Married But Available Launch Photos

To decide who would release the first copy of the book, we asked the audience to write their names on a piece of paper and drop it in a box. Karthika picked a name from the lot. that turned out to be Senthil Kumar who I share my alma mater with (just that he got way better grades than me always at XLRI - School of Business and Human Resources).In the photo above : (Senthil Kumar releases the novel. Karthika - the editor looks on)The launch of a book is the closest experience to childbirth. The editor will keep doing the checkups and fine tune the diet to ensure a healthy kiddo. But the date of the launch is always unpredictable. Once the book goes in for editing, the editor takes over your life.No good deed is ever left unpunished. The editor then gets to experience the same sense of helplessness when she jands over the edited manuscript to the Production Unit who will then design the pages and the cover and get the book printed.Then you do a launch event. So what IS supposed to happen during a launch event? It could be anything. The trick is to put up some kind of a circus that encourages the spectators to finally loosen their purse strings and buy the book. Hence a lot of authors (yours truly included) read excerpts from the book. That gives the audience a flavor of the story and the writing style. I had recorded some excerpts that I had recorded with the extremely talented Madhu Rajesh (who runs the blog of Fritolay India and is part of their HR team)."Why don't you read a dramatized version of some chapters?", suggested Lushin Dubey - the ever so experienced stage actor. That's finally what we agreed to do. Lushin did a marvellous job of changing her voice and diction and pace to create her own version of characters. Was she good!!These photos of the launch party are all courtesy R Rajesh who is a very innovative shutterbug. My mugshot in the backpage of the novel which are also being used on the novel's announcement posters for bookshops, is courtesy Rajesh. Check out his photos at http://www.pbase.com/r_rajesh1801/