Book Review: Sam Kean's The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

The older one, who's now 14, discovered Sam Kean first through The Disappearing Spoon and was hooked. The Violinist's Thumb followed quickly and there was no question about not pre-ordering The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons.

Here is a portion of his review of The Dueling Neurosurgeons:

The fastest and most powerful computers in the whole world cost millions of dollars to build and millions more to maintain, but a lump of tissue enclosed in bone crowning every human being can run a thousand times faster than the best machines in use today. And all it needs to survive is a good burger every now and then.

The entire review is on Blogcritics.org: http://bit.ly/1n1r12H

If you are interested in science and science writing, Sam Kean is a writer to follow. On Twitter he's at @Sam_Kean and his website is http://www.SamKean.com.

Theater Courses for Children in Kolkata (Calcutta)

This information is from The Creative Arts' Facebook Page


Objectives:

Theatre Skills, Life skills, Creativity and Imagination :

The Creative Arts Theatre Workshop is dedicated to providing an atmosphere for children to explore, imagine, create and have fun through the world of theatre arts. We impart Theatre Skills like Expressions, Acting, Voice, Speech, Body Training, Rhythm, Music, Dance, Creative Writing, Poetry, Dialogue and Script Writing, Teaching various genres of Theatre and Appreciation and knowledge of other Art Forms.
Though we do enjoy entertaining with our end of the session show - the process is what we focus on.. Our goal is to instill the joy of theatre and in doing so, help to grow happy, healthy, confident kids.Since it's beginning TCA has focused on the philosophy of "Creative Drama". Creative Drama is different from traditional theatre classes in that the primary focus is the Participants NOT the performance.
Creative drama has many benefits for children. Not just the child who wants to be an actor...but for EVERY child. The mission of the Children’s Theater program is to make the theater a setting where opportunities for telling a story in words, motion and emotions can bring awareness beyond the parameters of their own home/school environment. To provide an opportunity for the children from the first grade through twelfth grades to receive the benefit that theater activities can provide. These benefits include

Life Skills:
• Learn about emotions
• Be more confident
• Work on problem solving
• Learn to relate to other people
• Speak in public
• Support positive body image
• Learn to work in a group
• Gain Self- Esteem...
• Create sensitivity to others through teamwork, co-operative interplay, and conflict resolution.
• Explore the varied facets of imagination, and individuality.

Life Values can be imparted through drama and Appreciation of social values can be learned in the play message. An ensemble of students learning to appreciate the power of drama techniques can display the respect, tolerance and patience for all ages, genders, social and ethnic backgrounds, as they work together toward a common goal.


Theatre Days

Days Time Age Group Status

Monday 4pm-5pm 8-13 yrs No Vacancy
Wednesday 3pm-4pm 5-7 yrs Fast filling
Wednesday 4pm-5pm 8-13 yrs Few seats remaining Wednesday 5pm-6pm 5-7 yrs Few seats remaining Saturday 3pm-4pm 8-13 yrs Fast filling


Creative Writing

Days Time Age Group Status

Monday 5pm-6pm 9-13 yrs Few seats remaining Saturday 4pm-5pm 9-13 yrs Few seats remaining


For ADMISSIONS call 9830775677

What Makes Food Comfort Food?

The Aerogram published my essay on why a bowl of rice and some pickle is my comfort food.

On any other day, late night infomercials would give me company through a bedtime snack, but that day, with the occasional swish of a car whizzing past the house for company, I stood barefoot in the kitchen and polished off the entire bowl.

Not for the first time, I wondered what it was that drove me to seek this particular combination of foods in times of distress. I didn’t bother then to press for an answer, just content in the knowledge that for the moment all was right with the world.

Read the full essay on The Aerogram.

~

Profiting from Social Media

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, has a new blog on CNET. His first post is on profiting from social media.

Karadi Tales' Will You Write With Me? Contest

From my inbox:

Karadi Tales, India’s pioneer and leading producer of children’s audio-books announces the ‘Will You Write With Me?’ contest. Here’s a chance to win a publishing contract with one of India’s foremost children’s publishers! The three best entries will be published in an audio-book narrated by the inimitable Jaaved Jaaferi. The winners will sign a publishing contract with Karadi Tales.

For details on the contest and to read the first half of the story, visit www.karaditales.com. This contest is open to everyone! Entries must be received on or before 28 February 2010. Email your entries to contest@karaditales.com.

The first part of the story they want entrants to complete is pretty intriguing. If you intend to enter the contest, all the best to you!

Review: Akbar and Birbal by Amita Sarin

I was at one of my favorite book haunts in Bangalore, looking for books for my children when I came across a book titled Akbar and Birbal. It was on the shelf with other novels and non-fiction books targeted at teens and young adults, but it seemed like it would be a good introduction to a part of Indian history for my nine-year-old. I added it to the growing stash in my arms and gave it to him along with a book from the Lemony Snicket series and a couple of Ruskin Bond books.

As expected, he picked up the Lemony Snicket book first and later in the day moved on to Akbar and Birbal. I could tell he was tentative, not really sure what it was all about, but he gave it a shot. Half an hour later, he had not put the book down, which was a good sign. When he was done with it, he did not stop raving about it for days, recounting parts of the book that he liked best. He liked it enough to want to write about it. The indented text that follows below is his review of Akbar and Birbal. It was first published in Blogcritics Magazine for his own feature (!), A Kid With a View.

[Start] Akbar, the emperor, and Birbal, his top minister, were wandering through the streets of Agra disguised as ordinary men. They heard the yelling of a woman from inside a house. They both thought she had been screaming at her child. But to their surprise a man came sprinting out of the house. Akbar was furious. He could not believe that men in his kingdom were cowards. Birbal disagreed and said that while Akbar was a great king, men like the man who was running away from his wife were ordinary men and had to be kind to their wives or get kicked out of the house.

Akbar and Birbal argued for days and days. Finally Akbar called a meeting in his palace gardens. He invited all the married men in Agra. He then asked the men who listened to their wives to move to the left and the men who did not to move to the right. One man moved to the right. All the rest moved to the left.

Akbar told Birbal that he wanted to reward the man that had moved right. But Birbal asked the man why he had moved to the right. The man said that he did so because his wife told him to stay away from crowds!

Birbal had won the argument with Akbar. This was no surprise because Birbal's wit always outsmarted Akbar, and Birbal did it in the most clever way imaginable.

Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, lived from 1542 to 1605. He thought of himself as an incredible emperor, which is what he was. Birbal lived from 1528 to 1586. He was Akbar's most trusted advisor and a wise ambassador who found a way around war. Birbal helped Akbar see through problems that he could not fully understand. Birbal was an outstanding minister both to his people and his king.

Amita Sarin has narrated this book elegantly and in a funny way. I found myself smiling or laughing at the end of each story. The author has sneaked in some historical facts along with the anecdotes. The way Birbal solved problems stunned me.

This is a joyous book. Anyone can read it because it is a fantastic swirl of Indian history, Indian ways of life and hilarious descriptions of events.

Unbelievably, I thought this was going to be some boring history book my mom bought for me. Finally, I learned my lesson. Never judge a book by its cover or its blurb! [End]

I haven't read the book myself, yet. But needless to say, I am a fan already!

Update following Amy's (She Writes) comment: The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Flipkart (for readers in India).

Brief Quote in Article on Virtual Travel

Deccan Herald carried an article on virtual travel this weekend with a brief quote from yours truly.

There are other online resources, which can be used as educational tools. At mapmsg.com for instance, you can move blocks of countries around with the mouse. In that sense, are online resources such as wonderrotunda.com a great option for young learners?

Wonder Rotunda is an American website, which offers many virtual tour options. You could go on a climate change expedition if you so wish to, and there are simulations of Arctic ice on that particular tool.

However, Sujatha, a blogger and mother of two, says: "When we pick a destination, we pull out the atlas, check out the other places we can sensibly include in our plan and then move online to check out reviews and to make reservations. My son’s geography lessons still come from maps, board games, TV shows and the Nat Geo magazine."

Old fuddy duddies that we are, I had no clue that such a concept as 'virtual' travel existed, and that there are now websites dedicated to what used to be called 'armchair' travel back in the day.

Not Becoming My Mother, Ruth Reichl

A couple of weeks ago we were in the check-out line at the library, standing right next to a shelf of newly released books. As the kids and and I waited our turn we scanned the shelf, picking up books and putting them back. One book - about the size of my extended palm, a black and white photograph on the cover with a middle-aged woman and a young girl, both sitting at a table - caught my eye. The woman's expression drew my attention as much as the title did - her face is resting on her palm and she is looking at the young girl, a gentle smile creasing her cheeks. The title of the book was Not Becoming My Mother, written by Ruth Reichl, the editor of the newly-defunct Gourmet magazine.

