I want to write fantasy: Durjoy Datta

Durjoy Datta – the name is synonymous for Generation Y readers of India. This young author has carved a niche in the literary world for his light hearted romantic books. From a blogger to a writer, he has 11 books to his credit. And most of them were on the bestselling list.

The 28-year-old author also has two television shows ‘Sadda Haq’ (Story & Screenplay) ‘Ek Veer Ki Ardaas...Veera’ (Story) to his credit and will soon write for mainstream cinema. Durjoy is an engineer by profession and has quit many jobs to pursue his dream career. His latest book ‘World’s Best Boyfriend’ is garnering accolades for his simple approach and storyline. In an exclusive interview Durjoy talks about his passion for writing.

Was writing always a passion? When did you realise you want to make it a full time career?

I always loved to write but it never took the form where I would say I want to write a book and get published. I had been a blogger for quite some years and had a decent following and that gave me the courage to finally try writing a book. I never really thought my first book would get published, that I would sign book deals and go on to write 10 more books. I never thought I would be doing it for a living someday, and had I not been writing today, I would have been a marketing analyst somewhere. And, it wasn’t until the time I was sure I wouldn’t starve that I shifted to writing full time.

In ‘Worlds Best Boyfriend’, your central characters undergo immense social trauma because of their parents? Is it based on any real story?

Not really, but I have known people who have gone through similar experiences and how they have been scarred by it.

So Aranya, heroine of your story, has Vitiligo. Why did you specifically choose this disease?

I wanted the reader to immediately judge her on her appearance and then slowly show them the damage she has gone through because of that. Once that was out of the way, I wanted the readers to realise how beautiful and complex and passionate she was, and how foolish they were to judge her in the first place.

Dhruv and Aranya are head over heels in love in school, and then they get caught and hate each other, separate and meet in college again and they fight, etc. Don’t you think it is a perfect stereotyped potboiler?

Now that you put it like that, it sounds like one! But this book was never about the story or the structure, it was about a girl wanting to fall in love with herself and the majority of the book deals with that. The boy is really just an accessory in the book pushing her towards that. It was about Aranya and her self-discovery, and if it came with a potboiler story, it was totally unintentional.

Why did you choose such a whacky cover for the book, which says ‘Worst’ slashed the ‘Best Boyfriend’?

Because, I wasn’t really sure what Dhruv was till the end! I still don’t know, really. So this was the best I could do with the cover.

The book has urban and cool language with all F’s and B’s. Why did you choose this style of language?

The book is an angry book, a rant of sorts. And in the environment it was set in, people talk like that. I didn’t want the characters to talk in a language that’s not theirs.

This is your 11th book and all your previous books are based on young romance. Is there any specific reason for sticking to this genre?

I don’t think there were a lot of Indian commercial writers writing in the romance genre when I started writing it. There wasn’t really a market for it. If somebody wanted to pick up a romance book they would go to a foreign author. I started writing about relationships because that’s the only thing I understood when I was twenty one; love, heartbreaks, your friends and your relationships with your siblings and parents is all that mattered.

Also, I don’t really think I’m a hardcore romance writer. It’s just that when I wanted to assign a genre to me and my books, romance came closest.

Do you plan to write any other genre?

I would love to write a fantasy and a whacked out psychological thriller someday. I have tried and failed spectacularly at both.

How difficult was it to get your first book published?

Not very much! I finished the book and sent it out to quite a few publishers and I landed a deal within a week. So, no fancy story here to narrate.

Navin Pivhal