cafe city centre

He walked in to the coffee shop in the middle of the city. Wow! he thought, this place is so nice. He was grateful that cities have these pockets right in their over crowded centre where either the government decided to own it or the wonderful owner was not lured by the money that real estate was going to fetch him and decided to keep serving good old fashioned coffee in chipped china and with waiters who seemed like they hadn't had a bath in a few years. But the sheer amount of open space made the place seem like heaven amidst all the noise, pollution and congestion. Even people on the road seemed like intruders; there were just so many of them on the roads just like animals, cars and dirt and grime. The beggars made it worse. And at night, the pimps and hookers made it colourful. But the cool shade of the large banyan tree right in the middle of the open air cafe brought a huge smile on his face; he had chosen the rendezvous point right.

He was there for an interview. Interview of a person of some stature. Nothing huge or fancy about her, but she was a winner in her own right. She had, to put it simply, stood the test of time. Her novels never reached the NY bestsellers list, but that did not deter her from pouring out the travails of a woman in India. She wrote novel after novel, highlighting the good and bad things (more bad things) that happened to women in India. And finally the recognition was hers. The local government had recognized at her old age, the contribution she had made to the womens' rights particularly and modern literature in general. And she chose to express herself in English, a language not her native and definitely not the native of the women she highlighted in her work.

Why does she write in English, he wondered? It simply made her inaccessible to a vast audience that would have resonated with the way she felt and what she conveyed in her books. May be she never intended to reach them, may be she never thought of it as women's rights but looked at the whole issue with an indifference and only chose it because there were enough case studies around for her to easily make stories out of them. May be she was not creative at all; as is expected from most writers of books; may be she was just a special kind of reporter. Worse still, may be she never sympathaised with the women she wrote about; they probably meant nothing to her. She could may be write about cockroaches or global warming in the same way that she did about the oppressed women. And because someone who felt about oppression read her novel, they decided to make her a person who stood for all of this; womens' rights and all. May be she is like some of the people who can be branded as "cooling-glass-liberal". This he thought would be the ideal thing to speak about.