"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh PalMan is born. He dies. Between the two events lies his tragicomic lifetime, a cocktail of emotions, thoughts, ideas and actions. He bobs along under the delusion of a well-planned order but life awaits him at blind turns. He may then howl, shards tearing into his soul or he may choose to let the blood sing in his veins. In either case, the mask slips often.
Rather than charge like the Light Brigade, most mince along, watching their step, glancing behind, primed to ward off ambush. This treacherous negotiation calls for skills. We compromise, we pretend, we condemn, we judge and on rare occasions we take courage and are kind.
It is those bitter sweet increments we live in that these super short yarns seek to capture and reflect. Written for the busy, they entertain and educate, leaving you to ponder long after you have sat back, fighting a frown and a smile.
Neerja Sangha
In the India of the nineteen eighties, ambition was not a nice word, only losers enrolled in the humanities stream at senior school and the word most often used to describe life was “struggle”. Neerja Sangha’s path received further definition when she married into the armed forces. There was always a given way of going about things.
Life was good, regulated enough to ensure security yet elastic enough to tolerate the occasional adventure. The natural thing to do would have been to cruise along. But what does one do when a person’s default setting is frozen at ‘challenging’? A keen eye moreover, for the unending byplays in human lives and the desire to assert integrity inspired her narrative of the truth as she saw it.
This author’s fuel was a memory of the girl she was at seventeen when her hands would shake riffling the latest issue of ‘The Illustrated Weekly’, she wanted to become a writer that badly.
A trained teacher, media person and presenter, Neerja Sangha blogs at http://confessionsofanambitiousmother.blogspot.com/
Having patterned her life along the dictum of ‘to learn is to live’, she studies Spanish and attends Piano lessons today. Brought up to believe that life is given to each of us in trust, this book is a validation of that spirit.
