Sangeetha Alwar | Everyday People 76

A literature professor talks about art

Jul 27, 2018

1. Who are you, what do you do, and what is your current side project?

I am a teacher, I teach English literature, and I’m an artist and amateur poet.

My side project on Instagram is to look at cities and see how they present themselves.

2. What do you mean by how cities present themselves? Tell me more about this project.

When you go on the Internet or when you ask somebody what their city is like, the typical answer would be a rehash of the famous monuments there, or famous personalities who come from that city. It’s never about the common man or how the life in the city is.

What I take on Instagram is taken from buses or autos, what the city looks like to the common eye, without all its trappings.

3. What got you into teaching? What satisfaction do you derive from teaching? Did some students stand out to you?

I worked for a very short time at Jain engineering college in Bangalore, and there I met a few people who have stayed with me throughout.

Manas and Neil — both did not want to accept that they wrote poetry, or what they wrote was poetry. Through a lot of conversation, we came to the conclusion that they did, and one went on to win a prize for it.

I think it’s a brilliant feeling when you see your students excel in a field which they felt they weren’t accomplished enough to enter in the first place. It gives me jitters when I see them perform well. Outside academics, marks and the shit that college puts them through.

I think in my head I always knew I wanted something which involved interaction with a lot of people. Teaching has always been one of my passions. My mother and uncle are teachers. Different fields (physics), but I was interested more in literature and literature gave me a lot of interesting ideas to converse.

So what better way to converse than through teaching?

4. If you had to recommend 3 pieces of literature to improve the quality of your life, which would they be?

The first recommendation is very easy. He’s one of my favorite authors — his name is Milan Kundera. His writing style oscillates between the past and the present, and there’s a lot of confusion (about his writing style) but when you approach the end of his books, you realize he’s imparted a lot of good advice. His statements are very confrontational. When you read, you have to put it down, think for 10 minutes, and then pick it up again.

When it comes to Indians, I would recommend the poetry of Kamala Das. She was a feminist and she writes brilliantly about how oppression seeps into all parts of your life. She’s brilliant.

The third person… can I recommend a genre? For people who want to get into literature, I would always recommend the Russians. The Russian greats — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky, Gogol, and Chekhov.

5. What can you leave the audience with? What can they explore next?

I would not mind self-advertising. I’m on Instagram as ms.alwar.

Apart from that, what I would like everyone to do, which I also encourage my students to do, is close your eyes and draw a line. Draw a few lines on a page, and then try to make something creative out of it.

A lot of people come up to me and say that they’re not creative enough. How can they get up to my level of creativity (not that I’m great).

My advice is that art is free. Nobody is going to ask you to pay to make art. Everybody is an artist. So if you can make something out of a few lines on a page, then you’re way ahead of most of us.

So go do that right now!

Thank you for reading! If you'd like for someone to be interviewed, comment below and I'll get in touch. See the previous episode below.