Award-winning author of science and fiction
This one is completely my baby as a writer with artist Vivek Goel. Comprising of five short stories, this anthology is a new take on a mythology. That’s all I can tell you right now, more will come laters. Oh, and it’s going to release next year during summer holidays. Hope some kids out there are excited!
An older poem from my other blog (which I will be deleting most probably!)
A Word’s Journey
Hesitant
She resides
On a quivering, moist lip.
From the broken, beating, dying heart
To the boiling cortex lobe
Through an ignited stimuli,
To the barking voice box.
She came with lightening-speed
Grabbing on-edge, electric nerves
An angry flash from the larynx
Tornado-speed to the brink
Of the quivering, moist lip.
She hung, desperately
Wanting to break free
Fly like a free raven;
Not become an Albatross.
But gripped she was
Against her will,
Plastered to the skin
By a remnant of good sense.
So she tumbled back
Into the empty sinewy depths,
Endless cycles and nothingness
An eternal past tense.
(c) Shweta Taneja, August 2009
Bid your flabby body goodbye. Our celebrity fitness experts create 10- to 15-minute workouts with one aim in mind: a fab body for you in 2011. By Shweta Taneja
“All you need is 15-20 minutes of any hot and sweaty exercise to keep yourself fit,” says Delhi-based Reebok fitness trainer Nisha Varma. If it is tough for you to work out during the week, “make up on weekends with a 45-minute session of walking, jogging, swimming, cycling or dancing”.
Our fitness experts understand that many of you can’t take an hour out of your busy schedules every day, so they have created made-to-order workouts which will take less than 20 minutes a day to get you into a fab shape. “The idea is to be regular at the regime you pick up and do it every day,” says Mumbai-based yoga expert Tonia Clark, who believes a lot can be achieved if you make sure you exercise for at least 15 minutes early in the morning daily. “You can easily get a total body workout, body stretch as well as peace of mind,” she says. Here’s what you can do.
YOUR 2011 RESOLUTION: Tone arms, shoulders and strengthen neck muscles
OUR EXPERT: Nisha Varma, a Reebok master trainer and fitness expert based in Delhi who has authored ‘Yoga for Back Problems’ and ‘Yoga at the Work Place’, says simple strength training two days a week can tone up arms and shoulders.
WHAT SHE SAYS
You won’t see a significant difference in your body but yes, the chicken wings will disappear. You will need a pair of dumb-bells of a weight that is a challenge for you (should be at least 1kg).
HER WORKOUT
•Bicep curls: Stand with feet shoulder-width apart and hold one dumb-bell in either hand. Lift the dumb-bell towards your shoulders as you exhale. Lower it slowly to starting position as you exhale. Make sure you maintain the correct posture through the full range of movement. Alternate hands and do one set of 20 reps.
•Triceps extension: Stand with legs shoulder-width apart, belly in and shoulders pulled back and down. Hold the rod of one dumb-bell with both hands and lift it behind your shoulders in the middle of your upper back. Your elbows point towards the ceiling, arms are close to ears and the dumb-bell is resting between your shoulder blades. Exhale, lifting the dumb-bell towards the ceiling. Lower the arms slowly as you inhale. Do one set of 20 reps.
•Shoulder front raise: Hold a dumb-bell in each hand. Stand with legs shoulder-width apart. Lift both arms forward till shoulder level as you exhale and lower the arms as you inhale. Do not drop the arms suddenly. Do one set of 20 reps.
•Shoulder lateral raise: Hold a dumb-bell in each hand. Lift both arms to the side of your body till shoulder level. Inhale as you lift and exhale as you lower the weights.
•Finish the session with shoulder rotations forward and back eight times each.
A WORD OF CAUTION
Warm-up is a must before any exercise programme. You also need appropriate shoes and apparel. Before you begin, get a basic medical check-up.
YOUR 2011 RESOLUTION: I want to strengthen my heart
OUR EXPERT: Vesna Jacob, a Pilates expert based in Delhi who runs Hypoxis, a wellness clinic.
WHAT SHE SAYS
There are many ways to improve your cardiac health. Walking, jogging, running or hopping are some of them. But if you haven’t done cardio for a while, you will need to start small. Skipping rope is the most fun as well as effective way to tone up the entire body. Build up your stamina by starting slow and sticking to the routine regularly. You can increase the number of sets (maximum, four) per session as you build your stamina.
HER WORKOUT
• Start with a couple of minutes of good warm-up and stretching. This will make sure that you don’t strain or pull your muscles.
•Stage 1: Keep an even tempo of skipping throughout the workout, and finish off at a faster pace. Do this for cycles of 5 minutes.
•Stage 2: A couple of weeks into this regimen, change this to interval training: Follow a 30-second fast and 60-second slower skipping rhythm in cycles of 5 minutes.
