Chennai to Chicago – A memoir

This is a memoir from a part of my life, filled with tribulations, heartbreaks, travel, and adventures in the US, eventually being hit by the routine, frustrated, losing purpose in life as a software engineer, packed everything back up, and backpacked around India on a soul-searching journey, discovering myself along the way.

Webpage created for the book: https://www.chennai2chicago.com

Here’s a link to my book on:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FM8QLKP

Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07FM8QLKP

Goodreads.com – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54965063-chennai-to-chicago

I actually completed that book in 2013. Then one day I had a thought, “Who would wanna read what I did with my life?”. And that was it, I did nothing, and it had been sitting on my computer for 5 years. I decided to at least self-publish it on Amazon. Honestly, when I started writing my book, I thought it will become famous. Slowly realized it would only get lost in the pile of millions of books on Amazon. I realized how hard it is to actually put something out there to the world! It requires a lot of perseverance, hard work, creativity, and unfortunately, that’s not enough, we need luck! There are over 15 million books sold on amazon (1500 books published every single day), how many are popular? 10,000? 20,000 maybe? That’s like 0.1%! What about the rest? I am sure most of the remaining 99.9% of the authors are equally persevering and hardworking, heck some might even be relying on the sales to pay their bills, but unfortunately are down on their lucks to make even a dime-size dent in the market! I consider myself fortunate that I have a job and I am just writing for nothing more than pleasure.

I have titled the book “Chennai to Chicago” – Chennai is the hometown I grew up in. Chicago is just to rhyme with Chennai and a city in the US. And I designed the cover myself. I changed the names, places, and some chronology of events. I did have a dream to come to the US like many other Indians when I was a teenager, especially watching all those Hollywood movies… for many, Hollywood was America at that time, without these zillion TV channels or social media that we have today… listening to those patriotic Trumpet background scores from Independence Day movie, Rambo and Arnold, Superman, Spiderman, Batman, He-Man, Shazam! Spiderman and He-Man were my favorites… I used to climb all over my house when I was a kid and tell everyone, “I am Spiderman!”.