Author: Shweta Taneja

Shweta Taneja writes fiction and science for kids and adults. Her bestselling works include a unique two-in-one flipbook which covers real stories of Indian scientists: They Made What? They Found What?, graphic novel Krishna: Defender of Dharma and critically-acclaimed fantasy fiction series Anantya Tantrist Mysteries. She was a finalist in the prestigious French award Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, AutHer 2022 award and has been awarded Editor’s Choice Award for best Asian science fiction. She is a Charles Wallace Writing Fellow and has given talks at international SF conferences including WorldCon at Dublin, Eurocon in France and the Cartoon Museum at London. Her work has been translated to Romanian, French and Dutch. Find her online with her handle @shwetawrites
Posted on

The end is here!

120 days of daily of writing

One year of planning

1,17,835 words

132 pages of words

472 kb size of a word document

IMG_20121026_124353

Like I always believed. Numbers don’t tell you anything about the story. It is a beautiful story, btw, this one, of magical pubs and other places, creatures, people, humans and blood and violence and humour and lots of other things. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s Bollywood masala and sweat, all mixed up.

It’s my second novel. It’s a fantasy book, the one I always wanted to write. The one I wasn’t sure I could. When I wrote the words ‘The End’ many emotions rolled inside of me. Elation! Ten years ago, I thought I couldn’t even write an article. Two years ago, I was convinced that I couldn’t write a novel, but wanted to try anyway. Tears of having to say bye to characters I have cared for since the last whole year. What happens to them after I write ‘The End’? Their stories are not complete, not by far. They are still in my heart, thinking up of new adventures. I don’t know if my body will have the strength to write more stories about them. Or if I will move on to others.

This novel is double the size of my last—not only in words, but also scope and imagination. It has made me bleed with sweat, frustration, tears, emotion, crazy depression and even hallucination. I have loved it and hated it. I was never bored in its vast middle, always living in a weird rollercoaster while writing every word of it (as my family and friends will tell you) . As I say good-bye to the characters I have created (did i?), nurtured, become friends me, I feel tears in my eyes. I am so proud of all of them. I find them funny, frustrating and fun. They are my gang, my friends. And the adventures they have, are mind-bogglingly crazy! Unlike my relatively boring life.

This is not the end really. It’s just one-third of the work, as I experienced in my debut novel. This would have to be send through the vast drums of editing, rewriting, editing and some more rewriting. Novel writing is for madwomen. Finally, I know a profession, a career, a passion which suits my particular type of madness!

For now though, I am ready to party! And then move on…for a while atleast to the next fun thing.

–THE END–

Posted on

Kali and the patriarchal fears

She’s naked, covered with ashes, her hair matted with snakes in them, a garland of skulls and freshly cut heads around her neck. She laughs like madness herself, dancing to the chaotic rhythm of death, dragging a corpse behind her which she licks with her blood-red tongue from time to time.

Now imagine meeting her in the middle of the night on a dark lonely path. Here’s an old description – a dhyana mantra of Guhya Kali, one of the forms of Kali. The tantric text is called Tantrasaara and is written by Krishnananda Aagamavgisa.

2275223546_3ffee6f8ee

“She is dark as a great cloud, clad in dark clothes. Her tongue is poised as if to lick. She has fearful teeth, sunken eyes and is smiling. She wears a necklace of snakes, the half-moon rests on her forehead, she has matted hair, and is engaged in licking a corpse. her sacred thread is a snake, and she lies on a bed of snakes. She holds a garland of fifty heads. She has a large belly, and on her head is Ananta with a thousand heads. On all sides she is surrounded by snakes….She has a snake-girdle and an anklet of jewels. On her left is to be imagined Shiva in the form of a boy. She has two hands and has corpses for ear ornaments. Her face, decked with bright new jewels, shows she is pleased and calm.”

