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Journal

From Blogger to Author?

Are you a blogger? Many of the writers we work with are dedicated bloggers who have been putting their thoughts out there for the world to see. Whether their following is large or small, the blogger’s central purpose is met—to bring their voice, their thoughts and their words in front of an audience, to someone other than just themselves.

After consistent blogging, one’s thoughts start falling into place, and one recognizes oneself differently. Writing skills improve, self-expression come to the fore and feedback from readers boosts confidence. So what is the next step? Can a blogger take a leap of faith and move from random thoughts and opinions into creating a coherent, sustained story?

Many of our writers have had the courage to take their writing and creativity to the next level, going from blogger to author. How many of you would like to do the same?

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Campus Pyar

I met my future husband for the first time during interviews at the business school we had both applied to. Along with a roomful of nervous applicants, we were assigned an obscure topic and expected to fire off insights, one after the other. He is the only one I remember meeting that day; firstly because of the unkempt, bushy beard he was sporting and secondly, because of the conviction in his voice and his eloquence. Subsequently, when he shaved off his beard one day, to finally fit in with business school protocol, it was a pleasant surprise, to say the least.

What is it about campus-life that sparks love interests? With everyone eyeing everyone else as a potential connection, life on campus can seem like a long chain of checking-outs, hook-ups and dramatic break-ups, punctuated by boring exams and holidays.

Campus love is like no other—everyone knows who’s dating/mating/cheating who. Love is in the air and so is melodrama. Squabbles escalate into epic battles, boyfriend troubles can lead to three-day long crying jags and a shared cup of ice-cream can become the most memorable date ever!

Aided by suggestive songs from romantic movies, cheesy lines from romance novels and poetic couplets stolen from poetry books, campus lovers embark on the Technicolor, larger-than-life, no-holds-barred, love story of their lives. Whether they succeed or not, the point is to join in on campus pyar.

Was your college romance, love or crush the best of your life?

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Books Everywhere, Which One to Read?

In today’s world there is no shortage of books and writers, both of the published and self-published variety. With this deluge of books, how does a person decide what book to buy and read?

I have various strategies, depending on what I am looking for and the mood I am in.

When I am looking for a good read, I usually follow the tried and tested author path. If I like an author’s book, I generally buy everything that author writes—whether the second book lives up to the first or not. If I’ve liked the first book, I will generally like the second, and the third and fourth.

The other strategy I adopt is when I am out looking for a new experience. That means looking to read the back of the book blurb, reading a few reviews and dipping into the book to see if I like the author’s style of writing. Bookstores are a great place to browse and do this, and so are e-book retailers.

Finally, there are times when I just want the universe to literally hand me a good book. That’s when I look around briefly and pick up the book—any book that catches my eye—and purchase it. I have found some of the best books I have ever read that way.

What strategy do you follow when looking for something to read?

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That Irresistible Journey

When the Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, we were a group of 27 people lining up in cinemas around Central London trying to get tickets. When we finally got in, we were blown away. We’d been waiting, you see, since 1980, to find out what happens to the rebel forces.

My brother and I had toy light sabers, the millennium falcon, x-wing fighters, and the force was strong within us (with two years between us, being Luke and Leia was no big issue). We made sure that our little sister, six years younger than me, loved the trilogy as much as we did.  When we moved to Pakistan, we gravitated towards Star Wars fans almost naturally.

In 1977, when the first movie came out, it was groundbreaking in terms of special effects, and memorable for its epic story. Over the years, however, I have constantly come across analyses and reviews that pick on the fact that the dialogue was simplistic, the plot was trite and predictable and the movies weren’t well made.

No doubt, they are right—but a generation of moviegoers has, nevertheless, immersed itself and their next generation in this legend. Becoming a Jedi was actually a life goal for many young children. Thirty years later, I still love the movies, the story, the characters (of the original movies, mind you—the subsequent movies should never have been made, in my opinion), and if I ever find a way to harness the Force, I will give up everything else and train to be a Jedi, for real.

Star Wars garnered its loyal fan base because it was simple, not in spite of it. The theme, good vs. evil, was complex in its own way (after all, Darth Vader eventually ended the reign of the emperor he served for so long), and the characters may have been unoriginal, but were still loved.

George Lucas was free, within a broad context, to layer his theme with sub-plots and an entire universe of new species and characters, but there were clearly the rebels in the white hats on one side, and the empire in the black hats on the other. Good was meant to triumph over evil.

