‘My mind is open but my heart is closed’

A self-interview with minor writer Vikram Shah, who is yet to be published by a major publisher

David Hockney, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972)

Amshula is a curator. She’s the kind of human who dazzles every room she enters, and even the ones she doesn’t. I have been both nourished and blinded by her light. In June, she wrote to me about a project she was thinking about. Bored of banal interviews, she was inviting some artists to ask questions of themselves—ones they want to be asked, ones only they can answer—for an archive she is putting together.

The people with whom I’ve shared pieces of my creative life, like some dirty little secret, know how touchy I am about the word ‘artist’. I’m not sheepish because it means nothing. It is the opposite. I’ve seen the work of some of the people Amshula has collaborated with, as curator and confidante. They are artists in the true sense of the word: their work summons its power from somewhere natural; it also makes serious money. This question of authenticity may be so yesterday but I’m afraid it continues to cast a giant shadow over my creative ambition.

So I was excited to be one of the ‘Artist Friends’ who received this email from Amshula; to be considered a practising artist by someone committed to the pursuit of beauty not as diversion but vocation. The idea also dovetailed with a personal essay I’d been trying to write. Scraps of it existed as notes on my phone but the more substantial work had been done in the shower, and on long walks and short flights. In these hours of pure pleasure, I had conjured up many paragraphs of imaginary prose.

But when it came to the actual writing, there was no entry point. The material felt very personal. It involved parts of myself that needed protection by remaining unnamed. The world is always seeking explanation. And I—pleaser of people, keeper of expectations—I can’t help but stumble through the explanations, resenting the expector, weighing up lost time, measuring the gap between who I am and who I wish to be.

But then came Amshula’s email and a shape into which these thoughts could be moulded. The scribbled shanties, the wordless cathedrals, were responses to questions I was desperate to be asked—and asked in a context that privileges understanding over judgement.

This is my explanation for the self-interview. Let’s get into it.

Vikram Shah calls himself an ‘independent writer and editor’, which sounds like one of those titles invented by privileged people to sidestep real work. When I pressed for details, the gigs he listed included a consulting editor assignment with a legal reporting outlet; communications work for a recruitment company; short-term editorial projects with authors of non-fiction books. He was previously associate editor at an online magazine for narrative writing, and, before that, a fact-checker for the weekend edition of a mainstream business newspaper. While at the paper, he reported a story on a Gandhi ashram in Nagaland, which the historian Ramachandra Guha—a personal hero of Shah’s—called “charming” in a tweet.

I met Shah in his bedroom, where he spends most of the day clanking away at his laptop, and, in his own words, “fretting about how I can make real money, life-changing money.” As we spoke, Shah kept glancing at a mirror, which was fixed to the side of a cupboard made of engineered wood. The cupboard’s fauxness was cast into sharper relief by an adjacent writing table, which he was at pains to point out was built from “old teak”. The gap between the mirror and the room’s door was too narrow for Shah—six foot two, gangly limbs—to get a proper look at himself. To do that, he had to step out into the corridor connecting the living area and his parents’ bedroom. He remarked on this spatial inconvenience as if it said something grander about his life.

Shah looks skinnier every time I see him. In the mirror, as we spoke, his collarbones appeared more prominent, the cheeks more sunken. But the years hadn’t dimmed his smile, which eclipsed any gauntness when I asked him about Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel Chinaman, which was lying on his bedside table. Next to it was a copy of Gideon Haigh’s Stroke of Genius, which, he told me animatedly, was gifted to him by the author after an interview on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2020.

Unlike that conversation, this interview has not been condensed for length or clarity.

How does one come to writing, Vikram? Or does the writing come to one? What I mean to ask is if one can learn to be a writer.

First of all, Vikram, thank you for inviting me to be interviewed though I find the idea of the elusive writer very romantic. In my mind, the aura of a creative person comes from the fact that they dance tantalisingly on the precipice of meaning. I believe that the reader, the viewer, the patron, must be overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to sit inside the artist’s brain and know what they are smoking, in a manner of speaking. I know I have a long way to go because I am constantly seeking out opportunities to explain my work, explain myself, even as I feel repelled by the act. An interview is also an opportunity to hedge against the risk of readers conflating you—as a person—with the work you put out. One defence against this risk is to insist, as Karl Ove Knausgaard has, that it’s not me, but it’s the “text doing something, the text thinking something….it is not me saying it from who I am, but from inside the novel or the essay.”

