We are all funny, if you look closely, says author Koral Dasgupta
Author Koral Dasgupta speaks on her latest book, Summer Holiday, her love with the written word and more.
“Comedy comes very naturally to me,” says author and painter Koral Dasgupta. “If you look very closely at people around, you’ll realise how funny we are,” laughs Koral. Her last book, Summer Holiday, navigates three cities—Mumbai, Bengaluru and Shimla. The story interwoven with a family-feud and a homecoming laden with positivity and oodles of fun elements.
Writing about family came naturally to her and she didn’t have to look too far for inspiration, for “memories from childhood” were “fresh” when Koral wrote this book. “ We were a huge bunch of kids, who were together in Kolkata. I know what happens when all the cousins are together, and the kind of nuisance it can be for everybody else. That has gone in writing of the book. But none of the characters have any parallels from my life,” says Koral, who has also authored Power of a Common Man: Connecting with Consumers the SRK Way, Fall Winter Collections and Rasia: The Dance of Desire.
And the book didn’t need much research, shares Dasgupta. “Families are something we all know or grow up with, having seen our friend’s families. When I was writing Rasia that is about three Bharatnatyam dancers, that is when I had to research and reached out to real life Bharatanatyam dancers,” she adds.
Koral, who loves to read To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite “again and again”, says her favourite authors include Ruskin Bond and Devdutt Pattanaik. “My books have a mythological connect which may or not be spiritual. But I love what has been created out of mythological deities,” says the founder of a #Tellmeyourstory, a crowd-sourced storytelling platform.
Talking about her relationship with the written word, she says, “When you are talking, you are conscious. But when you write, your subconscious comes out to talk. When you read it, you realise ‘Oh god, there was so much inside me’. I don’t sit and plan my stories, but I have characters in my brain. I am not a person who’ll put a story graph, or who’ll know what goes into first episode or the fifth episode. I sit on the laptop and stuff keeps coming. It’s a very on the spot process,” she says.
Fun fact, as an author, she likes to eavesdrop on conversations all the time. “I do it all the time,” she laughs, adding, “If you check my Facebook, you’ll see whole list of stories which comes from hearing stories I am not authorised to hear—sitting in a coffee shop,travelling by public transport or simply standing on the road. On a serious note, if you want to be an author, you have to read between the lines, be extremely observant of what you are hearing . It’s also about the stories you have read or heard from your parents.”
Speaking about the trend of books being adapted into web shows, films, she says, “It’s very good actually that books are getting adapted. A lot of detailing goes into a book. Scriptwriting is a completely different craft. When a book gets adapted, a lot of synergy happens that is good from the perspective of content, and different creative heads.”
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