RAVI SINGH: A CERTAIN AMBIGUITY by Mihir Srivastava

Ravi Singh is the most known unknown publisher in the country. A publisher par excellence, he has had hundreds of books to his credit in the last 32 years - and counting.

Having said that, his profession is no indicator of his personality. What I like about him the most is not just that he is a publisher - and will eventually publish many of my books, which no one else but he can do justice to - but also that he’s one of those very few people who are their own best friend. 

A private person, self-contained and therefore enigmatic, with a certain ambiguity about him - that is what makes him very engaging to me.

To give an idea of the man, I will try to describe his living room, the space he inhabits when he’s home. Ravi lives intensively in this one room, and the objects here, carefully curated, stand witness to his long spells of solitude. Very few people are allowed in here, I’m one of them. He is a friend.

To me the room is symbolic of stability, things that don’t change with the tides of time. Here, in this space, time, which has its own maverick pace, seems to slow down considerably. Sedate, nothing here seems to be in a hurry. The swirling dust of time has settled down, which is symbolic of acceptance. Yet there is an activistic zeal, strong world views - even shades of grey are sharper here.  His quintessential space, though it seems slow to change, isn’t resistant to change, either. There’s a bit of slow churning too.

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I believe his core remains unreached and unbreeched; doubt anyone is close enough to experience the nuances of his life (even his living room!). So there's a certain enigma; a certain ambiguity. He doesn’t hide anything actively; he is just a private person. Perhaps, he’s ambivalent to his own self.

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Many objects collected in the journey called life are at home here; baggage becomes heavier with time even when you’re travelling light in life. Knick knacks, books, small prints of paintings of the works of some masters, locked in glass frames, looking back at you intently. And in this space, you see some acquisitions that are kept for sentimental reasons and some that are more at an intellectual plane.

The objects in this seemingly sparse room are a mismatch - a sofa with pallid upholstery is placed next to a wooden chair, tall, sturdy, broad, like that of a judge. A small study table is tucked into the far corner near the balcony. This is where he has rewritten many books, and many of them have won awards for writing. He makes writers look better. The word 'editing' is too generic to do justice to what goes into making a book. It’s a thankless job.

Ravi knows almost everyone in the city capable of doing long-form writing. Many hundreds in India and outside who aspire to write a book would have approached him at some point in time. They all have an opinion on him—the known unknown—divergent views, perhaps not always all good, shaped by their experience with him.

He calls a spade a spade, frank in his views, which can sometimes be quite strong, even sound harsh. He’s not guided by usual motivations and is not easily impressed. People seemingly successful, influential, well off, who tend to have bloated egos seem to be nervous with him. There are a few who love to hate him, like the entitled bureaucrat and the politician he refused to publish.

From very early in his career, not yet 30, Ravi was heading an edit team. At 34 he was publisher and chief editor of a major publishing company. As chief editor of leading publishing companies and co-founder and publisher of Speaking Tiger, he has mentored many celebrated editors and authors. Almost all of them never stop praising him. Ravi has some old friends, the closest being a couple of his authors. They don’t fall into any fixed category. They come from different backgrounds.

Yet, I believe his core remains unreached and unbreeched. I doubt anyone is close enough to experience the nuances of his life (even his living room!). So there's a certain enigma; a certain ambiguity. He doesn’t hide anything actively; he is just a private person. Perhaps, he’s ambivalent to his own self.

Ravi likes his drink. And drinks like a gentleman. Slow and steady, there’s no race to win. It’s a good time to be with him then. I tend to talk more; he gives me a hearing, mostly unperturbed, sometimes he enjoys it, sometimes we agree to disagree, then find common ground. With him around, thoughts materialise thick and fast, and he’s receptive to ideas, and makes a few interjections, very pertinent, here and there. He remembers things told to him.

Ravi tells me, You speak better than you write. He says, Write like you speak. He's right. Like a good friend, he shows you a mirror, but he also mirrors you. 

He is a good story teller, whenever he decides to tell the story of his life - in brief episodes. He belongs to a middle-class Sikh family from Himachal. His father was in the government, rose through the ranks, had a couple of postings in foreign countries— Sri Lanka and Canada to be precise—where a part of Ravi’s formative, reformative years was spent.

I wonder how he developed such an intimate relationship with the English language. Perhaps, the romance started in Canada. He says it happened much earlier, in Colombo. He read voraciously for pleasure, sometimes he did not read much, there were phases. Good reading made him a good editor is a logical conclusion to draw. But logic can be misleading.

I have a feeling he is better than all the writers he has edited. It’s not a comparison. He has dealt very well with celebrity writers, who feel obliged to believe that there’s no better version of a story than the one they penned. He’s critical and precise, also intuitive, when it comes to sharpening copy; an exceptional rewriter who hasn’t penned a book. He perhaps needs a shoulder to fire from. 

I also often wonder whether he will ever write a book. I did pose this question to him a few times. He seemed, at best, non-committal. ‘I don’t think I have anything to say that will make a book,’ he says. Writing is giving away yourself. Editing is like a penetrative gaze. Maybe that's the reason. If he ever did write a book, who would be allowed to edit him? It’s a rhetorical existential question.

Ravi is the youngest of three siblings. His sister and brother, the eldest, and he are three and four years apart from each other. Ravi took good care of his parents. He insists it was his sister who did it. 'She’s my anchor,' he says, 'held everything together', especially after they lost their mother last year. For a bachelor, when he loses his mother, the impact is difficult to fathom. It may not be immediate, or dramatic, but something shifts; it’s a seismic shift without the tremors. It happened to me not long after it happened to him.

He is always available for his family. They look up to him. He guards his space in an open way. He understands them better than they think. They understand him better than he thinks. And there’s mutual regard. Love is consideration, acceptance, and shunning the need to force a change. He, like me, is fortunate to have the love of his family. 

As a child, when he was about four - perhaps with the famed Himachali chubby red cheeks! - for some reason, he and his father, just the two of them, lived in a small government quarter in Delhi's Sewa Nagar colony (now being demolished). His father would make chapatis for him in the morning, lock the door from the outside and leave the house keys and his son under the supervision of a kind neighbour, a Tamil lady, while he was away working. She would come and feed the child at lunch. Ravi would be happy alone. He didn’t like the chapatis his father laboriously made in the wee hours and would dump them handily on the loft—very impressive for a tot - and wait for the Tamil aunty's sambhar rice.

It was only after months that his father discovered what the little Ravi had been doing to his labour of love. He got a good thrashing. I find this episode in his life fascinating. He preferred his own company, yet bonded with strangers, even as a four-year-old. Ravi knew from very early on what and who he likes and what he doesn’t, and how to avoid doing or being with what he doesn’t like. A skill that has kept him in good stead.

Though I get the feeling that change is on the cards, and in the months and years to come Ravi may end up doing things he has never done but, perhaps, always wanted to.