Kiran Manral's Blog, page 48
June 19, 2015
Yashodhara Lal on her latest book ‘There’s Something About You’….
Y, as I know her, or Yashodhara as the vast populace of the reading public knows her, like me, was part of the immensely supportive community of mommy bloggers way back when our kids were little and our angst was high. Along with Parul Sharma, we were three from Mumbai who blogged about our respective offspring and eventually, growing disenchanted with blogging, we in our own individual journeys moved on to writing books. This one, There’s Something About You, is Yashodhara’s third book and here’s what she has to say about it.
”I never intended to write this book as a love story, but it seems to have turned out that way. It’s not a typical love story anyway – Trish is 28, unemployed, single and highly, highly sarcastic. She’s convinced she doesn’t need anyone in her life and she’s fine the way she is. But then, she gets fired and suddenly finds herself in a lot of trouble given that she’s got two dependent parents and her father has Alzheimer’s. The story has quite a few twists and turns and complications which differentiate it from a regular romance – there are various issues touched upon including dealing with loss, guilt, the many layers of friendship, relationships at work and at home and of course, complications with finding love in urban India- it primarily follows the journey of self-discovery in a young woman’s own head. Sahil is a key character in the book and he’s interesting because he’s not just a tall, brown-eyed, sensitive boy, but he also has flashes of insight that give him special psychic powers. Kind of unusual, isn’t it? I loved writing this book, and I just hope it finds readers who’ll love it too!
Three sample chapters are available for free on this landing page right here – http://www1.yashodharalal.com/some-thing-about-you/”
My copy is here, and I plan to get to it this weekend. Go get yours.
June 18, 2015
Webinar with Womens Web on June 26th 11 am to noon
Fri, Jun 26, 2015 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM IST
Show in My Time Zone
How easy is it for aspiring authors in India to be published today? Is self-publishing the right thing for you? Even if a publisher wants to publish your work, what should you watch out for?This interactive webinar with Kiran Manral, Author of two published books with a third on the way, is meant to help aspiring authors on their journey to get published.
Kiran Manral was a journalist before she quit to be full time mommy. Her blogs were both in India’s top blogs and she was a Tehelka blogger columnist on gender issues.
Her debut novel, The Reluctant Detective, was published by Westland in 2012 and her second novel Once Upon A Crush, was published by Leadstart in May 2014. Her third book is due out in August from Penguin Random House.
She initiated the online volunteer network India Helps, post the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai and the team of volunteers worked on the rehabilitation of the affected and the bereaved of this and the 13/7 bomb blasts amongst others. She is also part of the core founding team of both Child Sexual Abuse Awareness online initiative and Violence Against Women Awareness Month.
She is on the planning board of the Kumaon Literary Festival and is an advisor on the Board of Literature Studio, Delhi. She was awarded the Women Achievers award by Young Environmentalists Group in 2013.
She lives in Mumbai with her family and counts every day off the Nutella wagon as a successful day.
[Note: This webinar requires you to first register here and then make a small payment to confirm your participation. Making a payment lets us bring you useful webinars like these, and also ensures that you add it to your calendar! In case you miss making the payment: this is where you go: http://www.womensweb.in/shop/writers-special-webinar-pass/%5D
June 15, 2015
An interview with me and the offspring on LetsGetOutdoorsy.com
A few days ago, the lovely Diipti Jhangiani, of Travel Diaries (http://www.diipti.in/) dropped in at home to chat with the son and me on the importance of sport in our lives. I was struck by two things, the first was her enthusiasm for LetsGetOutdoorsy.com, an initiative she’s begun to promote sport and fitness in India, and the second, actually a second and a third, her lovely mellifluous voice and beautiful eyes.
Here’s the podcast of the recording. What do you think, how can we encourage more sport and fitness in our everyday lives? I’m the most unsporty person ever, but I do make an effort to be moderately active. I worry for the next generation that is growing up as couch potatoes or being surgically attached to their gadgets. My son has a sport he is now passionate about. Thanks to him, I lead a much more active life than I did earlier. How do we bring the love for sports and fitness into the next generation? Would love to hear what you think in the comments section. Do listen in.
June 2, 2015
Love in the time of Whatsapp
Let us call her A. A is not what her first name begins with, but then, that’s okay. Many people she knows don’t know her by her first name. A is in her late twenties, living in Mumbai, galloping from strength to strength in her professional career. Her love life is a series of train wrecks punctuated by sudden, intermittent relationships that go from 0 to 180 kmph in a week or two and then end up as expressway casualties.
