Eavesdropping

About the Book

Eavesdropping is a credible anthology of stories of the many faces of India: mystical, ancient, traditional, and mysterious. You will see and hear characters in their native idiom in some stories. Accident’s Child is about how floods in India result yearly in human tragedy, but also in human compassion. The Indian Soldier and Pakistani Fruit Seller peeps into the avoidable partition of the Indian subcontinent and the conflicts arising out of separating neighbours, living in a climate of respect for each other’s religions, by a politically contrived surgical operation into two counties. The Quest is an apocryphal search for an ancient figurine. Ramaswamy, the Watch Maker is about a humble street-side watch repairer sitting unobtrusively in urban India. There are humourous vignettes that poke fun at Indian marriage and the fragile, but nevertheless enduring, relationships it provides between man and wife. The stories thus encompass the spectrum of India, from about the 1940s to very recent days. The poems in the book have a metaphysical basis—the soul of India from time immemorial. They reflect the deep currents of thought that have influenced the author.

About the Author

Haravu started his working life as a teacher of Mathematics, but soon turned to Library and Information Science as a career and profession, in which subsequently he has many firsts to his credit. He pioneered the application of computers to library and information management in India, and the development of India’s first and only open-source library management system. His expertise has been used by international organizations, such as UNESCO, FAO, and IDRC-Canada. His interest in creative writing was like a dormant shoot, ready to sprout when conditions were favourable. Retired life in Mysore, India, and the company of people who view life through a wide-angled lens, has been the trigger for his creative writing begun a few years ago, first with short middles, then poems and stories that were privately circulated to a few friends and relatives. Encouragement from friends that these should be published has resulted in the book in your hands.