Jaipur-based Mohit Parikh’s debut young adult novel Manan was published by Harper Collins in October 2014. Manan is set in the summer of 1998 in an anonymous sleepy Indian town slowly awakening to new information and communications technology (ICT), and revolves around the eponymous 15-year-old and his difficult adolescence, the tyranny of family relationships, authoritarian figures and peer pressure.
The elder of two children of Ajay Parikh, an LIC officer, and his wife Varsha, who runs a tutorial centre, Mohit is an alumnus of the pink city’s top-ranked Maheshwari Public School and the Malaviya National Institute of Technology. “My parents introduced me to the world of books in my early years. I have grown up reading children’s mags Champak and Gokulam, and was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels. My childhood was the most special and wonderful period of my life as it was full of joy and abandon,” recalls Mohit, an electronics and communications engineer who worked with power company NTPC Ltd (2008-10) and Sterling Hoffman, a Canadian management consultancy (2010-2011) before taking to full-time writing in 2012. “My corporate career with all its comforts never made creative sense to me and therefore I decided to give it up,” he says.
An avid reader of psychological and realistic fiction, Mohit has written over 20 short stories, seven of which have been featured in as many print and online publications in India and the US. Conterminously with the release of Manan, his short story Room 203 was published in Burrow Press Review, an Oregon (America)-based literary magazine. Back home, Amy and the Question of Before was featured in The Bombay Literary Magazine in its new fiction segment (July 2013).
This year has also begun on a promising note for Mohit. In January, his short story A Stroller in a Supermarket bested 125 entries to bag a cash award (Rs.30,000) of the Bangalore-based NGO Toto Funds the Arts.
The 29-year-old who occasionally plays cricket, engages in debates and dabbles in documentary film-making, is a man in a hurry. “I am in the process of finalising the plot of my second novel titled The House of Sleeping Pain which is about a 22-year-old boy who is planning to leave his family and join an ashram. I expect to finish it in two years,” says Mohit.
Power to your pen, Bro!
Indrajit Dutta (Mumbai)
Sanket Tomar
Sanket Tomar (15) captained the Delhi state five-member tennis team to victory at the 60th National School Lawn Tennis Under-17 Boys Championship 2014-15, held in Gulbarga (Karnataka) between January 7-11. Also a member of the winning Delhi squad which bagged the Under-14 nationals in 2013-14, this class IX student of Venkateshwar International School (VIS), Dwarka is included in the five-member team selected from a batch of 50 probables to represent India at the World Schools Championship Tennis 2015 — organised by the International School Sport Federation — scheduled in Doha (Qatar) from March 8. Thus far in the seven years since he started swinging a tennis racquet, this budding star has bagged over 42 trophies and medals. 
The younger child of Brijpal Tomar, a courier firm manager, and Seema, a homemaker, Sanket owes his success to home and school support. “Most of my time is spent in training, practice and playing tournaments. Therefore I’m grateful to my school teachers who take pains to mail me notes regularly. Their support has enabled me to write all my examinations with a fair degree of success,” says Sanket.
Parental support has been instrumental in the development of his game. “As a child I was hyperactive. So my father signed me up with VIS’ state-of-the-art tennis academy to work off my energy. It didn’t take me long to learn that I enjoyed playing and winning,” he remembers.
Under the expert tutelage of coaches Rajendra Singh and Shekhar Menon of the Delhi-based Shanti Tennis Academy, Sanket entered and won his first inter-school tournament in 2011. Subsequently, he won the Junior ITF (International Tennis Federation) 2012 tournament and bagged a bronze at the CBSE 2013 nationals. For the past two years, Sanket is being mentored by professional coaches Rohit Choudhary, Sandeep Choudhary and Gaurav Sharma at Delhi’s top-ranked Yellow Balls Tennis Academy.
Inspired by world No.1 Serbian Novak Djokovic, Sanket says: “After my class X boards, my focus will be to qualify for entry into the Indian Junior Davis Cup team and participate in junior grand slams.”
Power to your elbow!
Autar Nehru (Delhi)