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About the Book
The River of Slightly Better Heaven
A Haiku Collection for the Spiritually Curious and Slightly Ironic
Take a dip in the upgraded spiritual stream you didn’t know you were missing.
In this whimsical yet reflective volume, poetic snapshots flow like water from the skies—capturing India’s sacred sites, ancient monuments, mythic echoes, and modern contradictions through the concise elegance of haiku. But don’t expect solemn sermons or heavy-handed mysticism. This is poetry with a wink and a wanderlust, written in Esperanto, where even the divine pauses for breath—and perhaps a joke.
A part of the evolving mjolnir_poeto series, The River of Slightly Better Heaven offers:
- Seventeen original haikus written for A1–A2 learners of Esperanto
- A bilingual layout (Esperanto + English) for maximum accessibility
- Reflections on temples, rivers, and celestial metaphors—with a twist
- The literary equivalent of a spiritual retreat...with snacks
Why learn Esperanto through poetry? Why write Japanese-style haiku about Indian monuments with a splash of humor? Because sometimes, enlightenment starts with not taking yourself too seriously.
Explore more at:
🔗 https://github.com/delphicventurescode/mjolnir_poeto_book_series
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For more information about this book, please visit:
https://github.com/delphicventurescode/mjolnir_poeto_book_series/tree/main/L2__link_to_second_book
For more information about this book series, please visit:
https://github.com/delphicventurescode/mjolnir_poeto_kelkaj_pensoj/tree/main/M1__go_here_first__link_to_first_book
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About the Author
Anand Manikutty is a writer, journalist, inventor, entrepreneur, researcher, and poet. A graduate of IIT Madras in Computer Science and Stanford University in Management, Anand brings together deep technical expertise and creative expression in a truly interdisciplinary body of work.
He has written for leading publications such as Namaste Bharat Magazine, Pravasi Indians Magazine and Outlook India, and has served as Editor of Termite magazine, the voice of Top Society and the Oath Society.
Anand’s writing spans technology, economics, law, history, and culture. In the early 2000s (la nulaj jaroj), he was an active blogger on the group blog Zoo Station and other forums, shaping discussions on religion, policy, and digital culture. His work helped Zoo Station win the IndiBloggies Group Blog award in 2004, sparking his interest in writing for a popular audience with an eye toward social impact.
He later focused on developing business models and business development for both for-profit and non-profit ventures, including an early role with Digital Green. Anand’s strategic input helped shape the organization before its formal launch, a process that eventually led to funding from Bill Gates, who was impressed by the venture’s vision after a personal presentation to him. His published research covers topics in operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, database systems, and economic development, and he has contributed to the strategic management textbook Strategic Management: A South Asian Perspective, which is the South Asian update of a textbook in strategic management that is considered a classic in the field.
From 2019 to 2025, Anand has been developing books of poetry in Esperanto and Hindi, written especially for beginning learners at the A1 or A2 level. He has written more than ten books in this series called the Mjolnir_Poeto series. Most of the books in this series include nineteen haiku poems, crafted using AI and designed to both inspire and aid language learning, and are part of the Mjolnir_Poeto series. These works serve as lyrical introductions to Esperanto and Hindi, while also celebrating cultural and architectural heritage through the concise, evocative form of the haiku. English translations of books in this series are also available, for example, on Amazon. Esperanto versions are not available on Amazon since the Amazon platform does not support Esperanto. These books are part of his work related to social impact. As part of the work on La Gxoja Projekto and the Mjolnir_poeto series, he has also created two new conlangs, or constructed languages, similar to Klingon, Dothraki and Esperanto itself, which are also spoken by characters in one of his recent books, currently titled "Q City".
Some reviewers on Amazon have expressed confusion about the purpose of this book series. The core issue lies with the Amazon platform’s limited support for Esperanto. This stems from a technical limitation: Amazon currently lacks the capability to detect plagiarism in Esperanto, likely because they have not yet assembled a sufficiently large corpus of written material in the language. This is not a limitation of the books or the author, but of Amazon’s system. While this has not been spelt out on Amazon—partly because mentioning that the Amazon platform has these shortcomings and that these books are also published on LeanPub, a competing platform which supports Esperanto, might not be welcome in the book’s blurb—this reality affects how the books are presented and reviewed on Amazon. Thus, Amazon's platform is not sufficiently mempriskriba (that is, describing itself) as far as the mjolnir_poeto series is concerned.
The frustration this causes readers is understandable. Amazon’s platform does not allow this project to be fully self-describing, at least not there. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we have created a GitHub repository to share more information and resources related to the series. You can explore it here on GitHub:
https://github.com/delphicventurescode/mjolnir_poeto_book_series/
You can follow more of his work at:
- https://www.youtube.com/@delphicventurespublishing/
and on LinkedIn at:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/anand-manikutty/
Dankegon, kaj gxis la revido! (Translation: "Thanks very much, and until later!")