Ravinder Singh’s romantic overtures

Malavika Vettath meets Ravinder Singh, India’s dashing new king of romance writing, who takes his task of influencing young minds very seriously, indeed.

Indian author Ravinder Singh at Sharjah International Book Fair. Antonie Robertson / The National

Malavika Vettath meets India's dashing new king of romance writing Ravinder Singh, who takes his task of influencing young minds very seriously indeed
Young girls scream for his autograph and blush while taking photos with him. He has four official fan pages with more than 800,000 followers waiting for his next post. No it's not one of the Khans. It's Ravinder Singh, India's current best-selling writer of romance, who just couldn't care about labels his novels elicit in literary circles, such as "chick-lit" or "Indian Mills&Boons", from the romance imprint of the British publisher Harlequin UK.
"Tags don't affect me," Singh says in an interview. "I don't even call myself an author. I would love to call myself a storyteller."
The dapper 31-year-old knows how to keep his fans happy as he loves interacting with them personally – online and offline. "I don't want to outsource my Facebook pages. Whatever is there comes from my keyboard. I spend an hour and a half every day talking to them."
But Singh is about more than the writing that catapulted him to fame. An engineer and an MBA holder who's worked with Infosys and Microsoft, Singh recognises the influence he wields on young minds and has also taken on the task of encouraging first-time authors through his new publishing house Black Ink.
Singh's first book I Too Had a Love Story, published in 2008, was an intimate memoir of his first love, which ended tragically with the death of his girlfriend Khushi in a car accident days before their engagement.
"I was determined to bring Khushi back in my own way," says Singh. "My heart was a pressure cooker, ready to burst with the steam of grief and frustration."
So he decided to write it all down in language that was non-poetic, but came from the heart. Getting it published was a struggle – from knocking on several publishers' doors in Delhi to being told his manuscript had been thrown into the dustbin. The same book is still on Amazon India's bestseller list. Singh says he was shocked when his second book Can Love Happen Twice? turned out to be Penguin India's fastest-selling book in 25 years.
So what made him quit his dream job at Microsoft and become a full-time author?
"I wrote my second book for my readers. They wanted to know what happened to my character Ravin. Secondly, more than 100,000 readers wrote to me drawing a parallel between my love story and theirs. I realised that while my love was killed in an accident, they had ended their own love stories. So my second book is about the complications of modern times where heartbreaks are more common than heart attacks," says Singh, who's now happily married.
The author, who met fans at the Sharjah International Book Fair, makes it a point to remind readers of his lower-middle-class upbringing in small-town Burla, in India's eastern state of Orissa. And he's brutally honest when he says he had never read books before he wrote one.
"Actually, I'm an extremely small-town boy. My parents had a hard time buying schoolbooks for me so how could they buy me something to read in my leisure time? We had to travel 30km to buy my schoolbooks," he says, adding that he now enjoys reading.
His latest book Like It Happened Yesterday isn't about romance, but about these very childhood ­memories.
"I wanted to relive my childhood... so the book is about nostalgia, growing up in India in the 1980s when there was no internet and TV was black and white. So anyone nostalgic about that time should pick up this book," says Singh.
A big change in youngsters today is that they want everything now, says Singh, asking his young fans to learn to "differentiate between their wants and needs". "Now why would schoolkids need a smartphone?" he asks.
A fan's man to the core, crowds loves him even more when he tells them: "I'll be the last man standing to sign all your autographs and get photos clicked."
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