H. S. Bhabra
In college I took a couple creative writing classes and one of them was taught by this guy Hargurchet Bhabra. On the first day he strutted in wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses and just stood there for a while, staring at us, then took some plates out of his briefcase and smashed them on the floor. He said: “Write about what just happened.”
Another day one of my classmates started complaining about a grade she got and he yelled at her and kicked her out. He said: “Write about what just happened.” The whole thing was staged.
One of our assignments was to pick a classmate and write a story where they were the love interest and then give it to them to read. Which was not awkward at all.
He said to me: “Your story is like a beautiful sports car with no engine under the hood.”
Anyway I just looked him up on Wikipedia and here are some highlights:
Born in Mumbai, grew up in London, won the first Fulbright for “spy and detective fiction,” taught at UCLA for three years (where I took his class) while trying to start a screenwriting career that didn’t happen. He won a “handsome sum” on Jeopardy. He became obsessed with climbing bridges and got arrested trying to climb the Golden Gate Bridge.
He moved to Toronto and worked on a few TV shows and struggled to finish a novel. He killed himself by jumping off the Prince Edward Viaduct which helped bring about the construction of the Luminous Veil, a suicide barrier fence over the viaduct. It has had no appreciable effect on the total number of suicides in Toronto.
