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DOCUMENTING A VIEWPOINT Sadhna Shanker

Also, she is dressing up her first novel and has just recently compiled her articles under the title, When The Parallels Meet.

An achiever in her own right, Shanker, good at underplaying her aptitude for doing things in chorus, like most Indian women, says casually, “I think all women are great at multi-tasking. In India, particularly, our social set up is such that even if you are a stay-at-home woman, you are doing many things at a time.”

Sadly, she says with a laugh, “Our men are bad at it. I often see it in my office. Though the roles have evolved now and it is changing. It has been their social conditioning that contributes to their inability to balance many tasks simultaneously.”

This evolving of roles has a direct connect with a changing India. “We are in exciting times, fast-paced and madly interconnected,” she says. Things that would take five years to happen are taking place in two years’ time, she elaborates.

So, almost all her compiled articles in the latest book, 60 of them, demarcated into four sections, weave in this transformation in simple words. Opening up a world that shows a small-town youngster’s discovery of the Internet to sudden sprouting of new-age gurus all over the place now, to a friend winning the custody of her child in a messy divorce, to villagers sending kids out to the cities to study, and more. Her 168-page book, published by Alokparv Prakashan, cans these waves of change constantly.

“A lot of this is economy-driven. The economic boom has given a lot of confidence to our people, including youngsters. When you go out of the country particularly, you see the change of perception towards India,” says this alumna of Japan’s Yokohama National University. With so much happening around us, it is then not a surprise that a lot of people have put pen to paper. “It is not that there was not much to write about before but surely now there is a lot more stimulation to the creative mind,” she states. Personally, turning into an author has helped her become more sensitive towards her surroundings, unconsciously. “I now look at the layers,” she says.

Shanker is giving the final touches to her debut novel. “It is about three friends and their choices, not necessarily of their liking. I feel that my mother’s generation lived for others while my daughter’s generation lives for themselves. But our generation, now living the 40s, has lived for both others and themselves. My story will ring around this idea,” she explains.

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