Chennai: Technocrat-professional Sriram Subramanian’s first novel Rain – A Survivor’s Tale is a straight and compelling narrative about a budding architect with a very personal burning ambition behind his professional life – to build a ‘proper house’ in its full aesthetic sense for his wife Sarika.
Set in the life-world of Pune, the cultural capital of Maharashtra, the narrative is about the travails of an ambitious young man, the roller-coaster ride the male ego has to undergo in a typical middle-class society that confronts its contradictions as it evolves with actors taking on diverse modern roles, particularly women in the household.
The author — an engineer from IIT Roorkee and an MBA from IIM Calcutta — has in this first work of fiction coursed through real life situations when hard professionals take even harder individual decisions, whether it is at their work or on the home front.
The pace of change that a Patwardhan family of Maharashtra undergo silently over three generations from a land-owning class and how the dynamics of urbanisation, entrepreneurship and slippery world of commerce and finance can take even well bred individuals to the margins of social existence and how they confront the underbelly of a far less privileged society of the poor and the underdogs, have been well captured in an unobtrusive way by the author.
A broken relationship makes the protagonist a virtual tramp on the other side of Pune, but leads him in the process to an enlightenment wherein he learns that simply learning to live is not having to “prove something to somebody”. How this eventually leads to reconciliation with his wife forms the concluding part of this short and sweet novel.
Enhancing English skills
The Complete Guide to Spoken English – traverses simultaneously through Tamil and English to help tens of thousands of graduates who come out of our Universities to be well equipped with English communication skills. For without those soft skills, talented graduates find it hard to find the right employment, particularly in the IT and software industry.
The author of this highly practical guide to students and youths, S.G. Jayaraman, says he has been handling English classes for students of diverse Arts and Science UG courses since 2009 and the book “is the result of more than two years hard and conscientious labour on my part.”
The strength of this book is that it deals with correct spoken English not merely from the abstract grammar point of view but in real conversational contexts, where people all the time keep making utterances in Tamil and their equivalent in English.
The author has also provided some ‘interview tips’ for youngsters aspiring to take up a career in the IT and software fields.
A thoughtful foreword by film actor Sivakumar, who shares his experience on how he realised the need for simple and effective communication in English when he first came to Chennai in the 1960s’ to study painting and drawing, his first passion in life, has enhanced the value of this guide.