These are universal themes, ungoverned by borders or religions, races or class. And they are eternal, like ‘Love will Prevail’.  The journey towards this theme will always vary—keeping in mind, for Indireads, the South Asian audience—but the destination won’t. Romance in literature has existed in some form or the other for centuries, and the destination hasn’t changed.

The goal is to make the journey so irresistible, so interesting, that the overarching theme is merely the satisfyingly expected ending. Your reader should be rooting for the cheesy finale, and they should be disappointed if it changes course.

If, for instance, Leia had rebuffed Han in the Star Wars trilogy, there would have been bloodshed. And that’s the bar—our audience has a wealth of stories embedded in their minds, and writers have to supersede old memories with new ones.

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The First Book I Fell in Love With

I think I was four years old when I started reading. Peter sat down, Jane sat down. Peter went to the park, and Jane, of course had to go to the park too. This was the seventies and a blond Peter and a dark-haired Jane were glued together in perpetuity. I have no idea why these books were so fascinating; I think it was the unfamiliar pictures of a green English countryside that did the trick.

And then, when I was six years old, my teacher started to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to us. And just like that, I fell in love with words and books and reading. Mr. Wonka’s amazing factory run by tiny Oompa Loompas with a wicked sense of humor started me off on a journey that continues till today.

Did that happen to you? Was there a book, or a person who inspired you to become a reader and dream of perhaps, one day, becoming a writer? What story or person motivated your love of books?

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Journal

Sticks and Stones

I’m reviewing a manuscript where the heroine is the recipient of some nasty comments from a rival, and the author is refusing to let her heroine be affected by these comments. Our editorial panel has tried, in various ways, to gently explain to her that it doesn’t matter how self-assured a person may be. Some things just hurt, and you shouldn’t be afraid of recognizing it.

But she was adamant that words should have no affect on a strong character, on a woman’s self-confidence. That, however true their mark may be, words have no power.

I have to respectfully disagree.

I was very self-assured when I was younger (we’re so certain of ourselves when we don’t know anything, aren’t we?), even with the occasional skin breakout that left a scar now and then. I rarely worried about this because the people around me never commented, and I had everything else going for me. Until this hot young journalist came to intern at the magazine where I worked.  I enjoyed working there—with the exception of a snobby little sub-editor, the place was routinely populated with tough journalists, important analysts and the kind of conversations that, I imagine, shaped our world. We even received death threats after a particularly daring cover story, resulting in a brief police investigation, and a temporary armed guard stationed outside the office.

Never a dull moment!

But, back to my story…

My skin wasn’t something I was thinking about when I sat down and spent a good hour chatting up the intern. He seemed to be as interested in talking to me (we were discussing something extremely important—the increasing use of gangland imagery among urban youth, I think. Yeah. Right up my alley.), and the pesky sub-editor was neatly kept out of the conversation with a little deft maneuvering on my part. All it took to dethrone me, however, was one sentence.

In a lull, she leaned forward and looked at me intently. Then, loudly, and with a hint of condescension, she said, “You know, you could clear up those acne scars by putting some lemon juice on them.”

It was a masterstroke. If I had been standing, I would have fallen, she cut out my legs so effectively. I forgot what I had been talking about, and everything vanished from my head except the sudden clear vision of my face covered in scars. She had the intern out the door before I recovered. I never found the courage to approach him again.

I don’t believe in the old adage, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words…’ Words will wrench your gut in a second, and lay your soul bare. Words will bury themselves deep inside you and attach themselves to your skin. They will drive you to despair, and fly you out to the heights of ecstasy. Words have power.

And we are all affected by them.

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Journal

The Unexpected Side Effects of Trashy Novels

My first exposure to books was my mother’s extensive library. She is a voracious reader, and over the years, she’s collected an impressive array of books, both fiction and non-fiction. I read Perry Mason, Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart at a young age, though I never got into Agatha Christie (for some reason), and when I started making major inroads into her collection, she quietly hid the Harold Robbins and James Hadley Chase books so that I wouldn’t be tempted. She didn’t realize that I had friends whose mothers weren’t as selective about what their children read…

We were undeniably curious. And we did anything we could to satisfy that curiosity. We scoured bookstores, old books fairs and small shops (no internet back then—I know. That really dates me! And, libraries didn’t stock popular fiction, only literary fiction), looking for forbidden fare, and found all kinds of treasures as a result. I found Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon (really, look these guys up; you’ve heard of Stephen King, but you don’t know what you’re missing if you haven’t read Sidney Sheldon), and discovered Mills & Boon and Harlequin in the process.