•Stage 3: The next stage is to do 30 seconds fast, 30 seconds slow, and then 60 seconds fast, 30 seconds slow, and so on for cycles of 5 minutes.
A WORD OF CAUTION
If you have to gasp for air or feel dizzy, or experience any chest pain, you need to stop immediately and have yourself checked by a doctor.
YOUR 2011 RESOLUTION: Lose the beer belly
OUR EXPERT: Manish Tiwari, who teaches yoga to celebs such as Katrina Kaif and Sridevi, at his gym Cosmic Fusion, Bandra, Mumbai.
WHAT HE SAYS
A beer belly is a direct result of the excessive sugar in your diet. Ideally cut down on the consumption of beer. In case you still feel like having beer, remember to have darker beer as that’s richer in nutrients and antioxidants and has lesser sugar content.
HIS WORKOUT
•Shalabhasana: Lie flat on your stomach with your legs together, hands by the side of the body. Now raise your arms, chest, head and legs simultaneously, and hold for about 2-5 seconds. Then lower. This engages your abs fully.
•Setubandhasana: Lie flat on your back with your knees bent and your feet apart. Place your arms flat on your side, and lift your hips and back off the floor while leaving your head, shoulders and feet on the floor. Hold for about 5-10 seconds and do 10-15 reps. This burns your belly fat.
•Yoga crunches: Finally finish off with some yoga crunches. Lie down on your back, put your hands behind your head to support your back and using your abdominal muscles, push your legs up towards the ceiling, lifting your buttocks about 2-3 inches off the ground. Do 15-20 reps about three times a week.
A WORD OF CAUTION
Be careful when doing these poses if you don’t have any earlier yoga experience. You could injure yourself. Go slow on each one and keep breathing normally.
YOUR 2011 RESOLUTION: A speedy total body workout
OUR EXPERT: Tonia Clark, a yoga expert from Canada who is based in Mumbai and has worked on a DVD with Lara Dutta called ‘Yoga Recovery and Rejuvenation’.
WHAT SHE SAYS
Start with a Surya Namaskar or Sun Salutation, which is a full body warm-up of 12 asanas. Do five to start with and follow with the workout listed below. This will cleanse your body, give you a nice stretch and soothe your mind.
HER WORKOUT
•Vrikshasana: Shift the weight to the left leg. Lift your right foot above the left knee, pushing the sole of the right foot into the left thigh. Bring your hands into prayer position. Shoulders relaxed, jaw soft and gaze fixed on one point, inhale and raise arms up to the sky. Hold the pose for at least five full cycles of breath.
•Pawanmuktasana: Lie on your back, legs straight out. Bend your right knee into your chest and hug your thigh, holding it with your arms. Pull the knee towards the right shoulder, keeping the left leg active. Feel a pinch in the right hip crease. This will open up the hips, cleanse your digestive system and eliminate toxins.
•Shavasana: Lie on your back with your legs straight and apart, your feet relaxed. Place your arms alongside your body, a little away, palms facing up. Roll your shoulder blades in towards each other. Close your eyes and just be still, breathing deeply and relaxing.
A WORD OF CAUTION
First train with a yoga teacher.
For the complete story, click here.
A friend tweeted about her company’s requirement of mobile content creators. Now the term is understandable if rather pretentious (like using sales executive rather than the obvious salesman). But what I want to talk about here is what these content creators are actually doing and getting paid oodles of money for. What does a person who writes for mobile phones actually write? So I search and found it out: The mobile content creators write SMSes, one-liners for blogs or websites. Basically single liners which intrigue the reader, catch her attention and make her click and read. It means someone who can provide catchy one-liners which fit into the browser space of a small mobile screen and incite the user to click on it. For most of us, with our Tweet-long attention span, we give only a nano second to an SMS or tweet. In than time, we want someone to goad us with interesting headlines or single line sum ups of stories.
With more people getting hooked to this mobiles for content, I think this is here to stay. Easy money you think? Try writing one SMS with a 140 character limit and you will know. It does takes sheer creativity and ingenious to write that one liner; to sum up a whole story in a single line. It’s the same as writing a novel, which btw I think is fast becoming a dinosaur. I hear less and less people talking about reading novels. Especially the younger ‘uns.
Wonder if I should try my hand at a tweet-novel. Bet someone out there is doing it. Lemme find out.
Yes, I know it’s too poetic and dramatic. That’s the reason for that question mark there. What do you expect from a writer who is just chartering into an industry which by the looks of it is on its death throes?
Let me start from the beginning. I used to be a journalist. Then one day, I decided I would rather create my own stories and so quit my job and since then have been trying to live the dream of every journalist – that of becoming an author.
It’s not an easy job and I am not talking about the writing only. If I gotten into this industry 15 years ago, I would have had one aim: Get a couple of books out there on the book shelf. And one dream: I pass through a bookstore and see a child picking up one of my books and flicking through it with increasing interest. So much so that she might eventually buy it. Simple.
