Books and ballads

Don’t Fence Me In, sang the reclusive and seldom heard author Rohinton Mistry who amazed the audience at Bandra’s Mehboob Studios with this hitherto unknown talent in belting out this cowboy ballad. The prize winning author who lives in Canada was in India to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Times Litfest, reported The Times of India (TOI) on December 8, 2014.
In his nostalgic speech, interspersed with songs, Mistry revealed that he had once aspired to be a cowboy if not "Bombay’s Bob Dylan.” He also sang an old Hindi favorite from the movie Mother India.

Rohinton Mistry: unknown talents

Bachi Karkaria, who was festival director along with fellow journalist Namita Devidayal, said, "It’s a cliché, but Rohinton will agree that it has been such a long journey for him,” while handing him the award, a reference to his book Such a Long Journey. "Bombay is a promiscuous muse which has seduced many and angered many authors, but Mistry is different, not just because I am a Parsi. His relationship with the city is like a love poem, lyrical and searing.”
"A lifetime achievement award is a funny sort of thing, like a death or a funeral,” TOI reported Mistry as saying in his opening speech. "When an author gets one, it reminds me of his or her books. It is also the beginning of the end.” He now feels free to take up brain surgery or rocket science, much in the manner in which friends from other professions have taken up writing, he quipped.
"I got a very good piece of advice from somebody once that you don’t have to answer all questions; you don’t have to respond to everything. There’s no compulsion,” the reticent writer explained over the course of an interview with TOI on December 4. His wife Freny was "voluble and friendly,” prattling away about Bombay, which the couple had visited last a decade earlier, and the many changes in the metropolis. Mistry himself noted: "There’s a lot of new infrastructure like flyovers and elevated walkways in Bombay but I’m not sure if it is really helping anything. There are lots of malls and shops but I don’t know if that’s an improvement.” When queried about his relationship with the city in which many of his novels are set, he responded: "It’s not really a question of accepting or rejecting, liking or disliking. It’s all I have. Bombay is the place that formed me and my imagination.”
As a Parsi he had naturally chosen to focus on the community and his realistic portrayal has not gone down well with some who have chided him for "embarrassing” them with his unflattering descriptions of poverty and narrow-mindedness. Others have thanked him for putting the community on the "world map.”