‘I’m curious about science as a form of philosophy’

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The men you meet in Manu Joseph’s mordantly funny, painfully clever and brilliantly observant debut, Serious Men (Fourth Estate), are the men driven by their convictions, by the things they hold dear: family, relationships, love, hatred, treachery, jealousy, pride and glory (no one word out of these is adequate enough to sum up the novel’s theme).
They are the men obsessed with their place in the world and with the things that will make them upwardly mobile and intellectually elevated. Much of what they make of themselves and their lives has, of course, to do with two predominant factors: caste and class. Ayyan Mani, a low-class clerk, who is filled with hatred for Brahmins, lives in a chawl in Mumbai. To humour his wife and his 11-year-old son Adi, he must invent a myth of “child prodigy” around the boy and have some “fun”.
Arvind Acharya, an astronomer at the Institute of Theory and Research, is a venerable figure, who is called a Nobel laureate without having won the Nobel prize. An old foe of the Big Bang theory, he believes that microscopic aliens were falling all the time on earth. To prove it, he invests all the resources at his disposal into sending “hot-air balloons to a height of 41 km with four sterilised metal containers that would capture the air at that altitude”. But before that he falls for the young astrobiologist Oparna. He realises he can’t marry her and must return to his wife after a brief, though stormy, liaison. Heart-broken, Oparna must do something that brings disrepute to him. He loses his reputation, only to seemingly regain it towards the end of the novel, thanks to the machinations of his ever-conniving clerk.
Serious Men has simultaneously been published in India, the UK and the US. It is also being translated into Dutch, German, French and Serbian.
Excerpts from an interview:

Q: What was the genesis of the novel?
A: I always wanted to write a novel and I was very sure that it will not be autobiographical. For a few years, there were two stories I was itching to tell. One was inspired by the many little stories we see in the inside pages of a newspaper very often — the boy genius story, “boy genius invited by Nasa”. It was always Nasa inviting weird Indian geniuses as if Nasa has nothing better to do. I slowly became fascinated with the idea of a man who would promote his son as a genius, and create this myth not for any larger ruse than to just have some fun and entertain his wife.
The second story I wanted to tell was about sexy science — the hilarious deceit of multi-dimensions, time travel, search for ET etc.
Finally, I decided to blend these two stories into a single novel.

Q: The novel is about many things; it has many layers. What was it like weaving the underdog story into the workings of caste, science and relationships?
A: Most of the time when we learn things, when we read, we think we are taking in information. But the truth is what we are consuming is someone’s interpretation of a fact or a situation. The idea of interpretation as form of fact always interested me. And I thought how interesting it will be if a guy who is not supposed to interpret something begins to interpret it. That’s what Ayyan does. So weaving Ayyan into situations was not an effort — in fact, Ayyan passing through a situation, any situation, became the very basis of the novel.

Q: While the novel is about the two different worlds of Arvind Acharya and Ayyan Mani, it seems Ayyan is a greater puppeteer. Do you think he is more central to the story?
A: It is very interesting that you ask this. Some people think Acharya is the central character. Some people think Ayyan is the central character. I am now sitting back and accepting all views.

Q: How important was the setting? Did you at all think about it as a Mumbai novel?
A: I always thought Bombay (he refrains from calling the city by its “new” name) is a great setting for a warm sharp story, which was my aspiration. Also Bombay is the city I know best.

Q: Acharya’s is an intersting character and the readers empathise with him a lot. Do you see his concerns in the novel about the future of science echoing in the real life too? Did the science bits entail any research?
A: Yes, all of Acharya’s concerns, chiefly regarding the populist aspect of science, how corny and esoteric it has become, is a concern some old-fashioned endearing scientists have. I have always read up a lot about science as I am very curious about its place as a form of philosophy. My research for the book was largely derived from my regular reading material and from my experiences while doing science stories.

Q: It’s the tone of the novel which will definitely find favour with many. Did you have to work a lot on its humour and wit?
A: No. That is how I write, and honestly most of the time I don’t mean to be funny at all. I think writing is a bit like falling from a height — no matter what you try, you fall the way you are meant to fall.

Q: Some would say that your two female characters — Oparna and Oja — get a little overshadowed. How would you react to that?
A: I have read about this in some reviews and several readers have told me this. Many of them like Oparna’s character and they want to know her future. It is true that the women in the novel are somewhat overshadowed by the men, but then the novel is about men and how they react when things happen to them. But the important thing here is that the men are largely reacting to the women they love. So, in a way, if at all there is a puppeteer in the story that puppeteer is a woman.

Q: Do you see the novel in the tradition of the great Indian underdog story made popular by Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger? Was the “darker” India at all on your mind when you set out to write this? What do you make of the parallels with Adiga? How interested are you in writing about the “two Indias”?
A: I have a lot of respect for what Adiga has achieved, but honestly I don’t like the comparisons with White Tiger. I imagine Serious Men as a creation of my own way of storytelling, and I was well into writing the novel when The White Tiger was launched. Is there really a tradition of the great Indian underdog story? I don’t know. And this thing about the “two Indias” I am not interested in it at all. I find it very boring. Also, I do not like novels that try to be social commentary. Only social commentary should be social commentary, not novels.

Q: People keep talking about the dumbing down of journalistic writing. As a journalist, do you see share these concerns?
A: That reminds me of a funny cartoon titled The Great Editor (I think): Moses is holding the ten commandments and looking up at an illuminated sky and saying, “Look, I can’t dumb this down anymore.”
To answer your question, there is space for dumb stories and very smart stories. A reporter or a feature writer can always sell smart or well-done stories. It is my belief that journalism is really an extraordinary form of literature and journalists should not lose heart when their work is chopped down or diluted. We should fight for our ways of telling stories and I believe we can win this battle. Increasingly, the only way a publication today can distinguish itself is through quality and quality writers and reporters are going to be very important in the near future.

Q: This is your first novel, but is being published in many countries and being translated into many other languages. That must be quite heartening, isn’t it?
A: It is, really. I feel very lucky.

Q: What do critics mean to you? Do you think we still have a long way to go when it comes to healthy literary criticism?
A: After reading the first-ever Indian review of my novel, I started laughing because the review was so badly written. I thought I am going to be a victim of the mediocrity of Indian journalism. But then other reviews began to appear, some of them made observations which were intelligent and even useful to me as a writer, and I told myself even though generalisations are delicious I should not make sweeping statements about reviewers. Some new novelists are really beginning to change Indian writing in English and some reviewers commissioned by important publications sadly do not have the maturity or the intelligence to analyse such novels. Ultimately, the role of a book editor is important.

Q: Any literary influences?
A: Honestly, there is nobody who has influenced me. But I do love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.M. Coetzee, Truman Capote, Alice Munro, Milan Kundera, Anne Tyler and a few others.