What are your expectations from this endeavour?
I expect a large audience to read them as serious literary works. I haven’t published stills from the films in the book as they could limit the reader’s own visualization of the story. I want to promote Two Tales of My Times as a piece of literature, not a film book.  

Hasn’t your comeback to direction become long overdue?
I’ll return to it when I get bored of writing. Not making films isn’t the end of life. A film eats away a lot of your time and you can’t do your books. I need time for my books, but I am reaching a sort of saturation somewhere. I took a break from cinema to write books; now is the time for a vice-versa perhaps. I just hope that those who offering me films to direct don’t insist on a star cast. That creates a bigger problem.
For starters, I would like to adapt some of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories and novels as a 15-hour TV series, like the one I did with Munshi Premchand’s works for Doordarshan.  

You could also take up the project with other general entertainment channels.
No. I don’t think satellite channels are even interested in serious literature. Only DD is because as a national channel, it has a social responsibility. Perhaps, Sahara also is. We were, in fact, negotiating with them at one point of time, but some of their terms didn’t suit me. I need independence in writing and visualisation.
My visual interpretation should be the closest to literature so that students can read literature visually. 

... contd.