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A Harvard student's Motherland

By Sonia Chopra

Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's first novel, Motherland, grew out of a short story she'd written seven years ago.

She kept it aside and went about the tedious business of studying and working. But she was continuously thinking of ways to convert it into a full-fledged novel.

Finally, she quit her job and spent a whole year writing it.

Her heroine Maya, a 15-year-old, travels from America to the land of her birth, India, and takes a long hard look at her family and her culture to discover herself, to find out who she really is.

"For all it's tenderness and warmth, Motherland has a gutsy air of daring about it," said The New York Times Book Review.

The book combines truth with fiction. "All books are autobiographical to some degree. The character of the grandmother is my grandmother and it was my way of honouring her memory," says the author.

She made her heroine adolescent because it's the time for exploration and discovery, she says. But "the main character is very different from me. I am sort of bookish, while she is bold, inquisitive, adventurous, likes to explore and knows no fear."

But unlike her heroine, 28-year-old Vineeta didn't have to wait too long to discover where she belonged.

A graduate student at Harvard Business School, she worked on her novel, took it to a writer's workshop, and within a month found a medium-sized publisher called Soho.

"I was quite lucky. I was happy, surprised and excited when it was accepted," says Vineeta, who commutes between Cambridge and Manhattan several times a week. "I know this was an exceptional situation, it could have been a much longer road to publication."

Vineeta was born in Jamshedpur, India, but raised in Edison, New Jersey, by her parents, M K and Raji Vijayaraghavan, who work in healthcare management and biomedical research, respectively.

She realized early on that she had an aptitude for creative writing and enjoyed literature and history, her undergraduate majors at Harvard.

At the back of her mind, she always wanted to be a writer, but didn't know if she "was good enough and would have interesting stories to tell". So she decided to use her writing skills to either be a teacher or focus on education. And maybe write academic books, one day.

After college, she worked for the United Nations in the Caribbean, formulating education policy for four years. She switched careers to consulting and investment banking, working for Morgan Stanley for two years before deciding to hone her management skills.

She used breaks between her classes to do final revisions on the novel and refine the characters and the story.

The success of other South Asian writers may be a reason why new writers like her find it relatively easy to pitch their books. But Vinita demurs. "I think there will always be people writing. I was writing privately long before the recent wave of Indian authors came into the limelight. I have never heard of anyone selling a novel because there are other people from the same country writing, you write because you love writing and it's your way of seeing the world," she says.

Besides, she points out, the public can be fickle. "It comes and goes in waves. Salman Rushdie was popular, then Vikram Seth and now Jhumpa Lahiri. And then publishers were into Latin America and magical realism or, recently, East Asia with Memories of a Geisha. These things are hard to predict," says Vineeta, whose favourite writers include William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald.

Her plans after she graduates in June may include a Wall Street firm and perhaps another book. But that is all she is willing to divulge for now.

Writing is a trade like carpentry, she concludes. "You just have to work alone, in your room, day after day, just writing and thinking. You have to be patient and wait to share it. It's a craft, a skill with some magic mixed in."

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