The illicit happiness of interviewing Manu Joseph

Serious Men, The illicit happiness of other people, Decoupled and Miss Laila, the dangerous. The man needs no introduction. He is everywhere, on social media, books and Netflix. 

Raw, real and a genius writer. His authentic writing reveals the under-layers of our lopsided society, making a bold statement and showing mirror to the self proclaimed humanity experts. 

Storywala is grateful to Manu for accepting the interview and being his candid self. The lovely conversation ranged from the safe haven of reading and writing to the controversial topics of class divide, intellectual divide, and the city divide in our diverse country.  

The Writing process 

Like most budding writers initially I wanted to write a novel but didn’t know what to write about. I desperately tried to extract a story from all the ideas I had, wrote many amateur drafts and pushed myself to start and finish a novel.

After Serious men, my approach has changed.  Being an optimist I still get excited about an idea and write in my diary which I later question. I sit on a certain thought for some time and then at the right moment the realization dawns that there is a story here. 

You think the novel is in the plot but that is only a trick. It’s either a powerful sentiment or a character that comes to you or you discover a new way of telling something that happened to you. Then you find other characters, make it interesting, sustaining all of it for the main reason you wanted to tell the story. I start with a flowchart, plan one or two central characters, how to tell it and then one day, start getting serious about it. 

Currently, I am exploring other forms of writing, playing with the creative side, a different forum and audience like the series Decoupled. Novel is an all-consuming process of 8-9 hours a day and 500-600 words. Screenplay is fast, light and playful with more dialogues. Starting a novel is out of a compulsion and then luck could make it a hit or miss. 

The beginning 

It was never the love for writing but something that was important and I had to do. In school I could tell stories and got compliments. Writing seemed easy like cricket or a sport was for other boys. It made me feel special and different from others.

As an adult, I had to choose a profession. Journalism or advertising were the two possible fields for writers. The culturally posh world of advertising seemed far from me so the choice was obvious. A good thing about journalism is that it unconsciously trains one to write. 

In fact writing process is quite painful. All aspects of writing are not esoteric. Some are quite simple and mechanical which requires sharpening your axe and keep practicing. So journalism helped me to meet different people and to keep writing. That’s where it all began, accidental! 

My favorite child

It would be difficult to choose and even if I choose one, I can change my mind later. 😜

Miss Laila is the one closest to my own life and language without the aspect of thoughts and anger. Just about me and the other people. It happened the way I wanted to execute it. I wanted to capture mental states and labels before I knew they existed. There were only people, personalities, conversations, mannerisms, without any reference points. I wrote it at the age of 35 and I was able to capture the past without a corruption from my present. Miss Laila was the beginning of my mature phase of writing. Efficient, honest, and powerful way of telling a story. 

As for Illicit happiness, I was happy with the outcome. I felt it was flawed as I could not capture the young women of my time except Maria Chacko who was close to me. While writing illicit I liked the idea of beautiful prose and now I completely dislike it. I now want to say things in the most unremarkable way. 

Why is the happiness illicit 

(The Book title: The Illicit Happiness of other People) 

Chacko the father in the novel had a column in a Malayli newspaper called ‘Illicit happiness of other people’.  Every week he would focus on a miserable person. Someone who had lost a child, a prisoner or a prostitute. He would then come to point or prove that the person is not actually so miserable. 

Chacko would destroy the peace and break the belief of the readers. These ‘other people’ their role was to be miserable so one is reassured in their ordinary happiness, fortune or luck. You assume  misery is something that happens to other people. In comparison happiness is always relative. So if there are no miserable people you wouldn’t know if you are truly happy or not!  

A society assigns some people as sad to maintain the balance. Most anarchists are actually lame people. A true one would never suspect another anarchist. These miserable people may have moments of sorrow but they are not unhappy. So their happiness is illicit as they are not meant to be happy. I find that funny but many don’t. 

The anarchy 

(From the illicit happiness, moving to the illicit characters. Manu is known for unpopular opinions and unusual characters. His character’s don’t have a standard arc, surprising the reader but also being totally acceptable. The driver in white tiger versus the driver in the show Decoupled. The Dalit generally shown as downtrodden and the Dalit in Serious men challenging the societal hierarchy and intellectuals.) 

