This book was written with many false starts. I started writing the novel in a red colored notebook. A colleague from my days at Mudra - “Lakshmi” (no this is not a girl’s name), short for R Lakshminarayanan, spent exactly ₹90.00 in buying a blank notebook that he gifted me.
You must be wondering how I got to know exactly how much he spent buying that book. Notice that figure on the top right of this page. That “90” tells me exactly what it cost him. You will also notice that at the bottom left portion of the book there is another number 010598. That is evidence that I started writing the novel on 1st May 1998. The novel was eventually printed and published in 2005 after many fits and starts. That is year I will never forget... 2005
I had left Mudra to join Colgate Palmolive and moved from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. That stint at mudra brought me in touch with so many super smart creative people and inspired me to start writing a novel. I had written short stories before I had written poems but I had never actually been brave enough to write a novel. I started writing it in long hand in that notebook continued writing it bravely despite all the scribbles scratches and change of mind and characters. Once the novel moved beyond the initial pages I discovered that it was much harder to write the novel because I would read the previous pages and discover some grammatical error or a change of thought or add a line of dialogue all of which was becoming progressively harder and I didn't want to use my office laptop for my writing.
Being surrounded by creative people certainly made me feel brave enough to think I could attempt what was then an impossible task of writing about what I knew best. I had spent two years at XLRI Jamshedpur as a student. XL was a very different B school as compared to what you see today.
It was a tiny group of 40 people in the HR class and 40 people in business management or BM in every batch. The BM group was called Bummers for short. The time was 1982 and life was not just uncomplicated but also politically incorrect. That is just the novel that I started to write – unfiltered and unplanned. A few months after this, Colgate decided to move me to Kuala Lumpur. It was my first experience of living outside of India and I forgot all about the novel.
I looked for the red notebook and I could not for the life of me remember in which box I had tossed the manuscript when I moved from Mumbai to Malaysia. So I decided to buy a computer and started writing the novel afresh. My job in Malaysia got me travelling a lot in Asia Pacific region. It was frustrating because when I had the time which was usually at the airport in between flights I was not in front of my PC and would lose the enthusiasm by the time I got back home. So I bought a PDA and transferred the manuscript from the novel to the PDA and use that tiny stylus to keep scribbling my ideas and the story kept growing and I would have written most of the novel when the PDA crashed. I was heartbroken. The manuscript was gone…
To be continued…
