User:Author Devesh verma/Sample page

My first novel The Politician (Penguin Random House) came out on February 15, 2021, and in a year or so I look to publish its direct sequel. I was associated with broadcast journalism for a very long time but quit, submitting to an ever-increasing urge to do something that would have something of me in it—my experience of the world, my way of seeing, my view of human nature, human motivations et al.—something possible only through fiction, chiefly the novel because it’s so capacious an art form.

The languages that I can call my own are Hindi and Urdu. I was born and raised in a Hindi environment but Urdu I learnt as an adult. I was drawn to it because of the way it sounds, because of its poetry. I earned an MA and an MPhil degree in Urdu from JNU, Delhi. In 2004 I received the Sahitya Akademi Award for the translation of Sakhtiyat, Pas-Sakhtiyat aur Mashriqi Sheriyat, an important literary and cultural theory text, from Urdu to Hindi. I love to recite Urdu poetry in my own particular way. To showcase that I have my own YouTube channel, Nazm Hai Shart.

Why I chose to write my novel in English! It was an experiment, at first, but then I continued sweating over it and what an enormous amount of sweat it was! There is no gainsaying, however, that my vanity or insecurity would have played a part in it, or maybe I had an inferiority complex about my knowledge of English.

The Politician


It took me five years to complete the manuscript of The Politician. It was humongous. I had to cut nearly fifty thousand words to meet the upper limit—set by Penguin—of 1,20,000 words. Initially the title of the book was, “Any Way You Slice It”, taken from the letter that Deena leaves for Kartik, his journalist friend, before committing suicide, asking him to write a novel based on his father’s life, which is “worthy of a novel any way you slice it…No, not just one novel…My father’s life was so eventful you might want to look at a trilogy…”

So, Kartik is the narrator of the story of The Politician, the story that Deena wanted to turn into a book and become a novelist, his “intensely valued dream”. Failing that, he didn’t think life worth the trouble, “a life symbolizing nothing but the wreckage of what it could have been!” To understand Deena’s suicide, his letter to Kartik is very important, in which he also discusses the material for the said novel, the material contained in his VIP suitcase” by way of his diaries and papers, that he has left for Kartik to use.

Some readers might mistake it for being Deena’s life story. That it is not. The Politician draws to a close when he’s still an adolescent. It’s his father’s story. Yes, there will be much more of Deena in its direct sequel, the sequel of The Politician. In fact, when I had first conceived it, I thought I could put the entire thing in one book, but some way down the road I sensed if I tried to do that, it would grow into an insanely large book. Yet I continued in a similar vein for a long time, realizing much later that no traditional publisher, much less Penguin Random House, would risk publishing it. That too when I was little more than a nobody.

Here is a citation to a news article.

Here is a template for facts that lack a citation.

Here is a link to the page for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The text displayed for the link can be customized like this. When links go to pages that do not exist, they appear red, like this.

This is a subsection heading

 * Bulleted list item 1
 * Bulleted list item 2

You can make text bold or italic when needed.


 * 1) Numbered list item 1
 * 2) Numbered list item 2

External links section
https://devesh-verma.com/