HYDERABAD: The complement “wonderful” and a hug from his father after reading his first poem worked as a catapult for this international acclaimed writer Ramendra Kumar, who has 33 books to his credit today. He recently chaired a session at the 36th IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Congress at Athens, Greece this month. Although settled in Rourkela, Ramen, as he is known, is born and brought up in Hyderabad and still has a strong bonding with this place. He draws inspiration from here and most of his stories and books are based on Hyderabad.
Ramen started his writing career since his engineering days i.e. in 1996 with political satires. His transition from such satires to children books had an interesting background. His public sector job and raising his two kids are the reasons he cites for such transition as working under a PSU prevented him to write satires about Government and telling his own original stories to his daughter and son inculcated a habit of writing new children stories. He started sending those stories to publishers and was well received. Since then his all works revolved around children and stories for them.
In his first non-fiction book Effective Parenting: A new paradigm, he brings out the ways to nurture a child and his ideas as he considers parenting as an extremely difficult job. “I believe that time is the best gift a parent can give to his child and that must be a quality time where a parents’ all the attention is on the child”. Most of his books are all fiction with fictional characters too. He embeds values in his book as he believes a story should not be only for the sake of entertainment. While talking to Express he referred some filmmakers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Rajkumar Hirani to show how they in their films interwove values with entertainment.
Talking about his next book he said it is his one of the best accomplishment as the story is based on an NGO which is devoted towards development of female child. The book is a fiction woven around a bit of fact, and comprises 10 different stories on various aspects like child abuse, violence, stories of deprivation, disability, child marriage and child labour.
Ramen, though being the Chief of Communications and DGM PR at Rourkela Steel Plant, SAIL finds himself indulged in creativity and writing 24*7 because he believes there is no best time to conceive ideas. Ideas for writing can or inspirations can hit round the clock even in the state of half wakefulness.