When constructing Biography of a person follow these three laws*

🔴 *When constructing Biography of a person follow these three laws*

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📌 *One, first look for sources other than those emanating from your principal character.* So Elwin wrote 40 books, 400 newspaper articles, 4,000 letters and likewise with Nehru, Gandhi or Ambedkar. You can write the whole book based on what they have said – so look for sources that come from a second party, a third party, a 10th party which may be a friend or admirer. That’s the first law.

📌 *The second law is that the relationship with secondary characters illuminates the principal character.* So if you write about Ambedkar, there will be a light on Gandhi, right? If you look at their interaction or Nehru and the Hindu right, that is the second law. Pay adequate attention to the secondary characters, don’t just focus on the principal character.

📌 *The third law is always go chronologically*. A life is lived forward but understood backwards, but he has lived from day to day. So for example, in the case of Elwin, he was a celibate because of Gandhi, but then he became flagrantly exalting sex. But let that slowly develop. Don’t say – because the reader is saying ‘what an idiot to follow Gandhi in brahmacharya‘, and you as an admirer want to say, actually he later changed his mind, but don’t. Keep the reader in suspense. If you’re a sociologist or an economist, you tend to state your thesis quite early. This is a book about inequality, so the reader already knows the inequality is growing or something, right? Here the suspense because that’s how life is – unpredictable, unexpected. So these are the three laws which in retrospect I realise only apply to the biographer of a modern person where the sources are rich enough. So that’s what Patrick means when he says that he violates them.

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Notes of Nagesh

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