BENGALURU: Stories for Free (Sorta), reads a board outside Blossom Book House on Church Street. With a typewriter on his lap, sits Krishna Ravi Shankar, spinning a yarn.
He has about 15 minutes, amid all the noise and movement, to come up with a short story he tries to keep to A4 length.
“I used to take five minutes, when I wrote them by hand initially. But it takes longer on the typewriter because I can’t make mistakes,” says the freelance software engineer. But a typewriter helps spark interest in people.
So when people come and ask him for a story, he suggests that they finish book shopping at Blossom, or go across the road to Indian Coffee House for a cuppa.
“But some sit next to me, and that’s when I feel like we’ve created something together,” he says.
Even otherwise, what he writes is meant exclusively for that one person. “So I don’t keep a copy,” he explains.
When people pick up their stories, they put in as much money as they like into a can next to him. This has been a ritual for the past six or the seven Saturday evenings.
“On an average I get `500, an evening,” he says. “But it has started raining these days, so I have to find a new spot, maybe a cafe.”
Though Krishna started writing while in middle school — poetry and blogs, later in college — he began penning poems and handing them to people at bars in Belgium and on a train to Switzerland.
Krishna’s style is observational and his stories are mostly open-ended. “The best ones are those with a bit of me in it,” he says. “But I don’t always want to put myself out there, make myself vulnerable.”
He signs his stories with K R Shankar, and @sunsettler, borrowed from the title of a song.
“It’s by a Swedish band, Magna Carta Cartel,” says the engineer who worked in San Francisco for three years before coming back to his hometown in 2015. “I chose it because, eventually, I’d like to be in a new country or city every sunset.”
The Bengalurean works part of the year, and saves up to travel for the remaining months. “I have been to 15 countries so far,” he says. “By the end of this year, it will be 24.”
He hopes to have seen 30 countries by the time he turns 30, giving him ‘15 months for 15 countries’.