She’s not likeable. Hell, she’s scary. In Hindu mythology, she’s nature— something that causes death and destruction, something that’s wild and raging, something that’s unpredictable and uncontrollable. Her hair are wild and open (mark of undomesticated woman or someone who doesn’t belong to a husband-ry), she dances naked outside. Both being naked and being outside is something that is forbidden to the female gender in our society.

You wouldn’t invite her into your homes (unlike the more demure Lakshmi, goddess of wealth or Saraswati, goddess of knowledge). She’s wild, frantic, out of control. She’s nature in its more fearful, horrific form, an earthquake, a hurricane, a tsunami. Her world is the one where a dog butchers another and all of them perish.

No wonder the patriarchal society, the cultured society, the rule based, control-based society, you and me, tremble at the very thought of her. You see, the patriarchal society is all about control – through rules, rituals, and routines. Do this, and you will get this. Do this and this and you can prevent death and disease from happening to you. If there’s a death in a neighbour’s house, don’t go there, for you might catch that disease.

If there’s a garbage-collector coming near you, step away, even though he takes your own garbage. Don’t touch him as he touches something filthy and you will become filthy too. Oh, your left hand is by default filthy. It wipes your bum after all!

Both genders are mired in rules, rituals and routines in this society – all in an effort to control life, prosper and save oneself from death. A man should control his estate and his woman, a woman should control her body and keep herself inside the house, under her husband. Both should stick to the codified laws of dharma created by some rishis a few thousand years ago. People most probably too stuck up to let their hair down.

Since she’s uncontrollable and fearful, like everything else, she’s associated with tantrics, who all mainstream Hindus see as charlatans, black magicians or simply people who are evil or threaten the codes of the patriarchal society. Like Bhairava (Both Kali and Bhairava feature in one of the most beautiful stories I have written in my upcoming graphic novel The Skull Rosary) she’s a goddess who belongs to the fringes of the society. She and her worshippers are associated with blood sacrifice, sometimes even human sacrifice. S

he’s the patron of thugs and witches—both of whom threaten the society’s status quo. Patriarchal society intellectuals have alternatively looked at her ugly form (by societal standards) as filthy, fearful or downright disgusting. That’s the reason you would not see rich merchants in Calcutta or Gujarat worshipping her. She’s of the night, meant for those who roam about the shamshaan in the night. She’s death itself.

If you worship her, you are either crazy or inconceivably evil. You are definitely not a well-wisher of the society. You are an outsider. Her image is the opposite to the mainstream, civilized society. She distrupts society. Personally, she inspires me and pushes me to write. She is the destruction and inspiration of creative energies itself and my heart beats in tandava with every step she takes.

I wrote this blog long time ago, but am sharing it here to celebrate the upcoming Kali puja. May you be as understanding of the darkness as you are of light.

 

Enjoy some of the visuals I have collected of her—most of them are drawn by painters, created by sculptures in the last 1000 years.

 

I will do another blog post on the Bengal traditions of her as soon as I find time to study that! Did you like this blog?

Posted on

Take time out to customize Timeline

Have you been switched to Facebook’s Timeline? Here’s what you can do to protect your privacy

 

Timeline allows just about anybody to search through your posts by year, unless you tweak your privacy settings<br /><br />

In its early days, Facebook was an intimate space where people were off guard and goofed around with close friends. Then it became bigger, and before you knew it, you had your family, colleagues and even your boss there. Timeline has now changed things further by making your profile much more accessible, and by default, highly public. You need to make some changes to your settings, and quickly, if you haven’t already. Here are some things you must not do:
Don’t disclose your location
It’s tempting to tell everyone, but no place online is private, so keep your address and location to yourself—remember, anyone, just about anyone at all, can see this information if it’s published on your Timeline. As a rule, never include where, when and for how many days you might be on vacation.
Settings: Facebook’s default setting is to disclose your location. In the left-bottom of the status message box is a rounded arrow pointing downwards. If it shows your city, you can click on it to disable geo-location. For Facebook Mobile, check the app settings on your smartphone and switch off Messenger Location Services.
Don’t let the apps decide
Applications on Facebook ask for access to your personal information and post to your wall when you use them. Even apps you’ve given permission to months ago and never use are still collecting data.
Settings: In your Privacy Settings on Facebook, click on Ads, Apps and Websites. Apps You Use shows a list of apps, and you can give app-level permissions for each individual app. You can tweak these one by one, keeping in mind the needs of each app, and you can remove apps you don’t use any more.
Don’t forget the old updates
Remember the kind of stuff you were posting on Facebook four years ago? Facebook has by default made it all public and has also made it easier for anyone to see what you were up to by putting down your activities by year.
Settings: Click on the Account menu, go to Privacy Settings and find Limit the Audience for Past Posts. Choose Manage Past Post Visibility to quickly clean up your early years on Facebook. After that, it’s still a good idea to scroll down the Timeline and see if there are private posts to hide.
Don’t post to public
Public means just that—everyone in the online world can see updates marked public. By default, your name, gender, user name, user ID, profile picture and cover photo on Facebook are public information. Posts you make on Pages and in Groups are automatically public, so never get into an argument with anyone there. All your posts are also public, but you can change the setting for those.
Settings: Go to Privacy Settings. In Control Privacy When You Post, choose who all can see the status updates, photos and information you post. Change who can see posts made from your Facebook mobile app too. This will handle new posts, but for old posts, you need to go to your Timeline and manually change the visibility of each post. It’s tedious, but important.
Don’t forget Timeline privacy settings
Your Timeline can be seen by anyone on Facebook with a simple name search. Default settings are mostly public, so anyone can see your information—from relatively innocuous details such as the city you live in, to more sensitive details such as your contact information.
Settings: Go to your Timeline and click on the Update Info button. Each section of the profile has an edit button to change visibility levels.

Read the complete story on the HT Mint website.

Posted on

Krishna tweetathon

Krishna commands you to come out with all the weird questions about Krishna: Defender of Dharma and ask them on Twitter. I will be there as will be the talented artist of the graphic novel, Rajesh N (@rajeshcolors) and Campfire (@campfireindia) to talk about how we created this marvelous book. Join us at #krishnacampfire  tomorrow evening at 4.30pm.

 

Twitter POST copy

Posted on

Me on Krishna

Made this video for Comic Con India where Krishna was announced. My first attempt at trying to make a video. Slightly embarrassed! Hope you can see the humour in it or well, you can always laugh at my horrid attempt of video making, can’t you? 🙂 Go on, see it!

 

 

Thanks to Uthara for working on this with me and pushing me to try a bit harder (am crazy lazy at retakes as she can tell you at length).

Posted on

Villains are not evil, just different

Don’t you think so? I have always enjoyed figuring out my villains and why they do things that they do. Are they inherently evil or are they just misled? What is it they are fighting? Because fight they do, constantly, against social norms and status quos.

During writing Krishna, I met many villains, each with a different point of view, with a twisted (not necessarily a bad twist) philosophy and something ‘bad’ that they would have done. Krishna would punish them, decisively, unquestionably, with righteousness. He had to, since he was restoring dharma, a philosophy to prosper civilization, bring justice and equality. Personally, I am not sure how much I would agree to his ideology but I know there are millions in India who would still consider his path the status quo.

For me, each of these so called villains were point of views – different from Krishna’s ideology—which come in the mythology. They are punished, sometimes undeservingly, but their philosophies are never explored more in the story.

Take Kansa for example. Is he really the evil uncle? Or is there more to him? By not respecting Indra, is he actually fighting a war against the hierarchy and unfairness of gods who have labelled him and the demon clan inherently evil? Are these not his gods, but of others who are alien to him? We never find out his point of view, just broken parts of it, as the mythology is not about him but Krishna.

Kamsa 1

 

Then there’s Jarasandha. He’s a good king, his kingdom is prosperous. His rule is just. He’s powerful and has a mighty army, so refuses to bow down. Why does Krishna want him dead? The given reason is that he has captured princes of other kingdoms after defeating them, but frankly even in the Purana, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason. Krishna devises a convoluted, sneaky way of killing off the mighty king. I wanted to find out more about Jarasandha, but unfortunately, yet again, our mythology is more focused on Vishnu’s avatar.

 

JarasandhJarasandh 1

 

In both these cases, are villains just the other point of view, a view which might be an alien culture, a different way of civilization or simply the unknown? While writing this book, it was difficult for me not to ask these questions. I hope these cracks show through in the book as well. Have you read the book? Did you see these cracks?

 

All sketches are drawn by Rajesh N and are copyrights of Campfire

Posted on

The right app(roach) for writing

Do you find it hard to actually get down to writing? Some of these apps and websites may be of help

 

There’s help at hand for everything—from creative ideas to a nudge, even the company of others. Illustration: Raajan/Mint

Got the feeling that you too could write a book if you had the time? If you harbour a secret wish to become a writer, we have a solution for you—technology aids which can help you overcome writer’s block, keep you motivated or help you spur your imagination.

I procrastinate/I am not motivated enough

Fear is a primal emotion. It makes you react in unexpected, emotional ways. Destroy the block in your mind which is not letting you write with Write or Die, a Web app which pushes you to write more, with gentle and harsh penalties if you don’t start typing. “The app encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing,” says the website. Write or Die gives you an online textbox to write in and comes with an auto-save feature. You can use the app in three modes—Gentle Mode, where a box pops up if you stop writing for a certain amount of time; Normal Mode, which plays an unpleasant sound if you don’t continue to write; and the desperate Kamikaze Mode, which will delete what you have already written if you don’t write more.

If you don’t want negative reinforcement, try out Written? Kitten! instead, which rewards you for getting work done. The app rewards you with a cutesy kitten photograph for every 100 (or 200 or 500 or 1,000) words that you write. The kitten photographs are selected randomly from Flickr’s “most interesting” photos matching the tags “kitten” and “cute”. You get the picture? If you haven’t, then write some more.

Write or Die is available online for Mac, PC and Linux ($10, or around Rs.525) and on iTunes for iPad ($9.99).

Written? Kitten! is available online for free.

I am overwhelmed by ideas

Whether you’re writing or filing a report for work or college, your text needs to be linear and logical, but that’s not how your brain functions. Your brain tends to send spurts of ideas, connections, links and visuals all together on the topic you have been thinking about. And collating all of it into an ordered linear progression can be an uphill task.

According to The Mind Map Book created by Tony and Barry Buzan (2010), the solution is to create a mind map of the idea. A mind map starts with a basic idea and helps you radiate outwards and develop it by putting in associated ideas, words, concepts and links, closely resembling the brain’s neuronal structure with its infinite connections and its multilateral thinking, write the Buzans in their book.

Mind-mapping is easier now with smartphones. SimpleMind offers a basic freeflowing mind-map layout with options to add in colours and icons to bubbles which you connect in your flow chart. If you want something more comprehensive, opt for iThoughtsHD, which gives you the option of attacking all the niggles in your writing not only with a free-flowing mind map but also with other corporate tools like Six Thinking Hats and SWOT analysis. The app is even used by pastors to plan sermons, developer Craig Scott tells us in an email.

SimpleMind is available on Google Play and iTunes (free).

iThoughts is available on iTunes for iPhone ($7.99) and iThoughtsHD for iPad ($9.99).

I can’t think of a good idea

Sometimes a spark is all you need to ignite your creative juices. Get phrases and words which will get you on a thinking binge for creative work by installing Fiction Idea Generator. FIG, as it is called, creates random plots with elements like tense (past, present, future), narrator type (first, second, third), period, situation, protagonist, tritagonist and their relationship.

If you don’t like a structured plot suggestion and would rather go for just a few random prompts, opt for Writing Prompts, an app by the popular writing help website Writing.com. You can opt for suggestions through sketches, current news headlines and articles or, simply, a group of jumbled words. All you have to do is shake your phone and something new will crop up on your screen.

