{"id":10452,"date":"2011-02-07T12:53:56","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T12:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tat.reddaisytrading.co.uk\/index.php\/2011\/02\/07\/novelist-today-with-kishwar-desai\/"},"modified":"2016-01-07T17:23:38","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T17:23:38","slug":"novelist-today-with-kishwar-desai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/07\/novelist-today-with-kishwar-desai\/","title":{"rendered":"Novelist Today with Kishwar Desai"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Author speaks to Zeenat Moosa about her debut novel ‘Witness The Night’<\/h3>\n
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JOURNALIST and TV producer Kishwar Desai can now lay claim to being an award-winning novelist after scooping a top literary prize with her debut novel ‘Witness The Night’ last month. Her book, which exposes female infanticide in India, landed the prestigious Costa First Novel award. Here she speaks to Zeenat Moosa about ‘Witness The Night’<\/strong><\/div>\n

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Congratulations on winning the Costa First Novel Prize. How does it feel?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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It feels wonderful. I never imagined this would happen to me with my first book.\u00a0I am really grateful to the judges for finding my book worthy enough of such a prestigious prize!<\/div>\n

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You have a wealth of experience in media, as a journalist, TV producer and TV presenter. What made you start writing?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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I had worked in TV for over 20 years and\u00a0in the\u00a0last few years I found that I was\u00a0disappointed at how celebrity-oriented the shows\u00a0had become. I was also concerned that everything seemed to be becoming a little superficial at that time. So I thought it was time to get back\u00a0to writing – I used to write a lot, as a schoolgirl-and fulfil a childhood dream of becoming an \u2018author\u2019.\u00a0<\/div>\n

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We probably know you best as the wife of Lord Desai. Tell us briefly more about the real Kishwar Desai – your background, your life.<\/strong><\/div>\n

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I was born in Ambala (now in Haryana) and grew up in different towns scattered all over North India: in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi –and even Kashmir as my father was in the police and posted in all these places.\u00a0 I changed more than ten schools – but it was fun because I would make a lot of new friends, every year. After school I joined college in Delhi, to study Economics Honours in Lady Shri Ram College.\u00a0But I was interested in media –and\u00a0so after college I became a journalist in Chandigarh with the Indian Express – and then I got married to my former\u00a0husband –and again began a life of once again\u00a0being posted in different cities. However, I carried on working – in\u00a0Mumbai and in Kolkatta\u00a0– and by the time I began living in Delhi I had shifted to TV and joined NDTV as a production controller and later a TV journalist. I loved my\u00a0TV career\u00a0and carried on working\u00a0whilst my children grew up. I have two kids, Gaurav and Mallika, who are both coincidentally at Harvard Business School right now. <\/div>\n

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I met Meghnad Desai in India in 2004 –and we got divorced from our previous partners and married each other. The romance made front page news in India as everyone was totally surprised! Now I live in the UK and have a great life writing and visiting India and the US to meet friends and family.<\/div>\n

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Without revealing too much what is Witness the Night about?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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Witness the Night has been described as a thriller and a work of crime fiction.\u00a0 It is about a young girl who is accused of a horrific crime, and\u00a0about an unconventional social worker Simran Singh, who, convinced of her innocence, decides to help her. The book also deals with gender and with other issues which confront a modern India. But, overall, I hope it\u2019s a book that people will want to read.<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s an intriguing title \u2013 how did that come about?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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The book was originally called \u2018The Tyranny of Dreams\u2019. It had been long listed for the Man Asian Literary prize, 2009 but then we all felt\u00a0the title\u00a0was sounding a little too \u2018heavy\u2019. But I still wanted a name which represented some of the events and characters in the book.\u00a0 So\u00a0during one brainstorming session with my editor in which many names were suggested, I\u00a0came up with \u2018Witness the Night\u2019 and everyone liked it so we went with it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n

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What has the reaction been to the book so far?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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Very good and I am really pleasantly surprised by that.\u00a0 The reviews both in the UK and in India have been very appreciative and even readers have been getting back to me with\u00a0extremely positive feedback. They have been particularly affected by the issue of gendercide and have liked the character of Simran Singh a lot. So much, in fact, that she is now returning as the central protagonist in a book series. I am now writing the next one.<\/div>\n

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Sex selection is still prevalent today, within many British Asian communities. Why do you think this backward ideology is still so apparent?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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When people migrate overseas, they usually carry\u00a0their traditions and prejudices with them. So it is not\u00a0astonishing at all if some\u00a0British Asians\u00a0still show a marked son preference over their daughters. This\u00a0regressive attitude is self-reinforcing, and can be justified in a million ways: it is because of the dowry system which\u00a0still exists. It could be\u00a0due to the fact that\u00a0girls get married and \u2018go away \u2018, thereby turning out to be\u00a0wasted investments.\u00a0Or it\u00a0could be due to the fact that they do not bear the family name, after they are married. Or due to\u00a0the fact that in\u00a0a western world, it is also\u00a0much more difficult to protect the \u2018virginity \u2018 of girls, thus leading to\u00a0notions of\u00a0family shame associated with girls who have found their own partners. There could\u00a0be many reasons, and most of them are economic, but most of them are completely irrational in this present world of gender equality.<\/div>\n

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You spend your time living in Britain and India \u2013 what, in your opinion, needs to be done to combat this problem? <\/strong><\/div>\n

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The problem can only be solved through a change in the mind-set and a clear recognition that women are equal to men in every way. In the UK especially, this can be done quite easily through a targeted approach, using the media to spread the message. It is also important to ensure that girls are educated properly, and given an opportunity to work in the area of their interests. <\/div>\n

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Finally Kishwar what are you working on next?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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I am working on the next book in the series in which Witness the Night was the first book.\u00a0 And I am also completing the biography of some early pioneers of Indian cinema, Devika Rani and Himansu Rai.<\/div>\n

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Kishwar Desai: Witness The Night, published by Beautiful Books, is available to buy from all leading bookshops<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n

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Author speaks to Zeenat Moosa about her debut novel ‘Witness The Night’ JOURNALIST and TV producer Kishwar Desai can now lay claim to being an award-winning novelist after scooping a top literary prize with her debut novel ‘Witness The Night’ last month. Her book, which exposes female infanticide in India, landed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}