Horizons- Stories

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His jaw lies here, but he is no more.

He was not his bones turned to ash.

He was not his flesh melted away.'

At the first step of a promising career, Ranchor returns home to face the sobering reality of his father's demise. A railway employee prevents a young man's desperate attempt at suicide. Elsewhere, a doctor faces the harrowing prospect of facilitating euthanasia for a friend. In an idyllic city, Keshav's life is slowly engulfed by a terminal illness, and the spectre of death looms large.

Written in searing prose, these stories by debut author Himanshu Asnani are a rich portrait of lives that mirror countless others. Probing and often edifying, they capture the pathos of life while offering succour to those traversing similar paths - a reminder of fiction's singular ability to lay bare life's fundamental questions.

Himanshu Asnani is an author, researcher and translator. Previously he held full-time faculty appointment in the School of Technology and Computer Science (STCS) at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai and visiting appointments at University of Washington-Seattle, Stanford University, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. His research interests there included artificial intelligence, machine learning, information theory and statistics. He had received his B.Tech. from IIT Bombay and MS and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering. After his post-graduation, he worked in Ericsson Silicon Valley following which he got involved in some of his edu-startups which especially focussed on fostering education in underprivileged areas of developing countries with minimal access to English, internet and electricity. His awards include the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar Award and the Amazon Catalyst Fellowship.

A connoisseur of literature, linguistics and classical music, Himanshu also actively researches in the areas of philosophy. Social psychology, and medieval history. Horizons, a short story collection, is his debut work of fiction.