Veio Pou is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi. He is the author of 'Waiting for the Dust to Settle: A novel' (2020) and 'Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English' (2015). He has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and his areas of interest includes Victorian Literature, Modernist Literature, Popular Fictions, Oral Tradition, Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies and Writings from the Northeast of India, for which he widely engages academically through seminars and conferences, and publishing through various journals. He also writes at the popular level through The Hindu, Huffington Post, Scroll, Morung Express and Eastern Mirror, among others
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Veio Pou On writing community memory
On 28th Nov 03.00 pm - 03:40 pm
Writing is just a way of telling, and I used to tell a story. Many people tell the story differently. A painter tells through painting and many different arts for presenting some kind of story. In the oral tradition, expression is the primary way to tell stories. I came from such a community. In a large part of India, oral culture is still dynamic and vibrant. So for me, writing becomes a new mode of telling a story. I realize that there is power in writing. Words travel to different places and read by people whom I never met. It's quite an exciting experiment. Community is the subject of my telling, and my primary focus is on it than the individual. I don't the story of the protagonist overshadow the other characters, but all are important. I put the story in the last two decades of the 20th century. The 80s and 90s were a time of difficult changes. But this difficult time also helps them to shape a new outlook.