Fiction Idea Generator is available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Samsung Apps (free).

Writing Prompts is available on iTunes, Google Play, Kindle Fire ($1.99).

I can’t find the time

It’s all about managing it right. The Pomodoro Technique helps people manage their 24 hours better by breaking them down into 25-minute periods of work called “pomodoros” (which means tomatoes in Italian), interspersed with 5-minute breaks. Created by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, the technique sounds the alarm for you to take a break and get back to work.

“I use the Pomodoro Technique myself,” says Baris Sarer, owner of the newly launched app on iTunes,It’s Pomodoro Time!, “especially when writing. It helps focus without exhausting and overworking your brain.” He loves the technique enough to launch an app that uses all its features well. With It’s Pomodoro Time! you can set daily targets of how much you want to write, set your pomodoros and use alarms to give yourself the much deserving break (and more importantly, to send you back to your desk).

It’s Pomodoro Time! is available on iTunes ($0.99).

I need human stimulus to work

To write, you have to eschew the social world. But if you want sympathy, empathy or company, become a part of the National Novel Writing Month . NaNoWriMo is a monthly online writing forum which begins every year in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in November, with forums and groups of participants to help you all the way. The app NaNo Saga lets you compare your progress with your buddies’ and shows your novel details and current word count as well as the number of days left. Trust us, with more than 200,000 participants from across the world writing with you (last year, a whopping 256,618 participants wrote together), you will never feel lonely again.

NaNo Saga is available on iTunes ($0.99)

To read the complete article, head on to the HT Mint website. 

Posted on

The Kejriwal character

Since the name Kejriwal might get this blog banned without reason, let me start by saying this post is not about politics. It is about imagination.

As an exercise to improve the characters I write about, I have been looking at various people when walking on the road, or in news and creating their stories. See that old woman, in khaki? She just condoled someone who heard about a death in her family. See that little boy with her granny? He hates how the granny calls him by his nickname and he doesn’t like his granny’s spidery, wrinkled hands when she feeds him. In my stories, these people flower (or wither) so to say, becoming something more dramatic, sometimes sinister, sometimes vulnerable. it’s like a flash of an idea, a storyline attached to a face and I encourage it.

 

arvind-kejriwal0106Fir05.qxp

 

I got a flash of a character when I saw Arvind Kejriwal’s interview in one of the media channels (weren’t all of them interviewing him?). It’s not the real him of course, just a figment of my imagination. So hear it out.

Kejriwal is a puppeteer of people. He gets hold of strings which can suffocate those who are corrupt, and then uses those strings to make them jump to his calls or crash down. He enjoys it, just like a cat enjoys playing with mice. Hit with one claw, wait and smile. His smile is not open, but a simple stretch of lips, as if he’s amused by a hen ruffling her feathers (in this case, Karan Thapar was the hen who was interviewing him). The opposite doesn’t matter, it has to crumble in front of the power that the character exudes. Some call him an anarchist. Maybe he’s one. The character certainly looks like he wants feathers and skin ruffled.

As he cuts a wire in a middle class household, Kejriwal’s eyes shine with a strange kind of light – you might think it’s the light of righteousness, of conviction that he’s leading the society to a better place. There’s a Pied Piper in him, who will happily play a tune, hypnotise the masses and lead them, well anywhere. And every sheep will follow.

He has the charisma of a leader and he has the self-righteousness. Most of the parties are peeing in their pants looking at him right now and shivering as they wonder what will pop out next from his kittybag—will it be their corrupt name or their son-in-law’s? His power is unexpected and he knows it. His power is not of honesty, it is a power over people who feel dishonest. He’s the one-eyed king in a nation of blind men. He knows it. He will keep his feet on the table and tell you that he knows it and will see you sweat. All the while smiling that closed-lip smile. Can you trust him? I don’t know that yet.

That’s Kejriwal the character who will figure in one of my stories some day. I wonder how similar it is to Arvind Kejriwal the man. What do you think?

