To My Daughter redux

I first announced that To My Daughter was in print back in March 2014.

It's been more than three years since then. And surprise, surprise... the book has been selling slowly but steadily, which is far more than I had expected, seeing it is self-declaredly not an entertainer, and demands close and intelligent attention of any reader. The publishers had made a deal that I shall start earning royalties only after a certain number of copies had been sold, and this month they have remitted the first payment to my bank account. A very small amount, but it is the symbolic significance that counts. If you write a book, and it keeps selling, you will get paid for it as long as you live, and your offspring will continue to be paid long after you are gone. Besides, in a country like ours, it is rare for any author to get paid for writing, unless he writes textbooks or penny dreadfuls. I am being paid for nearly a decade and a half for my Oxford Tagore translations, and now here is this addition. I guess my daughter can take a bit of pride: not many of her friends can claim that their dads earn book royalties!

To all those who have not only bought the book but read it, here is a reminder request: please write reviews on any of the websites which advertise my book (see the previous post, linked above), or on goodreads. It will help to spread the word around, and that is the best kind of advertisement. This was not a commercial enterprise, so I am spending no money on publicity; the only publicity it will get is by word of mouth. And thank you all in advance. 

To those who haven't read the book yet, a gentle nudge: unless your attention span is no bigger than what it takes to read a tweet, try it. It will not be a waste of time and money. I have already been thanked by quite a number of people for writing the book.

In passing, I note that a 2011 post I wrote, titled A most frightening prospect, about Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, which had then become all the rage countrywide and is now quite forgotten, has reached the most-read list today. Do take a look, and go through all the comments on it too. Doesn't it sound very quaint today? What does it teach you about the public character, and about sudden wild enthusiasms? To all my current and ex-students, this is what I mean by saying that I am always teaching, and this blog is an extension of my classroom. Whether you learn anything of value or not is, of course, entirely up to you...