The Big Launch at Chennai's sparkling Amethyst.

 

Trick to get large crowds at your event: get Karthik Kumar, the city's best StandUp as your Chief Guest!

And then the first Interview & Review. (Whew!)

I think the main reason I write books is to catch up with old HTA pals! 

Meeting some after 40 years...oh what joy and screams marked this event at Quill & Canvas, as we return to the scene of the crime. Same bookshop, same gang, same place, different book:-)

 Quill and Canvas, for Runaway Writers, 2016

Quill &Canvas, for Oops & Downs of Advertising, 2011

BOOK LAUNCH AT WORLD BOOK FAIR IN DELHI.

IN Conversation with the delightful Deva Priya Roy

I couldn't have asked for a more sparky charming gal than Devapriya...straight out of my book! (Famed author of Heat &Dust). A cheering family comes along to fab events lines up at Delhi. 

A fab morning's chat with the IWA gals of Chennai.

 

A presentation on How to Appear Ridiculously Well Read, 

and then  a chat with Sushi Natarajan on the Book.

The word blog, I just realised, rhymes with slog.

Having just declared “I am going to go right back to blogging again”, I can see what a lot of hard work and commitment it takes to be a regular blogger. And yet the world is full of writers, who aren’t even actual writer writers, merrily blogging on, churning out in 400-words or so, ‘Dear Diary’ entries for the whole wide world to enjoy.

I remember the first time we heard the word blog, wondering uneasily if it was some kind of monster or a form of bodily discomfort. Turns out the origins of the word ‘blog’ owes its roots to an American Jorn Barger, as way back as 1997, who came up with the word weblog—to describe ‘logging the web’ as he surfed. Then Peter Merholz  broke up the word weblog to we blog, more as a joke --rendering it at once into not just a new–age noun but a verb as well. And that was in 1999.

And then arrived handy blogging techie tools to make it all a breeze for millions of wannabe authors, closet journos, and secret scribes, making it possible for anyone to become a published writer, instantly. I have just read that there are more than 8 million blogs online, and that a new blog is created every 8 seconds. (ie in the time it took to write the last sentence, another blogger was born). And I am sure most of us can’t remember when exactly the word blogging casually entered our lives, much like googling and tweeting.

Well I now have my second book out, ‘Runaway Writers’. I was told by a friend from the digital community recently, “Now that you are launching a new book, you better start a blog site at once…” I realised with a jolt that I did in fact already have one. Just sitting there in cyberspace. (It’s much like an automatic chappati-maker we all wish to buy when we see it on TV, and then realise we already actually have one , bought several years ago, sitting quietly  in our kitchen closet).

So I am now taking my blog out of the closet where it has languished for a few years, un-up dated, un-read,  rapidly uploading a few of my earlier writings to make it alive and breathe again , and start the slog again...

 I mean blog...

Time for the official Author portrait. Who else but Rauf...