Thoma Chacko is “twelve and has a long way to go.” He is one of those students who doesn’t see eye to eye with Mathematics - agitated by “the pain of the parallelogram” and bothered by the “great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle”, he wishes he could believe his elder brother when he had told him there would soon be a law “changing the value of pi from 3.14159 to just 3, making it easier for all Indian children to calculate the area of a circle.”
Come October 20 and you might just be introduced to young Thoma by his creator Manu Joseph, editor of Open Magazine and author of ‘Serious Men’. Thoma is a character in Joseph’s second novel ‘The Illicit Happiness of Other People’, from which the author will be reading to audience at the DC Books-Harper Collins festival at the DC Books showroom in the city.
Bibliophiles in the city can look forward to interactions with authors, reading sessions and a special exhibition of Harper Collins books, which are being organised as part of the festival. The festival will be on till October 31 at branches of DC Books and Current Books.
And if the city’s resident booklovers are not in a ‘serious’ mood, they can always take a step with ‘Toke’, or rather its author Jugal Mody, who believes that “only comedy can save the world from its people”. ‘Toke’ is the debut novel of Mody, who “started writing fiction six years ago while he was still struggling to clear his computer engineering exams.”
Bilingual author and translator Rizio Yohannan Raj is one of the other authors expected to participate in the fest. Published earlier this year was ‘A Tale of Things Timeless’ , the English translation of Raj’s Malayalam novel ‘Avinasom’, published in 2000. Apart from having published two novels in Malayalam and innumerable poems in English, she has also translated into English the works of many Malayalam poets, such as Kumaran Asan and Vayalar Rama Varma.
Also slated to be present to read from his book and debate with readers is Anees Salim, whose book ‘The Vicks Mango Tree’ is being published this year by Harper Collins. The Kochi-based Salim, has been working in advertising for over a decade.
Discounts will be offered for books in various categories - fiction, autobiography, biography, management, history, non-fiction, business, self-help and reference.
Besides discounts, those who make purchases worth `500 will get A P J Abdul Kalam’s ‘The Family and the Nation’ and those who make purchases worth Rs 1,000 will be given Mother Teresa’s ‘Faith in the Darkness’ or Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘Something Beautiful for God’ free of cost.