In working order due to hope, love, pig-headedness: Ruskin

For the indomitable Ruskin Bond, writers are only as old or as young as their readers and he would not have survived into his eighties and remained in working order without hope, love and pig-headedness.
He says he has also been lucky by temperament: the things he wanted were not out of reach; he only needed to preserve and remain optimistic.
He pens down his life's experiences in his memoir - "Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography" - which he calls a "story of a small man, and his friends and experiences in small places".
Bond says it has never taken a lot to make him happy.

"And now here I am, an old man, an old writer, without regrets," he says.
But he hastens to add, "But I must correct that. I decided long ago to stop trying to grow up; and writers are only as old or as young as their readers. So here I am, a young boy, an old writer, without regrets."

According to Bond, both as individual and writer, he has known his limitations and he thinks he has done his best with the talents he possess.
"Sometimes it is good to fail; to lose what you most desire; to come second. And the future is too unpredictable for anxiety."

In the book, published by Speaking Tiger, Bond recalls his boarding school years in Shimla and winter holidays in Dehradun, when he tried to come to terms with a sense of abandonment, made and lost friends, discovered great books, and found his true calling.
Bond was born in Kasauli in 1934; grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun and Shimla, worked briefly in Jersey, London and Delhi, and moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time. He has lived in Mussoorie ever since, alone at first, and for many years now, with his adopted family.
Determined to be a writer, he spent four difficult years in England, and he writes of his loneliness and heartbreak there, even as he kept his promise to himself and produced a book - the classic novel of adolescence, "The Room on the Roof".

It was born of his longing for India - the home Bond would return to even before the novel was published, taking a gamble that proved to be the best decision he made.
"It was only after I had left India in 1951, at the age of 17, that I realised that I was Indian to the core and could do nothing else," he writes.
Bond says it wasn't family that brought him back, it was the country, the land itself, and all that lived and grew upon it.
"It is India that has made me. I have loved it, and for the most part, it has loved me back," he says.