Character Interview: The Journalist from Kiran Bhat's we of the forsaken world

 

We’re thrilled to be talking to the journalist from Kiran Bhat's, we of the forsaken world.  It is a pleasure to have him with us today at Pimp That Character!

Thank you for your interview.  How old are you and what do you do for a living? I am 34. I am a journalist

Can you tell us about one of your most distinguishable features? I have high cheekbones. I look like my father in the face, and look like my mother in skintone. Whichever one makes me look more like a foreigner depends on who is looking at me.

What would I love the most about you? My sense of humor.

What would I hate the most about you? My sense of humor.

Where do you go when you are angry? I guess I go by the window and smoke. There isn’t much that pisses me off, I would have to admit. But, if I feel a little too self-conscious, I find a cigarette takes it out of me.

What makes you laugh out loud? I don’t think I laugh that way. People rarely talk about me as if I laugh at all.

What is in your refrigerator right now? I’m living away from home right now, renting a place in a suburb in the city my mother was born in, and honestly, I don’t have a fridge. I have to rely on outside food. It’s not so bad, to be honest. I’m finally gaining a little weight, which I thought I would never do.

What is your most treasured possession? I suppose my pants. They were gifted to me by one of the best journalists in the country. How I got them off of her, that’s a story for another day.

What is your greatest fear? That people will understand me someday, and I won’t know what to do.

What is the trait you most not like about yourself? I suppose my lack of dress style. It’s because my mother only thought about herself and her writing, and so she never took the time to dress me correctly. I try to cover it up by dressing all the time in black, but I wish I could care enough to make more effort.

Do you think the author portrayed you accurately? Eh... I never got to speak, so I guess he told the truth as best as he could, using the voices around himself.

What is your idea of a perfect day? Sitting in bed, smoking, and reading a good novel.

What are three must haves when shopping at the grocery store? A lot of patience, a lot of appetite, and a lot of stamina.

I’m opening up your cabinet.  What foods do I see? I don’t keep much food in the house, so maybe some unused spices and olive oil, and some uncooked pasta.

If you could change one physical thing about yourself, what would that be? I know it’s going to make me sound self-hating, but my skin tone. If I could just change that one thing, I would look like everyone else in the city I was born in, and if that had been the case, I would have been so much happier growing up, and then so much happier as an adult.

Are you a loner or do you prefer to surround yourself with friends? A loner, no doubts.

Who is your best friend? A more charming version of myself.

Do you have children? No, and not thinking about it.

What is your favorite weather? Cloud and smoky, with a tad of sun.

What’s your idea of a perfect meal? One which doesn’t cause my stomach to get upset.

Someone is secretly in love with you.  Who is it and how do you feel about that? God, I don’t know. A lot of people write me in from the newspaper as admirers, but I don’t take them seriously. I supposed I was once in love, but she was six years older than me, and a foreigner, and it didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t meant to.

When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I suppose a poet, like my mother.

Do you like to cook?  If so, what is your favorite thing to cook? Nope, though people say I am surprisingly good at seafood.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today? I would smoke as long as I need to, because frankly, I’ve always known death was coming, and hoping that when it would, it wouldn’t take too long.

About the Book:

Title: we of the forsaken world
Author: Kiran Bhat
Publisher: Iguana Books
Pages: 216
Genre: Metaphysical Fiction / Literary Fiction

The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.

In, we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

Like modern communication networks, the stories in , we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.

As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”

Bhat continues:  “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”

“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”

we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017. 

Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.

Order Your Copy

Amazon → https://amzn.to/2DQIclm

Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/2Lqe9Fi

About the Author

Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Website  → http://iguanabooks.ca/