Mining the archives for book ideas - by Harini

Where do you get your ideas? No but seriously what do you use for inspiration: art, music, landscape, the news, dreams, family stories . . . ? 

Whenever I'm stumped for ideas, I go to my favourite place - the archives, where I stumble across the strangest things. 

For example, the case of William Edward James, a Mysore surveyor who only wanted to do his job. But in 1873, he had to contend with farmers who threw stones at him, absentee bullock cart drivers who preferred to drive their bullocks into...