“I have bad relationship karma,” she tells me laughing, and then fishes out her phone again to click click click swipe swipe swipe and check out her Whatsapp, her FB, her Twitter, her Instagram. For the hour we are together, to ostensibly catch up, over coffee, she spends more than 30 minutes peering into her phone.
She is to meet, in the flesh, a person she has recently connected with over on Facebook the next day. Her face has the glow of new love. “We met on a common friend’s wall,” she tells me. He sent her a friend request, she accepted it, they’ve been chatting for weeks on FB, and then Whatsapp and have done the occasional Facetime. Now it is time to take the relationship to the moment of truth, meeting in the flesh. She’s nervous, who wouldn’t be?
“What if he has bad breath? Or we don’t connect, don’t have any chemistry?”
She already knows his favourite colour, his favourite book, his favourite television show, the name of the first girl he kissed, and some stuff she will not share with me, because, well, its rather risqué. She has shared with him the story of her previous break up, they’ve found friends in common, they have DMed each other for days. It has been a bonding experience. They have already sexted.
“Mild stuff,” she tells me. “Nothing hardcore.”
I sit upright when she tells me this.
“Come on, don’t be such a prude, this is quite normal, sexting someone doesn’t necessarily mean I will sleep with him,” she laughs, as she sees my face rearrange itself into a disapproving prune.
I’m a dinosaur, from an age of love-letters and Hallmark cards. Kind souls would call my notions of romance antique in this day and age of love over the electronic medium, when the most romantic thing in a day can be the ping of an incoming notification, and when you agonise over the interminable delay between the message read notification and the reply received.
I can’t help but think back to how much simpler things were back when I was dating. Given I dated one man and then eventually married him, I don’t have much experience to draw on for comparison, but I do realise that we were definitely just barely just one level higher from the days of Meghdootam and subsequently carrier pigeons, who could be relied upon to bring back a return message if trained well. Both of us had no telephones in our homes, which made fixing dates rather difficult. Consequently, this meant that the hapless to be boyfriend took recourse to haunting every potential spot I would be at like a well fed spectre. (On an aside, this was back in the day when you applied for a telephone and waited for years, grew old and lowered both legs into the grave, ever hopeful that your landline allotment letter would come someday. And when it did, you would spend the month never leaving home, or even getting into a long shower, in case the telephone company man came to install your phone and went away finding the door locked.) Mobiles of course, were still a nasty gleam in telecommunication’s eye. Letters came in via snail mail and a postman who knew your first name and enquired kindly about the health of the elderly members of the family, telegrams meant bad news and you just landed up, with luggage, at a relative’s home and hoped they were happy to see you visit.
But then, those were different times. Relationships moved as slowly too. First there was the introduction, or the wrangling of one to be orchestrated. There was mystery, there was yearning, there was waiting. There was, that delicious word, anticipation. Then there was the getting to know process, which could be long and cumbersome, especially cruel when adolescent hormones were involved. And then there was the consolidation of the relationship into something that brought the shehnai players in, or the break up which was trauma and tears and face to face.
Face to Face is a luxury in these times. We probably began when Tom Cruise broke up a marriage via a fax machine, and then Russell Brand told Katy Perry he was ending their marriage via text. Relationships now ending via email and Whatsapp are more common than one would think. Endings are becoming easier. Beginnings are becoming easier. What is getting tougher is the in between—the staying in love.
Things, they are different these days. The young ones today are in a different zone where love and relationships are concerned. One where they learn all that there is to learn about the object of one’s affection, sometimes, even without meeting the person. Google and Facebook stalking is convenient to find out all that one can about the person, without needing often, the heart to heart conversations that are an integral part of the getting to know each other. Chats are emojis and whatsapp, sometimes snapchat, which is as ephemeral as conversations should be, how does one relive conversations that fade out into the ether at the touch of a button, how does one recall a tone of typing.
“It helps you cut through the clutter faster,” A tells me. “What if you spend time and effort going out with someone a couple of times only to realise you don’t like the same music or the same shows or the same kind of food? What then?”
I nod. “But it shouldn’t matter,” I should say, with the limited experience of one who has married another who is completely on the other side of the coffee-tea/ beach-mountain/idli-vada divide, and knows it really doesn’t but then I don’t.
We cheek kiss and part. She promises to tell me how it went. She messages me a couple of days later. “When is a good time to talk?”
I call her back. “We had nothing to talk about. It was awkward. We already knew everything about each other. Well most of it. And he was shorter than I thought he would be. It was strange,” she said. She had a list in her head and boxes to be ticked. Like most of us do when it comes to romantic partners, only sometimes you cannot really know how you react to a person until you meet him or her. Face to face.