Posted on

Krishna’s beautiful video

This video of Krishna’s awesome graphics by artist Rajesh N was shown at the launch of the graphic novel. Check it out!

 

 

If you would like to pick up the book, it’s available online on Campfire and Flipkart as well as in the stores across the country. Like it? Or hate it? Tell me about it!

Posted on

Third-party Twitter

Fed up with the official Twitter app? Want something better? Get more with the right apps
 Twitter’s rise to one of the most popular social networks was driven in part by the open nature of the service, helped along by a number of third-party apps to access the network. This started changing last year though as Twitter banned certain apps to try and create a uniform experience.
Aaron White, co-founder of the third-party app Proxlet (which was one of the apps Twitter suspended), says in an email interview, “The diversity of the third-party ecosystem certainly contributed to Twitter’s fast rate of growth, considering how long it took them to launch an official iPhone client!”
According to Paris-based analyst group Semiocast, the social network had 517 million accounts as of July. That is a lot of eyeballs, and Twitter has begun to try and market to advertisers with expandable tweets (or a short blog with pictures and videos) and sponsored accounts under #Discover. As any regular user knows, there are two basic ways to access Twitter—you can either use your browser or an app. Apps range from the official Twitter application to custom applications that can use the features of the social network and give you a different experience.
Since the new official app can also serve ads, users might want a third-party experience instead, and there are a number of different apps to choose from there.
Monika Katkute, ideator and project lead at Lemon Labs, which created the Hashtag App for the platform in May, hopes that Twitter will remain an open platform for all developers. “If a third-party app is making tweets available in a more attractive and usable format, Twitter shouldn’t have an objection to that,” she says.
Like to try different flavours of tweets? Then try some of these innovative, out-of-the-box apps for a different take on Twitter and support the third-party ecosystem that has made Twitter what it is:
Slices
Is your timeline flooded with inane tweets? Slices is a free third-party application which divides your stream into categorized information. Launched in August, Slices lets you “browse” your timeline. The app does three important things: First, it automatically divides your Twitter stream into neat categories like technology, celebrity, etc.. Second, it suggests new people to follow through its Explore tab, where it divides users by categories like News, Local, Celebs, Humour, Music, Tech and Science, etc. Finally, it lets you choose from live events and trending topics from around the world or locally, in a simple interface which is actually quite addictive to use.
Free to download, on iTunes, Google Play and Web
Some innovative and out-of-the-box apps for a different take on Twitter. Illustration: Raajan/Mint
Tweetcaster
With more than five million downloads on Google Play since its launch in October 2010, TweetCaster is the No. 1 app for Twitter on Android. It offers basic Twitter functions like timeline, compose, mentions, Direct Messages, favourites and lists. What sets it apart from even the official Twitter app is its search mechanism, called Search Party. It allows you to search not only your own timeline, but also someone else’s timeline, mention or favourites. It even allows you to search for tweets near your location.
Free to download, on Windows Phone, Google Play, iTunes, Samsung apps and BlackBerry. The ad-free TweetCaster in a unique pink-colour version is available for $10 (around Rs.555).
Tweets between
This one’s meant for those who love to eavesdrop on conversations. Missed out on what your friends were chatting through tweets? Simply type in both their Twitter IDs on the Tweets Between website and see what their most recent conversation was all about. Launched in February, the app is quite addictive.
Free to use, on Web
Twicca
Created by Japanese developer Tetsuya Aoyama, this lightweight Twitter app gives you great filtering tools and basic Twitter app functions. The interface is clean, without too many buttons, icons and menus. Additionally the app has features like colour codes for lists or individual users so you never miss tweets from those important to you. It mutes overzealous tweeting individuals quite well too. The app is relatively new, having launched in May, but it comes with a lot of polish. It even has a built-in image viewer that supports a lot of image-hosting services—Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, Posterous, etc.
Free to download, on Google Play
To read the complete article go to the HT Mint website.