THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The country’s first ‘Twitter fiction,’ the book form of a story told in hundreds of tweets spread over years, will be released by Harper Collins this week.
Written by Kerala-born British journalist and academic Dr Chindu Sreedharan, ‘Epic Retold,’ as the title suggests, is the retelling of the Mahabharata, from the point of view of Bhima and loosely based on Jnanpith recipient M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s classic, Randamoozham.
The 278-page book is a compilation of tweets Dr Sreedharan had posted as @epicretold for 1605 days, from July 27, 2009, to December 20, 2013.
The choice of Mahabharata for the country’s first Twitter fiction seems both appropriate and incongruous.
This because the writer has to catch hold of the world’s mightiest epic and manage to pass it through a literary needle-hole called Twitter. “That appealed to my wicked side,” Dr Sreedharan said.
While on Twitter, to keep the notoriously fickle new-age reader hooked, each tweet had to work as bait.
Each one of them had to be profoundly austere but still had to hold all the seductions. This skill had to be employed tweet after tweet, for all the 2,628 of them.