It was a risk, meeting someone she knew only through mutual acquaintances on Facebook and had accepted a friendship request on a whim. But it was a risk she took well. We are ourselves just one generation away from those who got married to strangers they met barely once. And then, everyone is a stranger until one gets to know them, in this, the era of six degrees of social media separation.
“We just didn’t click in person. It was like meeting someone who should have been so familiar, but was actually a stranger.” Like a pen friend, I think to myself, of the antiquarian custom of exchanging letters with strangers from around the world, back in the days where hitting send meant changing out of your pajamas and hitting the post office to get stamps and an aerogramme envelope, and sometimes sending pressed flowers you’ve made yourself to those you really like. One cannot press flowers in an e-reader. One does not pick flowers anymore to press them for eternity and a day. One orders flowers, and arranges them in neat vases, and disposes them when they fade away. There is no time to press flowers for eternity when we change status updates and DPs on an hourly basis.
She sighed. “He’s actually more fun on chat than in person. I’m going to continue chatting with him, but I don’t think I’ll meet him again.” There was a brief pause. “He spent all the time we were together on his phone, he was probably chatting with someone else.”
Love perhaps, in this generation, is when you finally put the phone down with no overwhelming urgency to reply to that mail just now this very second, check your notifications as they come in, shut down that app, remove your profile from that dating site, change your relationship status to “In a Relationship.” Perhaps love is when you can bear to stare into the other’s eyes for longer than you stare into your phone. Love is when you discover that there is a music to laughter that an emoji can’t convey, that there is a longing in a glance that a Good morning text cannot measure up to, even if it stands up on stilts, love is the waiting for a call, a reunion, a meeting of, the feel of a person, the smell of a person, a touch, a glance, experiencing the layers fall away as one reveals more and more of oneself without really getting into what is out there for everyone to know on your online social media profile. Maybe romance today is wooing via emoticons. But how does one press a Whatsapp message to one’s heart, how does one even begin to understand the bittersweet joy of waiting, of not knowing, of yearning, in this the era of instant messaging, skyping, facetime, where there is no lack of instant availability, where the only lack perhaps, is that of focused attention.
But then, love and relationships are different these days. I do know lovely stories of folks who have met online, and realised they’ve met their soulmates. But those are few and far between. Technology is a wonderful tool for meeting people one might have never met in one’s everyday routine, outside one’s normal circumference of friends, family and workplace. The good stories exist. But do they outnumber the other stories, those looking for love and thinking they’ve found it, only to begin looking again.
For every tentative “what’s up” message sent across, the “you’re in my thoughts” version of the generic joke forward so it doesn’t come across as too needy, there’s the walk of shame from the hell of the drunk text sent at 3am to the sobering light of the morning, where there is no recall of having sent it. That moment when a quick glance at the phone show multiple drunk texts sent out at an hour when spirits prowl the earth, is a not good thing when the morning after hangover is still hard at work on your temples, and any thought of food induces nausea. Some of the messages sent out have replies. Some of the messages you wish you could unsend, but then this is what it is, a touch of a button and a missive fired off into the void of space where the recipient will know nothing about what has been the precursor to the sending of it. There is no context, only characters, emoticons, some misspelled words and a trembling emotion that hides behind the blue white light of the expressionless screen.
Maybe this is what romance is now. A plethora of options, pick and choose what is available at that moment in time when you need to be needed. It is limitless, always available, beautiful strangers available at a swipe of an app screen. All looking for love. Everyone around seems to have it perfect, they display this perfection of relationships on their Facebook feeds, the couple statuses, the photographs of them cuddling, the cootchie cooing on public timelines, the Instagram updates. Relationships are made for mass consumption these days. Except the ones that are meant to be hidden in the shadowy recesses of DM columns. Then comes the disillusionment. It doesn’t work anymore, there is something out there that is better, shinier, newer and that comes without the baggage, and at an off season discount. Of 140 characters of an tweet being dissected for deeper meaning. A status message meant to be a sly post targeted at the one you’ve fallen out of love with about the state of your heart. The fragility of your emotions put out for the consumption of the flotsam jetsam of the egghead followers. Another break up. Because breaking up is now as easy as falling in love was. It is just an email away. Or a Whatsapp message away. A chat history deletion away.
Till the next connection. Till the next emoticon that thrills your heart. Till the next shy, tentative connection made via a hesitant ‘hi wassup’ via DM. And the roller coaster begins all over again.
