Books and Stuff Podcast

In this episode of the 'Books and Stuff' podcast, the host discusses groundbreaking books with Dr. Pallavi Narayan, a writer, editor, and literature enthusiast. She shares her journey from being a young poet to an author of multiple books, including 'Singapore at Home, Life Across Lines' and 'Pamuk's Istanbul, The Self and the City'. Dr. Narayan offers profound insights into nurturing a sense of community through literature, encouraging emerging writers to start small and set achievable goals. She also emphasizes the healing aspect of writing and the importance of reading varied genres. The podcast concludes with inspiring advice Dr. Narayan would give to her younger self about embracing one's diverse interests and the solace one can find in books. Singapore at home - https://www.amazon.in/Singapore-At-Home-Across-Lines-ebook/dp/B097D7WDN3/ Pamuk's Istanbul - https://www.amazon.in/Pamuks-Istanbul-Self-Pallavi-Narayan-ebook/dp/B09ZHD9GR9/

A very simple question to you. Just take a piece of paper and pen or a your mobile device.

Think of any authors or creators that come to your mind when I say the phrase science fiction.

Just the top 3, 4, 5 names maybe.

How many Indian science fiction writers popped up in your list? If you are anything like me, my best guess is you probably have none in your list.

But Sumit Shetty from the Pune Writers Group can rattle off a dozen names from the top of his head. In my chat with him for the Books n Stuff podcast, he didn't stop with Indian Sci-fi authors, but also covered Chinese (and Chinese origin) Sci-fi authors as well. We, Earth people, haven't colonized Mars yet, or we would have had Sumit rattle off a few Martian Sci-fi authors as well.

Till that happens, check out some of the stories and authors that we discussed about in this exciting podcast episode:

- Inspector Matadeen

- Gollanz Book of South Asian Science

- Kyla chandar dutt - 1835

- Anil Menon

- Arjun Rajendran

- inconceivable idea of the sun by Anil Menon

- Leila by Prayag Akbar

- The woman who thought she was a planet by Vandana Singh

- Things we found during the autopsy

- Moustache by S Hareesh

- Broken Stars and Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

- Three body problem by Cixin Liu

- Story of My Life by Ted Chiang

Imagine you have 48 hours in a day and 14 days in a week. What all would you be able to achieve? Without changing your achievements, change the number of hours in a day and days in a week to the usual 24 and 7. Look through your list, you can achieve a lot more than what you think, correct?

This is the kind of thinking that Pathik Mitra seems to have taught himself. He holds an engineering degree and an MBA. He works in a company, has the same duties and responsibilities that each of us has, yet, he's managed to generate those extra 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week to publish his book and direct several plays.

His secret sauce - he argues with himself using a 1 member WhatsApp group and irons out his ideas when he has to wait in line or wait for boarding a flight. His other succesful idea is to sacrifice sleep.

I spoke to him about his book "Scarecrow chronicles", in particular and how to nurture your creative life, in general.

He spoke about some of the stories in his anthology, particularly "Roots" and "A1 Jaggery".

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

In the second episode of the Books n Stuff podcast, Parvathi Ramkumar and Medhavi Dhyani discuss the book "Legends and Lattes" by Travis Baldree. Bala Ramadurai quizzes the two readers and finds more about the book.

The summary:

This book is called Legends and Lattes. It's by Travis Baldree. It's also published by Tor, which is an imprint of MacMillan in the US. This book is about a certain adventurer called Viv. She's tired of adventuring. She's seen her share of battles and all that. So she decides to come to a very large city called Thune, and there she decides that she wants to open a coffee shop there. And basically that's all the plot is. She comes to the city, she opens a coffee shop, she adds more things to the menu. She has a nice time, she makes friends.

And the twist here is that she has a certain artifact with her that she got on her last adventuring mission. And some people know that she has this artifact and that causes her a bit of trouble with a former adventuring partner and the local crime lord.

All's well that ends well.

That's basically it. It's simple.

Wow. It's very simple. This is the shortest summary we've had in this entire podcast.

Foundation is the first book in the Foundation series of books. There is a prequel to this book, but we're not gonna talk about that. We're just gonna focus on Foundation. So what we have here, the plot basically is that the 12,000 years there's been a galactic empire.

Imagine that a 12,000 year old galactic empire, and this empire is dying, and one person called Harry Seldon, he's a psychohistorian. And he's basically a doomsayer who's predicting that this empire will fall. Of course, the empire hates that this guy is predicting their fall, and he has a lot of followers and a lot of people who are working with him, mathematician, scientists, and not many psychologists for reasons I'll tell you about later.

However, the empire does not like this, and he and his followers are exiled to a far flung planet. Far away in the galaxy, right at the wings of the galaxy, somewhere really, really far away. And there they have to continue working on an encyclopedia that this guy wants. He cannot travel with them because he's too old.

However, he knows exactly what will happen. And basically what he says will happen is that the empire will fall after 12,000 years and then there'll be 30,000 years of darkness. He knows a way to kind of forestall that darkness and bring about a new age of enlightenment because 30,000 years is a very long time to remain in the dark.

According to him, if he and his followers work on an encyclopedia, they'll be able to bring back a second empire. So basically that's what the plot is about. However, as his followers discover over a long span of time, nothing this man says can be taken at face value. And he has his own agenda.

The Foundation, the novel, is split into five little novelettes and each are interconnected, each deals with a different period of time. And only the first section actually has this man, Harry Seldon alive. And each time he makes an appearance as a hologram, he guides this planet called Terminus. It's got absolutely nothing, and he guides this new civilization towards this intended goal.

So each time there's a crisis on the Terminus, this man makes an appearance right on cue and they've come to expect it. And it's almost like clockwork that he makes an appearance, everything that happens to this planet Terminus, he's able to guess. And because of psychohistory, which is basically a mix of mathematics, science, and psychology. And anything the human race does, this man is able to predict because apparently we are not as free as we thought.

And everything can be predicted. Everything is set into a pattern. So that's what this book is about.

Acknowledgements:

A big shout-out to Akhilesh (for his voice for the intro), Anita Nagarajan (for her voice for the sign-off)  and Parvathi Ramkumar (for her Gottuvadhyam adapted rendition of Simon&Garfunkel for the intro music and for Raga Garudadhwani Thyagaraja kriti outro music) for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used:

-   Podcast banner: http://canva.com

-   Audio editing: Shotcut & Descript

-   Podcast recording & hosting - Anchor.fm

-   Blog post editing: Org Mode

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Krishna narrates his own views and what he picked up from a book on Ex-Prime Minister of India, P V Narasimha Rao.

What can one learn from a Prime Minister who masterfully pulled a country out of recession and socialism while keeping a slender majority at bay, while pursuing his own passion of life long learning? Listen to the podcast to know about this.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

What strategy did you use while studying or learning a course at school/college? Mine was simple: read, then read one more time, and then wake up in the morning and read again.

Magically, just after the exams, all the learning vanished from my head. All these years, I wondered about why that happened. Let’s find out from our learned friend, Krishna.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!