I know titles are meant to be provocative and grab the readers' attention, but it still managed to shock me. I added it to our pile of books and read it at the first opportunity I got - that night after the kids were in bed.

The tussle between mothers and daughters, the conflict-ridden relationships that many women have with their mothers, is not new to me. I had a classmate back in college who struggled with her mother's jealousies. That a mother could be jealous of her own daughter's good looks or appearance was unfathomable to me. Didn't all mothers and fathers want their children to be better, to do better, to have better than them? Since then I've listened as numerous friends talked about their daily fights with their mothers over trivial matters, about massive disagreements over deeply-held beliefs, about mothers not showing up at weddings, not even coming to celebrate the birth of grandchildren. And I have read about them. With all those women I could sympathize, but I could not empathize.

I could wax eloquent about my mom and the post would run ten screens long. It's not that I did not have disagreements with her, but even in the midst of my teenage rebellion years, I saw her for what she was. She was a mother looking out for her daughter and her best interests. She was a different human being than me - quite simply her DNA make-up is different than mine - so it was an exercise in futility to expect the both of us to react in the same way to a situation.

For me, in the grand scheme of things, she was and is an awesome human being with a wicked sense of humor that she turns on herself as frequently as she does on us, with a fierce sense of loyalty to her husband and her children (and now her daughter-in-law, son-in-law and the grandkids), a fantastic cook and hostess, practical to a fault ("if something needs to get done, put your head down and do it and quit whining" is her mantra), very strong sense of knowing one's place and doing what is expected, especially when it comes to respecting elders. Being a mother myself now, it is mind-boggling to me that somehow she's managed to impart much of her wisdom to us, without even seeming to try. All in all, she is trying her damnedest to do the best she can. And I love her to bits and respect her all the more for it.

Reichl has had a far different relationship with her mother. She writes that her mother was not good at many things and she was not "if truth be told, a particularly good mother. [M]y mother was a great example of everything I didn't want to be, and to this day I wake up every morning grateful that I'm not her."

The sub-title to her book is 'and other things she taught me along the way'. It gave me an inkling that perhaps the book is not the damning indictment that the title would have you believe, but my initial reaction to the book's title stayed with me until I made my way through a few more pages and it dawned on me what Reich was attempting to do.

At first blush, the memoir is a woman's effort to draw lessons from her mother's life. But it is so much more than that. If a child wrote a letter of love, appreciation, respect and deep gratitude to their mother, it would take the shape and form of Not Becoming My Mother. It is an attempt to peel away the layers and layers of hurt that had enveloped the author over a number of years. It is an attempt to put her mother's actions in context. A mother who was brilliant and wanted to be a doctor, but not that great-looking. In an age where women were expected to be beautiful but not ambitious, it was a double whammy that succeeded in decimating her chances at happiness.

It is so easy to give in to hurt, especially when the one person in the world that is supposed to love you unconditionally does not. Which is why it is all the more heartening that Reichl embarked on the journey to figure out her mother at all, to understand her as a woman. With the help of her mother's writing she finds in shoe boxes, on scraps of paper, on old receipts, Reichl pieces together the portrait of a woman who somehow figured out how to be the kind of role model that her own daughter did not want to emulate. As the sketch fills out and we slowly start to see the flesh and blood and color appearing on canvas, our viewpoint undergoes a change. We are no longer looking at the dark and foreboding image of a bad mother, we are looking at a woman who desperately does not want her daughter to struggle with the demons she did.

Meeting Mom - the real Mom - was even harder than I expected. I never thought her life was easy, but until I read her letters I had not known the enormous burden of pain she carried with her.

There are a few good reasons why it's worth reading Not Becoming My Mother. It is beautifully written, lucid, introspective and thoughtful. It is a personal memoir, but it manages to capture the life of an entire generation of women. It makes its point and moves on.

But the most important reason of all is the fact that Reichl wants to see beyond the veneer that her mother presented to the world. Some of us might undertake the same exercise and come up empty, but Reichl does succeed in seeing her mother for who she was. She places her actions in context, understands her mother's own upbringing, learns of her desires and ambitions, her disappointments and failures. And she sees that her mother tried to do the very best she could, given her experiences and her background and her circumstances. She sees that her mother manged to get her to a place where she could be happy. And she gives her mother credit for it.

The only want I see in this story is that I wish Reichl had reached this understanding when her mother was still alive.

