Sunday, Apr 18, 2010 In India for the launch of the second book in the Empire of the Moghul series, author Diana Preston - one half of Alex Rutherford- holds forth on psuedonyms, India and the perils of research trips. An excerpt from a story in today's Hindu: Interest in history and India *** Always been interested; after all history tells you why we are where we are. We've been coming to India for quite some time now. It was the first place we visited after we got married. And of course we went to the Taj and we got interested in why the Taj gets under your skin. We thought of telling the story of the Taj and while researching for that we got interested in the period. We were also working on a book on Dampier, the English pirate, and read his notes of 17th century India. And in the process we got drawn to Central Asia and Persia and our research led us to the Baburnama, which fired our imagination. It's rather Shakespearean, isn't it: revenge tragedy, love, passion, war. So we decided to tell their stories. But there were gaps in the accounts so we decided to fictionalise it. *** http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/04/18/stories/2010041850040200.htm --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar