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India Currents gave me a voice in days I was very lost. Having my articles selected for publishing was very validating – Shailaja Dixit, Executive Director, Narika, Fremont
Note From author, Murzban Shroff
As you know, the Kerala floods have been the worst floods experienced by humankind in the last 100 years. The floods have left 250,000 people homeless, 900 dead, and the state reeling under damages to the tune of USD 2.7 billion. It will take 5 years of consolidated effort and investment to rebuild this once-bountiful state of India. As one who has benefited amply from the loyalty and hospitality of Malayalis (the people of Kerala), who has chuckled at their ingenuity and marvelled at their intellect, I have pledged to donate the full sum of my earnings from my novel Waiting for Jonathan Koshy retailing worldwide on www.amazon.com, from today till the end of this year. Coincidentally, the novel is about a Malayali with a high IQ, Jonathan Koshy, who can make a difference to everyone else’s life save his own. Anyone who purchases a copy of the book from an Amazon site has my assurance that my part of the royalty will, in entirety, go toward this noble cause. Do buy a copy from any of the links below and then help spread the word through your network of friends and contacts. After all, there can be no greater joy than when the power of words translate into humanitarian actions – Murzban F. Shroff
Here are the links to the Amazon sites where the book is available:
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B071X11VHY
U.S: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071X11VHY
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071X11VHY
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B071X11VHY
Praise for the Book
From the Author of Breathless in Bombay comes an intensely engaging novel about life, family, friendship, and duty.
In the heart of Pali Hill, the Beverly Hills of Mumbai, four friends await the arrival of Jonathan, a man “greatly appreciated for his wit, his effervescence, and his indignation,” a man exiled from his home state. Through their conversations, we learn of the tumultuous life of Jonathan – how he single-handedly breaks up a matka den, disarms a rioting mob, charms a recovery agent, evades arrest at a drug-ridden rave party, and brightens up the lives of sex workers and their children. Jonathan has a solution for every crisis that strikes others, but not for his own dysfunctional family life. It is left to life then to resolve matters for him. Drawing on the terse intensity of a play, the sparkling wit of a stand-up comedy, and the insights of a thought-provoking novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy reflects the triumph of a spirit that refuses to let up on humor and quick thinking in the face of intense personal adversity. It is a book about friendship, perseverance, family obligations, and duty. Most importantly, about life’s late but redeeming powers.
“What a delicious irony sits at the heart of Murzban F. Shroff’s Waiting for Jonathan Koshy: the central character is almost larger than life, having done the things we all might dream of doing to serve others in desperate situations; but in his own life, for his own welfare, he is, in many ways powerless. By magnifying the heroic, Shroff unflinchingly portrays our human vulnerability. Waiting for Jonathan Koshy is a fascinating reading experience from a deeply skilled writer.”
– Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winner
“Waiting for Jonathan Koshy is a splendid portrait of its quixotically hard-hustling hero. Murzban Shroff’s kaleidoscopic image of Koshy’s passage through the complications of his journey offers a remarkably frank and revealing view of twenty-first century Indian life.”
– Madison Smartt Bell, National Book Award Finals
Excerpt about Kerala – from Waiting for Jonathan Koshy.
Jonathan had a routine. Every few years, he’d land up in Mumbai, from Kerala, his ancestral state. He would arrive bright-eyed and smiling and declare, “I am back and I mean business. Believe me, guys, this time I am here to make money. Loads of it!”
“How was it in Kerala, Jonathan?” we would ask, and he would say, “Good! It is home-turf, after all. Home to the Gods, if you like that kind of serenity, if you can take to it and vegetate. I say, how much thinking can a man do in paradise? Kerala spoils you. It reduces you to a nature junkie. Something about those coconut trees, those backwaters, those endless groves of dark green. The beauty overwhelms you, stuns you. You can’t think. You get paralyzed. You don’t want to work, at least not commercially. Everything that had to be created in the universe has been created there. It’s there in the sun, the soil, the air, the water, the clouds, and the small little canals frozen in time.
Murzban F. Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. His fiction has appeared in over sixty literary journals in the U.S. and UK. He is the recipient of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. His short story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the best debut category from Europe and South Asia. It was rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize.