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Questions and Answers:
Professor Anita Desai
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from a story about Anita Desai that will appear in the MIT News section of the June issue of Technology Review magazine. Tucked away in a nondescript, rather bare office in building 14N off
of Eastman Court, sits a professor whose skill and accomplishment in her
field often go unnoticed by students-an unusual circumstance at a place
like MIT where respect and admiration for Desai was born in 1937 and grew up in India, the daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother. She graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in English literature and soon after embarked on a writing career of short stories, children's books and novels. In 1978, she won the National Academy of Letters Award for Fire On the Mountain. Two of her other novels, titled Clear Light of Day and In Custody, were finalists for Great Britain's literary honor, the Booker Prize, and she earned the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for the novel, The Village By The Sea, which was published in 1982. She has taught writing at Girton College in Cambridge, England, as well as at Smith College and Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts. But of all the places where she has worked with budding writers, she concedes there is something uniquely intriguing about MIT. "The minute I stepped on to campus, I knew this was an exciting and different place to be. There is electricity in the air here. Everybody has a purpose. And the writing program attracts those students who have strayed from the straight and narrow, those who recognize that there is something more to life than a degree or a career," she says in her characteristic tone which is almost a whisper. In fact, to watch her in the classroom, you might not notice how effectively she leads a body of students in discussion. For she sits around a conference table as one of them, encouraging each writer to read his/her work out loud for comment. She then quietly interjects here and there in the lull of conversation, skillfully pointing out parts of the story that may have been overlooked. Desai admits that it can be frustrating to teach at an institution like MIT because she knows how unlikely it is that students will give up on pursuits of science and engineering for the arts. "I once had a Chinese student who wrote quite beautifully and hardly believed in her own gifts. I couldn't dissuade her from science," smiles Desai. "Being young isn't easy. They are torn. These are amazing students who could do either or both [arts and sciences], but they are under tremendous pressure to succeed in their chosen careers." According to Desai, she started teaching to help herself deal with the solitary life of a writer. "To be a writer, one must spend one's life at one's desk by one's self. I started teaching to have a life beyond that. Teaching on campus gives me a contact with reality. It is most rewarding to be in contact with the young. I grow older but they stay forever young," she says. --Carly Kite
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology