"What it means to be human" by Nilanjana Roy graced the back page of the Life & Arts section of the Financial Times in their Sept 17-18 weekend edition. Below is an excerpt:
You'd think that, after 200,000 years of practice, we'd be pretty good at being human. Not so: as a species, we're flounderers, acting as though we've only just arrived on Earth, as if we were the first generation to grapple with the complexity of existence.
Humans struggle with everything - communicating with one another, accepting grief and loss, dealing with the general messiness of life, handling the uncertainty of the future. In this respect, I am no different to anyone else. But one person who has helped me make sense of what it means to be human in a time of dizzying, sometimes ominous technological change is Ted Chiang.
The article goes on to praise Chiang's 1998 essay Story of Your Life with free-flowing, honest prose indicative of fantastic writing.
In an interview entitled "A Conversation With: Author Nilanjana Roy" for the New York Times back in 2012 after Roy published her first novel 'The Wildings,' Roy comments:
If I had said even once to myself, "I am writing fiction; I am writing a novel," I would have stalled. I had spent my adult life, in publishing and the media, as a reader. That makes you acutely aware of how many books there are, and how little time: will you have room to read 3,000 books in your lifetime? 2,000? 4,000?
The first thing I had to discard was the idea that you had to be as good as the greats - Atwood, Borges, Coetzee, Desai, Eliot, Fuentes - in order to write at all.
The second thing to go was the idea that spending a lifetime's apprenticeship as a reader will teach you anything at all about writing. Sitting down at the desk teaches you how to write, not reading about writing, not talking about writing.
The third thing to release was the idea that writing was hard work. Finding the time was very hard work; writing 'The Wildings,' and later, editing it with David Davidar and seeing the finished book emerge from the exuberant mess of the first draft, was pure happiness. When part of your job description as an adult is 'making stuff up,' you know you've been very lucky in the way you've lived your life.
Here, the paralytic questioning of your own voice and value that Roy describes is not unique to writers (or readers for that matter). Rather, questioning is symptomatic of a genuine self-awareness of the human condition. It is an experience anyone (voluntarily or involuntarily) in touch with his own nature will face persistently over the course of his life and his career.
Finally, in another one of her book reviews (she writes a weekly column critiquing books for the Life & Arts section of the FT) entitled "How paranoia works," Roy writes:
In one of the quieter nooks of my ancient MacBook, there is a folder of photographs marked “Faces in the Crowd”. Compiled over years from news photographs and documentaries, it captures people at those moments when they appear most at ease, despite what is going on around them — anything from the destruction of ancient monuments to the delivery of a hate-filled speech by a demagogue.
Sometimes the people in the crowd are listening quietly; sometimes they are pointing something out to their children. They are often wearing their good clothes, content, apparently buoyed by the presence of others just like them. One photograph focuses on a group of Indian men cheering on some of their own, who are savagely beating three lower-caste boys. The watchers share a commonplace respectability. Their expressions are filled not with hatred but with the satisfaction of watching a job well done. [...]
I go back to the “Faces in the Crowd” folder every time I need a reminder that much of the trouble in the world is caused not by the madness of crowds but by the willing complicity of people who see themselves as essentially decent and righteous, even as they endorse or participate in chilling forms of evil.
Roy just invited her anonymous readers into her MacBook - a private, password protected space that is as close to an 'adult-diary' as you can get in the 21st century. She coupled this intimate invitation with a goodie bag of insight for the reader to bring home with him: "Trouble in the world is caused not by the madness of crowds but by the willing complicity of people who see themselves as essentially decent and righteous, even as they endorse or participate in chilling forms of evil." Could Roy be any more candid, any more human? Any more 'right' in her prose?
Well, no. She is human-perfect (as markedly distinct from robot-perfect). Whether she is writing about another author or sketching her own images of the world, she faces the blank page with utter honesty that is unfortunately dwindling in a world of curated social media platforms and wannabe perfectionists. It allows the reader to sit back after a paragraph or two and think, "damn, she's so right," or, "so true." These fleeting moments of truth, only accessible through honestly forging a path through the ugliest, darkest and most confusing parts of yourself make writing worth reading.
Admittedly, my first response to these admirable examples of humanness is to commend her femininity. She is a living example of a woman who is aware of her humanness because she has been forced to face it on a daily basis in a way that men haven't. However, while there may be value in this interpretation, I'd rather zoom outwards to consider her personal ethos on a macro scale. Regardless of gender, acknowledging humanness is a strength not a weakness and one that I look for not only as a reader but also as a human being in search of connection. I know when I see Roy's name on the byline that I have a few paragraphs of genuine human-connection to look forward to.
I take you on this abbreviated (yet lengthy) tour de force of Nilanjana Roy not only to encourage you to look out for her writing, but also to remind myself that - despite popular belief - my mother was right, "honesty is the best policy." In writing, and in life.
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