Mukherjee Musings

I strongly believe that an author of popular fiction, trying primarily to entertain, also has a great social responsibility. The work of an author, in my view, should be socially relevant and should hold mirror to the changing times and lifestyle of the people his work is meant for. In the garb of a thriller, In the Shadows of Death deals with a number of issues - fragility of marriages, corporate scandals, insecurities in a relationship driving an individual to the edge - each potentially leading to passionate debates, diverse perspectives and interpretations. I have been acutely conscious of the same all along. As an author, I consider it my responsibility to present my point of view, and share my thoughts with readers and reviewers. Firstly, I would like to draw attention to the portrayal of the modern day urban man and woman in the story. While there are female characters in the story who make certain personal choices and the resulting indiscretions lead to their ...

It's spring and love is in the air. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I wanted to share with you an excerpt of the story "Love Came Calling Again" from my book "Loves Lost". I have always wanted to "feel" the love for someone, more than "being loved" and pampered. I missed having someone in my life I would feel like cuddling with, on the couch in front of the TV with a tub of popcorn on a rainy evening, or someone I would just be happy buying things for, even if he didn’t need any of those. I missed being unreasonably possessive about someo ne. I wanted every romantic song I heard to throw up images of me in the arms of that special someone. I’ve always wanted someone to think of when it rained and the earth smelt sweet; I’ve always waited for a name I could whisper with my heart and soul, while clinging to my pillows under a warm blanket on a cold winter night. I spent my days and nights with that dream. And when I wo...

It feels great to be back! My brief hiatus was due to my travels and then catching up with the final edits and cover design of my book scheduled for a December 2015 release with Srishti . The good news is we are making good progress and the cover should be out on Facebook very soon. I am excited and looking forward to your feedback! In this edition and in the next few, I choose a topic close to my heart - looking at the private lives of the detectives we love. As a reader, I have always loved a thriller where I have been able to relate to the investigator as a human being. In my story, I have made sincere efforts to make Agni Mitra anything but an infallible, larger-than-life law enforcement machinery. And as we wait for Agni to share his life with us this December, let us revisit the lives of some of our favourite sleuths. I look at Holmes this week. In the accounts of Dr. Watson, Holmes comes across as bohemian and a tad eccentric. Holmes was also very apprehensive about dest...

Firstly, huge thanks are in order for the steadily mounting readership of this blog. I am loving the wonderful comments and feedback from readers, especially from my friends on my  LinkedIn  author page. I just finished reading Keigo Higashino's Malice . And I am still in awe. And the book is also the inspiration behind my blog this week. The book is about an author Hidaka who gets killed in his study in Japan a couple of days before he is ready to migrate to Canada with his second wife Rie, the first having died some years back in a car accident. Shortly before his death that evening, the author was visited by his friend from middle school, Nonoguchi, who happens to be an author of children's fiction, and the sister of another friend of theirs, Masaya, from the same school on whose not-so-glorious life Hidaka's last book was based. The sister has been demanding an apology and a complete re-write of the book, removing all references to the family. The detective Kaga...

It is important for authors and publishers to understand that, the real competition today is not among themselves, but authors and publishers as a community are competing against the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, which are grabbing the largest share of the attention span of today’s youth, as well as, a very mobile workforce. I had a very interesting experience some time back. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, over the last one year, I wrote a couple of e-books: Nargis Through my Summers  and Loves Lost  and then published the stories in print in paperback as Romance Shorts . I reached out to a select few of my professional friends in LinkedIn who I know are in the habit of reading fiction. I told them about my book Romance Shorts and that they could order the book from Amazon. Interestingly, a large percentage of them asked me if, instead of ordering the paperback , they could download an e-book in a Kindle device or into their tabs or smartphones. I, then, of c...

Take a look around and you will see an increasing number of professionals from a variety of fields – technology, marketing, finance, sales or what have you – lighting up the literary firmament like never before. Your no-nonsense colleague in the next cubicle whom you have seen spending his days and nights crunching numbers comes up with the next best-selling romance, and the bespectacled geek who you thought dreamt in JAVA writes a thriller that keeps you up all night! What exactly is the motivation here? I invest some thoughts into this very question in my blog today. I have a job in one of the leading global Consulting and Technology Services companies – a job that keeps me on the move across nations and oceans, and sometimes glued to my seat in my quiet office for hours in tele-conferences, but does assure that the bills get paid when they are due. Nevertheless, over the last 1 year, I wrote a couple of e-books ( Nargis Through my Summers and Loves Lost ), got them in one...