All this sounds like a diversion but it ties up to your question. To me, a writer is someone who instinctively understands what Knausgaard is trying to say here. It isn’t a question about fidelity to facts as it is about creating something that is true in the world of the text. Can you learn to feel this in your bones? I’m not so sure. There’s a kind of thinking—and therefore a kind of writing—that approaches the emotional core of an issue at a certain angle. It’s a sensibility, and I think one either has it or doesn’t. Of course, one can improve on technique and craft but I think the sensibility needs to exist to begin with.

Right. You speak of sensibility as something specific, but it may be much broader than that? In the universe of fiction, for instance, a mass market author’s sensibility may have nothing in common with the aesthetic view of a literary novelist.

No, the sensibility I am referring to is more basic than that: it’s the instinct to shape a narrative that is in conversation with human conflicts and contradictions. Durjoy Datta writes mass market fiction, simplistic in its framing and with neat little resolutions. And if you turn off the sound on his Instagram Reels, you’d think he’s just another content creator selling Indian millennials a certain yuppie dream—hot wife, cute kids, credit cards, clean eating, festivals, vacations. But if you listen to his voiceovers, which I’m assuming he scripts himself, you can see glimpses of the writer’s sensibility. His narration may be delivered in a saccharine, conciliatory tone but they are often about clashes: traditional and modern, Indian and global, freedom and belonging, families and friendships. He’s no iconoclast, of course, but you can see he is at least mulling over these questions in written form, as a writer would.

Recognising the fundamentally textured nature of human emotion and observation, and not flattening them in expression: that’s the sensibility I’m referring to. Geoff Dyer uses this wonderful phrase in the context of what a novelist has to do: “discern the psychological freight of the smallest gesture and the tangle of motives that constitute an individual’s moral relation to the world.”

When it comes to the resolution of these conflicts, Durjoy and I won’t land on the same side. And I’d pick a Naipaul title over a Durjoy novel any day of the week. But I do think there is an overlap in their concerns. The literary writers are going to take me to the back of the building and shoot me for this comparison.

I think both Naipaul and Durjoy would want to shoot you for this. I spoke to some of your friends as prep for this interview, and a couple of them did say you can be contrarian for the sake of it, haha. Okay, let’s move on. Was there an exact moment when you knew you wanted to become a writer?

When I was in the sixth standard, I got back a copy in which I’d written a composition on the topic ‘The Most Memorable Day of My Life.’ My essay was about the day I scored two goals in an inter-school football match. I’d tried to capture the pure and compressed elation of the moment the ball hits the back of the net. The teacher hadn’t graded it. Instead, she’d left a note: “Is this your own work? Please meet me.” Her incredulity seemed to leap up from the lined page of my notebook. The walk to the staff room was the most confident I’ve ever felt, because it was indeed my “own work”. Something had been conjured out of nothing, and a figure of authority, an arbiter of worthiness, had been left wondering how I had made it happen.

Of course, the writing may have been influenced by the sports journalism I was reading at the time. But I know now that to write anything you have to, as Julian Barnes said once, “deny influence” and “pretend that it’s not only separate from anything you’ve written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written.” Barnes calls this attitude “a grotesque delusion” and “a crass vanity” but he also recognises it as a “creative necessity.” So yes, it was this sense of having my originality noticed and acknowledged that is my earliest memory of wanting to be a writer.

You must have noticed how tied up this anecdote is to external validation. Even now, the moments of being published, read, and complimented tend to carry a sweetness that the moments of writing don’t. Most days, writing feels like tuning a recalcitrant instrument until you can take the harsh notes no more. But this is changing. Irrespective of the output, writing is coming to be associated with solitude. There’s a zone where the world gets drowned out, and it’s only me and the tak-tak-tak of the keyboard. It’s a lot of frantic backspacing, but it’s starting to sound like the soundtrack for cognition. There’s a quote attributed to the composer John Cage: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.” I’ve been unable to get over myself to the extent that I leave, but I do love the feeling of being completely alone and working on a thing I care about.

I think you might be underestimating how easily solitude tips over into loneliness. Don’t you worry about loneliness?