Updated to add the first part of the second sentence in the penultimate paragraph.

Pico Iyer's Journey to Happiness

Pico Iyer, a travel writer (among other things) is someone whose writings I make it a point to read whenever I come across them. The topics he writes about are not raging controversies nor the latest hot-button issues of the day, but they do offer a unique view of the world and offer food for thought. In yesterday's New York Times, he wrote about living with less and getting wants to match with needs.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives [Etty Hillesum, a Dutchwoman on the way to a Nazi death camp, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a Japanese poet Issa] when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”

Towards the end of the essay he says,

The constitution of Japan, refreshingly, says nothing about the pursuit of happiness, as if to suggest that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

There is something vaguely discordant about that idea, am not sure what it is. His giving up his life in New York and seeking a life in Japan seems like the pursuit of something. And anyone giving a thought to whether they are happy or not (which is the only way you'll know you're happy) must be seeking it. And if they don't give a thought to whether they are happy or not, then more power to them and their detachment, but it is not the same as being happy. I guess what I'm trying to ask is, Can you be happy without seeking happiness?

I know this must seem like a nit picky point, but it was, perhaps, unnecessary on the author's part to ding all things American, including the Constitution, in order to make his point. I'm sure there are a lot of genuinely happy people in the Western World working and living within its value system.

Related post: What Makes You Happy?

[Update June 9, 2009: The New York Times carries reader reactions to the original Pico Iyer article, some in agreement and some in disagreement (such as, It takes a boat load of money to go off and live a simple life). Worth reading. Thanks, BPSK, for pointing me to the revision of the original article.]

[Update #2, June 9, 2009: The revision to the original article was to remove the reference to the Japanese Constitution. Thought I'd put it here in case you don't make it back to the original article or to BPSK's comment to this post. At some point during the day yesterday I got to wondering whether Japan even had a constitution given that they had emperors 'n all. NYT's note just says that the reference to the Japanese Constitution was 'incorrect' without elaborating.]

Tweeting and a history of brevity

Ryan Bigge in The Smart Set:

By the early 17th century, Shakespeare was praising short and snappy punchlines in Hamlet. Later that century, Japanese poet Matsuo Basho became a haiku master thanks to his immortal frog-pond-splash trifecta. By the 20th century, the telegraph made it possible to send your thoughts around the world, but curtness was an economic imperative since you were charged per word. The modern equivalent of the telegraph, thumb-intensive cellphone SMS (text messaging) also makes pithy thoughts a necessity. And overdiscussed Twitter imposes a 140-character limit on your genius, which works out to 20 or 30 words, depending on the sophistication of your vocabulary.

[...]

The concision of telegrams created poetry and wit born of economy. "STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE," is what humorist Robert Benchley sent his editor at The New Yorker upon arriving in Venice for the first time.

The entire article is available by clicking here.

Writing Prompt #4

Here's writing prompt #4!

Rules: Take 10 minutes to write. Please time yourself. When you have finished writing, please leave a link to your response in the comments box. Have fun!

Prompt: Write about an ordinary, everyday event in your family's life. It could be something that your mother or father did every day - ironing clothes, cutting vegetables, doing puja. Or something one of your siblings did - washing the moped or scooter, perhaps. May be even something that all of you did together regularly.

Enjoy!

Writing Prompt #3...

... is up on Altoid's blog here! Go on over and let your creative juices flow!

Response to Writing Prompt #2 - Embarrassing Moment

I drained the last drop of tea as I looked out of the sliding glass doors onto the grassy expanse that ran along the back of the apartment buildings. Only it was grassy no longer. White, fluffy snow caked everything in sight, the cars on the parking lot to the left, the steps leading down from the street onto the open space behind our apartment, the wooden fence on the other side of the evergreens, the evergreens. Icicles hung from the branches, from the bottoms of the cars and they held on for dear life to the balcony railing. From my cozy family room, all was right with the world. It was January of 1993 and my first winter in the US and my very first winter of any consequence.

I just wanted to touch the snow. Was it as I imagined it to be? Smooth, soft, squishy? Would it stay in my hand or would it crumble? Could I make a snowball? Would it make my hands cold and wet?

