I never thought I'd ever be referred to as an author...
In the next stage, I had to arrange all the required photos for the book. I had only a few photos for the period related to my childhood, schooling, and college times. Right now whenever we want, we can click a pic with our smartphones. In those days this was not the situation. If we wanted to take a photo, we had to go to a photo studio only. And also affordability was also an issue. Hence I wanted to take the support of artists to draw a few pics to give a form to my thoughts for the better understanding of my readers.
I approached Shanthi, friend of Aruna (my student-cum-Guru J ) to draw a pic to depict my parents’ journey in a bullock-cart along with me when I was affected by polio.
For an artist it’s easy to draw pics of the situations which they saw with their own eyes or in some pictures. But it’s not an easy task to draw from the explanations given by other people. We troubled Shanthi a lot to meet the expectations of my parents and siblings as they knew very well all those circumstances. Finally, it came out very well! Thank you so much, Shanthi for making it easy for my readers to understand that situation and my parents’ feelings!
I explained a lot about my struggles in wearing a cage like calipers in my book. But I didn’t have a pic to show my difficulty to my readers. Professional artist, Shashank, helped me in this regard, who was introduced to me by my brother. As it was an old model calipers, I could not get any such pictures now.
My cousin Dr Narendra helped me in finding a picture of a model to some extent nearer to the one I had in my childhood. With the help of my photo at that time (not in calipers) and with the model we found out, Shashank drew the picture. I am very happy that I could give an idea about my calipers to my readers with his help.
My siblings shared whatever photos related to the olden days are available with them. My ex-colleague Balaram helped in getting a high-resolution pic of our batchmates.
With regard to childhood pics, the situation was like this. But when it comes to the later part of my life, the position is exactly the opposite. I have a “n” number of pics. As we have to ensure keeping the price at an affordable level, naturally I was constrained to choose only the most relevant pics.
Finally after a lot of brain-storming, we finalized the photos. Tech support was from Pranavi. J One very big job was over.
The next requirement was with regard to photos for the cover pages (front and back)…
Watch this space for more on my journey...
Swimming against the tide - True Story of Para Swimmer Madhavi Latha Prathigudupu
By Madhavi Latha Prathigudupu
To get updates on the available platforms of this book, pl visit www.pmlatha.com
Proceeds from the royalty on this book would be used to fund our activities at YWTC CHARITABLE TRUST (www.ywtc.org).