The Recession Groom

Publisher: Leadstart Publishing

Twitter handle: @Vani_Author

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Parshuraman Joshi, 27, handsome, Hindu-Brahmin, IT Professional, settled in Canada, earns a high-figure salary.

These are credentials that would make any young man hot on the Indian wedding market, so it’s no wonder that Parshuraman’s family is inundated with matrimonial proposals. While so far all attempts to ‘settle’ him have gone kaput, he has bigger issues vexing him – such as Jennifer, his ‘fireball’ of a colleague, and their efforts to save Project Infinite. To top it all, as the credit crisis grips the global economy, the little world he’s created for himself begins to fall apart. Will he be able to pull himself together to face the challenges posed by a tough economy? More importantly, will this Recession Groom be able to find his ‘perfect partner’?

GUEST POST

Writing for an International Audience

I know that sounds easy. Not so easy when you read this.

I am an Indian and I don’t know what image that conjures up in your mind – an IT professional, Slumdog millionaire, Mahatma Gandhi? Not a writer, for sure. We are great readers, topping the charts across the world; no wonder people think we are nerds. But not many among us have yet received international success to parallel J K Rowling, Stephen King or George R. R. Martin (a few, yes, not forgetting Rushdie, Naipaul, Roy, Ghosh, Adiga, Desai and Chaudhuri, but not many). We will, in time. For now, I offer you a sneak peek into my world to help you better understand the reasons.

I was born in Libya, in a Hindu Punjabi family and was still small when I moved to Chandigarh, a small city in the north of India. Up to the age of 21, I wasn’t allowed to watch English movies nor read romantic novels. Growing up, I never told anyone I wanted to be a writer. To follow the cliché, you can be two things in India: a doctor or an engineer. And to keep to those expectations, you must read ‘textbooks’, almost a quarter of your life. I wasn’t interested in either, and so set myself up for a disaster when I decided to be a full-time writer.

I don’t blame my corseted upbringing, nor the small city I grew up in, but these doubtless killed off some of my creative urges early on. My experience as a business journalist finished the job. If I hadn’t unlearnt some of my old rules, I’d have written my novel in the inverted pyramid style, front-loading it with important information, saving the unnecessary for the end.

I knew I needed to cultivate an eclectic taste in movies, books and music. The story had to interest a wider audience and have a global appeal. What about the credit crisis, I thought. What about the story of an Indian IT professional during the period of global credit crisis and his adventures to find his ‘perfect partner’? I knew the concept of ‘arranged marriages’ had always piqued the curiosity of western readers and this was one idea I wasn’t ready to let go.

For the next few years, I was a woman on mission! I watched several English movies a day, didn’t miss a single soap on TV, read top international authors and cultivated a taste for different genres of music, just so my writing could engage people from different nationalities and multiple cultural backgrounds. ‘The Recession Groom’ is out now and I hope it is well received by the international audience.

I am a small-city girl, a microcosm of this sea of humanity that surrounds me. We have over a billion people in my country, and as many stories as there are people, yet the reality remains the same. We have scope for writers… many writers… international writers. ‘The Recession Groom’ is my contribution to this story, and who knows where it will take me! Wish me luck and I hope you enjoy reading the book. To know more about me, log on to vaniauthor.com or leave me a message at vaniauthor@gmail.com.

Thank you, Vani! It was wonderful!