Wired for words

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Blogger-turned-author and now the editor of Brown Paper Bag, a lifestyle/review website, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is out with her third book Cold Feet. Like her previous works — You Are Here and Confessions of a Listmaniac — her latest book is again a coming-of-age novel told through the lives of five young women trying to find their life in Mumbai while dealing with the complexities of love and intricacies of relationships.

A decade back Meenakshi had joined the prestigious Lady Sri Ram College on a creative writing quota, and aimed to be a screenwriter for Hollywood. Well, that never happened, but three years later she showed up as a rookie reporter at a now-defunct tabloid.
It was during the mundane late night hours in office when she started reading blogs that she realised that she could also run a blog of her own. Thus began her exciting journey in the virtual world with The Compulsive Confessor. Initially she wrote about her boyfriend, friends, parents and the parties she went to before moving on to other stuff under the pseudonym ‘eM’.
“eM is like ‘M’, the first letter of my name and also is ‘me’ backwards. A bit clichéd now but back when I was 22, it was full of meaning and symbolism,” she tells us.
She liked blogging for a long time. She just loved to spill, discuss, talk about anything without it being put into context of her as a person, as a friend-of-a-friend, as her parents’ daughter and so on. Although she continued to blog, she had always wanted to write a book. In fact, a version of You Are Here, her debut novel, was actually written when she was 18. So, when an editor at Penguin asked her if she had anything, she said, “Yes! Yes, I do.”
You Are Here — a semi-autobiographical story of a young woman, who grows up as a modern Indian girl in a traditional society, is between boyfriends and has boss issues — got mixed reviews. Her second book Confessions of a Listmaniac failed to impress both critics and readers. With her latest, Cold Feet, she attempts to woo the readers by dissecting Indian women’s relationship with marriage. It started as a short story, which then turned into a novel about five different women and five different motivations. “Cold Feet talks about the urban Indian woman more than anything else, what makes her go to work, have sex, fight with her parents, travel and so on. I really enjoyed writing it,” she says.
Her writing is more inclined towards human bonding. She has delved into all sorts of relationships in her books and blog. Intrigued by the human mind, people’s interpersonal relationships, which reveal so much about them, push her to explore further.
Her own relationship with her parents has many facets to it. Since both her mother and father are passionate about the written word, she inherited their passion. As a writer, does the lineage burden her?
“No pressure at all, we’re all into different things. My father writes literary fiction in Malayalam, my mother writes non-fiction and I’m the commercial fiction side of the family. In a way, it’s nice because we can all go out for dinner and discuss books all evening,” she replies.
Shuttling between Mumbai and Delhi, two of her favourite cities, she calls herself a “bicitial”, a term she coined for a person who belongs to two cities. “Delhi is where my shoes are, but Mumbai is my spiritual home. I always feel happy when the plane is circling over Mumbai. I’m in a relationship with someone who lives in Mumbai, and so it is coloured with domesticity. On the other hand, Delhi is where my own house is, where I cook, entertain and clean, occasionally, so that’s domestic too.”
An influx of books by young Indian writers writing in English unsettles her but she is an optimist and says that every book finds its reader. “Sometimes the flood of books coming in scares me, but you have to think about your work in terms of ‘will it still be relevant in about a 100 years?’ If your answer is yes, then you’ve written a good book. If not, then you have to find it the best audience you can. People will read what they want to read, whether there’s one new book available or 500,” says Meenakshi, who watches a lot of the new American shows online and takes photographs on her big SLR.
Tell her she is expected to be India’s answer to Bridget Jones and pat comes the reply, “This parallel bemuses me. Do you mean me, as in me-the-author, or my books? Either way, I’m flattered, and I hope it means that my books are as funny and as relevant as Helen Fielding’s.”