Coelho: Fast, and how

New Delhi, Feb. 29: Renowned Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has never visited India. But the 56-year-old writer, whose novel The Alchemist has sold over 43 million copies and been translated into 56 languages, is just waiting for a suitable occasion.

“I have many, many friends in India. But I am waiting for the right moment to go, because India deserves not a week, not even a month, but much more time to be understood,” says the writer, whose latest novel eleven minutes — that is how the title is written — has also become popular.

The novel tells the story of Maria, a Brazilian village girl who lands up in Geneva, becomes a prostitute and develops a fascination for sex. The novel explores the different options that sex can offer. It can be a tool for physical pleasure, a means to see the inner light or both. “Sex is about understanding the sacredness of life,” he explains, in an e-mail interview.

Coelho, whose favourite authors include Isabel Allende and Khalil Gibran, writes at a rapid pace. But he considers that experiencing life is in itself a process of writing.

So he says that The Alchemist took him 39 years and two weeks to finish: 39 years to live, two weeks to put in the form of a book. “eleven minutes took me 55 years and one month,” says the Rio de Janeiro author.

Few people have savoured such a colourful life as Coelho. As a teenager, his rebellious tendencies and his regular flouting of family rules was construed as a sign of mental illness by his father. He was sent thrice to the mental asylum.

In the coming years, Coelho became a hippie and wore his hair long. He also took drugs. “The hippie movement opened my horizons, as people were trying to find new answers for old questions. The drugs weakened my power of decision. Today, I am totally against it.”

In the seventies, he also wrote lyrics for popular Brazilian musician and composer, Raul Seixas. Together they were a huge influence on the domestic rock scene.

Coelho also published Kring-ha, a bunch of comic strips which asked for more freedom. Those days Brazil was a dictatorship under General Emilio Garrastazu Medici. And Coelho was imprisoned for a short while for his subversive acts.

His life changed in 1986 when he walked the Road to Santiago, a medieval pilgrim’s route between France and Spain. “It made me understand that life is simpler than I thought, and that I should pay the price of following my dreams (in this case, to become a writer).”

The writer, hugely influenced by books as dramatically different as The Bible and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, is brutally honest about his early approach to writing.

“I was trying to write some complicated books to show how intelligent I was and how people could not understand my genius. Later, I realised that this was the most stupid approach to literature that someone can have.”

But the walk changed all that. In 1987, he wrote his first book, The Pilgrimage, which did fairly well. But it was his second book, The Alchemist, published a year later that hurtled him to literary superstardom.

One of the 43 million copies that the book sold was read by pop star Madonna. “It is a beautiful book about magic, dreams and the treasures we seek elsewhere and then find on our doorstep,” she once said.

Many other bestsellers have followed. But, to many, Coelho has been much more than a writer of novels of gentle spirituality. During the Iraq War, he penned a scathingly sarcastic article in the Brazilian newspaper, Folha de Sao Paolo, titled, “Thank You, President Bush”.

Coelho wrote: “Thank you for revealing the enormous abyss that exists between the will of the people and the decisions of government.… Thank you for ignoring us and marginalising everyone who opposed you.”

But why? The, man who loves listening to Wagner, Beethoven and Chopin, says: “Because I thought that, by being a celebrity, and having a chance to be heard, I should voice out my opposition to this stupid war, regardless the consequences that I would face.”