Meeting “Eskay”

It all started with a DM (Direct Message on Twitter) from Gitanjali Sriram that I received about a month back. Actually, there were 3 of them.

Hey! My dad published a book last yr ‘Indira Gandhi: The Final Chapter’ which chronicles her story from the Emergency to her assassination

The story is told thru the political cartoons he was doing for the Indian Express during those year. It’s a fab book.

Would you like a few signed copies to give away during one of the TSBC sessions?

(Note: #TSBC or The Sunday Book Club is a book chat on twitter. For more details please click here.)

Ahem… Would I like a few signed copies…? 😉 Once I had conferred with Raghav and Rahul, my #TSBC co-founders, I sent a DM to Gitanjali accepting her offer. She, in turn, sent me the email address of Suraj ‘Eskay’ Sriram, her father and author of the book giveaway, to work out the formalities involved. And a few emails later we were set.

I am embarrassed to admit now that, at that time, I had not heard of the book or the author. A quick online search revealed that Indira Gandhi: The Final Chapter (Niyogi Books, 2011, pp.176) was a glimpse of the Indian political and social scene through Eskay’s cartoons and illustrations, during the last few years of Indira Gandhi’s political regime. I also asked my older brothers and Amma if they had heard of Eskay. To which I received an immediate “Of course !” followed by a “Why do you ask?” When I gave them the background details, I was told by all of them that I don’t read enough ! 😦

But I digress from the main topic of this post: Meeting “Eskay”, which happened last Saturday in Pune. And what a meeting it was !

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