In this episode of NL Recess, author Anuja Chauhan joins Mehraj D Lone of Newslaundry to discuss her latest novel, Club You To Death, which revolves around a murder at a posh Delhi club.
Talking about her journey from copywriter at the advertising agency JWT to fiction writer, Anuja says she joined advertising because she wanted to write and she left advertising because she wanted to write. As she moved up the career ladder in the ad industry she was left with more administrative work and had little time to write for pleasure. In her time with JWT, she was involved with such successful ad campaigns such as Pepsi’s Ye Dil Maange More and Mountain Dew’s Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai.
As a novelist, she has published such popular works as The Zoya Factor, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Battle for Bittora.
For Anuja, just like a good ad is the one the audience wouldn’t mind rewatching, a good book is the one readers would love to reread. Her favourite books which she goes back to reading again and again, include Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
Asked how she developed such a good ear for dialogues, Anuja says she loves eavesdropping and collecting phrases from everyday conversations, especially Indianisms. A funny one is her portmanteau, Bhainscafe, which describes coffee with buffalo milk villages.
On being called a writer of chick lit, Anuja says she finds it reductive and dehumanising towards women. However, she says she has developed a thick skin for biased criticism, but enjoys constructive criticism such as Mehraj’s observation about some of her characters being somewhat caricaturish. She says she feels no animosity towards people who denigrate her as “rice bag convert” or “fake rajput”, and, in fact, finds them rather funny.
Talking about the pace of her writing, she says it comes from advertising. “We can’t bore them. There has to be something sparkly and funny on every page,” she explains. In advertising though, she was conditioned to write briefly and she has found it “very liberating to be taken off that leash and being able to write as long as one wants”.
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Text by Jaspreet Singh.