Book Launch of Urban Shots at Landmark, Pune.
Friday, 26th November 2010.
I don’t know what I was expecting from the launch of Urban Shots in Pune, but whatever it was, the event turned out to be a whole of lot of fun, much more than what I was prepared for. Present at the event were contributors Sahil Khan, Naman Saraiya, Paritosh Uttam and moderating the talk was Aditya Bidikar. As far as timing goes, the event started only half an hour late, which means it started on time.
(From Left to Right: Aditya Bidikar, Paritosh Uttam, Sahil Khan, Naman Saraiya)
Though the event wasn’t as star-studded as the Bombay launch, the fact that the boys were on home ground, made for an excellent round of Q&A.
Paritosh Uttam, writer of Dreams In Prussian Blue and editor of this book recounted how the book came about after meeting publisher/writer Ahmed Faiyaz at a book event. He mentioned how they wanted to bring out a book that would reveal the changing perception of relationships in urban India and had placed stories into vari
ous sub-themes of friendship, love, longing, etc and how they tried to balance age and youth and experiences under each of these. He explained how they chose authors from different walks of life to get different perspectives and takes on urban relationships and come up with a collection that would appeal to a wider audience. Well, he wasn’t wrong with that. There were people from every age group, though the young, college-going crowd was clearly dominating the scene.
The ladies in the audience were definitely taken by our young and very amiable writers Sahil Khan and Naman Saraiya. Their questions directed at the writers definitely gave the audience much entertainment, something which I think is not that readily available at most book events.
Paritosh, who has contributed 10 stories that he had written over a long period of time tried to explain, without inviting any more innuendo-laden questions, about the naivety present in love stories he had written before his marriage and those after that.
Sahil talked about his story “The Untouched Guitar” (featured in the friendship section) which led to many insistent questions about the heroine of his story. Naman’s account of cutting short a holiday in Goa to return to write the story, a story which featured in the “longing” section of the book also attracted as many queries and digs at more details.
(From Left to Right: Paritosh Uttam, Sahil Khan, Naman Saraiya)
I’m sure most of the people at the launch bought a copy to find out more about these authors through their stories. This one is surely whipping up a good fan following. Make sure you pick up your copy before the stores run out of stock!
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