I worry about loneliness but I’m not afraid of it. Loneliness is inevitable if you’re serious about any kind of artistic pursuit. When the writing is going badly, which it often is, solitude takes on the flavour of loneliness. Also, when you’ve developed an aesthetic view but lack the talent to express it, or an audience that gets it, it can feel very isolating. The life of an artist is about bridging that gap, about finding the tone and the textual or visual vocabulary to express how they view the world. But the gap must not be completely closed, because loneliness can be nourishing for the work.

Kiran Desai uses the word “exquisite” to describe “artistic loneliness”. Elsewhere, she says that a writer has to be lonely. And I love what she says after that: “I know loneliness in all its different forms, the difficult bits, but also the sustenance of it, the quiet of it, sometimes it does also feel so glorious.” This might sound like woo-woo to most practical people, including you, but I get Desai’s glorification of loneliness at a deep level. An artist must stew in their own juices. You must be prepared for the world to call it self-sabotage. And it will be self-sabotage if you genuinely don’t believe it to be self-preservation. In Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, the aspiring artist’s mentor tells him: ‘Toote hue dil se hi sangeet nikalta hai.’ I would adapt that to ‘Choote hue dil se hi sangeet nikalta hai.” Choona, as in ‘to touch’. If you want to create art, you have to be touched by things, and you have to want your work to touch people. A creative person must be prepared to be touched by loneliness but must guard against being torched by it.

You’ve quoted Knausgaard, Barnes, Desai. Let’s talk about artist interviews. After everything you’ve said about letting the work speak for itself, you clearly spend a lot of time trying to lift the veil of creation.

I’m always consuming interviews of writers and film directors. The good ones are studded with clues about how the work happens. If they’re being authentic, artists often come across as self-indulgent and chronically dissatisfied in these conversations. The most candid interviews offer a glimpse of some kind of internal churn. But the great ones are never all doom and gloom: any bleakness is cut by charm, like light caught on the blade of a Japanese knife. At its best, an artist interview is like a cortado—the irresistible bitterness of coffee cut by a dash of milk…

You do have a lot of metaphors, I’ll give you that. Sorry for interrupting, please go on.

Yes, so I was saying that meeting the artist in interviews often confirms the suspicions I’ve had while engaging with the work. An interview can sometimes feel like watching an artist think in real time. In a television interview in 1977, Jorge Luis Borges talked about why he found English more interesting than Spanish; he said English has two registers, Latin and Saxon, which is why, for any idea, English has words with similar but not the same meanings (his examples: ‘dark’ and ‘obscure’; ‘regal’ and ‘kingly’). It makes sense instinctively. There is a lightbulb moment, and you’re open to receiving it because it’s coming from someone who has a deep love for language, someone that you just know relishes weighing words inside their mouth and saying them aloud when sitting by themselves. That’s the beauty of the interview format. For a beginner, reading or watching something like this can make them feel less weird for enjoying the things they do.

In my twenties, I’d inhale the ‘Art of Fiction’ interviews in The Paris Review. I’ve grown up in the kind of ritualistic and mercantile Indian environment where writing is, at best, a hobby. It’s not seen as serious work. It’s something one does for a lark. And the bar is so low, everyone fancies themselves to be a bit of a writer. You only need to use big words and bombastic language in a LinkedIn post or in a WhatsApp message to be considered ‘creative’. Such a person is referred to as a ‘wordsmith’ in my social class. So descriptors like ‘wordsmith’, and phrases like ‘more power to your pen’ have come for me to represent a kind of mediocrity and obscurity.

That’s why reading The Paris Review interviews, where writers like Marquez and Mahfouz and Lessing hold forth about writing almost as a matter of life and death, was important. And of course, the greats know that literary work is decidedly not a matter of life and death in the way medicine or law or technology can be. But it’s still the difference between life and death at the individual level. You get the sense that these people will die, metaphorically at least, if they didn’t write. I’m not quite there yet but that’s where I want to be. For that, I must get over the guilt I carry for wanting to spend all day trying to impose order on feelings through the written word, when I should have been reporting on tumours or running deals that move millions of dollars.

These days, as much as the craft talk, the thing that draws me to interviews is the chat about the circumstances in which the work was done. Was there a sick parent to look after? Was there a cabin in the woods, paid for by a benefactor they were sleeping with? Was there a pram in the hall, to use the Cyril Connolly phrase? Was a construction site next door creating a mighty racket? Rahul Bhattacharya, for instance, said that he wrote The Sly Company of People Who Care in “very noisy circumstances”.

