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PHOTO (click here) & VIDEO (click here)THE MAKING OF.../THE WRITING OF...I tend not to make a lot of notes while writing a book but I photograph around me. These serve as notes, reminders, and as a record of various details. For instance, while writing Summer I photographed hundreds of paintings at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the entire collection of the Musée Rodin. These served as a sort of personal memory. While copyright issues don't permit me to replicate some of the paintings mentioned in the novel, I have reproduced other photographic records in the sections below. These correspond to the visual journeys I undertook in the course of the novel.Prem's & Pascal's trip to Mont Saint Michel That Summer in Paris, just like my other novels is not a true story. However in order to write it I did spend time in Paris. While the novel was written over the period of one summer
it was edited and revised over the course of a trip the following spring when the section pertaining to Mont Saint
Michel really came together. In a sense I knew I'd be using the trip to Mont Saint Michel rather directly in the writing
of the novel. This meant that I ended up looking at the entire trip through Prem's and Pascal's eyes at the price of truly
being there myself! In some ways this enhanced the trip but in others it detracted from it. My photos on this trip were taken in place of notes for the novel.
The photographs in this section often served as visual reminders of my time in France. I used them to conjure up the flavor of Paris, sometimes even as I was writing the novel in Paris itself.
The truth is that even in the city of light when I'm writing a novel I'm cooped up in my room typing on my keyboard, often sitting cross-legged with the laptop balanced on my knee. A picture
serves me better than whatever I might have scrawled on the small notebook I carry in the back pocket of my cargos. Working on the book I stayed in various sections of Paris including
the 6th, the 19th, the 5th, the 18th, the 7th, and the 3rd. It was a good way of getting to know the city that was my muse.
If you've read the novel you know that we don't see much of Maya's Indian trips. A couple of things that she mentions like the Automatic Tea and Coffee Stall are for real! But mostly, I'm just attaching photos taken in India over the last two years since
I'd already started That Summer in Paris and had Maya's character in my head as I traveled around. Almost all these photographs are of the south.
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Press Books Bio Blog Events Ink Drawing Painting Write in |
The two Ps in Normandy & BrittanyClick on any image in the series to enlarge it
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A Summer in ParisClick on any image in the series to enlarge it
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The corner bistro in the 5th
Apartment where a big chunk of "Summer" was written
A painter setting up at Place du Tertre
Favorite Street
View of St. Michel
Métro Abbesses station
A morning in Montmartre before sitting to write
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Grand temples, ratty guesthouses, and general chaosClick on any image in the series to enlarge it
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Maximum Ganesh maximum prosperity
Bus station goat
Detail of carving
Thanjavur at dusk
Madurai Temple
Trichy Temple
Random ratty motel room
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EXPERIMENTAL FILMSAn hommage to Marcel Duchamp shot in old Delhi.
With modernisation and urban development many street professions are rapidly being pushed out of Delhi
The change in the urban environment include depletion of forest voer and foliage has pushed Delhi's
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