‘I was always good at writing’
PAROMITA PAIN
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Painter, musician and now writer, life is full for Suchitra Krishnamoorthi with her first book, The Summer of Cool, being released last week.
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I knew there was a book waiting to be written.
Photo: P. V. Sivakumar
Home-grown inspirations: Suchitra Krishnamoorti.
We know her as Anna, Shah Rukh Khan’s heartthrob in “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na”. We also know her as the songstress who swayed to the beats of “Dum tara”. Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, musician and singer, is also an artist. Her latest exhibition was well received.
Just when we were getting used to saying, “Here comes Suchitra, the painter”, she took off that particular hat and became a writer. Her first book, The Summer of Cool, in her Swapnalok Society series has just been released. Unlike her singing and acting that she has been into since her college days, Suchitra started to write just recently.
Right from school
“I was always good at essay writing,” she muses. “They were often read out in class. I also scored the highest in the national ICSE board in English but never thought I would write the way I am doing now. My earlier career choices were determined largely by the fact that I looked a certain way and could earn easy pocket money from it.”
Singing since the age of six (“Mine was a family trained in classical music”), she was too busy acting or performing to actually sit down and give voice to that book that she now believes was always inside.
Also her parents wanted her to do an MBA. “I knew there was a book waiting to be written. In fact I also wrote a play called “Candlelight” about a woman’s journey in the music business where she finds her niche in the quagmire of her own limitations. The play was to be performed as well. But production costs went way over budget and we had to stop. I got busy with my painting exhibitions and never really turned to it again.”
Set in a busy Mumbai housing society, Swapnalok Society revolves around 10-year-old Chitrangana, a precocious teller of tales, who also has the nerve to take to Mumbai’s mean streets armed with only her talking doll in search of her father. Suchitra’s inspirations are a lot like the many other things she has made a mark in — basically home grown.
“I am surrounded by young people,” she smiles. “I love watching them.” Many of the episodes in the book are stuff that happened to her nieces. “There’s an incident where my 10-year-old heroine eats too much and farts in a party. That happened to my youngest niece who was mortified. Her sister explained to her that it was perfectly okay. I put it just as it happened,” she laughs.
For young adults
Her next piece of writing after her play for adults is for the young adult — the most difficult segment of any reading audience to write for. What were the changes so that it would appeal to young readers? “I started writing the series when I was taking a break from painting. ‘Candlelight’ was heavy and full of adult intricacies. I wanted to write something happy and light. I write fast. It relaxes me. Swapnalok… flowed through like a stream of connected ideas I didn’t have to work too hard to create.”
Her heroine too is a lot like someone she went to school with. “Swapnalok… for me is, in many ways, a return to innocence. We had this girl who was full of fibs about her absentee father — about how nice he was, the lovely things they would do together. He lived abroad and quite a figure. It was only after we passed out from college that we discovered she had no father. She sustained her own fiction,” she says.
This story is also reflective of the kind of family she had and the kind of atmosphere she has grown up in. “My childhood years were full of multicultural experiences. So the characters like Haldi Mami, underwear uncle and aunty are no figments of imagination. They were the kind of people I have always known,” she smiles.
Top priority
A budding love story, a lost father, an often mean mother, her heroine has a lot to cope with. “Children will understand these seemingly adult ideas in their own way,” she asserts. And she would know for her most important role is being a mother to eight-year-old daughter Kaveri.
“Giving up acting was difficult when I got married. Today I don’t consider roles even if they are from the best banners if that means I have to stay away from home for two months. Kaveri is more than priority; she is the most important aspect of my life.”
Art to her is language of emotion. Painter, musician and now writer, life is full for Suchitra. Yet coping with schedules comes easy. “What most women should do to get more out of life is to put their priorities in perspective and be upfront about their own wants and desires. As women we negate our needs. That doesn’t help.”
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