Short stories · Jun 2025

Travel Tales and Close Encounters

Name: Travel Tales and Close Encounters
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9788193677353

Edited byMaithili Rao & Rinki Roy BhattacharyaIllustrated by Anushree Shukla

An anthology of short stories featuring an incredible line-up of authors!

Format

Amazon store

Buy the paperback on Amazon India

Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Pages: 266
ISBN: 978-8193677353
Language: English

About the book

The journey is more important than its destination. A truism whatever the mode of travel. Trains, planes, cars, buses, bikes and on foot too. One may miss the destination, but can anyone forget the journey?

This anthology brings together many journeys of so many people from various backgrounds. Memory may blur details. What remains is the experience...anticipation, the lingering taste of shared food and stories, chance encounters with eccentrics, mishaps and missing papers.

Our authors travel within and abroad, bringing a kaleidoscope of images and moods. We round it off with fiction set in the context of travel. Welcome to this moving cavalcade.

About the authorMaithili Rao

Maithili Rao drifted into subtitling and writing on cinema after a brief stint as a lecturer of English. From hobby to passion for writing on films was a natural progression.

Her recent book, The Millennial Woman in Bollywood: A New ‘Brand’ (OUP) was out in 2023 following Smita Patil, A Brief Incandescence (HarperCollins) in 2015. (opens in a new tab)In between, she co-edited The Oldest Love Story, An Anthology on Motherhood (2022, Om Books International) with Rinki Roy Bhattacharya. The same year, she edited Films Through Women’s Eyes for Suchitra Film Society.

Rao contributed chapters to many books on cinema: Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema (Springer), Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema, Bollywood (Dakini, London), Icons (Rupa), Frames of Mind (ICCR), Rasa (Anamika Kala Sangam), The Man who Spoke in Pictures (Penguin), Madhumati (Rupa), Suhana Safar: The Journey of Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (Mind u Read Media).

She has served on national and international juries: National Film Awards, MIFF (International festival for documentaries and short films, Mumbai) on four occasions, The International Children’s Film Festival, and was FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) member at Sochi, and member of APSA (Asia Pacific Screen Awards).

She was member of the script committee at NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) and CFSI (Children’s Film Society India).

She is the recipient of FIPRESCI-India’s Satyajit Ray Memorial Award for her contribution to writing on Cinema for 2024 as well as the Bimal Roy Memorial Committee’s award for her “perceptive and in-depth analysis of Indian Cinema in general and the role of women as actors and creators in particular.”

Rao started as critic of foreign films for the Sunday Observer and columnist, writing on the images of women in Hindi films for Eves Weekly for over a decade. Then followed a rewarding freelancing career for Indian and international publications: The Hindu, Frontline, NFDC’s Cinema in India and London-based South Asian Cinema, Film Comment (US) and International Film Guide, BFI Website. She believes that besides aesthetics, films must have relevance to social and political reality.

More about Maithili Rao

About the authorRinki Roy Bhattacharya

Rinki Roy Bhattacharya was born with cinema in her veins. While her father, celebrated film-maker Bimal Roy, wanted to educate her in Oxford, Rinki eloped with his assistant, Basu Bhattacharya. Love blossomed but the Oxford education was cast aside. Entirely self-taught, despite intense domestic demands, raising three children—Aditya, Chimoo and Anwesha—she learnt journalism hands-on. For over five decades Rinki contributed prolifically, filing art columns, features in The Indian Express, The Hindu, Mid-day, The Telegraph and The Times of India. It is after almost fifty-odd years in the business of chasing by-lines, Rinki has finally caught up with her dream of bringing nostalgia to life.

She keeps the memory of her celebrated father alive by organizing benefit concerts, film retrospectives and curating museum events. Rinki remains a feisty patron of cinema and the visual arts, a tireless supporter of women’s rights, and an enthusiastic hostess, writing nonfiction when opportunity offers it.

Rinki lives alone, in a bougainvillea-sprayed apartment, imagining it to be her childhood Bandra home demolished by the cruel builder’s bulldozer. She enjoys solitary walks by the sea, gathering flowers she has grown or pressing them, pickling mangoes from her own harvest, and delights exploring unknown shores.

More about Rinki Roy Bhattacharya