RITIKA’S WRITING PROMPTS | PARENTING

On the steps of Trafalgar Square

(a childhood memory unfair)

Trafalgar Square, London. Left: back there with my daughter, July 2023 — Right: photo by expedia.co uk

Here’s a confession: I have always loved Ritika Mahajan’s no-nonsense writing style, both in English and Hindi. Ritika’s Hindi is funny and gloriously impure. It makes me remember GV Desani and his all-time classic All About H Hatterr. But Ritika is serious and it isn’t because her language soars so light-heartedly in the springtime breeze that we should doubt her well-soundedness. Ritika is a professor at an MNIT in Jaipur and some time ago she and I co-submitted a research project that we wanted to co-author a paper about. We didn’t win, but were in a sense unaffected by the ordeal — and somehow we promised each other that we would collaborate in something nevertheless. Something, sometime, someplace.

Meeting of a Shut Up & Write chapter at Bukit Timah, Singapore 2023 — photo by an incidental bystander

So now I have joined Ritika’s online writing club

I have been in several writing circles but Ritika’s is different. We are fifteen-or-so members. The writing itch we have in common, but writing we do very differently. Most of my peers are professors and academics, or in any case young professionals. I am…