Literary Rainas

Vitasta's Antecedents

Vitasta's father, Pramathesh (Tisha) Raina was one year behind me in School in 1956. Tisha and I joined the National Defence Academy together and have been crossing each other's path since then. Tisha's elder brother, Suresh, was my classmate in School and College. I missed Tisha's wedding-he married another friend's sister. I've seen V as a kid and look where she is today! I'm proud of her and for her parents. 

Vitasta's grandfather, Pandit Trilokinath Raina, who I called Baikash after the death of my father, was Uncle Raina to me in my childhood, right up to 1967, when I joined the NDA. Thereafter, he was 'Sir', one of our English teachers. Tisha's mother has always been my surrogate mother, more so after my mother died in 1983. Sadly, they are no more.

I am the proud possessor of an autographed Pandit Trilokinath Raina's masterpiece, "An Anthology of Modern Kashmiri Poetry", published in 1976. 

Vitasta's book,'Writer's Block' is available at Amazon for $5.34 and all family members, friends and course mates can get it from her father for just Rs.99.00. Go pick up a copy of her book. He is at pramatheshraina@hotmail.com

Who is Vitasta Raina?

 WRITER'S BLOCK by VITASTA RAINA

'Writer's Block' is a novella which imposes upon its reader all the physical forces that Chalet, the fictional city, represents; there is pressure from all sides, from the strictly delineated social class system to the acronym-ridden bureaucracy, and above all we are pressed by the the sensation of the sheer quantity of human life contained within an urban enclosure. The populace of Chalet is teeming and we are drawn into the milieu by the denizens of the Writer's Block, and it is through the collection of writers, artists, philosophers and diarists that we understand the middle ground between the rich and the degraded poor, that is to say, we understand that humanity has somehow been lost among the crush of buildings and bodies.


Vitasta Raina writes with an canniness as she describes a city in which equality does not reign, an awareness of the power of the class system to dehumanize. Her writing is forceful, yet dreamy in places, clever with a wry humour. Her personification of Chalet is particularly striking--Chalet as a festering body, as a victim, as a matriarch.

'Writer's Block' is not so much a fantasy, for it is far too possible to be that; instead it hangs somewhere in the realm of speculative or dystopian fiction, appealing as it does to the cynic in us all, the cynic who suspects that a city like Chalet might actually exist, that there might be a class of people who do not wish to see poverty in their playgrounds. And this, perhaps, is what allows us to sympathize with the denizens of the Writer's Block as they remark that it is 'Quite sinister, really'.

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