Category Great Personalities

This author with a particularly unique name – Pika Nani – says that her childhood dream of becoming a writer was forgotten when she stepped into the world of higher education and went on to study Psychology. But writing beckoned her once more after her daughter was born. “She really became my inspiration,” says Pika, who was born in Bengaluru and brought up in Mumbai. “When I was a kid, as young as four or five, I used to write small poems. My father was my first inspiration as he would write poems and plays in Kannada. I remember I wrote my first short story in front of the class.” Pika loved to read, Enid Blytons mostly, and along the way, many authors such as R.K. Narayan, O. Henry, Jane Austen, Agatha Conan Doyle have also inspired her.

Writing like Pika Nani

Pika feels that being a good listener and observer is the key to good, emphatic writing and realistic characterization. Here are some tips from her armoury!

• First, even before you begin writing, learn to observe your surroundings and people. Be a good listener, develop empathy. This will help you create realistic characters and settings.
• Ideas for a book can come from anywhere, even when you are on vacation, so always stay ready to jot them down. A good way to get ideas is to ask the question “What if? Like, in my case, a question popped up – ‘What if Sherlock Holmes was a teenage detective from Mumbai?’ It led to my Shrilok Homeless books!
• Start by setting small goals such as writing a diary or short stories. Contribute your writings to the school magazine or blogs. This will give you the confidence to write a book.
• Before you start writing your book, prepare a cover page. Write the title of your book (in large font) and your name below it. You can even add illustrations! Every time you write or type your story, you will see the cover page first and it will motivate you to complete the book. “This worked for me for my first book ‘Little Indians’,” says the author.

Books by Pika Nani

Little Indians: Stories from across the country
The Adventures of Shrilok Homeless
Shrilock Homeless: The Ultimate Adventures Volume 2

The writer’s routine

Pika says that she is, what she calls, a “visual writer”. “I imagine the scene and write what I see,” she explains. “I write in the mornings and afternoons. But if a deadline is near, then I am at my laptop till late night as well. I usually like to get the ideas on paper, from a general outline of the story and protect from there.”

Bet you didn’t know that Pika Nani is not really a pen name, though it has eventually become hers! (The writer’s name is Deepika Murthy.) When she was about two or three years old and people would ask her name, she would end up saying ‘Pika Nani’ when she actually meant to say Deepika Rani, a title she had given herself after hearing all the Raja Rani stories, she thinks! She writes a poem once in a while, when the inspiration strikes.
 

Picture Credit : Google

Siddhartha was born Guwahati in Assam and he lived for the first 18 years of his life on the campus of Gauhati University. He started writing for publication when he was seven – first in school magazines and then for newspapers. “Before that, I used to write small stories for myself, or tell them to whoever was interested. I started reading chapter books around the same time. So I really can’t tell if reading stories got me to start writing, or I liked reading because I responded to stories and to telling them,” says the writer.

Writing the Siddhartha Sarma

Siddhartha insists there is no single way to being a writer, and what works for one kind of person might not work for another. However, he has put down what he has learnt over these years. According to him, there are three things a good writer needs.

Read: “First, you need to read. At this stage in your life, when your mind is fresh and memory sharp, you need to read as much as possible. I remember almost everything that I read till I was 18. You can afford to be indiscriminate. You can read across genres. You can read good writing and bad, because it is only when you have read enough bad writing will you know what to avoid. Afterwards, when you are older and have less time, you can specialize in genres or writers. For how, just read every single printed word you can find. Don’t count the number of books you have read. It’s being rude to your mind. Don’t set targets. Don’t read for other people. Just read.”

Write: “Good writing is also about craft. All the books you read will not help you become a good writer unless you have done a lot of practice and discovered what your strengths and weaknesses are. Before writing about the world, you should explore every corner of your mind, and writing practice helps you do that. There is no fixed ration of reading to writing that I can recommend but at this stage in your life, give some time to writing just for yourself. Publication can wait.

Live: “This one is super important and very difficult. Go out, explore the world, study humans, animals, systems, structures, ideas. Experience the complexities of the human condition. The best writers always write about things that matter to humans even when they are writing about dragons and aliens and robots. The best writers have a profound understanding of what it means to be human. And the best way to discover it is to live, make mistakes. Learn. Watch other humans (that gives you templates for your characters).”

Siddhartha Sarma’s books

1. Year of the Weeds
2. 103 Historical Mysteries, Puzzles, Conundrums and Stuff
3. 103 Journeys, Voyages, Trip and Stuff
4. The Grasshopper’s Run

Inspiration from the real world is of essence to him, “When I write, I go into a small place in my head, which is very precious for me. The place where I grew up was beautiful, wooded, full of ponds and small creatures. The small place in my head is my personal copy of this real place. I go there because it gives me a sense of peace, quiet and focus. So you could say that I am inspired by the world, and by my childhood.”

The writer’s routine

He says he tries to write in a simple manner and lets the characters drive the story. “I don’t like using big words or long sentences, adverbs or exclamation marks, he says. “My favourite time is at night, preferably between midnight and four in the morning. That’s when I write. I think about what I am going to write during the rest of the day, I have no standard process. But sometimes, while writing a novel, I write scenes from different points in the story, and then put things together later, like shooting a film.” He confesses he doesn’t usually make a storyboard but he might just begin to.

Bet you did not know that Siddhartha is a trained swordmaker and marksman. That he thinks he is rather boring, in spite of his hobby of collecting comic books, classic die-cast car models and swords. “These aren’t really uncommon things to do,” he says.

 

Picture Credit : Google

To the art world, the works of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher – mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints – seemed like bizarre optical illusions. However, to mathematicians and scientists he was a genius, and to the hippies of the 1960s he was a pioneer of psychedelic art!

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, Holland. He was the youngest of five sons. He was more interested in carpentry and music and failed all his final exams except for mathematics.

Escher enrolled at architecture school in Haarlem but left to try his hand at graphic art. He was a great success. By the end of the 1920s, he was exhibiting his work regularly in Holland. In 1934, he won his first American exhibition prize.

In 1936, Escher visited the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. Its geometric tiling provided a further creative impetus to his work from then on.

Two of his best works are Ascending and Descending (1960), with its ranks of human figures trudging forever upwards and eternally downwards on an impossible four-sided staircase and Drawing Hands (1948), the image of two hands each drawing the other with a pencil.

The artist created some of the most memorable images of the 20th Century, but it was not until two years before his death in 1972, that the first full retrospective of his works was held in his native Holland.

 

Picture Credit : Google