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…
Download, share or listen online to Sundari Venkatraman’s reading of her novella, Double Jeopardy.
Do you like puzzles? Hidden clues and little word teasers that keep your brain busy? Well, Yamini has a little gem to share with her readers. Download the attached file and solve the puzzle Yamini has created. If you’ve read Full Circle, you’ll have a big advantage, but all the answers can also be found in the preview of her book (available here).
Discovering Malini [PDF, 34KB].
Download, share or listen online to Yamini Vijendran (author of Full Circle) talk about her journey to becoming an author.
Download, share or listen online to Jaya Siva Murty, as she shares a chapter from her novella, Canvas of Dreams, with you.
Sometimes in life you meet people who start living in your heart, but give you no place in theirs. And though you tell yourself that time will heal and seal all damage, this is simply a far cry from reality. You wake up every day and remember a sunlit carefree smile, a happy moment or a sad one, and those memories make them cling to you a little more.
Sometimes some people walk into your life as friends. They seem to understand you even before you’ve spoken, they seem to share your likes and dislikes, and often know you inside out even better than you do. And at the moment you believe that you’ve found true love, they look surprised, and tell you that they don’t love you, not really.
Sometimes you end up marrying the wrong person. The one who seemed perfect at first turns out to be a monster, showing a side you never knew existed. They lie, ignore you, cheat and play the kind of games you thought only happened on TV. And you have to live with that hate, fear and insecurity for the rest of your life, for the strangest of reasons.
But then sometimes, the person who remained in your heart gives you space in his. Or, that special one who said that he didn’t really care tells you that he couldn’t live without you. Or, the wrong kind of guy becomes an angel again. Sometimes, you find perfect love in the most imperfect of places.
Canvas of Dreams is such a story, inspired by the Ryan(s), Siddarth(s) and Rehaan(s) of real life. It speaks not only of how tough life can get, but of how one toughens up to take on life. It talks of love lost, found and rediscovered. And of how people love you back only when you begin to love yourself first.
My journey to The Perfect Groom began on a lazy afternoon when I got an enthusiastic phone call from a distant relative. Her daughter’s marriage had been arranged and she gushed on about how good the groom was, how rich his family was and how happy she felt that her daughter was going to be in the US.
I congratulated her and made polite conversation for a while. For some reason, her conversation kept playing on my mind all through the day. ‘He is such a perfect groom’, ‘He is all that I wanted for my daughter’, ‘His family is rich and he is the only son’. And I was reminded of an anecdote that an old friend of mine told me about a girl, almost a decade ago.
That was when I got the idea to write a story about that unknown ‘girl’. I had no details about her except for what had happened in her life. But I instinctively knew that she was bold, caring, broad-minded and yet innocent and naive. And my heroine Nithya arrived on my pages. I am sure that Nithya’s perilous journey through love and relationship will capture the reader’s heart and hold it.
I do not know what happened to the girl whose anecdote inspired me to write this novella. Hopeless romantic that I am, I wish with all my heart that she found a man like Vasu to share her life with.
P.S. A special thanks to my friend Anupama who shared that anecdote with me all those years ago.
Sumeetha Manikandan tells us how she came up with the story for The Perfect Groom in this brief audio clip.
Mimmy Jain takes a moment to tell us about herself, and why she is compelled to write…
Download, share or listen online to this brief introduction.
I am Mimmy, author of A Scandalous Proposition. I thought you might be wondering why there’s so much food in my book, so let me tell you about it.
I went at food the way I do most things in life—the wrong way. After a childhood spent looking malnourished, I progressed quickly to the other end of the spectrum post-pregnancy. Years of hostel life insured I knew nothing about cooking. But I spent a good part of my professional life as a food critic. I learnt first-hand from some of the top chefs in India and abroad how they get this particular nuance or that particular undertone to a dish. It helped that I have a very keen tongue that finds it easy to puzzle out the spices that went into any dish.
But I still didn’t know how to cook! I used to joke that my son would never quarrel about food with his future wife because he would not want her to cook like me. Then three years ago, I was thrown head-first into the kitchen when my husband and I moved to London. No mother, no mother-in-law, no servant, just us and our growling tummies. You can bet I learnt to cook double-quick! A ladleful of help from the Internet and today, I can actually cook amritsari chhole that would give any self-respecting Punjabi dhaba a good run for its money. I now find I love cooking, especially if I can set my iPod to loud and drown out everything else.
When I got around to writing A Scandalous Proposition, I was willing to let my characters do pretty much as they wanted. I was sure of one thing, though—there had to be a food element in my book. And this is why Mira Talwar, though she’s not a cook, loves cooking. And when she and her family are in dire straits, she takes the ‘food’ route to sustain them financially. And bumps straight into Ranbir Dewan.
Mira is innovative, full of bright ideas and loves to experiment. Often when I thought of her it was in the kitchen, trying out some new twist to a dish that would later have her family drooling over it. So she is able to produce a vada manchurian and a green mango salsa with great elan.
Mira looks down on what she calls firangi food, but she is conscious that a lot of the time, Indian food can be unhealthy. So she hunts for ways in which she can make it healthy and tasty.
When she lands the job of cooking for Dewan Industries’ conference dinner, Mira is so excited that all her personal turmoil gets shoved onto the back burner. She realizes that this is not the right occasion to innovate, but she can’t resist trying out one teeny little experiment—and so she comes up with the idea of topping rabri with whipped cream.
If you want to know more about Mira’s adventures with food and, of course, Ranbir Dewan, go read A Scandalous Proposition. For Mira actually lives the adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.