A Taste of the Bangalore Literary Scene

In the matter of letters, yesterday was a red-letter day, for me here in Bangalore.

First, I got to meet Pradeep Bahirwani, the author of The Youngest Daughter, a book set in the Khasi Hills, a place where I have deep roots and which, in many ways, is home for me. I had stumbled upon the book quite by accident on Amazon Kindle and finding the author’s email address sent an exploratory email even before I had read the book. The response was quick and in two days there we were sipping coffee at the Café Coffee Day in Koramangala.

The Youngest Daughter is a very well-written book with a compelling story (I read it in two settings, hampered only by the need to charge the device) set in the hill-station town of Shillong where my home is and where I was living during the same time period as the events of the novel. It was difficult for me to believe initially that the author was by education an engineer. But Pradeep is an amalgam of many things – engineer, writer, entrepreneur, inventor, golfer … and I’m sure, many more besides. The book is extremely well-edited and formatted for a self-published book. I found during our conversation that Pradeep was a merciless editor slashing the manuscript nearly in half to arrive at its final form.

We could have continued our conversation for many more hours if it were not for the fact that Pradeep was headed to a book presentation at the quaint Atta Galatta, a charming bookstore and café, housed, I’m told, in the ancestral home of its booklover owners, Subodh Sankar and Lalitha Lakshmi, who gave up the corporate world to follow their passion – literature and the arts. Atta Galatta has become the happening place for literary events and a haven for book lovers of all ages. (www.attagalatta.com)

I couldn’t resist tagging along with Pradeep. The book presentation was of Solitude and Other Obsessions, a collection of poems of five Indian poets who write in English. Of the five, Uma Sudhindra, Binod Panda, Trupti Kalamdani, Shruti Arabatti were present, while the fifth, Saurin Desai was not. I was amazed at the diversity of their day jobs (engineer, anesthesiologist, entrepreneur, activist, etc.) as well as their mastery over English, fluent as they appeared to be in their own regional languages. The compilation is an excellent joint effort by first timers.  There are several outstanding poems that strike the innermost core of the reader and some that did not hit the mark. But, all in all, a job well done!

For a change, it felt good to be on the other side of the fence at a book presentation and draw vicarious pleasure from everything that was going on around me, seated in the last row of the audience.

Although my baggage is already way over the limit for the forthcoming flights, I knew what I had to do. At a mere ₹199 ($3) the book was a steal and I did not lose any time getting it autographed by the four poets present.

Being an author myself, that seemed the right thing to do.