As you can imagine, on this aspect, there is much more to gain from reading about how women work, with all the demands on their time and brains and bodies. It’s why, as I grow older, I hang on to every word in a Deborah Levy interview or in a podcast featuring Ayşegül Savaş. There’s a remarkable Mahasweta Devi interview from the early 2000s that I consider as coming closest to painting the truest portrait of the writer. There’s a point where she says, in Bangla, “Shomosto shomoy lekhi gechi”—I’ve written through it all —and that moves me in an inexplicable way.

But between all this reading and watching, when does your own writing happen? You seem to spend way more time reading about writers than actually writing. This was forgivable in your 20s. For the longest time, didn’t you dream of having your first novel published by 33, a decade after you finished college? Well, 34 and ticking now.

Wow, that was direct. But I guess I needed to hear it. The thing is: I still fear the blank page, the half-written page. I’m scared of confronting the limits of my talent, and even that is more bearable than confronting the limits of my discipline or my stamina for doing hard things. By now I’ve developed enough of a taste to know whether something is half-decent. Creating the world of a literary novel is painstaking work. You have to do it brick-by-brick, over weeks and months and years. I’m nowhere close to being a natural. I saw a tweet the other day: ‘There’s nothing more humbling than encountering someone who is casually better than you at the thing you’ve made an identity out of.’ This happens to me all the time. I come across a beautifully written Substack post, a pithy YouTube comment that packs in pages worth of emotional articulation, tight novels that have been written along with day jobs and I think ‘Pack it up mate, why are you even trying?’

Sorry, what was I saying? Yes, so building that world takes work. And it is delicate work. One poor sentence, one patchy transition, and the spell breaks. A modest novel is about 60,000 words. Imagine how much you have to get right, how many times you have to get it right. There are a lot of poor novels out there. But, with the novelistic form, I’d rather not write than write something unreadable. I don’t have this compunction with non-fiction. With non-fiction, I think writing something is always better than writing nothing. There’s another block I face….

So that’s the endgame, then? Writing a novel? With the life and career choices you’ve made, I don’t quite understand where you’re going. Where does all this lead to?

I’m trying to get to it but you’re interrupting my train of thought.

Okay, go on then.

Thank you. The other block I face is an embarrassment around feeling. In my milieu, melodrama is acceptable but a lower emotional register is not. We are naturally dramatic people, having grown up in the kind of homes where a parent or grandparent could say something like “I know you’re waiting for me to die” and then go on the next day like nothing happened. We have a lot of words and gestures but so much of it is performative. In daily family life, emotion plays out at such a chintzy, flaky register that it ceases to mean anything. In this environment, if you say what you mean, it’s viewed with suspicion.

This gets in the way of the creative journey. Most of the art I admire and want to make operates at a lower emotional register, which demands authenticity to get closer to the truth. And that’s the challenge, to feel and express without hitting that high note of sentimentality that feels superficial. This is especially troublesome when you can’t get over the need to be taken seriously by a society that rewards only two things: conformity or stratospheric success, which usually translates to money and fame. Despite what we’d like to believe, material success is an objective metric. In this society, the most pitiable thing is to be an unsuccessful non-conformist.

The novel remains the holy grail. I’ve been published several times since I quit a job in corporate law in 2017. I’ve written journalistic stories, a handful of book reviews, pieces short and long about travel and cricket and so on. On the fiction side, I’ve written a few short stories over the years, some of which had been published on websites that no longer exist. Happily, a couple of stories have been published in print this year—one in a mainstream newspaper and another in an anthology with limited distribution.

But I’m still embarrassed to call myself a writer because there is no novel yet, that thing with your name in large font on the cover, available in bookstores in every major city in India and preferably at the airports, too, defiant amidst the sea of self-help titles and mythological trilogies.