I got into the habit of reading every night, and couldn’t sleep until I had read something. I was reading trashy novels, and lots of them, under the cover of darkness (and I was also making inroads into my mother’s library at the same time). But I had limited access to books, and very little money to spend on them, particularly as I was in school and not earning. So, either I hoarded all my pocket-money, or I found friends who also read trashy novels. Friends, and cousins; it turned out, there were loads of them. Everyone read, and they read everything—trashy, popular, literary—it didn’t really matter, as long as there was a book in their hands.

We exchanged books and reviews, and that led to other books—non-trashy books—equally entertaining, and worth the amount of time I spent with my nose in a book. I found S. E. Hinton and Paul Zindel because of a cousin who also read Mills & Boon, and we bonded (I grew up outside of Pakistan, and barely spoke Urdu when I returned—books were the first things we bonded over). I read Jean Plaidy because I introduced Georgette Heyer to a school friend. I found Anne Rice, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut because I traded Nora Roberts with strangers on the first day of school (and there were a lot of schools—eight, in total, not counting college—and the best way to make friends, I found, was books). I introduced a friend to John Wyndham, who got me hooked on to Asimov and C. S. Lewis’ adult fiction. And, when my grandfather passed away, and no one but my mother volunteered to take his books, I found Shaw, Victor Hugo, Shakespeare’s complete works, and a bunch of fiction writers I had never even heard of.

Reading gave me all kinds of joy, which led me to choose literature as an ‘A’ Level subject. Over the course of two years, we read fourteen works, and my friends (who were all taking accounts and economics) hated me because all I needed to do was read.

I realize now that I got into the habit of reading because of trashy novels. I often wonder, if they released all popular fiction novels with a disclaimer…

Warning; excessive reading may lead to more serious and literary works, and may be habit-forming and/or addictive. It may also lead to new friends and possible bonding with complete strangers

…more people may be inclined to turn their secret guilty pleasure into an open one. Because the key is not what kind of books you read, but that you love reading.

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Journal

The Cocktail Bar That is India

There has been no dearth of times when I wished I could call myself a Maharashtrian or a Tamilian. Even Gujarati, Rajasthani, Bengali or Assamese would have done as well. Fate, and circumstances of birth, however, make this impossible.

Whenever anyone asks me, and I dread it when they do, where I am from, this is how the conversation usually flows.

The Inquisitive Behenji (IB): “So, where did you say you are from?”

Me: “I am from Chennai.”

IB: “Oh, so you speak Tamil at home?”

Me: “No. We speak Marathi at home.”

IB: “Then you are from Maharashtra!”

Me: “No, we live in Tamilnadu, but speak Marathi.”

IB: “But you speak Tamil so well that no one would believe you are not Tamil!”

While those who have heard my Marathi say “But that is not Marathi!” This is usually accompanied by a look that ranges from ridicule to sympathy to amusement.

In the three decades that I have been the resident of this planet, I have been through this conversation (more or less) many times with different people, and sometimes even with the same people again and again! At those times I often wonder, “Why did God choose me, of all people, to be a part of this complex linguistic and demographic equation?” OK, not just me, but the small group that constitutes my community—what did we do that made us so ‘special’?

Well, apparently our great forefathers weren’t satisfied with their sedentary (I am assuming!) life in the great land of Marathas, under the rule of the great Shivaji Maharaj. The Diwan of Tanjavur sent out a distress call that the Nayakar of Madurai was greedily eyeing his town, and off they went, marching down south from the mighty western frontiers, led by Ekoji, Shivaji’s half-brother. Trot, trot, trot, his horses tread the lands of southern India, reaching Arni, then ThiruMallepadi and finally Tanjore.

Now, once they declared a sweeping victory over their rival, the Nayakar of Madurai, one would have expected them to return from Tanjore, right? That’s what people do; come home after work, right? I think, however, that my forefathers are the inspiration behind our modern IT bachelors whose motto seems to be, “ghar jaa ke karna kya hai?” So they stayed behind and made Tanjore and the surrounding places their new home.

While this one act of bravado earned them a small slot in the pages of our history books, it did little to preserve our identity. The generous, openhearted and broadminded souls that my forefathers were, they soon embraced the culture of their new homeland, and happily mixed it with their own. They also mixed in some Kannada traditions, not to mention Telugu and even maybe Malayalam. The result? A heady cocktail of various South Indian customs and cultures and languages in a base of Marathi; a Marathi that no one even recognizes anymore.

