"Noon echoes violence that killed my father"

A talented young writer, Aatish Taseer is the son of well-known Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, and the late Pakistani businessman and politician Salman Taseer, who have provided both the impetus and the starting point to his writing. His thought book “Noon” is out recently where he continues to explore the contemporary Indian psyche as well as the state of Pakistan. Below is a verbatim transcript of his interview with CNBC-TV18’s Anuradha SenGupta. For complete details watch the accompanying videos.

Your personal life story has been the starting point and actually much more than the starting point of all your writing so far, isn’t it?
It’s true. One of the things that people get confused with is they think that in some ways I am revisiting that personal story, but it’s quite a different thing that I am trying to do. It’s to use the personal as a prison to make a journey outwards. So a stranger who is intensely personal really about my own circumstances that’s probably why it was a book of nonfiction.
The way the template goes, I think it is a book about Delhi and about class and yet I have used that nonfictional crust. Part of the reason is I like to show how I got from one place to another. I like to show my working as it were and to also sort of allow the reader backstage in some ways. My fiction has a kind of almost transparency in some ways.

While your stories do go beyond your personal context, an eye about larger universal truths or about universal realities, they are still and perhaps only barely disguised fiction, isn’t it?
No, that’s the thing that people trip up on. I like to create that sense, almost an illusion of nonfiction. But the stories are not mine. It would be a mistake to believe that the narrative of the template goes as Aatish Taseer or to believe that Rehan Tabassum is Aatish Taseer, he is not.

Full interview here Moneycontrol