‘Asides, Tirades, Meditations’: Kiran Nagarkar wrote with an electric style on a host of topics

Writer Salil Tripathi grew up in an apartment near Kemp’s Corner where Chaitra, an advertising agency, had an office. His mother would translate Chaitra’s advertising copy into Gujarati. Now and then she would meet the celebrated writer Kiran Nagarkar, who also worked there. When Tripathi was in his twenties, he was introduced to Nagarkar. They began a lifelong friendship.

After his studies abroad, Tripathi joined the Indian Post newspaper as an assistant editor. He offered Nagarkar an opportunity to write a column. The author became a film critic for foreign films. That is probably how Nagarkar became a columnist for an English-language newspaper.

Tripathi recounts this in his introduction to the book, Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selected Essays by Kiran Nagarkar. He also mentions that in 2018, three women journalists accused Nagarkar of behaving inappropriately. Nagarkar denied the allegations. The next year, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 77.

Tripathi said, “I admired him as a gifted writer, a champion of freedoms, a friend who saw through the clouds clearly, who warned us about the seductive peril of majoritarianism.”

There are 36 essays in the 317-page book, clubbed under the headings, “Writing”, “Cinema” and “On Society and Politics”.

Creative work

In the first essay, “Clueless: An Occasional Writer’s Journey”, Nagarkar states, “You can dictate to...

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