Life after death
Journey of a 32-year-old man who wakes up in the middle of nowhere and is told by a stranger that he is already dead
By : amrita paul
Update: 2014-09-16 22:43 GMT
Hyderabad: Arnab Ray describes himself as someone with a “genre attention span of a two-year-old”. His first book May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss was a non-fiction satire on Bollywood, Indian politics and the society in general.
His second novel, The Mine, was a horror fiction. And now his recently released third book, Yatrik, is also a fiction which follows the journey of one 32-year-old Anushtup Chatterjee, who wakes up in a deserted field in the middle of nowhere and a stranger tells him that he has already died.
The author says, “It’s not particularly a good thing for commercial authors, or so I have read, because it dilutes the reader-base. But for me writing has been always about putting to paper the story that’s currently knocking inside, asking to be let out. If it’s horror, it’s horror. If it’s satire, well then that’s it. In a way this dancing about reflects my own reading habits. I keep jumping around there too.”
Arnab, a senior research scientist specialising in software engineering, is also an avid blogger. His blog, Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind is also one of the most popular blogs in the country. He mentions that even after three books, writing remains a hobby because it allows him to write what he wants to write.
“I have been writing since I was ten years old adventure tales set in Africa and a war thriller where the White House is attacked by the Russians, all scribbled into a green diary which fortunately has now been lost to the world,” he adds.
Speaking of Yatrik, the author who is presently an adjunct Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland in the US says, “Yatrik is about life, love, regret, forgiveness and understanding. It is also about choices — those that we make and those the world makes for us.”
“Like The Mine, the end was the first thing that came to mind for this book and then I followed it back. In a way it’s the most personal of all my books so far, set as it is in post-Naxal Calcutta around the time I grew up there,” he adds.
Arnab lists his other interests as “reading, gaming and sleeping.” And adds, “The previous sentence should tell you I am not one for too much physical exercise.” The author who started blogging 10 years back feels that although the creative medium still remains the same, people’s attention spans have declined considerably.
“140 characters and boom! People want to move on to the next thing,” he says. Arnab informs that his next book is tentatively titled Sultan of Delhi: Ascension and it is the first part of a two-book multi-generational crime drama.