Girl, Anticipated. And feed my cat.

I started this blog nearly a year back (9 days to go, actually) in Calcutta, somewhere in the middle of writing Manticore, for a few reasons, none of them particularly significant. I’d been blogging as part of an anonymous feline collablog, Putu the Cat, for a while, and found myself ever so slightly restricted there, as a number of bloggers and a few people I worked with at the time knew Putu was often me – and I needed a place to be random, and occasionally let off steam, so the Duck of Destiny was born. The good thing about running a blog with no particular theme or focus is that you can be as random and megalomaniacal as you like, which always increases your chances of having a really good time.
Now a lot of my favourite Indian bloggers are journalists and, um, mediapersons. Their blogs are all so much better than this one – they’re dedicated, opinionated, stylish and always a great read (which is why they have many, many more readers than this blog, so this is not mere backscratching). But the one drawback of their popularity is this – it nearly always prevents them from talking about personal achievements and milestones. Which is perfectly justified and a very clever thing to do, actually – they spend so much time acting as portals, and for FREE, that there’s no reason they should hold their lives up for public scrutiny. When they do, they get attacked by trolls and promptly retreat. So when these bloggers become the news, instead of just bringing us the news, you have to read about it in other blogs.

Which brings me to the point.
Which is that one of my favourite bloggers is getting published by Penguin in January, and it’s a book they are very excited about. It’s called The Girl, published by Penguin Viking, release date January first week 2006. It’s fiction, set in contemporary Goa, and I even have the first paragraph of the blurb.

On a gloomy December morning in a sleepy village somewhere in north Goa, it’s time for yet another funeral. The Girl is dead and no one in Azul—better known to the world as the Village of the Dead—is surprised. But two men who knew and loved her are achingly curious to discover what made her give up her life to the sea.

Congratulations, Sonia, and good luck. The rest of you, watch out for it, and apologies if its already all over the blogosphere 🙂 Ive not been reading blogs overmuch recently.

And blog inactivity brings me to the Other Point of this post (thus making the second point in about a month) which is that Putu the Cat needs new caretakers. So if you like the blog, think you can speak in that voice and have interesting things to say, do write in and I’ll set it up. I’ll set up a meeting with Putu, that is, the final say is Putu’s alone. The other parts of Putu’s brain all have real lives, and, perhaps more importantly, very popular blogs which take up all their blogging time. But we all want to see Putu make a comeback…consider this an invitation to feed what was once a robust and deadly cat.