About the Author
Anuraag Srivastava is the author of the book To my love with Love. He has been interested in reading and writing since childhood. He had written his first rhyming lines at the age of 11 and further improved on writing poems. He has written more than 100 poems in Hindi and English. Author has got his first fiction novel of thriller genre published in 2017 titled “Twenty Twenty – a race against time”. The present work is a fiction of romance genre which will be of interest to young readers. An avid reader and observer like to tell stories around life. Author runs a blog anuraagsrivastava.com for writing articles under spirituality and general philosophy.
Interview:
Q1: Tell us something about yourself, your background. Did you always aspire to be a writer or did you chance upon writing?
A – I have done my education from Lucknow and is presently a banker. I have been writing poems since childhood and also wrote some stories. Being introvert I always found myself comfortable in expressing myself through written words. Felt better to express my imaginative creative side through writing. A need to express myself in spiritual matters led me to also pen down my thoughts through a blog which I run.
Q2: What is your professional background?
A- I am a banker by profession. MBA (Finance) and CAIIB by qualification have been into banking industry for last 22 years.
Q3: what made you decide to write this book? Is the story based on anecdotes from your own life or someone else’s life that you know?
A- I love imagining stories around life, one of the many such imaginations led me into writing this book. The story is not about the life of any single person I have met, it is a work of fiction and picks incidents as we are around in our life.
Q4: Please tell us a bit about the book itself.
A- First love is never forgotten and sometimes it becomes difficult to propose to someone we love. But love does finds its place in the heart, several such romantic encounters happen in the protagonist’s life and he goes along the flow, always having that first crush preserved somewhere deep in heart.
Also read: Author Interview with Kartikeya Ladha
Q5: The book mentions a series of relationships the protagonist gets into, or sometimes falls prey to. How do you feel the readers will react to the aspect of the protagonist’s character, especially as a married man, in multiple relationships?
A- The protagonist is a typical male who experiences romance at several stages of life, from his teen years to middle age and even at old age. The protagonist has not been in multiple relationships but has felt romance several times in his life at different life stages. Many readers will find such situations mirroring in their own life.
Q6. The protagonist loves his wife dearly, yet is unable to forget his first love till the end of his life. Do you think it is possible for an individual to love two people equally and yet be fairly happy in the life he leads?
A- We always associate love to a single partner in Indian society, while love can be any relation we experience in life. The story only focuses on protagnist’s romantic encounters in different situations in his life. Our feelings do not have limited space to accommodate only one such feeling, it usually has enough space to have such feelings for multiple individuals and we should not forget everyone has some hidden adventures of his own, which cannot be shared with everyone.
Q7: There are instances in the book where the protagonist of the book comes clean with his wife about the women-related problems he is facing and we find the wife actually helping him out. Do you feel this can actually happen in real life? Can a wife really help her husband out in these matters without reacting or being jealous?
A- Love brings trust, the protagnist’s wife is in deep love with him. The support given by wife may be rare but not that we do not encounter in real life too. Usually support like this from one of the spouses saves families.
Q8: The book has a bit of a fairy-tale ending. Though there are deaths to deal with, the protagonist and his first love are finally together, even if it is for a few minutes. Do you think such things can actually happen in real life?
A- Yes it can happen, though we should not forget it is still a work of fiction. The whole idea is to leave a pondering statement that what if the protagonist had actually proposed to his first love.
Q9: What do you want the readers to ‘take-away’ from the book?
A- It is a work of fiction and is not to give a moral of the story, it is just a flow of emotions. The only take away is a thought that sometimes keeping our feelings to ourselves may deprive us something which was ours from the beginning.
Q10: Which character in the book is your personal favourite? Why?
A- The character of Arushi is my personal favorite for her unconditional love and support to Anurag.
Q10: What’s next for you? Are you writing something new for the readers? Something equally off-beat and interesting?
A- I have never bound myself with any genre, my earlier book “Twenty Twenty” was a thriller while this one is a romance. I write poems in every emotion. Further I am writing some more stories of thriller and romance genres at present. I feel stories are abound in this world to be told and I also have a small part in sculpting them into words for others to read.
Q11: How do you decide about the topic you want to write about? Is it from observing life around you, or do you follow some other method?
A- Since childhood I have been a keen observer of people around me. Sometimes a particular action by someone elicits an imagination which, associating with other events, I try to spun into a story. As I said earlier, the topic is never pre-decided it is an outcome of what I fictionalize during my day to day observation and thinking.
Q12: Finally, is there something that you would like to share with your readers/audience?
A- Life around is full of stories and we should continuosly experience them, an author just precipitates those stories floating around us so I would like the readers to read more and experience the life in words.