In olden days (think 10-15 years from now) a writer’s problem was mostly sustaining herself–both economically and emotionally –till she came out with that one winner. That one winner would be published by a publisher of repute or not, marketed decently, covered or thrashed by critics and if you were lucky, you won an award and a celebrity named your book in her favourites.
A couple of books and you could sustain yourself to write more. Basically get yourself an agent/publisher and work as a freelancer with them.
| WRITER |  |
PUBLISHER |  |
TRADITIONAL MEDIA / BOOKSTORES |  |
READERS |
Now my dear reader, it’s a web that a writer has. I talk literally—the World Wide Web or the Net or Internet. The internet has changed the way we writers functioned. It has especially started to show the door to traditional style of publishing.
Content, dear friend, has become free and easy to get. We are buying lesser books today than we did some years back. The reason can be youtube.com or Facebook. The reason can also be Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. If you have a ready, searchable encyclopedia online, why would you buy a printed edition which comes which is old as soon as you buy it? Content in today’s world is free. Now logic says that if something is free (like air), you don’t buy it. To sum it up, the print industry is dying as all the content can be read for free online and no one’s buying things written on dead trees anymore. Or so will be the case in another 10-15 years.
The confused lot that are writers, are clinging to different ideas of selling. Publishers are trying out the e-books way. Producing e-books brings their paper, distribution and stock costs to nil. But if it’s all about making e-books, why does a writer need a publisher? Why can’t a reader simply convert her book into an e-book and put it up online? My publisher friend Shobit, is asking the same question in a great blog on e-books and the publisher.
So how does a writer, whose sustenance comes from writing or content creation, survive in this new world?
More and more writers are trying out ‘self-publishing’. It means the writer pays a website some money to publish her work as per demand. So the more people buy, the more you earn. You are marketing mostly. Some savvy websites have also added e-books and services like editing, book layout, marketing and designing as part of the package. The people who I have seen take this route are a mix—some are those who tried and got rejected by traditional publishers. This is their way to pay and get their book published. Then there are those who are tired of the measly royalty that traditional publishing gives—20-30 percent and want more. Then there is a third kind who wants to experiment with this medium, has already published some works the traditional way. I don’t know if this is the new publisher and the new model of sharing the revenues and if it will be successful.
One thing is clear though: In the mess that is the Internet, content (I mean your or my book) needs to be actively advertised to the right people to be read. Else, it will be simply lost. I am sure there must be a sea of e-books lying in archives of internet killed by mismanagement. The writer has to take responsibility of her content. No more is it about convince a publisher and leaving the rest to them. If you want to sell content, you have to be there online, interacting with your readers, convincing them to buy. How do you do it? Maybe the route is one of the above. Maybe those are desperate ways of traditional modes who don’t understand this new dark world.
Maybe the answer is completely different: The story that is interactive, or uses different mediums to be told—a comic book, a video, an e-book, a web application, a mobile app, a game – all seamlessly stitched together. Or maybe it creates a web – as complex as the Web itself—built upon by various people (author and reader) who own and nurture it. Maybe this becomes the new medium, the new novel. The one every traditionalist will call ‘scrape’ or ‘trashy’ before it becomes the norm.
I still haven’t figured out how the author will earn money out of this new world. But one thing remains certain and gives me constant assurance. Everyone still loves to hear a story. I just need to figure out where my readers are sitting, waiting for a story to come by.
More, when I understand this better.
Trying to write a horror story but the characters keep bringing in more drama in than a horror requires. Controlling the people is becoming a problem. An extract I will most probably delete from the story:
‘Oh my Gawd! Are you smiling Mr Mishra!’
Mohan looked up with a start. He had been so deeply sunk into his own thoughts that he hadn’t noticed Mrs Gowda walk into the teacher’s room with her gang of lady teachers. It was almost lunch time, he noticed, looking up at the huge black clock on the broken wall at the far end.
‘What’s the special occasion, Mr Mishra. You seem to be smiling to yourself.’
Mrs Gowda looked excited at the prospect of needling Mr Mishra. Her breasts jutted out like beaks of twin crows from her black sari blouse. That and her huge body, draped in a tight chiffon sari, blocked the remnants of sunlight streaming from the window behind. Mohan looked up towards her sneering face.
‘Yes, yes, tell us Mr Mishra, we want to know too’ echoed the other me-toos who hung around Mrs Gowrah, looking up to her. His stretched lips sunk back into a frown.
‘No, Mrs Gowda. It was nothing.’
He hated this room. He hated these Pink Lizards. He wanted to throttle them all
‘Hmm. I seem to have made a mistake. Mr Mishra could never smile. He has no sense of humour.’ She said, laughing. The other girls followed their crow leader into a cacophony of laughter.
