Tarun Tejpal - No Mimic Man, this the incredible life of VS Naipaul
                     No Mimic Man, 
this: the incredible 
life of VS Naipaul
“Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn 
thing to prevent it coming. You just gotta sit and watch and wait.”  From Miguel Street, by VS Naipaul
There is perhaps no greater mark of a writer’s genius that you cannot read him through his words: anyone who ever heard, saw, or watched V S Naipaul engage in the real world will find this throwaway philosophical aside on life entirely 
alien to their experience of the man who was famously precise, pitiless, and impatient. Yet, that same experience of the man makes the words inescapably his: economical, deeply weighted, deceptively simple.
To describe Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — or V S Naipaul as he came to 
be universally known — as a ‘writer' is to describe Einstein as a scientist; in 
many ways, for many writers of the postcolonial era, he was the writer; 
inventor of a form, a language, a way of seeing that simply did not exist before 
him; a man who used the same language available to them but somehow re-
formed it in his writing, turning the most simple of words, most lucid of phrases 
into vehicles of the deepest, darkest complexity. 
That was why not only readers but fellow writers of every age, race, culture 
and orientation — including those who had bitterly, often viciously disagreed 
with the famously irascible writer — were joined, briefly, for a collective 
outpouring of grief when he passed away on 11th August 2018, just a week 
short of his 86th birthday.
Born on 17th August 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad, the grandson of indentured 
slaves who had emigrated there from India, Naipaul’s singular sensibility was, 
it seemed, forged out of otherness: a Trinidad and Tobago born Indian-origin 
writer who went on to settle in the land of his ancestors’ colonisation. 
While his early novels set in Trinidad seem to speak of a young man still 
finding his material and his voice, he nonetheless, by the time he was 30, had 
already written one of the greatest works of 20th century literature, A House 
for Mr Biswas. Over the next decade-and-half — by the time he was 45, he had 
published a jaw-dropping 15 books — he acquired global acclaim for his almost 
otherworldly grasp and rendering of alienation, and for his vigilant chronicles 
of life and travel and of authorisation.
In many ways the man who was hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 
20th century could also be hailed as a seer, intuitively grasping the potential 
for radicalisation, for brutality and for human darkness that has come to so 
deeply mark our present.
In announcing him as the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature — some 
thought he should have won decades prior — the Swedish Academy referred to 
him as the “modern philosopher”, a writer of incorruptible scrutiny who 
compels us to see suppressed histories. 
This, then, was the loss, on 11th August 2018 — not merely a writer of extraordinary prose but an unflinching seer of the human condition, whose novels relied on the inherent irony of events to illuminate the truth of the world, a writer who 
was at once called “a writer’s writer” and who triggered their fiercest anger for the often uncompromising bleakness with which he looked both at the country of his origin — India — and the land of his birth, the West Indies, as well as his 
visceral gaze on the African continent. 
He called himself the sum of his books; that his books say everything there is 
to say about him. Describing his journey in his essay, Prologue to An 
Autobiography, he wrote, “Half a writer’s work… is the discovery of his subject. 
And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and 
moves: from grandmother’s Hindu house in the country, still close to the 
rituals and social ways of village India, to Port of Spain, the negro, and G.I. life 
of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which is 
called Queen’s Royal College, and then Oxford, London and the freelancer’s 
room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where 
to focus.” 
And still, with no idea of his material and no sense of the ‘genre’ he wanted to 
occupy, writing was all he ever wanted to do. In a sweeping, often revealing 
interview with author and journalist Tarun Tejpal, he remarked that his only 
ambition was to become a successful writer, to be known for his writing all 
over all the world, right from the age of 10. 
He didn’t know how he would become one, he told Tarun Tejpal, or what he 
would write about, but the fact of writing, and the need to become a famous 
writer drove him; it was the only noble profession, he said. 
He hoped, he said, that writing would come miraculously to him. Yet, when Sir V S Naipaul started to write, his first two novels failed to hold — till just before his 23rd birthday, he got the idea to write the first sentence of the book that went 
on to be published as Miguel Street, from a childhood memory. 
The book came to him in a sweeping flow then; he finished the entire book within just six weeks in 1955. It was, unfortunately, not to be published until 1959. But by then, his breakthrough came in 1957 when he published the novel The 
Mystic Masseur. 
No-one, perhaps led by Naipaul himself, could have envisioned the stunning 
arc of the next 50 years and his undisputed place as one of literature’s all time 
greats. 
He wrote just over 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction — an output not 
merely extraordinary but almost impossible to grasp, given the epic quality 
and sweep of the work he produced. Tarun Tejpal, interviewing the temperamental genius live in front of a packed hall of 2,000 at THiNK fest, remarked that the 
number of books Naipaul single-handedly wrote are equal to the work of almost 10 writers together. 
While the Nobel prize was the penultimate of literary honours, it was hardly his only: in 1971, three decades before the Nobel, Sir VS Naipaul won the Booker Prize for his book In a Free State; he also won every other literary prize of note 
including the Jerusalem Prize, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest honour The Trinity Prize, and was knighted by his adoptive country, the UK, giving him the honorific Sir V S Naipaul. 
Tarun J Tejpal is a journalist, publisher and novelist. In a career spanning 26 years, Tarun Tejpal has been the editor of the India Today and Indian Express groups and the managing editor of Outlook, India's 
leading news magazine. In March 2000, he started Tehelka, a news organization that has earned a global reputation for its aggressive public interest journalism. Tarun Tejpal's first novel, The Alchemy of Desire, was published in 2005. 
Tarun J Tejpal's second novel, The Story of My Assassins, was published in 2009 to rave reviews. Also you can check Tarun J Tejpal.