Books
101 Stories in 101 Words
Eavesdrop on a dancing grandmother, on Eve looking for suitors anew, on Krishna glancing back at Arjun from his chariot seat to find a man frozen. Read of an eagle falling in love, a man tortured by love, a woman freed by it. Wander through the maze of minds unlike yours and others much like yours in bite-sized story-nuggets. Enlivening myths to grope realities stranger than fiction, the writer presents tiny vistas both enmeshed and at odds with the modern experience of living.
Try a peek. Words don’t bite.
Yet.
The Universe in His Mouth
The poems in this collection are primarily about loving. They’re a celebration, a plea and a path.
We cannot exist without relationships – with each other, with nature and now with machines. We make ourselves dependent quite happily and love to blame Love for it. But Scott Fitzgerald said it better, so am gonna let him: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
We belong together in our loving and blaming and moving back and moving forwards, in the dance we do here on earth so that we can ‘get somewhere’. But there’s nowhere else to go. The earth and each other is all we’ve got, to make our piece of heaven, right here.”
The Honesty Programs
This collection of not-so-short stories is an exploration of love in the time of technology’s growing tentacles on all human relationships. What is real, how much is true, how does fear trigger desperation? And what do desperate people or cyborgs do in ordinary circumstances.
Think of all the love songs with the lovers dancing in the rains. So why are the Mumbai rains a cause of dread for Aditya and Mira?
Natasha and Tushar discover each other through the internet. What follows is much more painful than a heart transplant operation.
Tara is a cyborg cleaner in a new kind of farm. Will she single-handedly engineer a coup?
Fire Wears Flesh
All love, in essence, generates fire – for there is a lot of burning involved in each practical action of loving – at home, in the world, or within one’s conflicted self.
This poetry collection attempts balance on the knife-points of ancient Indian performance traditions of sringara and bhakti rasas – where spirituality encompasses romance. It is a story of two lovers (their names famously synonymous with romantic love in Indian lore) who crisscross each other in time.
The question, dear reader, is: Can a single relationship live out many lifetimes in one?