Kaushik Barua interviews Kaushik Barua: Writing a Post-Modern Novel
Q1. What is your post-modern novel about?
It’s a fable for 30-year olds. It answers all the compelling questions facing the millennial generation.
Q2. What kind of questions?
Now that Dylan is almost dead, Bieber is omnipresent and Cobain shot himself, do we have any gods left? Do you know who you really are? Are you a piece of bacon in the Lady Gaga dress? Does anyone here remember the world before Facebook? Before Aamir Khan started gazing into the middle distance and before Salman Khan’s six-pack?
Q3. I don’t think you know what post-modern really means. Do you?
I refuse to answer that question.
Q4. You’re talking to yourself. How could you refuse to answer a question?
Q5. What is your novel really about?
Krantik is a paranoid hypochondriac living in Rome. He is recovering from a failed suicide attempt (not his own). He constantly asks people for directions to places he already knows, and he obsesses about:
social media,
the indifference of the gods (if the cockroaches have been around for so much longer than us, maybe god is a cockroach),
a girl he has just met,
a cricket cult with members who take life decisions based on match results,
his haemorrhoids.
The publishers say it’s a book where ‘Kerouac meets James Joyce meets Harold & Kumar’.
Q6. Is that true? The bit about Kerouac?
Absolutely. We asked Kerouac before we put it on the blurb.
Q7. Kerouac is dead.
No he’s not. He’s just hanging with Tupac.
Q8. How does Krantik treat his haemorrhoids?
He shoves painkillers up his ass. All kinds of steroids. He’s like Ben Johnson without an Olympic medal.
Q9. Ben Johnson doesn’t have an Olympic medal.
Okay, fine. He’s like Lance Armstrong with his nuts intact. I’m running out of metaphors here.
Q10. I don’t think you know what a metaphor is.
I think I’m done with this interview.
Kaushik Barua’s postmodern novel No Direction Rome is currently in book-stores and allegedly has all the answers you need for living in these times.