The greys behind the glossy cover

Stories have always fascinated me and somewhere I have seen that stories linger on minds much longer than dry news articles do. Thus, I decided to spin stories about all the dates that I thought fit into the Indian context and more importantly those where each time I looked at them, a certain face and a certain voice floated through my head as if screaming at me to tell their stories in my words to the world. I scribbled thinking that this was a new concept; I was a brave girl after all – deciding to take on a serious topic as this instead of the popular youth fiction as was floating around.  And there it goes my first book –  "A Calender too crowded' - was born.

Naïve as I was, I thought finding a publisher will not be difficult. Faith – is something that breaks a first time author each day when the morning begins with a reject mail. And then there are mornings when there are no reject mails, but mails that say that they like your work but want you to change the theme and content of the manuscript. It’s like a pre-condition for marriage where the groom’s mother likes you and your cooking but wants you to only cook Indian and never Chinese. Then there are mornings when there are no mails – as if your script has been eaten up by a dark hole and you do not know if it ever saw the light of the mailbox! The family asks you to stop the madness of re-writing scripts without sleeping for nights and then working like a zombie at work. Friends write you off the party lists after you turn down two and suddenly you find yourself over judgmental about your work – but extra sensitive to other comments. Guess, here’s where humility steps in – the need to take feedback about your own work and never be biased towards it, just because you created it.

It was a long journey even after the publishers took the script under the wing. What the world till date sees is just a printed copy of a gloss covered book, they critique what appears just words to them. What they fail to see is the persistence, the perseverance and the sweat that has gone to make that. Being a first time author is not easy - so while every bad review strengthens me every good one also keeps me grounded, but with a smile.  It’s indeed being a long journey and I haven’t had the luck and the fame yet (which people think come oh so easily once you get published!), but guess it’s not the ending to my story yet, so I can wait for it. I know there are miles to walk and millions of misconceptions to be broken, but as Ranbir Kapoor says in Rockstar says ‘jab tak takleef na ho life mein, tab tak koi bada nahin banta’ (Till there are discomforts in life, no one can make it big) – true that! No one said life was going to be a bed of roses, why blame life for certain misconceptions of the idiosyncratic mind?

It’s all about growing up in the end, thus if you can look back at your struggle and say a “wow” the less number of reviews on sites, or the reject mails you still store all make you smile!

Keep visiting this space for more updates on the book and my interactions with writersmelon team.The book is launched and is available at your favorite book store online -  Flipkart . 

----- Sagarika Chakraborthy

Author of the month on Writersmelon,