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 word 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.
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 word 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.
Then I wrote to technical magazines, management magazines and got a few newspapers to print my political views. Short stories were published in women’s Era and Citadel. Now dailies stopped publishing middles and Citadel stopped publishing fiction. Some time towards the end of the last century (the XX) the desire to write a novel caught my fancy. I had no idea about what to write and neither did I have a skeleton on which to pad up the details. In my spare time, often in slots as short as 15 mins, I started writing on scrap of paper. Computer was there at home, but I was still comfortable writing on paper needing long stretches to be scored out, rewritten, interposing sheets of paper and what have you.Somehow,a novel of 100,000 words about a young girl helping an older lady who was out of depth with financial matters,with some romance interwoven got published in the USA without any editing at the publisher’s end. That was Sunita. Nothing was done to promote it.
At the non-fiction level I wrote a book putting together my experience in getting through life without paying any bribes. It was published by one of the NGOs I work with. It is for free distribution to interested people, not for sale.For me it had always been a pleasure writing, for my own pleasure. In a male controlled society and economy women are making valiant efforts to succeed and break through the interestingly termed glass ceiling to rise higher and higher. I find fascinating to write about this phenomenon.
Publishing and marketing is secondary. That is why I never bothered about the present novel, Through The Glass Ceiling, until Vishwakarma took it on. Now I shudder at the thought of promoting the present offering.
