It all begins at the fateful forest hearth of 2018 on the hills of Kurangani in Tamil Nadu. Atulya Misra, an IAS officer, was appointed by the State Government to probe the incident. He has now written a novel whose protagonist is impressed by the information who saved the lives of a number of trekkers.
Testimony By Fire (revealed by Rupa) is a couple of journey this survivor undertakes throughout the size and breadth of our nation. When Misra, an Additional Chief Secretary to Government, Department of Sports & Youth Welfare, got down to write a novel, he wished his protagonist to journey by India’s “aspirational districts”.
The time period, he explains, is utilized in administrative parlance to explain locations which can be underdeveloped. “I always thought that as an officer, I should work on these districts; find out what can be done for them,” he says. His protagonist’s journey, therefore, is thru these “underdeveloped parts of our country,” Misra explains, including: “He tries to figure out what is going wrong in these places, but does so without judgments.”
Misra took over a yr to jot down the book, balancing a really demanding work schedule. Testimony By Fire is his third work of fiction. His earlier titles, additionally by Rupa, embrace Oxygen Manifesto and Vultures of Paradise, each of which have, at their core, the atmosphere. While the former is about the emergence of a inexperienced occasion in India, Misra explains that the latter talks about round economic system. “I have always enjoyed writing about the environment,” he says.
Atulya Misra
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Special association
In Testimony By Fire too, the protagonist Ranjeeth witnesses issues that our nation faces attributable to senseless improvement. He, nonetheless, isn’t an atypical citizen. “He rises to be the President of India,” explains Misra, including that nonetheless, in the story, he dies, turning right into a “walking ghost” who’s accompanied by a co-traveller, the narrator.
Misra enjoys writing; he finds the course of a “stress-buster”. He says, “I am not a regular writer. I’ve just written just three books over a period of 10 years.” He explains that when sure story concepts take root in his thoughts, he has the urge to place them down in phrases. “This is how I started writing,” he says. He prefers to jot down early in the day. For his latest book, he weaved in his experiences of travelling throughout India on work. Ranjeeth, the protagonist, travels to Agra, Goa, Delhi, Rameswaram, Mumbai, and Manipur, amongst different cities and states, taking in points that plague the atmosphere in every of those locations.
While Misra is continually on the transfer on official obligation, he’s additionally pondering of story concepts to work on. He hopes to jot down a book on the Chennai floods subsequent.
Testimony By Fire is out there on Amazon
