Grit overcomes writer?s block

Every time Lalremmawii would pick up a pen to write, it would slip out of her wobbly hand, leaving the young woman from Aizawl, Mizoram furious at her partially immobile body.

Every time Lalremmawii would pick up a pen to write, it would slip out of her wobbly hand, leaving the young woman from Aizawl, Mizoram furious at her partially immobile body.

HT Image

The outcome of the anger was Confessions —a 202-page Mizo novel that she wrote in 26 days by hitting the keys of a typewriter with her pen. The typewriter was gifted to her by popular Mizo writer PL Laindinga.

The book is about a girl born out of wedlock, who chances upon her mother's secret diary and finds out who her biological father is. The 26-year-old author, also known as Mafeli, was struck by disability when she was only 2, after she fell from a chair. The bone-joint disorder crippled her for ever.

Though Mafeli often curses god for her physical condition, she agrees that her disability helped her type out the story in the record time. "I worked almost 24 hours a day to complete the novel," she says. Now, she hopes the book will do well to pay Rs 23,000 her family owes to the printer.

Bhubaneswar: An Indian engineer has received patent rights in India and Britain for a fuel-saving and pollution-reducing electronic catalytic converter.

Srinivasan Gopalakrishnan, managing director of Chennai-based Hydrodrive Systems and Controls, developed a fuel synthesiser, which can control exhaust emissions of all four-stroke internal combustion engines using diesel, petrol and gas fuels.