Reading of a Novel-in-Progress by Rohit Manchanda June 3, 2009

Reading of a Novel-in-Progress by Rohit Manchanda. This is a Chauraha presentation. This is a novel about the fortunes of a family, one of shadowy antecedents. The family dreams of claiming for itself a respectable place in the world by working its way into the realms of the arts and the 'honourable' professions. The fruits - or otherwise - of its efforts are contemplated by the novel's narrator, family patriarch Madan Lal Bali, whose memories flit to and fro in place and time, mapping the key phases in its life. And as Bali ponders the forces that have shaped the family members' lives - their own gifts and failings and foibles, independent India 's difficult first decades that backdrop their endeavours, the fickle dispensations of biology memory, for Bali , becomes a stimulus for both celebration and regret. The juxtaposition of past and present also holds an unsparing mirror to him, inducing reflections on how he has lived his own life, and where he has gone wrong, dismantling many long-held notions. Rohit Manchanda went to university at Oxford , where he took his Bachelor's and his D.Phil. in the physiological sciences. He is now on the faculty of the School of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IIT-Bombay. His critically well-received first novel, In the Light of the Black Sun, dealt with life in the coalfields of eastern India and won a Betty Trask award (given to writers from the Commonwealth under the age of 35); a second novel is in progress. Monastery, Sanctuary, Laboratory, a book chronicling and analyzing the evolution of IIT-Bombay over its first 50 years, appeared in 2008. There will be a discussion with the novelist after the reading. Admission on a first-come-first-served basis.

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