Breaking news: I’ve found the youngest reader of my first book Version One and a Half — my 21-month-old daughter, Sahiba! She proudly calls it “Chotu Dada – Young Dada”, pointing to the childhood photo of me on the cover like she’s just discovered baby Shakespeare.
Watching her “read” (aka flip pages and occasionally attempt to eat them) made me pick it up again myself. And wow — reading it now, I’m amazed at how far my writing has come… and slightly embarrassed by what I once thought was publishable!
Fun fact: this book was never meant to be a book. It was my journal, my scribble pad, my personal brain dump. But thanks to my dear friend Chetan Singh (RIP, bro), it turned into something more. I had a shoestring budget (actually, more like a broken flip-flop budget), so I didn’t hire a professional editor. My wife stepped in — despite never editing a book before — and gave it her best shot. I designed the cover myself, without any design experience unless you count drawing suns in the corner of notebook pages.
People keep telling me to re-edit and re-release it. But I say: nah. I’m keeping it raw and unfiltered — partly for nostalgia, partly as a writing time capsule, and partly because editing is exhausting.
So if you’re curious about life in a small Indian town in the 1980s — or just want to witness what happens when a journal accidentally becomes a book — give Version One and a Half a shot. Sahiba approves, and she’s a tough critic (just ask her teddy bear).
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