Today my community follows a mixture of customs that no other community can recognize. Here is a sample of this wacky, tangy cocktail that is my community:

  • We are so completely Tamil that we cannot do without our rice, rasam and sambhar. By the way, sambhar is not originally from the South, did you know? It was us, the great Marathas who stayed behind in Tanjore, who invented the spicy dish.
  • But we are not completely Tamil either, since we also like our pitla, gojju, dangar (sounds like Tanker!) and kadhi a lot!
  • We decorate our houses with golu, the dolls exhibition, during the nine days of Navratri, just like the people in the south do.
  • But we will not celebrate Karadayan Nombu, for our ‘day-to-pray-for-hubby’ falls on the Amavasya of Ashada, and Tamil New Year is just a government holiday for us, for we, the ‘Grreatt Marratthhasss’, celebrate Gudipadava.
  • A sentence containing eight words, spoken by my granny, will have two Tamil and six Marathi words. A sentence of eight words spoken by my mother will mix four Tamil and four Marathi words. A sentence of eight words spoken by me, will have three English, three Tamil and two Marathi words.
  • We have this uncanny ability to curse the autowallah in Marathi when riding an auto in Chennai, and in Tamil when riding an auto in Pune.
  • When we are heatedly debating with a friend in Tamil, we will invariably drop in a Marathi word.

Every time these contradictions prop up, I have to give exhaustive explanations, with a growing feeling of ‘na idhar ka na udhar ka‘ inside my heart.

The ‘why me!’ feeling used to be quite intense until some time ago. I woke up to the fact, one day, that it was not just me, or my community that felt this way. I looked around and saw a Mallu from Delhi, born and brought up in Kolkata. A Telugu Brahmin so Chennaiized, that people in their native town in Andhra refused to respond to the language they spoke. A Punjabi, mouthing expletives freely and casually in Amchi mumbaiyya Marathi.

Looking at these examples I realize how unique a people we are. Ignoring politicians shouting their throats hoarse that ‘we are Indians’, the cocktails that the bar called India has to offer truly makes us ‘Indian’, sans community, sans religion, sans language.

And yet we spend so much of time defending and fighting each other on behalf of our communities.

It’s probably the bar effect; have you not heard of drunken bar fights at all?

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Journal

Romance, South Asian Ishtyle

I don’t think I will ever forget watching movies as a child and seeing the hero and the heroine disappear behind a tree or under an umbrella. As a child I always wondered what they were doing under there, and the focus on the bee pollinating the rose that inevitably followed never really helped me.

Till recently, the umbrella principle largely held for us as a society. We asked Choli ke Peeche Kiya Hai? and got the disingenuous Choli Mein Dil Hai Mera as the disappointing answer. However, it seems we as a society have finally arrived at the point that we can be trusted with more daring—and factual—answers.

We see love scenes being written in great detail in books, not just couples going to bed and waking up bathed in an after-sex pre-glow. Movies are featuring one-night stands and bedroom scenes and even some TV shows are adding in some mirch and masala close-ups.

rsaishtyleSo does this advance the cause of romance in our part of the world? I don’t know. It is a breath of fresh air to see sexuality up close and not left in the realm of ‘those books’ and ‘art’ movies. And yet, sometimes it feels like a collective loss of innocence on our part. Does the longing of the couple for their wedding night lose its charm if they are already co-habiting? Can clumsy embraces and stolen kisses be more titillating than overt sexual encounters?

I feel that in all mediums—books, television and films—the characters and the stories should drive the romance and intimacy. It would probably be unrealistic to expect a modern urban couple to simper and act coy. It is, however, equally off-putting to see a woman with strong values suddenly jumping into bed because a sex scene is the demand of the hour.

Romance comes in all packages, shy and sweet, bold and explorative and sizzling hot. It is up to the storyteller to take the reader by the hand and make her experience the romance, so that in each form, it is the natural conclusion, neither forced nor ridiculous. That, to me, is the true essence of romance.

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Mini-Jeopardy — A Puzzler

Double Jeopardy author, Sundari Venkatraman, has a little brain teaser for you—a small puzzle to help you while away the day. Those who have read the book have a huge advantage, but you could possibly get most of the answers from the preview of the book.

Download and print out the puzzle [PDF, 422KB]

And, for those of you who have already worked it out, here’s the solution…

mini-jeopardy-solution