SK: If a detective looked at your browser tabs right now, would they arrest you, call an exorcist, or buy you a weighted blanket?
BP: Probably all three, in that order. Some writers have a genre. I have an alibi.
By day, I teach English in West Bengal and spend my time persuading commas, clauses, and young human beings to behave. By night, I wander into Kriya Yoga, consciousness, reincarnation, paranormal experience, myth, and the possibility that reality has omitted several important footnotes.
My tabs move quite comfortably between English grammar, literary submissions, Kriya Yoga, parapsychology, consciousness, reincarnation, and things people report seeing after death.
The detective would eventually reach a grammar worksheet and realise I had already been punished enough.
Would you rather your protagonists sue you for emotional distress and gross negligence or be sentenced to life in a Happy Ending colony?
After around twenty-five years in education, I have learned two things with reasonable certainty: language rarely behaves, and neither do people. Fiction is simply where I allow both offences to continue without disciplinary action.
So, Sadie, I enter the Gauntlet with the calm of a man who has already survived parent-teacher meetings.
Let them sue.
I have drafts proving that every emotional injury was administered for narrative purposes and with the best literary intentions.
A Happy Ending colony would be crueler. After three chapters of uninterrupted contentment, my protagonists would start a rebellion just to restore the plot.
Would you rather delete your favourite 5,000-word chapter or replace every instance of ‘said’ with ‘ejaculated’?
Delete the chapter.
Five thousand words can be mourned, rewritten, or lied about later as ‘necessary cutting.’
Replacing every ‘said’ with ‘ejaculated’ creates evidence. And evidence survives screenshots.
Are your characters named after ancient deities and celestial bodies, or did you just glance at a spice rack and decide ‘Cumin’ sounded heroic?
Ancient names, certainly. Nachiketa and Rudra came from older shelves than the spice rack.
If Cumin ever appears, he will be the minor deity of deadlines, invoked only when editors are waiting.
If you could magically delete one trope from existence, which one are you throwing under the bus with zero regrets?
The Chosen One.
I already escalated matters to five in Kalchakra: Oom and the Chosen Five. After that, one chosen person feels less like destiny and more like understaffing.
If your WIP characters were ghosts, would they help you find your keys or rearrange your furniture to match the mess in your head?
My ghosts would know exactly where the keys were.
They would refuse to tell me until I had understood the karmic significance of losing them.
By then I would have changed the lock and written an essay about attachment.
Oxford Comma: Life-saving necessity or pretentious clutter?
Life-saving necessity.
I have spent roughly twenty-five years teaching students that punctuation prevents confusion.
Experience has since shown me that human beings are perfectly capable of producing confusion without punctuation, but I continue the campaign out of professional loyalty.
Plotter or Pantser? (Start with structure or fly by the seat of your pants writing)
Plotter.
I build the architecture, place the doors, decide who enters, and know roughly where everyone should end up.
Then the characters discover the plan, form a union, and refuse to cooperate.
I call the wreckage organic storytelling.
One word that makes you go feral every time you see it misused?
Revert.
Especially when it arrives as ‘please revert back.’ After twenty-five years of teaching English, I still wonder where ‘revert’ was supposed to go if not back.
At that point the email sounds less like a request for a reply and more like instructions for reincarnation.
Would you rather your status on Submittable remain forever ‘received’ or ‘in-progress’?
‘In progress.’
‘Received’ is uncertainty.
‘In progress’ is the same uncertainty wearing a tie and carrying a clipboard.
Writers require very little evidence to manufacture hope.
What’s the last thing you researched that has probably put you on a government watchlist?
Parapsychology, occult traditions, altered states of consciousness, reincarnation, what happens after death, and whether consciousness can exist independently of the body.
If anyone is monitoring me, I hope they have at least visited badalpaul.com.
Traffic is traffic.
Drafting fuel: coffee, tea, liquor, Haribo or the tears of your antagonists?
Tea.
In Bengal, tea is not merely a beverage; it’s a committee meeting between the brain and the soul.
No decision is usually reached, so another cup is ordered.
Are you a ruthless assassin or a sentimental hoarder on a kill your darlings scale?
A constitutional democracy.
Every darling receives a hearing. There is an appeal. Fresh evidence is considered. Sentimental arguments are entered into the record.
Then I delete the paragraph anyway.
Stinky Books: old library vanilla or fresh-off-the-press chemicals?
Old library.
A new book smells like possibility. An old book smells like somebody has already spent forty years arguing with mortality inside it.
I trust the second one more.
Your author’s bio as a clickbait headline?
Author Investigates Reincarnation, Suspects He Has Been Making The Same Mistake For Centuries.
Would you prefer a 1-star review that says ‘This changed my life for the worse’ or a 3-star review that says ‘It was fine’?
One star.
If I have changed your life for the worse, I have at least changed it.
‘It was fine’ is the literary equivalent of being informed that your funeral had adequate parking.
What’s the most useless talent you possess that you humblebrag about?
I can hear a subject-verb disagreement from across a classroom.
It has never stopped a war, fixed a roof, or found a missing key, but civilisation must assign its heroes carefully.
Are you an Ellipsis… (trailing off into mystery) or an Exclamation Point! (perpetually caffeinated and/or yelling)?
Ellipsis…
An exclamation mark already knows what it wants to say.
An ellipsis suspects there may be another world hiding after the third dot.
I would obviously follow it.
BADAL PAUL – YOU HAVE PASSED THE WRITER’S GAUNTLET!
THANK YOU FOR YOUR WIT AND WRITERLY WISDOM!
I’m Badal Paul, an Indian author, poet and educator from West Bengal. I write in English and Bengali, usually at the point where the visible world begins behaving suspiciously. My published books include Kalchakra: Oom and the Chosen Five and Whispers of the Invisibles: Nachiketa and the Mystery of the Dark Shadows, and his poem ‘Whispers Between Worlds: A Dialogue with the Ancient’ received Third Prize in the 2024 Steve Miller/ Baltimore Science Fiction Society Annual Poetry Contest.
Current works in progress include Journey Incognito: Poems of the Inner Traveller, a forty-poem movement through karma, Kriya, death, rebirth and consciousness, and Whispers of the Invisibles: Return of Rudra. I will stop there, Sadie: you asked for an introduction, not a synopsis, and my WIP characters have retained counsel.