My career in writing seems cobbled together by standalone pieces of non-fiction and fiction. The novel could be the clean line. In his Art of Fiction interview, László Krasznahorkai said that the novel “contains a huge construction, like a bridge, an arch, from the beginning through to the end.” According to him, a story—as opposed to a novel—is a “black box in which no one knows what happened.” One of the conceptual problems with my stories is that they span long periods; they accommodate too many time jumps. My stories borrow unconsciously from the novel’s treatment of time but my characters remain impressionistic. These discordant notes are why the stories sometimes feel insubstantial to me, lacking a core. So yes, there’s an urge to write a novel to impose a kind of order on my writing career. A novel will make it feel like something real has been achieved, that all the wrestling with oneself was worth it.

Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question about when the writing happens. Let me ask directly: do you write everyday?

Well, what I’ve said partly answers that question. The writing doesn’t happen, not as a discipline in any case. I’m still very much a hobby writer. It’s not my day job. It should be my night job or my early morning one, but it isn’t. This whole thing feels a bit like something Geoff Dyer would say. He wrote an entire book about failing to write a D.H. Lawrence biography (Out of Sheer Rage). But there’s a difference. He’s doing a bit. He’s playing with form to say what he really wants to. There’s a lesson there—you have to be mad to want to be a writer, but you have to have a method to be a practising writer.

When I’m working on something actively, though, it feels frantic. I can’t think of anything else. It’s as Hemingway said in his Art of Fiction interview: “Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.” He also has this sex analogy in the same response, about how, at the end of a morning’s writing, he feels “as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love.” Weird, but then Modiji ne bola hoga…sorry Hemingway ne bola hoga toh kuch soch-samajhkar hi bola hoga.

Anyway—when I am in these bursts of writing, I don’t want to see or talk to anyone, I don’t want to do anything else until I finish the first draft, at least. This is actually a problem that needs fixing. This approach elevates writing to some kind of rarefied air, as if it must happen outside of life. But the only way to be a practising writer is for the work to happen inside of your life. If you’re writing outside of your daily life, ‘writer’ is not your primary identity. People say things like ‘Oh, I’m a writer at heart’, ‘I don’t need to write every day to be a writer.’ They—I should say ‘we’—write a couple of blogs and then, with cultivated bashfulness, say that we are writers. Would you go around saying you’re a historian if you don’t write history or teach it? You’re a history buff at best, an enthusiast.

That’s why I find it hard to call myself a writer. I don’t write every day. There simply isn’t the time, mindspace or stamina to write amidst the work, the family life, the paying of the bills. Caregiving for elders, getting the door, keeping the kitchen clean: there’s an assortment of little things that add up in a way to erode you and your foolish dreams. Let me give you an example of the doorbells. On a weekday morning, I have to answer six doorbells. What a first world problem, you think. But it’s a very real problem for me. I am snapped out of the world of the thing I’m working on, and then I must lock back into it. I’m not a dreamy person, I take real life seriously, so it’s difficult for me to drown out the world. And the distractions accrete, you know, especially when you lack the courage to take your writing practice seriously. Let’s leave it here though. I don’t like the look on your face. People often have this look when I’m talking about the things that bother me.

Your troubles do sound somewhat self-inflicted. You’re not the first person to have to move back home to care for a sick parent, you know. And what are these bills you keep whining about? Your parents don’t need your money. I know your father tells you to stop doing your day jobs and spend your working hours on literary projects.

Okay, so we’re getting personal. Then I should also place on record that you have a simplistic way of viewing the world. You may justify your one-dimensional view, saying you’re happier and less worked up than I am. But I’d rather live without happiness, whatever that is, than live an unexamined life…

Hang on, where is this coming from?

Anyway, the bills are metaphorical. Financial dependence seems to me a kind of defeat, whatever spin I put on it, so I need to have enough money to be able to strike out for myself at short notice. It’s reached a point where I consider financial independence more important than the writing. It’s a dangerous place to be from the point of view of my creative ambition, because a life could go by with only the standalone, mismatched pieces of work to show for it. The danger is compounded by the fact that financial freedom is a mirage at this point, because I feel incapable of doing an office job that promises progress up the financial ladder. Nor do I know how to make money in something like the stock market. All this is hard to explain to people in conventional careers, but it’s harder to explain to people who live an artistic life. The result is that I feel caught in the middle—too normie for the creative cosmopolitans; too wishy-washy for the householders.

So much talk, Vikram, so much theorising.

