'I'll be able to deal with bad reviews'

Blogger Amit Varma is out with his first book - and he's not afraid, he tells Anoothi Vishal

Amit Varma may be one of India’s best-known bloggers but if there is one thing that he emphasies during the course of this interview, it is this: “I don’t want to be known as a blogger who has written a book.” The last is, of course, true. The India Uncut writer has just come out with his first attempt at fiction, a novel called My Friend Sancho. It’s a love story that also captures a sense of Bombay and is a breezy enough read though it belies expectations of a more “literary attempt” — but we’ll come to that.

For now, sitting in the 10th floor lounge at The Park, New Delhi, Varma is charmingly casual and unruffled. “I have always wanted to write a novel, ever since I was six or seven,” he mentions, “the blog just happened.” But because he is a blogger — someone who, at one point, was so active that he put out as many as 22 posts on a single day — he is also thick-skinned. “I think I will be able to take bad reviews in my stride because as a blogger you are used to much worse. The reaction you get is immediate... I’ve been abused by both the Left and the Right when I have written on economics or politics.”

But will there be bad reviews? If you go through My Friend Sancho, you are likely to be suitably entertained but the book lacks depth. As a well-known blogger, wasn’t he bogged down by expectations to produce a more “literary” work? He’s possibly been expecting this question. “I have always felt that writing should be entertaining.” And by being entertaining, an author is not necessarily compromising on quality. “There are some books which ,when you read, make you feel that even the author couldn’t have had much fun writing them,” he smiles, “at least I did”.

The narrative, according to Varma, has been kept deliberately as a single strand. “I wanted to consciously keep the focus on the love story” (between Abir, the crime reporter- protagonist and Muneeza, from a lower middle-class background, a girl he would never have met in the ordinary course but for a tragic incident.)

As he started writing it, Varma says, the voice of Abir, 22 years old and somewhat callous, took over. And the novel, the author maintains, is in Abir’s voice —even though friends who know him say that the humour and the sarcasm that form a lot of the writing are very much Varma’s.

As the plot unfolds, Abir changes and matures because of his growing attraction for Muneeza. This is a change that Varma wanted to mark. If there are references to issues such as communalism and crime, these are strictly echoes — “I wanted to keep everything else as a backdrop,” Varma justifies.

If the book is not literary enough for your taste, Varma is already working on his next that is “more ambitious”. It will charter the course of a middle-aged man in a small town in central India navigating change, and “that can be very poignant”, Varma says.

For now, however, the author may be happy servicing the “great hunger”, that he says authors like Chetan Bhagat have revealed, for entertaining and simply-written fiction in English that may not necessarily fall into categories such as “chick lit”. “Non-literary writers are looked down upon and people are intimidated by literary works… I want to bridge that gap,” he says. Like Nick Hornby or Harumi Murakami. Perhaps.

MY FRIEND SANCHO
Author: Amit Varma
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 217
Price: Rs 195