May 31, 2015
My Parent Quotient post for the week
Posted by Kiran Manral
One of the greatest challenges I face as a parent is as to how to keep the child up with all the General Knowledge he needs to know. The child is not a natural reader, and his curiosity is limited to the little universe of Pokémon cards and characters and WWE superstars that he inhabits, with the remainder of the precious curiosity given to investigating about past greats in swimming, a sport he is a part of.
General knowledge is something I know is essential for him to have in his arsenal and one can never have enough general knowledge to get by on. So how does one, as a hapless parent of a child who barely reads, get him interested in expanding his knowledge about the universe he lives in?
Here’s what I have been trying over the past few months, and hoping it works.
Read the rest of the post here
May 25, 2015
When one man’s passion leads to a cultural bonanza
An article on the Kumaon Literary Festival scheduled for October 2015 in Mukteshwar and Nainital in yesterday’s TOI.
Take a bow Sumant Batra.
ALMORA: Come October, the hills of Kumaon will serve as the backdrop to a gathering of famous personalities in literature, politics, media and cinema who will congregate at a sleepy village in Dhanachauli, near Mukteshwar, for the five-day Kumaon Literary Festival (KLF).
KLF, whose organizers claim it is the country’s first annual ‘retreat literature fest’, will be held from October 23 to 27 at Te Aroha resort and will see participation from over 80 speakers including Amish Tripathi, Satyarth Nayak, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sanjay Gupta and Santosh Desai.
The festival is the brainchild of writer and senior corporate lawyer Sumant Batra and has eminent Supreme Court lawyer Saif Mahmood, authors Geetanjali Shree, Sudeep Sen and Kiran Manral, and Priya Kapoor of Roli Books on its planning board.
Besides, about 30 students from schools in remote villages will be selected to participate in the event through a competition to be held in June. Workshops will be held over four months to hone their skills in Hindi and English with special emphasis in writing prowess.
Young editors of different Delhi-based college magazines will also be hand-picked for participation by the board.
The first four days of the fest will be open to registered participants who can sign up for the event from July onwards.
“KLF will focus on the quality of attendees, rather than the quantity. For the first four days, 200 attendees will be invited per day of which 100 will be local residents, including school and college students,” said Batra.
On the concluding day, the festival will travel to Nainital and throw its doors open to all. Every single session conducted in course of the five days will be available for enthusiasts on the internet.
KLF will be the first ‘retreat’ lit fest in the country, making it a truly unique experience, claim organizers. “The fest will not be confined to ballrooms or hotel premises. Speakers and participants will stay at a beautiful hamlet for three to five days interacting in the midst of nature, going for walks, participating in poetry-reading sessions under the open skies,” Batra added.
The festival is expected to provide a boost to employment and tourism opportunities in the area where more than a dozen summerhouses will cater to visitors and in turn, provide a boost to villagers’ economic conditions.
Read the original here
May 19, 2015
A Parent Quotient post from a couple of weeks ago-When your tween finally gets online
By a strange fluke of fate, a tab entered the home a couple of years after I had declared the home a no gadget zone and disposed of the iPad. The offspring took to it like the proverbial duck to water, squawking excitedly to add verisimilitude to the scene. He was two years older now from the time he had been introduced and then surgically separated from the iPad. Surely that would also mean a trifle more responsible about his time, and there were always benefits to technology, I thought. He could download apps which would help him with studying, watch videos on competitive swimming that he trains for and not to mention videos on topics relevant to the syllabus he needed to study. He, obviously, had other plans. Before I could blink, he had downloaded WhatsApp and Instagram and was hard at work informing the world at large about his arrival into cyberspace. While I rushed to put privacy controls in place and learning his password by heart for supervising purposes, I wondered how, as a parent I could introduce him to the joys of online social networking but simultaneously ensure that he stays clear of the very real and tangible dangers of social networking.
Here are ten tips that could help you keep your kids safe online.
Read the rest of the post here
My Parent Quotient post for last week: Making sure your child eats right
One of the mainstays of making sure that your child is strong and healthy is by ensuring he or she gets a proper diet. Given these are growing years, everything that a child eats is important in terms of energy for activities and to aid muscle and bone growth. How does one make sure, as a parent, that the child gets a right balance of healthy eating that provides him or her enough energy and nutrition to fuel activity, studying and growth, as well as provide the child with enjoyable, healthy food that curbs the very real and present danger of childhood obesity that seems to be an epidemic these days? Here are some things you need to keep in mind.
Read the rest of the post here
