End Date :
1134 International Affairs Building
A brown bag lecture by Kavery Nambisan.
“This talk is about my own intiation into writing and about what it means to me. In a rapidly changing, consumerist world in which human values are repreatedly questioned, fiction writers need to redefine goals and ask ourselves more critically about our story-telling intentions.
All writing–like speech– begins with the desire to communicate. It is easy to forget this in one’s eagerness to be clever and saleable. The use of words as a means of false communication happens all the time, in the political speeches that are written and spoken, in the media, in the easy jargon we resort to in conversations and just as dangerously, in fiction. Often neither the writer nor the reader is able to recognize the falsehood and thus, insidiuosly, the channels of communication beggin to decay.
My surgical career, which is very practical one of using one’s brains and hands, has also taught me a certain type of integrity which I believe runs parallel to writing. A surgeon, if she has any substance, must reach for that single truth, that choice which is the best for her patient. She will make mistakes, face failure and disappointment but if her objective is clear, sooner or later she will do it. With each success the learning process gets easier and ultimately becomes second nature. The pain of failure and the joys of success are vital to surgery and to writing.
I will talk about the books that have influenced me deeply; about the connection between one’s beliefs, values and writing; and my conclusion that for me, fiction must be rooted in reality. In a world jammed with iinformation, knowledge and beildering array of choices, reality is not easy to find. It is easier to wrap ourselves in what we consider “the good self”, to shudeer the strocities we witness, to do our “little bit for society” and carry on living our good lives. The role of fiction is to peel away this skin, to shake us out of our presumed innocence. It is to enable ourselves and the reader to see through the blind spots of civilization.
I write with the hope that fiction will bring us face to face with the real questions that should concern humankind.”
