Amitava Kumar & the art of journalling to make sense of the post-pandemic world

"I was attentive to time in the sense that I felt that during the pandemic, there were so many deaths and I was thinking who is marking it, who is remembering it. I started the paintings (in The Blue Book) by taking the obituaries in The New York Times and painting over them," Kumar said when I met him in central Delhi's Lalit Hotel on a winter afternoon. He was in Delhi then to launch The Yellow Book in India.

"I think I was slowing it (time) down there (in The Blue Book) too. Just to be attentive, and to ask oneself, what is it that I am forgetting and how to not forget everything. Because I was very conscious that news comes at you in such a rush. And we might have been in lockdown, but that didn't mean that we weren't surrounded by what the WHO (World Health Organization) called an infodemic... the spread of misinformation. Hence the emphasis on slowing it down."

Journals as memorykeepers

There's death in both The Blue and The Yellow books, too - Amitava Kumar memorialises the passing of his father in The Yellow Book. But death registers differently in The Yellow Book than the harshness of dying during the worst of the pandemic (when there was also a horrible sameness in death and the inevitability of becoming a statistic that everyone in the world was watching) that is recorded in The Blue Book where Kumar literally painted over New York Times obituaries.

"By the time I come to the next (Yellow) book, I almost want to take a risk and say to you, the pandemic has never stopped happening. True, we are not under lockdown any more but I've never felt like I've stepped outside crises. During the pandemic I was afraid that my father (who was) in his late 80s would die. When we come to this book, the reader will find out that my father did die - not during the pandemic, but this year. And I am recording that as well in a way - sitting in the ICU, next to my father's comatose body, I was thinking what would I remember, and I would note down. And then when my sisters were out, I just stood up and I did a drawing which I also put in the book. I sent it to my sisters yesterday. My elder sister wrote back, 'Brings back painful memories'. My younger sister didn't respond. I was thinking this morning that she might have thought it was too much," he added.

Author Amitava Kumar's new journal

Journals as generative devices

To be sure, writing as a way of making sense of events and of a particular moment in time is not a new idea. From Joan Didion to Sheila Heti in the Alphabet Series, authors have fallen back on writing as a way to express their thoughts even to themselves and arrange and rearrange ideas. Yet across The Blue Book and The Yellow Book, Kumar makes the idea his own. He writes in The Yellow Book about journalling being generative for him; that for him, wanting to write something good was motivation to do something good.

"A part of The Yellow Book is an account of my having taken my students to London. And while we were there, I read this book by Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?" Kumar shares. The idea of journalling as generative may come from there, but the search for meaning and motivation was near-universal post-pandemic.

Journals as processing pits

There's another idea at play here. Of information design - of the interplay of text and images that's ubiquitous in the 21st century. Kumar gives that his own spin, too. His drawings, sometimes playful, sometimes profound (like his father on his deathbed), sometimes painstaking, and sometimes banal (there are scenes he observed from his kitchen window) break the text up and free Kumar from recording in words what the day was like or the menu board he was looking at when a certain thought occurred to him.

In Kumar's Blue and Yellow books, journalling works as record - not just of what has been, but also what is hoped for. And not just of the writer's own life and thoughts, but the times and places he occupies and moves through.

Journalling as a habit

One last observation - those who journal tend to have writing (and in Kumar's case, sketching) instruments at hand at all times. In The Yellow Book, Kumar cops to keeping a diary in his jacket pocket at all times. So, when we meet in New Delhi ahead of the launch of The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary, I ask Amitava Kumar about this.

He's wearing a navy jacket and khaki chinos with ankle socks and loafers. On this occasion, though, his notebook is too large to fit into his pocket. It's a slim brown paperback, and Kumar seems to have rolled it into a cylinder and unrolled it many times over.

Now, he opens the notebook on the table in front of us. (The lobby pianist at The Lalit has been tuning his piano; and we are trying to wrap up before his playing makes it difficult for us to chat peacefully.) Inside the notebook, some pages are already filled with sketches and notes in the margins, some of which could find their way into the next book - The Green Book.

Here, too, there's a desire to mark time. Walking his son Rahul to school, discussing podcasts with his daughter or buying something for his wife. To crystallize the everyday happinesses that can so easily be overlooked or forgotten in the daily grind.