Moonstone: The Incredible One Hour

This is the title of my first non-fiction humor book that is just about to be released to the market. A short snippet of the book, that you will find on the back cover also is “Performing Arts Festival (PAF) is an inter hostel competition at IIT Powai, where a pair of hostels present an hour long skit. The paired hostels completely own the performance, right from script writing, to dramatization, sets, sound, lights, music, and publicity to attract people to come and watch the show. This story, a laughter riot, is about the PAF presented by H6 and H9 in 1991. With an amazing story line, some never before seen incredible special effects, amazing light and sound effects, great actors, musicians, and dancers, in short with an abundance of talent, Moonstone was headed for a definite victory. Did they succeed?”

You can pre-order a copy from here. It has taken substantial effort over multiple years (there were unavoidable gaps in between) to get this book done, but I am proud to say that the final outcome is very satisfying. The various initial reviews that I have had on the book, are all very positive and now that the book is in production, let’s see what the market says... i.e. what all of you say? J. 

As I now sit back and think over, I wasn't always into writing. In fact I wasn't even into reading. As a kid I was reading Amar Chitra Katha a bit, but mostly because of their very interesting picture based stories. It was my brother who got me into reading. He was a passionate reader and when not reading, he was playing his favorite game with the book: book cricket. It was probably a kind of sibling competition that got me into reading and there it stayed for a while. Writing was still not something that I liked and writing essays in school exams was always a pain.

In 1995, I had done my graduation and moved to Bangalore for my first job. There, on one of the weekends, I went for a trip along with many of new found friends and after the trip, for some reason, I cannot recall now, I decided to write about this trip. I shared it with some of them and most of them liked it and it gave me the first boost that I could take a shot at writing. So thereafter I wrote about all the trips that we had been to and I still have that collection. Maybe I will publish it someday. However my writing stayed to these short 2-3 page stories covering the trips.

The next level came when in my official capacity and I wrote a few technical papers. The top one on this site is the latest I have co-authored along with a colleague of mine. During this time I also wrote 2 short technical books. These were for internal circulation and not published in the market. These were known as for lounge reading. The idea was that these were short handbooks, something one could quickly check out while waiting at Airport Lounge. I also started writing at our official blog site and soon this became the most popular blogs and that gave me lot of confidence. In early 2011 I co-authored my first full scale technical book for Packt publishing and it was a great experience.

I then started with my, this, personal blog and used this to share mostly interesting and humorous events that happened in my life. Occasionally I wrote about serious topics as well, based on current affairs. After all this writing I felt fairly confident and then picked up this book on Moonstone, something that has been very dear to all of us, who graduated out of IIT Powai. I strongly felt that this was one story that should reach out to everyone and so, here’s the book. I do hope that you would enjoy reading this non-fiction humor story. You can order the printed copy from here. The Kindly version will be available shortly.

You can post your review about the book on the publisher’s website and any generic discussions/comments on the Facebook page.