I grabbed a jacket from the coat closet and ran out to the front steps. Delight! Snow, within reach! Except for one set of footsteps on one side of the steps and in the middle of the footpath, the snow was unblemished. I decided to make my way to the bush to the side of the steps. The snow formed a mound over the bush. It seemed a good place to start as any, a good place to begin my acquaintance with snow. Without thinking or not wanting to disturb the snow, I can't remember now, I put my feet, one after the other, in the exact same spaces as the previous set of feet. I made my down the steps and reached a bit longer to fit my foot into the foot on the sidewalk.

In a flash I found myself on my butt, acquiring a whole new perspective of the underside of a very dirty car. Too embarrassed to even look around to see who might have been witness, I got up hurriedly and went right back in.

Response to Writing Prompt #1

Write about a sleepover, a slumber party or the time you stayed somewhere overnight.

It is 6 o' clock. The driver hasn't shown up yet. The grown-ups don't seem to care. They are laughing, having fun. We are all gathered at my uncle's house. We've been here since the morning. We've had breakfast and lunch here. We're getting ready to have dinner here too.

After dinner, I really want to go home. I want my own bed, the smells of my own home. It's looking like it might not happen. I'm desperate. "Dad, where is he?" I ask, poking him in the shoulder. "Be patient, he'll show up," Dad says.

An hour later, I imagine what it's like to sleep on a hard, prickly, old mattress with sheets that are not my own, on a pillow that doesn't know the shape and weight of my head.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't like strange beds. It's just that the beds in my uncle's house are not strange enough. They are just that little bit familiar. Enough for any excitement to drain away at the thought of having to spend any time on them.

------------------------------------
Updated to add the prompt on top of the post a link to the previous post that provides background.

Writing Prompt #1

Before you read the prompt, make sure you will have 10 minutes of uninterrupted time to write and please do time yourself. Once you've written it, please leave a link here so we can come over and read it. Here goes:

Write about a sleepover, a slumber party or the time you stayed somewhere overnight.

I will post my take on this prompt tomorrow.

If you have no idea what any of this means, this post from a couple of days ago will give you background and context. If you'd like to join in, hop on aboard, but please leave link here so we can read your take on the prompt.

20 Minutes

I made it to my first meeting of the writer's group I signed up with three months ago. Finally! I got to meet some cool women, listened to their work as they read it out to the group, and got a sense for some of the issues they were dealing with as they tried to shepherd their writing towards publishing.

I also got 20 minutes. Of pure silence. On a weekend. In the middle of the day. To write.

That alone made my scrambling to get to the meeting, and dragging myself in late, worthwhile. Each one of us wrote to one writing prompt for 10 minutes and passed the prompt on to the person to our left and wrote another 10 minutes on the second prompt.

This was the first time I'd done anything like that. It was fun as it was revealing. I was surprised at the little nuggets of memories that popped into my head in that short duration. It was fun to read how differently we'd all reacted to the same prompts. And it was amazing to see how much work can get done in 20 minutes with no distractions.

Writing - Process and Routines

After dragging my feet for a while, I recently found a women's writing group. I just needed to have a sense for how other people like me, attempting to write but finding themselves pulled in a hundred different directions, got any writing done at all. I signed up three months ago, but haven't been able to attend one of their monthly meetings yet. Argh!

But all is not lost. Via The Daily Dish, I found this website called Daily Routines, devoted to "how writers, artists and other interesting people organize their days".

What a find! The entries about Alice Munro ("As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children's nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven.") and Toni Morrison ("Writing before dawn began as a necessity--I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama--and that was always around five in the morning.") are heartening. Of course, they are accomplished writers and I'm still languishing in wannabe land, but one can always dream, right?

There are other fun nuggets - Kafka was a procrastinator (yay! so am I!), Emily Post wrote in bed and did not get off it until noon (sigh!).

The posts reminded me of the time a couple of years ago when I interviewed author Sashi Deshpande for AIR's FM station in Bangalore. One of the questions I asked during the interview was what her advice would be to people who wanted to be writers. The lady looked at me, wagged a finger and said, her voice gentle but admonishing, "You can't want to be a writer. That's the wrong way to look at it. You must want to write."

I think I've got the 'want' part down. I was up at 4 this morning, little ideas that demanded to be put down on paper doing the jiggy in my head. Just don't ask me how I ended up on The Atlantic's website.

Guest Post: Homes In My Heart, Padma Venkatraman

After those two long interviews (with some wonderful questions) on Thursday and Friday at Saffron Tree and at Reading, Writing, Wondering it’s nice to have a stop here to write a short guest blog. Thanks for having me, Sujatha!

