Product Description
In the heart of middle-class India, Neelesh Pandey, just out of college, dreams day and night of his first love America and also of an escape from his fathers grandiose desire to land an upper-caste daughter-in-law. Unable to go to the United States, he takes the second best a job at a call centre where he assumes an American identity. Meanwhile, in faraway New York, Angela Cruz has escaped her racist father and life in Jackson, Mississippi, and is a journalist chasing her big story of a school band of immigrant kids in a New York suburb who have been selected to perform at a musical extravaganza but dont have the money to fly there. Angela buys a computer, it malfunctions, and she calls the call centre to scream at them. She runs into Neel, and, many many conversations later, they tumble into a faraway romance. Once upon a Timezone is a funny, light-hearted look at two people, in two different continents who are both trying to escape similar worlds of prejudice, and who realize somewhere along the way that mix-ups and cover-ups, nationalities and distances, notwithstanding, they are deeply in love.
About the Author
Neelesh Misra was born in 1973 in Lucknow, India. He worked with the India Abroad News Service and the Associated Press before joining the Hindustan Times in New Delhi as senior roving editor. In a career spanning seventeen years he has covered some of the biggest news stories in South Asia including the Kargil conflict, Orissas super cyclone, the Gujarat earthquake, the massacre of the royal family in Nepal and its transition to democracy, the Asian Tsunami, and the Kashmir earthquake. He is the author of two non-fiction books: 173 Hours in Captivity: The Story of the Hijacking of IC 814 and End of the Line: The Story of the Killing of the Royals in Nepal. When he is not chasing the news he writes songs and scripts for Bollywood.