She is filled with energy, enthusiasm and has always wanted to enrich Kannada literature with her writing skills. Popularly known as the Jayanagarada Hudugi, Meghana Sudhindra is a 26-year-old Bengalurean who works as a Research and Development Engineer with a start-up called AppAchhi. However, her day job has not stopped her from writing. Over a period of time, her versatility in writing has garnered so many readers for her column in Kannada, that this September, her first book will be published by Sawanna Books — making her the youngest writer for this publishing house.
Thrilled at the prospect of launching her first book Jayanagarada Hudugi, she said, “I never thought that the columns which I wrote would come out as a book. This is my debut book and it has everything about Bengaluru, my childhood days spent playing around huge trees in Jayanagar and the happiness I felt when I played the role of a queen in a school play. Apart from this, the book throws light on issues like why voting is an important right, small snippets of different cartoons and comics which have vanished over a period of time due to technology and much more.”
While many youngsters choose to write in English, this Barcelona-return prefers to write in Kannada. When asked about the reason behind it, she said, “I grew up in a family where Kannada was spoken, written and read. No matter what language we would speak at our schools, we had to read Kannada newspapers every day. And of course, it is a beautiful language that has so much to be explored.”
Another important point is that she comes from a family of writers. While her father Sudhindra Haldodderi writes about Science and Technology, her grandfather Nagesh Rao was an editor of a Kannada newspaper. “I have got my writing skills from them. My grandfather took a keen interest to inculcate the habit of reading books within me and that has helped a lot. I read at least five hours a day,” she proudly says.
Time to collab
Meghana’s interests are not just bound to writing columns about Bengaluru. She is now throwing light on collaborative writing in Kannada Literature. She said, “Many famous writers have written collaborative stories, plays, and films in Kannada. My friend Prasad Nayak and I have written collaborative stories in Kannada and we have named it Sammishra Kathe (Coalition story) because we wrote it at the time when the Karnataka government was formed with a coalition between two political parties.”
Barcelona Diaries
After completing her BE from Visvesvaraya Technological University, she worked as a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Science. This was when she decided to do her Masters abroad. She religiously wrote her GRE and TOEFL exams, but unlike others, she did not choose to study Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) embedded systems and signal processing. Rather, her interest in music made her choose to study Master’s in Sound and Music Computation in Barcelona. “Barcelona is a place where Carnatic classical music research, raga and tala classification and identification are done on a pure signal processing basis. I got to learn Spanish and Catalan which is mandatory for survival in Barcelona. When I was there, I took some time out to write the episodes for the column,” she added.
She is eagerly waiting for her book to be published this September so that Jayanagarada Hudugi reaches many young readers.