Because talk is cheap, innit? And you know what, I’m not a monster. On his episode on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Colm Tóibín was asked whether it was true that he once told a creative writing class that ‘you have to be a monster to write.’ And here’s how he explained himself: “I meant, stop worrying about your grandmother’s feelings, your mother’s feelings, your girlfriend’s feelings; your job is to get the thing down and if you have to use something that belongs to you or somebody else, write it down. Just don’t be saying that ‘when Auntie Marie dies, I’ll be able to write the most wonderful story’; write it NOW…”

So, you see, I’m always worrying about everyone’s feelings—also because the ideas and stories that come to me are of the things I know closely. I’m incapable of conceptualising wildly imaginative material. I will become a serious writer the day I become a monster. For now, I’m a regular, well-adjusted man who tries to give society no reasons to fault his existence. Well, except for believing that it might be possible to live a fulfilling life without romantic and sexual companionship. That might be the most deviant belief I hold.

Oh, that reminds me of something that your readers—okay, friends—want to know. What do you do for sex?

I’ve gone without it long enough to not need….Hang on, where the hell is that coming from? How dare you. Can we stick to the work please? But you know there’s a thing that Tóibín said about sex in that same episode…

Stop. Just stop. Can you say one thing without quoting a novelist you haven’t even read? God, you’re so full of references. You’re an overthinker, Vikram. You tip-toe around the thing you really want to say. And it reflects in your short stories, if I’m being honest. You teeter towards the brink and then pull back from taking the leap.

But why do you say ‘overthinker’ like a slur? In that, you reveal yourself to be a foot soldier of the dominant modes of cultural production, where thinking for oneself is anathema. ‘Overthinker’—the word itself is a refuge for the unimaginative. I accept that the world has been shaped by men and women of action. But take a moment to look around you. The world contains wonderful things—it always will—but, on balance, do you think it’s turned out to be a place where most people retain their humanity? Don’t mistake this indictment for hopelessness. Because, like Mahasweta Devi said, “I am determined to live, I have that.” And engaging with the humanities is one way to live. The fact is that our ‘overthinking’ intimidates you, it makes you feel lesser. You worry that we may have tapped into something that’s outside your grasp. That threatens your technocratic fantasies of control; it reveals how mechanical your own existence is. I want to reassure you that my intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency isn’t a criticism of your life choices.

But I will admit your charge about my writing. It’s not airy enough, right? It feels like the material hasn’t been hung out to dry. There’s a sentence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, where she writes about a character called Obinze wearing a relationship “so boldly, like a brightly coloured shirt.” It made me aware that I’m nothing like this. And it made me wish I was more like Obinze. In my inter-personal relations, I can be a good ‘whoever you want me to be’. Agreeability may be the defining element of my personality. But the flipside is that I can’t be a good ‘what I want to be.’

This dissonance leaks into the writing. I think that’s where the work gets this quality you’re referring to—of stepping back when it’s time to pull the trigger. I’m not ready yet to pay the price for freedom. I won’t be ready until I have the courage to unsubscribe from this moral code based on reciprocity. That’s what lends the stuffiness to the work, the feeling of being trapped in a web of obligation and expectation. I stay in it, because the web is also a net. And a net means safety. My mind is open; my heart is closed. To write something real, the mind and the heart have to be on the same page.

Some of the things you say are mildly interesting, Vikram, but you don’t have the courage to convert them into something that doesn’t sound like an entitled whine. You like a good pity party more than having words on page. Because it’s the easier way out.

You know what, Vikram, you will never understand because you’re no different from the rest. You live like a clone. Creative work has its own logic. Rearing children and writing code and acquiring real estate aren’t the only useful things that can be done with a life. And you think all this ‘do more, talk less’ stuff makes you interesting. It doesn’t: you’re a fucking bore. You have no understanding of an inner life, of what it means to have your work move strangers, to be stirred by a sentence that sounds like music, to….

Vikram, dude, I’m trying to help you, man. You’re too far into your own head. “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” That’s a line from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky? Really Vikram, you’re quoting Dostoevsky to me? You saw this on Twitter, didn’t you? With zero idea of what comes before and after. You’re a mindless consumer of ephemeral, snackable content. You have created nothing of your own. And you have only loved when you’ve been certain of being loved in return. You have….you know what, fuck you.

No, fuck YOU, Vikram. Snap out of this batshit dialogue. Get a real job, settle down, have a couple of kids. Time is running out, buddy. And, for god’s sake, stop talking to the fucking mirror.