My first effort at publishing was for my hostel rag, the Nehru Hall Reporter, when I was a student at the IIT in Khargpur. It got printed, may be because nobody else wrote anything. Editors of such mags – hard pressed students themselves, with little time to spare after clearing demanding class work and homework- usually chase, implore and bully first year green students to write something just to fill the page. I don’t even remember what I wrote and can’t locate the copy of the magazine. Nothing happened for the next quarter century.

Then we came to Pune and discovered that the city has just one English language daily, the Poona Herald. I enjoyed writing middles for the paper. It was a happy change to get paid for what I write to amuse myself- amuse myself because the incidents described every few months in 350 odd words were always about what happened in my home with the three women in my life. Of course, the ladies of the house young and old, had their own views on my authoring skills and my making public what went on within the four walls of the house. But there was some satisfaction in the fact that some 15,000 odd readers might have had a good laugh in the mornings.