My nephew
had come over last Saturday; you know how it was in those days, my aunt, (kindly
read blogpost ‘Mrs. Aadi’) was married when my father was born and gave birth
to a son after a year, and Prashant is her daughter’s son, who currently works
at Earnst & Young, London (born in Mau and raised in Bareilly!)… So, he was
asking how the process of writing stories works… Here’s the account of the
creation of one of my favourite stories…
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| Lata, Umesh, Samrat and I with Sir... clicked by Snehveer |
It was around
1:30 am or 2:00 am but definitely way beyond midnight and I was returning home
alone in the auto-rickshaw after a long but very enjoyable day at the ‘Monday ManDali’…
That was a story workshop with renowned Lyricist Neelesh Misra who now has the
fourth season of a radio story show running successfully…
As soon as
my rickshaw entered the building premises, and I could see some cars parked
outside the small gate, a thought flashed in my mind, ‘If I were to get down
silently and vanish (by the time security opened the main gate) behind a parked car, what would happen to the auto-rickshaw
guy? Would he not get scared when he finds nobody around?’
I related
this to my mentor, the next morning, as the new story idea and generally a
serious person, he laughed out loud! We as a family have been through enough to
realize the value of comedy. So I began writing, hoping for a segment of 450
words per week… In the middle of that, my niece, Manya, then in class VI, called
up and asked for a poem to recite in class… I came up with something that she
thought was too childish… So I narrated it to Sir, and asked if I could do
series of ‘kid-ghost’ stories… He liked
the idea. It reminded him of Casper…
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| Most of the manDali at my friend Yamini and Sir's wedding in Mussoorie |
And then
came the instruction from the channel- ‘Only love stories!’ What finally came
about a couple of months later is a mixture of my own life experiences, theatre
scene in Lucknow, coming to Mumbai with dreams, some news reports of fake ‘sadhu babas’,
some anger and some empathy with auto waalas and some fantasy with the paranormal…
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