Kalpana Mohan – författare

A big-hearted meditation on love, loss, and happy memoriesWhen journalist Kalpana Mohan''s elderly father falls ill in Chennai, she is on the next flight over from California, where she has lived with her husband for three decades.Caring for her sometimes cranky, sometimes playful, and always adored father at his home in Chennai, Mohan sets out to piece together an account of her father''s life, from his poverty-stricken childhood in a village in south India, to his arranged marriage, to his first job in the city, all the while coming to terms with his inevitable passing.Mohan''s tender, moving, and sometimes hilarious memoir is an account of a changing India captured in her father''s life, from the sheer feat of surviving poverty in I920s India of his birth, to witnessing key moments in the nation''s history and changing alongside them. Above all, Daddykins is an intimate and deeply relatable account of our relationships with our parents whatever our age, and the shared experiences of love and grief that unite us all.

The book is an entertaining narrative about the myriad Indianisms to be found in the Englishused by a large percentage of Indians; the growing importance of Indian English in a worldof many Englishes; the ongoing tussle between the elite who speak the King's English andthose who speak in their mother tongue or mother-tongue-accented English; the effectof the IT boom on global English; and the changing attitudes of young Indians towards alanguage introduced by the Raj hundreds of years ago.