BOOK DISCUSSION

24 Thu 10.15 A.M

Presidency Club    

Pearl Room, Fairlawns

51, Ethiraj Salai

Chennai 600 008

Madras on your Mind : A City In Stories

Once upon a time by the sea, there was a story – and another and another – and some wandered into these pages to make up a city. So meet, amongst others, a travel guide who falls for a French tourist, a rice merchant with Kollywood dreams, a god whose editor proves elusive, a portly musical lawyer caught in a noir plot, and a man in search of family in the Great Madras Flood. Find yourself, among other places; in Town, at that gastronomic oxymoron, the Udipi cafe, in Velachery, in a fast car on East Coast Road, fleeing the city! It’s all here: the salt in the breeze, the eternal summer, the swing of the sea. It’s Madras on your mind.

“Madras has a multi-faceted identity which we wanted to capture. This is a

story of Madras through the prism of many pairs of eyes,” explains Chitra Viraraghavan, who has co-edited the book along with husband, Krishna Shastri Devulapalli. Various writers, hand-picked by Viraraghavan and Shastri, have come together to create this eclectic anthology.

Chitra Viraraghavan has worked in academic publishing, taught English, and is a book editor, school textbook writer and author of The Americans: A Novel. She is working on her second book, a work of  Historical fiction. Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a humour writer,cartoonist, columnist and the quintessential Madras-Chennai novelist. His most recent novel is The Sentimental Spy.