Ranjit Kulkarni

Ranjit Kulkarni is an author with a penchant for portraying characters from the real world and weaving stories around their apparently mundane lives. He is the creator of Jigneshbhai and Swami. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Kulkarni spent his childhood in the environs of urban, middle-class India. As an adult, he’s travelled the world, exploring the cityscapes of America, getting lost in the natural beauty of Europe, and absorbing the tastes and sounds of Asia. With his constant knack for observation and a deep seated fondness of reflection, he loves crafting tales that entertain and provoke thought. When not writing, Kulkarni loves reading and going on trips with his wife. He is an avid traveller, a passionate investor and a devoted student of spirituality. He loves ice-cream and chocolate too. He lives in Bangalore India.

Irrelevant

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It has been a few months since one of my friends successfully summitted Mount Everest and came back down in one piece. When he returned home, it seemed to me that he had not quite registered the enormity of his feat in the eyes of commoners like us. In the number of interactions that I … Read more

Aparokshanubhuti

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Note Extracts from my reading of Aparokshanubhuti by Adi Sankaracharya: Such treatises as aim at serving as introductions to a more advanced study of a system of philosophy are generally known as ‘Prakarana Granthas’. Besides giving an outline of the system, each of them emphasizes some one or other of the main features. Aparokṣānubhūti is … Read more

2nd Round Editing

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After my first draft, my first round of editing is about getting the story right and sharp. In that round, I focus on getting the character, its conflict and the resolution of that conflict correct and smooth. My second (and usually last) round of editing is more technical and focused on finishing. Here is my … Read more

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

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I read this much-celebrated book ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferriss lately. Perhaps it is intended for a younger audience but for me, a writer close to fifty after twenty five years of corporate life, most of the details in the book were too much work to read. I found only the last section … Read more

Start to Finish

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One of the things that I have often wondered is whether it is necessary to finish everything that I start. There is this quintessential image of a writer with heaps of torn paper next to him as he isn’t quite able to finish what he started satisfactorily. I have come around to the thinking that … Read more

Drig-Drishya-Viveka

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Notes Extracts from my reading of Drig-Drishya-Viveka by Sankaracharya The importance of Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka as an aid to the study of Vedānta has been well pointed out by the learned Swāmī Nikhilānanda in his introduction to this translation. The central theme of the work is that Brahman is realized through mystic or Yogic samādhi (concentration). After … Read more

The Flipside

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I spent most of my first two and a half decades of working life in a corporate job. It is a fairly stable career that assures a reasonably good life. After years on the grind, one might feel there is limited upside, but there is also limited downside. A creative life is different. The upside … Read more

First Lines

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50 isn’t very different from 49, I discovered the day after my 50th birthday. Did the above line catch your attention? I just wrote it as an experiment. When I started writing, a lot of courses told me that the first line of a story is very important. So, I cultivated this habit of noting … Read more

On Rituals

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Swami Vivekananda on Rituals: (Extracts from Complete Works) In the world’s ritualistic symbols we have an expression of the religious thought of humanity. It is easy to say that there is no use of rituals and temples and all such paraphernalia; every baby says that in modern times. But it must be easy for all … Read more

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