Sid-O-Scope

The northern winds blew over the inn and creaked the door open. The cold breeze blew inside sending chills down Vinayak's spine. He shuddered and went to closed the door again. He gasped at the door, cursing his job. He was the inn-keeper of this family INN. It was started by his father and provided wayfarers a place to rest and have a hot meal on the highway. Vinayak glanced at the clock on the wall- it showed closed to midnight. No one is going to come here now. He sighed, no one will come here anymore, it was the coldest night. He might as well close down and go to sleep. Just as he was about to lock the door, an old Sage stepped inside, "Room for one, please?" Vinayaka rushed to the door and helped the Sage inside, "Please come in father, where are you going in such a cold night?" The Sage could barely stand and was leaning on a wooden stick. His thin frame of body bends from the spine. The long flowing gray beard complimented the back and created ...

I received a request to write a story on the ever loving Krishna and I chose this. There are lot of things already said about Krishna, the controversial warrior-poet. He was a great leader, strategist and orator but he rarely drew the following like his predecessor Ram. He was cunning, manipulative and a fierce lover and a lot has been said about him in mainstream storytelling. But what happened in his enemies mind? How did other warriors saw him? Everyone feared him, some worshipped him, some hated him but no one could ignore him.  This story is entirely fictional and creative adoption from the text of Jaya, that describes the Kurushetra war in detail.  "We need to talk," Bhishma walked into the war room unannounced. No one had dared disrespect Duryodhana before in his own war room but this was Bhishma. "I gather you got my message?" Duryodhana asked, "Come." Bhishma looked at the audience that was gathered in the war room. Sitting in the circl...

On the southernest peak of Bharatvarsha the army of monkey kingdom Kishkinda camped near the ocean bank. Few were busy preparing food for the rest, while others were sharping their weapons. There was a murmur among the army about crossing the ocean. At that time four people huddled at the beach discussing their option. Ram, Lakshman, Hanumaan and Jambavana discussing the strategy for crossing the ocean. "We need to find out if Ravana is holding Sita captive in that kingdom. I do not wish to battle the king without any sort of proof," Lord Ram said. "King Ravana rules Lanka. He is one of the most powerful and the richest king," Jambavana said. "But is there is a way to confirm if he has held Sita captive there and..." Lord Ram spoke, "... I need proof that he holds her captive against her wishes." "Brother!!!!," Lakshman gasped, "Do not doubt Sita mayya please." "I do not but as prince of Ayodhya and the lead...

Ravan was pacing hard in his royal chamber. A disturbing trend was brought to light in his peoples court today. His advisors informed of rise in corruption among the civil servants.  Ravan had always tried hard to instill discipline in his people. He tried hard to maintain peace and policy in the golden land of Lanka. We are the richest kingdom ever, don't they see it? he asked himself, If everyone is rich, why is there corruption? He kept asking question again and again. Why are the people corrupt? We are just and fair to everyone, we do not over tax them, no one is poor? Then why do we have corruption? Watching him agitated Vibhishan walked towards him, "Anything worrying you brother?" "Why is there corruption Vibhishan? We have given them everything they want.... why corruption then?" Ravan asked, "Even the poorest of the villager eats in the plate of Gold, then why do we have corruption? Why can't we end it once and for all?" Surpa...

If you know me in my other life, I proudly boast of myself as the Monk Who Sold His Computer for the Cloud. I do not own a computer, apart from video editing, and invest a lot of time trying to replace my computer with cloud services . One of the most important problem faced by me in this period was how do I move novel writing services to the cloud? Can an internet based service be used for Novel writing? The service should be such that it can be used to sync on the phone, iPad as well as Web. With NaNoWriMo around, I decided to put on the thinking cap and setup my workspace in Evernote. If you are new to this world, Evernote is a note-taking tool that helps capture text-based-notes, picture based notes, Web-Links (Clips) and even voice based notes. So let's get to work.  Evernote lets you create Notebooks that can store your notes together. The notebooks can further be grouped together in something they call ' Stack'. For the purpose of the blog, I am going...

This post has been published by me as a part of Blog-a-Ton 56 ; the fifty-sixth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. There are moments that come in time-traveller's life when he has to look over his entire existence and asks himself - Is this it? Is this the moment when you determine if you are in the right time-stream? Look, those who do not know time-travel, here are the basics- in space we can travel. We can go from point  A  to point  B  in private vehicles, public transport or even just walking. It's easy, you learn it when you are 3 or 4 years. The first time you crawled from the end of the room to the arms of your parent you feel, this is it , this is your biggest achievement. But then in the next few years, your parent take you to a garden and then you think... woah, can I run from one end to another? Sure you can, you try that and you feel good about it. You try to tumble, you try to crawl, you know d...

