Name: Ashay A KapseRoll No: 20Module: Feature WritingWord Count: 510

Critical Contradictions and Choices

Human beings are a bag of contradictions. They can be pleasant and vexing at the same time. They can be feminist while being casually sexist all the time. For ex, the great Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto wrote incredibly empowering female characters all through his short life, while also being sexist in their portrayal. Another contradiction human beings are beguiled with is of being ordinary and extra-ordinary at the same time. Tanul Thakur is a walking manifestation of this contradiction. Wearing a white-striped polo t-shirt and jeans, living in a house on rent at Yari Road, he’s quite ordinary that way. But he’s also a National Film Award winner.

Of course, Tanul is no Manto. Their first point of divergence is the number of words they take to express their ideas. Manto wrote short fictional stories. Tanul writes long non-fictional stories. He also speaks a lot….A LOT. During the course of our interview, which went on for more than 3 hours, he would spend 15 minutes describing in painstaking detail his life in Dhanbad, before letting me get a question in, followed by another 15 minutes about how he failed miserably at cracking IIT. He also hates NRIs a lot. Which I believe is a natural extension of the fact that like all artsy-types, he’s a self-loathing narcissist with a little bit of misanthropy peppered in. Tanul spent 4 years in the United States, at the University of Illinois, and working as an engineer. As he put it, “I used to be that douchey kid, who used to think that Jack Daniels is what labourers and all drink in India”. It’s hard to find this douche Tanul anymore. Today, he’s happy with his Old Monk and Classic Mild.

Tanul always wanted to write. He wrote his first book when he was 16. His second when he was 18 and third when he was 22. All unreadable by his own admission. “Dumb Indians write on Quora that follow your dream and all that crap as if it’s that easy”. He created a website 3 weeks into his first corporate job called “Dowry Calculator”, which was a satire on the practice of dowry. The Dowry Claculator went viral and had a lot of pieces written about it. Tanul found them all insipid and uninspiring. This coupled with a viewing of a TED Talk by Krish Ashok in which he says that talent is time along with manic obsession, instigated Tanul to quit his job, send applications for a job as a journalist and come to India. A website called The Big Indian Picture (TBIP) gave him a job. He would work for TBIP for a while before it closed down and he moved on to The Sunday Guardian as a film critic. His first year working professionally as a film critic, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic. But it wasn’t easy before the win. Relatives would pass snide remarks at him. On one such occasion he burst out at his aunt, “If I tell you I’m happy, why won’t you believe me?” I suppose even the aunt’s happy now.