their pay packets to them, very often.
14:02 And in fact, I think the neighboring island of Guernsey was where the author Victor Hugo
14:11 had lived in exile for a few years, when he was exiled from France.
14:17 And he had used the Guernsey sewers as background in his Les Miserables, I think.
14:29 Some of the architects were there.
14:35 So looking back, what would you consider the high points of your life, or the happiest
14:41 moments?
14:42 Happiest moments?
14:43 Oh, there have been so many happy moments.
14:47 A lot of happy moments.
14:50 But the happiest, I don't know, happiest?
14:57 Hard to think of the happiest.
15:04 I can say it's been a happy life, more or less, because I don't have any regrets, any
15:13 major regrets.
15:14 If I had to live my life over again, I would do things more or less in the same way.
15:24 I might try to write better books or better stories, or maybe some relationships could
15:33 have turned out better.
15:34 But by and large, you could say I'm a writer without regrets.
15:42 And don't think in terms of happiness so much, but of contentment or of feeling that I've
15:50 done what I wanted to do, and I'm lucky too.
15:54 I've been very lucky in many ways, in living the life I want to live.
16:03 And the people close to me who I like most and loved.
16:11 So no complaints.
16:17 And nowadays as part of your daily routine, what's the thing that you really look forward
16:21 to on a daily?
16:26 Sitting in this chair with a good book.
16:29 Well, just life in general is sort of, goes at a very gentle pace, except when we are
16:42 rushing to catch a plane.
16:46 Rakesh likes to get there at the last minute.
16:49 And I'm a nervous traveller, so I'm usually ready two hours beforehand.
16:53 Now I'm getting wise, I think maybe I should make a little money myself too, out of some
17:04 of my manuscripts.
17:06 So that's why I'm writing.
17:08 And I thought, a nice beautiful violet.
17:14 When I went to the bookshop, she gave me two or three paintings, one and the other.
17:22 She gave me this.
17:23 People give me paintings, yeah.
17:24 And it's a nice one, the sunflower.
17:25 I thought it would be nice there.
17:26 I like paintings and art because I can't paint myself.
17:37 Even at school, my apple would look like a football.
18:00 Some older stuff.
18:02 But it does accumulate, book contracts, then letters, and of course, very often clippings
18:10 and manuscripts.
18:11 I keep completed manuscripts in that cupboard so they won't get dusty.
18:21 I used to send, of course, in the old days, typescripts.
18:27 Now I just take a photocopy.
18:32 So I keep the original.
18:33 Sometimes I might send the original.
18:38 Recently, someone told me, "Keep your originals."
18:50 Last year, you know the actor Rahul Bose?
18:56 He supports an organization to help poor children get educated in Bombay.
19:09 To raise money for that, he asked me if I'd give him one of my manuscripts for auction.
19:19 I did, I gave him the typescript of Flight of Pigeons, actually.
19:40 (gentle music)
19:43 you