City-based journalist Sushila Ravindranath set the tone for the Chronicles of Urban Nomads book launch at the Department of Management Studies at IIT Madras this weekend. As a self-confessed fan of short stories, Sushila said that the medium was a great way to encourage people to write: “Talk to any author and they’ll say it’s (short stories) that are the most difficult to write and publishers say they don’t really sell. We’ve all grown up on short stories — Aesop's Fables , Panchatantra and the Mahabharata and they are the purest form of entertainment and education; short stories have everything.”
Chennai has a special connect with the launch as six of the 20 contributing authors hail from the city. Chronicles of Urban Nomads came about when these stories were chosen through a nationwide hunt by Readomania, an online publishing platform for budding authors. The book is an anthology of stories that include genres like romance, drama, action and more. The book is divided into two sections: Imagine and Musing.
Deepti Menon, one of the authors, explained the idea behind the title of the book. “As storytellers, we’re all chroniclers, and we’re all urban. At the last launch, we realised that we're not just nomads, but instead we are ‘all mads’ — we authors provide madness,” she said. Apart from Sushila, the guests present at the launch included actor Mohan V. Raman (who regaled the audience with stories of yesteryear koothus ), lyricist Madhan Karky, actor and theatre personality Karthik Kumar and publisher of Inbox 1305 , Jyoti Agarwal. The book is available for order on Amazon.