Most days, he would have been depressed by this. But he didn’t mind. Not today. Today, he had found the perfect solution. Murder. The path that will set him free. He stared on his computer screen and pretending to type.
M_U_R_D….
He quickly pressed the Delete key looking around hurriedly to ensure that no one had noticed. It was definitely on his mind. Murder. He rolled the word in his tongue and smiled and puckered his lips. It was a delicious thought.
It’s painful to sacrifice ghosts. I don’t mean it allegorically in a past baggage sort of a way but rather literally. Let me begin in the beginning. I have been working on a kids’ story for the past eight months trying to get it approved with a publisher. The story, which I was very excited about started out as a ghost story and now has converted into a kids’ detective story. This is a result of about eight back and forths between me and the editor. Now, the editor has quit and I am working with a new one. This results in another series of back and forth. But this post is not about the shaping. It’s about my ghosts.
My pretty, enthusiastic ghosts who were the ones who coloured the story with their pale sights. They were funny, sarcastic and made the story their own. I loved writing about them. They owned the story from Day 1. On Day 154th, they are being chopped out of the story. First it was just rendering them in the second half of the book, then they appeared only in the climax, now they are being completely chucked out. It’s a simple case of the camel taking over the tent and pushing the poor owner out in a cold desert night. Sigh.
I, their creator and the one who loves them the most, is kicking them out of the ‘real world’ created in my fiction story. Making them story-less. Killing them off in cold blood. In other words, I am selling my ghosts to the suggestions by a series of editors who claim to know more about their ‘audience’, ie, the children.
So this is a post to give them a hug and bid them goodbye. Today is the day they die and are forgotten. But only by the story, not by me. I will bide time and create another story – this time exclusively for them. A story where they are the heroines. Till then, I know they have enough space in my imagination. At least they have no choice.
This post is my exploration of the pain of killing characters you have grown to love and associate with a story. It hurts. It’s as bad as taking out a thorn from your hand. Or cutting your own limb, without anesthetic. I am emotional over this today.
My poor ghosts are quiet. They don’t blame me. They just stand there in a corner, waiting. Biding their time. Another time. Another world. Another story. I owe it to them.
Now back to my story for the final kill.
Blank. Blank. Blank! How will I ever finish my novel and get it to be published if I just can’t write? I should quit. Should for sure, quit and take up a cushiony job of an editor somewhere and criticize other people’s writings. Maybe the writer in me is dead and the only way to get her is to meet Yamraj and BEG!
But I know I wouldn’t quit. What’s life without a little bit of fun like writing anyways?
All the strings need to tie together. Only then will a complete picture be formed. Holistic. Is it okay if I write bad than not write at all? What stops me from writing? I had decided to keep on typing to try to record what thoughts are coming to tell you how it feels to be stuck without any words in a head which is 
supposed to be a writer’s.
My mind thinks of many things but my hands aren’t fast enough to write and my vocab not varied enough to express. Write, write write. Language binds my thoughts.
But still I try to write because I have decided to do something and try to stick to it. Is it that bad? Shouldn’t I stick to something? I want to. I seem to float in empty air, meaninglessly drifting with the flow of life. Aren’t I supposed to do something I believe will bring me pleasure? But is this pleasure? Is it even right to run after the fleeting pleasures I get from writing? Or do I want to experiment with highs and lows which come from new experiences? Is writing like extreme adventure sports for me? I don’t know. Again as I told you, my dear long dead document, I have only questions, no answers.
These answers seem to be quite tricky to find. Even if you manage to grab hold of one, it smokes up and manages to silkily slip through your fingers. Also, as soon as you have this creature called an answer, your eyes become blurry and myopic, almost blind and though you can see your answer, it becomes a misty, mystical creature. Soon, it starts turning invisible. That’s how it works with answers. The more you look at them, the more they start to vanish. Then suddenly, the slippery bugger vanishes completely leaving you with more questions. Sigh. Can someone live their life with only questions around them? Why do we need these slippery buggers called answers anyway?
Only 413 words. That’s the tragedy. You think you have said a lot. You think your thoughts are quite fresh, new, unusual, never heard, dah, dah, dah. You think you have millions of words at your service, working like minions standing and saluting you where you want them to. You think you control them and then suddenly, the seat of power changes. They start playing with your mind. Thoughts which were cohesive and coherent in the garbled walls of your mind turn into gibberish when converted into words in an e-document. How does expression work? How do you put your thoughts onto a document in a cohesive order?
The control is slipping away. But isn’t that the magic of writing? Why do I need the control anyway? You wanted abyss, abyss is what you get.
Men are crazy. Women are crazier. No, it’s not relative; it’s just the way it’s meant to be. You are but a puppet in the hands of language.
(Again, not edited.)