'Kindness helped survive pandemic'

When we face a situation where we have lost everything, it is very easy to fall back and lose hope, but it is more important to go on, says Tiffany Tavernier , French novelist and screenwriter. “At such a time, love, kindness and compassion gives us hope. This is what happened during the pandemic. People met with crises but sudden kindness from unusual and unexpected places helped them survive,” says the author of Roissy while in conversation with Naveen Kishore , publisher, on the topic of Kindness in fractured times’ at the Times Litfest .

She adds that healing is very important to go on in life. “Colours, music, language become very important in the process. When we lose our existence, we fall back to what is poetic inside us. It is essential to see a light when you are drowning. It helps us to come back to the primary purity of the self and see kindness,” says the author, who lost both her parents -- screenwriter Colo Tavernier and the director Bertrand Tavernier -- in the past one year and struggled with void in her life.

She says that she puts her personal experiences into her characters to bring them to life. “Roissy is lost in her own disaster like a lot of us during the pandemic and she finds a way out through love and kindness,” she says, adding that we need to find the lost compassion in the world.

The author lived in Kolkata when she was a teenager and still fondly remembers the place. “I lived there when I was 19 and when I visited the place again two years ago, I was glad to see that the compassion in the people there is still the same. The place has a mix of intelligence and suffering. It helps you question your existence and that is what we need to survive the tough times,” she says.