The Idea-smithy

This is for Dee, the editor I’d like to have, who quite literally showed me the way.
~O~O~O~O~O~
Where do stories come from? she wondered. Her editor had told her that her writing had a quality of finesse in it. But, he said, the spark was missing. She wanted to protest, it had been such an effort [...]

“And this is Kunal.”
“Are you on Twitter?”
“Yes, I’m @c00nal.”
“I don’t think I FOLLOW you.”
“I don’t follow you either.”
Kunal frowns as he turns to the Hot Dog stand.
“I think I hurt his ego a bit.”
“You just met!”
“Social boo-boo, telling someone you don’t follow them on Twitter.”
“What rubbish, nobody cares about these things.”
“Some people do. Maybe he’s [...]

The person I wrote this for, when he read it, told me,
You don’t yet realize that we are beyond this.
It was a fitting end in every way possible.

We concluded the first Mumbai BlogCamp of 2010 on Saturday, 20 Feb 2010. First of all, thank you and congratulations are due to Gaurav, Adil, Arushi and their team at ACM for setting up a great venue for us. My backbencher-at-college days of yore had not prepared me for the spanking new campus, the soft [...]

Another writing exercise and this one I thought up myself! (Pat on the back…thank you, thank you). The challenge was to write a 140-word story about Twitter. Samir and I did this under a timer. And finished in close to 14 minutes. I call this a twory.
~O~O~O~O~O~

An 80s song went,
“The instant generation….Instant food, instant [...]

Vineet was an ordinary young man with one remarkable talent that came to fore only in his late teens in college. It all started with an inter-collegiate festival.
His college and the hosting campus had a long running feud and the annual festival was both, a new episode in the war as well as a chance [...]

Announcing the first BlogCamp of 2010!
For those of you who don’t know, BlogCamp is an unconference, an open forum of social media users. BlogCamp began as a module of BarCamp (which looks at the wider net of technology and business) but has gained enough popularity to merit an event of its own.
The format is as [...]