Contemporary Romance in Indian Fiction

Recently I was invited by SheThePeopleTV to participate in a panel discussion on Contemporary Romance along with other authors at the Women Writers Fest. It was an interesting session and threw up some fascinating insights into how authors (and editors) approach the topic of romantic love in fiction writing.

Are darker themes replacing feel good romance? This was one of the issues that was debated.

Real life love stories often have a gritty edge to them. We read about women being stalked, being killed by jealous lovers. In the age of instant gratification and Tinder-dating, where does that leave romance and more importantly fictional romance? Is lust more relevant than love to readers?

The concept of romance has always been shaped by mainstream commercial movies and the classics. Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate love story and it ended in tragedy! But can it be classified as romance? Love and romance, though often used interchangeably, they are actually not one and the same thing. Romance is what happens when a couple is sexually attracted to each other; it's the dating game, the push and pull of emotions, the surge of oxytocin. In 2012, researchers actually found high levels of oxytocin (often called the love hormone) in people who were in the first stages of romantic involvement.

Dating however is not an end in itself. Biologically, we are hard wired to find the perfect mate. Someone with whom we have that special bonding and without whom our lives would not be 'complete'. Call it what you will...but to me it sounds like Love. The subtext of it all is to find a Happily Ever After (HEA). And for that reason alone, HEA will never go out of fashion in contemporary fiction!

What are your thoughts on the issue? Please do share....

Facing my fear - one Pitch at a time

Pitching makes me freeze up. In fact, the very thought of it makes me wanna run away. For a screenwriter that's simply bad news. Because no matter what, if you want to get your stories out of your computer and hit the big screens, then you need to get comfortable with selling your story to potential producers and studios. And the first step in that journey is pitching. My fear of pitching has prodded me to find different ways of overcoming the hurdle. So, for a few years I tried to work with agents in the hope that they would read my book and be able to handle the job of pitching. But soon I realized that agents were not into reading. So, I was just another name in their long list of clients. How that helps them grow their business is a different story, and one that I will perhaps share at a later point when I get around to solving that mystery! But the turning point (life does imitate screenplays!) came when I was called to pitch my book to a prominent OTT channel. This was an o

Basu Chatterji's "Balcony Class" Films

Basu Chatterji's Rajnigandha was like a breath of fresh air in the 1970s film universe of Bombay. At a time when the Angry Young Man was beginning to dominate celluloid screens, Amol Palekar was as un-hero-like as you could get. He was the Common Man who traveled in buses, did not have hero-like mannerisms and did not breathe fire and brimstone at his opponents. Basu Chatterji's Middle of the Road Cinema burst on to the scene and surprised the movie-going audience with its everyday situations and storylines that had an undercurrent of humour. Chatterji catered to an audience that he liked to call the "Balcony Class". Anirudha Bhattacharjee, author of Basu Chatterji and Middle-of-the-Road Cinema writes an entertaining and heartwarming account of the life and work of Basu Chatterji, one of the most under-rated directors of Indian cinema. Recall of Chatterji's brand of feel-good, slice-of-life movies is perhaps highest for his Rajnigandha, Chotisi Baat, Baaton Baa

'Pure Evil' has been my biggest and most complex project - Author Balaji Vittal

Love them or hate them, you simply can't ignore them. That cliche is perhaps most apt when it comes to the bad men of Bollywood. In fact, some of the most memorable lines of dialogue have been mouthed not by the heroes but by the villains of Hindi cinema. So it is only fitting that these shining stars of the dark world (after all, antagonists are the protagonists of their own stories!) deserve to be spotlighted. Balaji Vittal , the author of Pure Evil: the Bad Men of Bollywood undertakes this onerous task of highlighting the world of these evil characters and how they have come to occupy a special place in the hearts and minds of movie goers. I spoke to Mr. Balaji Vittal, a National Award winning and MAMI Award winning author of Bollywood books, a columnist for News18, Outlook India, The New Indian Express , a Bollywood commentator and a public speaker, about his journey of venturing into the world of Pure Evil . Here are some excerpts: Your book "Pure Evil: the Bad Men

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