As I said recently in an interview with South County Independent editor Betty Cotter, I have a lot of homes inside me. And that’s what you’d asked me to blog about – travel, my early life, how (if) that has affected my writing.

I grew up in India. I lived in Chennai (Madras) until I completed High School and I spent many summers in Mumbai (Bombay) in my sister’s home. Chennai and Mumbai are of course the cities where most of Climbing the Stairs takes place. One obvious way living in different places has influenced me is the detail with which I can recollect and thus recreate the ambience of these cities. I can still remember the Jamun tree that grew along the drive in the house in Velacheri where I spent my early childhood, and the ripe fruit really did dye our drive purple in August, just as the tree outside Vidya’s home does at the beginning of the novel.

For my undergraduate degree, I moved to Bangalore – mostly because I was stubborn and I decided that I wouldn’t do engineering or medicine (the two professions that everyone else around me who got excellent grades wanted to do). I wanted to do something for the environment and only St. Joseph’s College in Bangalore had Environmental science as a major.

My days in Bangalore…I met a lot of people, made many friends, enjoyed myself socially. I don’t really remember studying very hard, but my CV indicates that I must have done something right…

Bangalore…when I returned there recently it was such a shock…high rises everywhere…so many lovely old homes destroyed…gridlock…no longer the idyllic place I was sentimental about. MG Road, Brigade Road, Commercial Street…Koramangala…and of course Indranagar HAL Stage II I think, where mum bought a flat…Rotaract Orchards…research at the Indian Institute of Science.

Then, I left India, for the most part, to study abroad, although I did return to work as a researcher on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – the place where my second novel, Island’s End, now under contract to Penguin and scheduled for publication in 2010, takes place.

Where else have I lived? England for a bit, at a very Hogwarts-ish boarding school. A few years ago I met an old friend from there and he said reading Harry Potter had taken him right back to Brockwood Park, the international Krishnamurthi School where I’d spent a few years, both as a student, and later as director and head of Inwoods, the elementary-middle school there. I remember beautiful walks, rolling hills, and mountain climbing trips and hikes to Wales, Cornwall, Dover, Dorset, the Lake District. Maybe I’ll write about it someday, who knows? We’ve had lots of Brits write about India from their point of view, and now we Indian authors are starting to write about the UK…

Germany. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel set here…for adults though, not YA. Why is that? I can’t explain. But if I did write a book set in Germany, I think it would have to be a book for adults not children, not even young adults.

Then, of course, America. The College of William and Mary, where I did my graduate work. The colonial parkway covered with dogwood blossoms. The sparkling waters of the Chesapeake. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I did post-doctoral work. The farmers market in the middle of the city. Swimming pools on rooftops. Cozy coffee shops. Crazy ambulance drivers screeching past my flat all night long.

And now, Rhode Island. Ocean State sums it up perfectly. Started my life in the ocean state of Tamil Nadu, and now here I am in the Ocean State of Rhode Island… but not quite at my life’s end, I hope! After all, I have the rest of this blog book tour to complete.

Here are my remaining stops:

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 25th, I’ll be blogging on the topic of being a writing mom and finding time to write at Desi Momz Club;

Monday, May 26th, another guest post. Where were the British colonies during WWII? Doing background research for Climbing the Stairs, at author Laura Purdie Salas’s blog;

Tuesday, May 27th. Climbing the Stairs - The process of writing the novel, weaving together the different threads, at the 5 randoms;

Wednesday, May 28th. Oceanography, research and Climbing the Stairs. Making my schizophrenia work to my advantage. My (at least two) personalities. What it’s like to spend your 21st birthday on a research vessel at author Greg Fishbone’s blog;

Thursday, May 29th. What exactly is that dot on the forehead all about? Arranged marriages, Women in India in the 1940’s, Indian marriages today, gender equality issues in Climbing the Stairs, anything else you ever wanted to know about India at author Carrie Jones’s blog; and

Friday, May 30th. The grand finale. Moving to America, Becoming an American, Multicultural writing at author Mitali Perkins’s blog.

And before I forget, if you want to travel to places online that have reviews of Climbing the Stairs, here are some links:

http://www.padmasbooks.com/
http://padmasbooks.blogspot.com/
http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-CLIMBING-STAIRS_05-18-08_6HA2FQC_v7.b6a7bc.html
http://www.uri.edu/news/releases/index.php?id=4393

~~~

Padma, thanks for stopping by. Best wishes for a fun and successful book tour, and for continued writing success.