Kunal, Coffee and Curry Puffs

Kunal Basu was the guest author at MPH's Breakfast Club. He read from the title piece from in his short story collection, The Japanese Wife in which a painfully shy Bengali boy finds a true friend in a Japanese penpal, and later marries her ... by letter. The two never meet, but remain entirely loyal to each other. It's a relationship, as Kunal says :

... of great intimacy, but no domesticity ...

Kunal had a small but very tuned in audience and it was certainly one of the liveliest Breakfast clubs that I have been to with no-one being shy to ask questions.

He talked (among other things) about how he is :

... driven by the strange ...

when he writes; about where his inspiration comes from :

I think I have a chemical imbalance in the brain ... stories germinate in my mind ...

whether he finds it easier to write short stories or novels :

... both require the same emotional passion ...

who he writes for :

I write to please myself and hope this will please others

and whether he has writing rituals :

I write fiction longhand and non-fiction on the computer, and I write fiction at home, and non-fiction at Oxford (where he a Professor of Marketing) ...

And of course he talked about the making of the film of his short story The Japanese Wife with director Aparna Sen which will start doing the rounds of the film festivals next month, and be on general release in October. It is a true piece of world cinema, filmed in English, Bengali and Japanese, and by the miracle of YouTube I managed to find this news item about it :

Aparna ready with The Japanese Wife



I have more posts to come on Kunal, so stay tuned!