Saiswaroopa Iyer's Blog, page 7

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

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Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Sakshi Dixit -A #Blogbuddies Guest post by Rohan Sonalkar

Welcome Rohan Sonalkar, a promising fiction writer to my blog, as a part of Blogbuddies initiative undertaken by the wonderful Richa Singh (@richa_singh), founder of @blogchatter.

In his own words, Rohan iscurrently struggling to find time from work and home to update his blog. But whenever he does, he writes short pieces of fictional reality. Do follow his blogand probably push him a bit more towards blogging more.

Who knows, we might find our next best selling fiction writer amongst us! :-...

In Conversation with Saiswaroopa Iyer, Author of Abhaya.

Saiswaroopa:

Where I share about the characterization of Abhaya, the research involved and much more!

Originally posted on picturesquereflections:

An IITian and a former analyst with a Venture Capital firm, Saiswaroopa Iyer’s interests include Startups, Economics, Carnatic Music, Philosophy, Politics, History and Literature of India. Trained in Carnatic classical music, she won a state level gold medal from TTD in rendering Annamacharya Kritis. She currently lives in London.

In this post, I a...

My first novel Abhaya, live on Kindle Store

It is a memorable moment when your first novel goes live. Abhaya and the world she lived in were in my thoughts constantly all through in the last five years and it gave me a surge of mixed feelings when I let the book go out into the market. It was a feeling akin to seeing your child go to school on her own!

Sangeeta Bahadur, author of Kaal Trilogy had some gracious words to share about Abhaya :

“An excitingly different take on one of the myriad legends celebrating the light vs darkness mat...

Can the Lutyens’ elite resolve the mistrust they evoke from an aspirational Indian? My response to @MalikAshok ‘s column.

The noted columnist, Ashok Malik in his very thoughtful pieceopines that the Modi Government needs to over come its‘Lutyens Paranoia’. He says that the under performance of the present Government in the last 18 months is a result of its dysfunctionalrelationship with Delhi and the institutions that constitute the political sinews of this city.

From an ideal point of view, a dysfunctional relationship with crucial institution is a no-no. One would not want to disengage from those domain expert...

The Oneness of Hari-Hara in Telugu Bhagavatam

First published on Myind Makersin October 2015

Harihara-abheda or Harihara-advaita, the non-duality of Shiva and Vishnu was an intellectual movement in the Telugu literary sphere led by Tikkanna Somayaji (13th Century CE), one of the poet-trinity who composed Andhra Mahabharatamu. Though the concept of the oneness of Hari and Hara did exist in the older scriptures, the contemporary conditions warranted its revival as a movement. I have blogged about what led Tikkanna Somayaji to found the mov...

Easy To Mock Hindoos And Their Holy Cows, Difficult To Truly Revere Nature

First published on Swarajya Magazine on 15 October 2015.

Jaitirth Rao in his article, this matter of beef starts with making a right statement that the present laws protect neither the cows nor the dairy farmers. This post of mine is not just a reply to his article but a call to all those who think of themselves as truly liberal (on both sides of political ideologies) to examine their arguments about beef and environmentalism and yes, ‘economic viability’.

Before I proceed, please read my cer...

Learnings from writing my first novel

Writing the first novel is equivalent to giving birth to your first child. It is just that the gestation period for a baby is nine months and that for the novel can take years. In my case It has taken more thanfive years out of which more than half the period was spent fighting the writer’s block. This post is to pen down what I learnt from the process and felt through. The aim is to share my experience with those who want to put their first story to print andothers who want to know how it fe...

Andhra Mahabharatamu Part 3 : How The Epic Reached Completion

Saiswaroopa:

Last of my three post series on Andhra Mahabharatamu on https://pittagoda.wordpress.com/

Originally posted on Pittagoda:

This is the last post in my three-piece series about Andhra Mahabharatamu and the three poets who contributed to this epic project that spanned almost to 3 centuries. The first two posts were on the contributions ofAdikavi Nannayyaand Tikkanna Somayaji.

With Tikkanna Somayaji’s marathon contribution, the Andhreekarana of Mahabharata was almost complete, except...

Ilaa, the tale of grit and change – My attempt at Times of India’s Write India Initiative

This was mysubmission to TOI’s Write India initiative, a short story competition taking place this year.Backed by a team of published authors, the process requiresthe participants to work on a certain prompt given by an author every month.

The prompt for this story (in the brown font below) was given by Amish Tripathi in the month of July 2015. My attempt could not make it to the top ones ( :( ). But of course, there were people who seemed to have worked hard on it for the whole month and I c...