Hyderabad: The latest to join the global wave of emphasising on the need to live in the present and look beyond our cellphone screens is a book by a city techie. Jatin Kuberker’s While I Was Waiting is a collection of 26 stories, all compiled while he was waiting.
The book that was released recently actually began from a blog originally titled ‘From the streets of Hyderabad’. “But over the months I realised that the stories weren’t as much about the city as they were about the people and the incidents. So I changed the title to ‘While I Was Waiting’,” says Jatin.
The 30-year-old started compiling the stories into a book in 2009. And by the time he found a publisher in Leadstart in 2013, he had 26 stories.
The book doesn’t dwell too much into the characters as much as it narrates observations. But Jatin does take artistic liberties and that’s what pushes the book into the genre of “reality fiction”.
Among his favourites is the story Paranormal or Otherwise, which narrates a “spiritual” interaction Jatin had with an old man in a hospital waiting room. The Queen of Night, meanwhile, recounts a tale of a girl and how the men around her treat her as she waits at a bus stop late at night. “When you observe, the inspiration just hits you. And the inspiration is derived from reality. But when it comes to what might have been in the past or what may be in the future, that’s when I become the judge,” says Jatin, originally from Nizamabad.
Having a mother who was a teacher and a father who wrote occasionally, Jatin always had an “inclination towards writing”. But he says “bread and butter” drove him towards a degree in BSc, and then NIIT before landing a job in Hyderabad as a software engineer 10 years ago.
While I Was Waiting, however, is not Jatin’s first book. He had self-published a book of poems in 2011. “I just made 100 copies, for friends and family,” he says.
Married and father of a son, Jatin is now planning a novel. “I was just testing the waters with these short stories. I actually want to write a novel. But even that won’t be completely fiction and will be inspired from real life,” he shares.