I never intend to give unpopular opinions or create ripples in a room full of people. I actually don’t care what people think but I may know it is going to be an unpopular opinion. 

Most writers come from intellectual well to do families. They go to brilliant tutorials for emotional expression. My peers using their artistic talent have to guess what poverty or lack of fortune is. In my case I come from a different social background for an English writer in a third world country. 

Human relationships mean nothing when you are nothing. I have seen and belonged to different layers so possibly I can see what others miss. I write what I know. Say a Scandinavian man would never be a central character in my story as I don’t know anything. 

If you are treated poorly for very unremarkable reasons, you are never in awe of society. You refuse the naive, sentimental or esoteric aspect of humanity. A European anthropologist student would have that opinion because they have had such good lives and believe in human goodness. So they always try to arrive at what we are meant to be rather than what we are.  

When I look and read them I find it funny. I find serious people very funny and comical. Especially Academics and the way they talk. With a good life in a first world country that plundered others, they now talk about kindness and humanity. They talk about hunter-gatherers theory that cuts across the world. In truth they are not same people but treated as same people. 

I am doing what I like doing. I don’t try to do anything special, but some ideas interest me more than stories. I can capture most useless things. Like a fellow trying to start a scooter in Madras with boisterous jumping and how this person would have sex. 

The unusual characters 

(A genius fraud, a dead cartoonist, a man who considers self as a dead body, a woman who has taken an oath never to speak, a woman who talks to walls, etc) 

It’s easy to write about remarkable layers of a characters. In fact it’s more difficult to write about unremarkable things. The challenge is to get the ordinariness of the characters. 

A novel is a combination of observations - the commentary or manipulated memory of C. By observations I mean tricks which are contrast to the core of writing. You want to tell the truth (not facts) but instead you trick them into a lie as a storyteller. 

So how do you put a character who is real and ordinary but don’t want you to get bored as a reader about ordinariness of the character. There is always a master soul who you divide and put in the many characters which pulls you into the story. 

The Cities as characters 

(Bombay in Serious Men or Madras in Illicit, cities feature prominently in Manu’s work. The city seems like a narrator as well as a character. City as the chessboard and the characters the pieces.) 

A city is inevitable in a fiction. As a writer it’s difficult to make up stuff even though you mostly lie. It is helpful if you are still  authentic about the city, places and people. Then you can totally forget about the lie in the fiction. Call it a lie or a story or simply arrangement of moments. The backdrop and the setting has to be real for me. Like I couldn’t set Delhi or Gurgaon as a backdrop with its boring people unlike Bombay or Madras. 

Love hate 

(Finally a rapid round of the likes and dislikes) 

The Books  

I liked Disgrace, 100 years of solitude, Debt by David Graeber and Elephant Summer. 

People hate some books because they see themselves in them. He currently dislikes all popular anthropology like ‘Sapiens’

The Authors  

I liked reading Kundera, John Maxwell Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and David Graeber

The Genre 

I don’t believe in genres. It is possibly an invention of the marketing departments. Open to anything but will avoid fantasy. Recently, I have been enjoying non fiction. 

Advise to aspiring writers 

Writers always say ‘Read’ but actually what they vainly mean is ‘Read me’. So reading more to be a writer is not true. Like a sportsperson playing a certain sport will also watch that sport, same way as a writer you will also read. The foundational training for a writer is to write and write a lot. 

Reading will tell you a lot about other writers and culture but it is important to find your own voice. Reading about South American writers will not help you write about the alien world. You will write about what you know. 

The Upcoming 

I am working on something but too early to say anything. It’s still an idea. It’s not political but something on exploring mental spaces like in Illicit. 

Thank you Manu for your time and thoughts! We the readers, are hoping for more novels and a second season of ‘Decoupled’ with may be more female sass. 

Read more: Storywala reviews Manu’s Books

Serious Men

 The Illicit Happiness of Other people