Preeti Verma Lal

Preeti Verma Lal

Preeti Verma Lal was born with a lock of white hair but her friends say Gods confiscated the wisdom that should have come with it. Funny!

She grew up in an obscure town called Hazaribagh in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand – with prudish Catholic nuns in school and a wild leopard at home. That explains the somber and the wild in her. All the literature that the nuns cluttered the syllabi with made Preeti a literature-freak and despite sane advice to take up the ‘safe job of teaching’, she opted for journalism – it was rebellion and sacrilege simultaneously.

She worked for The Times of India, the largest daily in India, and then gradually moved upstream only to give up a cushy job as a magazine’s assistant editor to freelance. She took up assignments for wire agencies in India and London, wrote columns for The Indian Express, another major daily in India, and churned stories for magazines in India, US, UK, Trinidad, the Gulf countries…

Life took another twist when she trotted around seven seas and joined a newspaper in California as its assistant editor and later as Group Editor of a California-based literary website. She now lives in New Delhi, India, writes, edits, takes pictures, runs her website www.deepblueink.com and calls the 26-letters in the alphabet her “best companions”.

Ask her what her pen remembers the most and she would tell you about the sex workers that she had met on a special report assignment; she would tell you about the pre-pubescent girls, about the pimps and the men, about destiny and what it is to sit next to a drunk man in a dingy room and see a sex worker gyrate to a raunchy tune… All for less than two cents.

Ask her what her religion is and she would tell you it is “holiness of the heart’s affection”.

She still thinks love makes the world go round… Funny! Maybe her friends are right; the Gods did confiscate the wisdom…

If God had given her a choice, she says she would have opted to be a farmer who was also a writer – her hands stained with wet earth and deep blue ink.

Stories:

Cherrapunji Cascades  - If the British could twist their tongue a little, there would have been no Cherrapunji on the face of this planet. The wettest place on earth would have been known by its original name Sohra, which the British rolled into “Churra,” the name gradually morphing into Cherrapunji... [Visit this Feature]

Souri's Relief Riders in Rajasthan  - Let the eulogies and the travelogue wait; let’s begin with happiness and defiance. No, I am no Nietzsche defying God, I just want to defy litterateur Graham Greene who vociferously refutes that one man can arrange another’s happiness. “No one can arrange another’s happiness”: That’s ripped straight out of the sepia pages of The Heart of the Matter. Ah! Mr Greene, you stand corrected. Happiness can be arranged... [Visit this Feature]

Contact:

Contact Preeti Verma Lal at or
Website: www.deepblueink.com