We all know how much Bollywood loves the twins-separated-at-birth story line and we’ve all taken perverse pleasure from these movies. So when a couple of writers team up to poke some fun at it, the result is a hilarious juxtaposition of reel and real life. The author–illustrator team of Sowmya Rajendran and Niveditha Subramaniam are […]
Books
Week #52: Goodbye 2014
Fifty-two weeks of reading and writing have flown by—I can hardly believe it! It was mostly fun, sometimes tiresome and sometimes desperate, but what counts are those 52 blog posts, one for each week of 2014. It is the time of the year when I like to look back and start thinking of my goals […]
Week #50: Slightly Burnt in the media
Slightly Burnt has been getting more media attention than any of my earlier books. Truth be told, this is mostly because it happens to address issues that are being talked about around the country right now. It’s also thanks to the definite strides young adult literature has been making in India over the years, with […]
Week #48: Weekend book haul
Having spent last Saturday at Bookaroo amidst books and authors, it’s hardly surprising that I came back with a decent haul of books and to-reads. Here’s a selection: Queen of Ice by Devika Rangachari Devika Rangachari can do two very interesting things—make history really fun and put away an unbelievable amount of chocolate. Her latest […]
Week #47: Keeping secrets
We all have secrets—or we have had them at some point in our lives. But why do we keep secrets? What do they tell us about ourselves? More importantly, what do they tell us about the rest of the world? These are exactly the questions that Himanjali Sankar and I will be grappling with on […]
Week #46: Eat the Sky on tour in Bangalore
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean went on a whirlwind book tour and I got the chance to join Kirsty Murray, Isobelle Carmody and Samhita Arni on the Bangalore leg. We kicked off on Sunday, 16 November, at the Oxford Bookstore, where the book was—literally—launched at our Bangalore audience. There were about a dozen children, […]
Week #45: Eating the sky, drinking the ocean
Two things arrived this week: (a) Z, because of whom I became an aunt for the second time; and (b) copies of Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean! While is Z is busy getting used to the new world and will lie low in the nearish future, we’re having a grand old song and dance […]
Week #44: Slightly Burnt, the finished goods
Yesss, it’s here! Slightly Burnt is hot off the press and I’m told copies are going out to bookshops tomorrow! Slightly Burnt is a book about being different. About what happens when we don’t follow the rules that society has laid down for each of us. So what do you when you have a secret […]
Week #40: Seven days and six books
Yep, that’s how many new books I’ve got myself over the past week. Let’s see: The Screaming Staircase (Jonathan Stroud): This has been on my list since Week #3 and I thought I already had it. Well, it turns out I didn’t (or I have a copy stashed away somewhere that I can’t see) and […]
Week #39: Discovering Anne Holt
Disovering a new author is always fun, and when their writing combines two of my favourite things—crime and Scandinavia—it’s that much more fun. Anne Holt has often been described as ‘the Val McDermid of Norway’, but I would beg to differ. Apart from the fact that they both write crime fiction, there is nothing similar […]