Born: 14 January 1978 Hair: Curly, partially bald Profession: Founder-  'Takshashila institute of Advanced research' Anyone who met Professor Sampakta Shastri always had an undeniable urge to punch him hard in his face. Prof Shastri was a self-proclaimed expert on everything under the Sun. His theories and ideas were famous around the world. He was also known to have an outburst of information about everything in the world. He used to share it in random conversations with no moral obligations of any kind. He liked to give prolonged lectures, which he was fond of giving, at any unfortunate moment. Sometimes, irrespective of whether anyone was willing to listen to him or not. Professor Shastri was in his late thirties and had a round face and a big belly. From a distance he looked like a giant panda with short and curly hair, dark brown complexion and no facial hair. Depending on who you believe in, he was either a modern day Einstein or a lunatic devil wors...

The idea behind Ragnarok, my upcoming science fiction satire, came exactly three years ago when I was talking to a friend. This friend of mine (who has explicitly asked me not to name him) was harping on and on about how religion is necessary for faith and belief. That put the idea of God in my head. For as long as I remember, I was an agnostic about the concept of God. I never faced any crisis that would make me look for a higher power or ask for forgiveness. But my friend put the idea that there has to be someone out there looking out for us. That was the definitive moment when the idea popped into my head. See, here is the thing, we all want to believe that someone out there is looking out for us. Everyone, even an atheist, at one point in time want to look up and say, hey this is not my problem, this is yours. Here is the idea, if everyone (or most of us) talk to someone all powerful to solve their problem, what kind of pressure are we putting on that one person? And ...

I stand on the eve of a monumental achievement. After a long effort of four years, I finished my first novel- Ragnarok. It is a science fiction satire based in a fictional world just like us. There were a lot of questions around Ragnarok and I chose to answer some of them. The most common one was, why Ragnarok? Those who know me, know about my obsession with Hindu Mythology but still for the first novel, I chose a title with Norse Mythology. To those wondering, my Ragnarok is not about mythology. It is a science fiction satire based in a modern world. The only thing related to the old mythology is the title of the book and the chartered name of the secret society planning on world domination. Just as a disclaimer, it has nothing to do with the Marvel movie. Ragnarok literally means The End of Gods in Norse mythology. Ragnarok is described as a decisive battle between Gods and Titan to determine the successor for the throne of Odin. The following is a poem that is roughly tran...

It's been a year of gruesome writing . What started as a small short story for a blog, turned into a hailstorm and now is coming out as a novel. Get ready for contest, cover launch, teaser starting August and your chance to win goodies, signed copies and (if you really really plead) un-signed copies. Join me on the facebook page where most of the contest will take place. The social media links are available on the sidebar.

A recent controversial article by Chetan Bhagat tried to highlight a moot point of how the Bhakts (as the Narendra Modi supports are called on internet) are sexually frustrated, male egoist and are people with no proper English dialect (which might summarize the last three characters in his books or any Bollywood film for that matter). But while his observations are completely without any research (as are his flat stories or half-cooked Bollywood plot boilers) the main purpose of this article to set the record straight. Lets look at the facts without any masala added to it. Since the dawn of internet there were trolls who loved to seek attention. They first started email marketing sending countless emails about the exclusive offer they had. But as technology grew closer we brought all sorts of people together and with them we brought these trolls near us. This is a global phenomena and not limited to India. A definition of an internet troll by Wikipedia is as follows In Internet sla...

The past year was something of a golden period for writing for me. For those who came in late (or not following me on  Facebook page ), I had a big writing year.  I finished the most epic science fiction book this year titled Ragnarok . The book will be released this August or September. A graphic novel titled  Agatya is set to release immediately after that. Agatya is a book about the last line of defence between Heaven and Hell. That's two fictional releases back to back. There is one more technical book coming out soon (no release planned). And finally a short film based on a Short Story from this blog. (Read  Original Ginger Chai  if you are in that sort of thing) I am writing a lot in the past year and that was a shameless marketing plug for my  Facebook page . With all these books and releases I had a big writing year behind me since last May. I was writing and editing most of the time. And as with any norma...