Beyond Namaste

Dreaming in Hindi (Tranquebar,Rs 395) begins when Rich found her world turned upside down. She’d lost a job at the magazine she worked for,had battled breast cancer twice. She was single,unemployed and had the freedom to do new things. Perhaps,learn a language. “I’d been studying Hindi in New York for about six months when one day,I heard all these sentences around me. I saw three Indian guys talking about the weather,not any secrets of the universe,but I was flabbergasted to be able to understand them. I felt I’d been shifted to another place. I was hooked,” says Rich who had been working on a piece about taking Hindi lessons and the effect learning a second language had on the brain. The story got killed. “But I took the material and turned it into a book proposal in which I said I’d go to India and spend a year there,” says Rich.

The year in Udaipur was nothing Rich could have imagined. A new language is not always romantic when you are asking for pyaar instead of pyaala. “But my thinking grew more supple. The world was doubling,” says Rich who took eight years to write the book. In the meantime,Eat,Pray,Love by Elizabeth Gilbert had become a rage. “Often,a cynic declares that I wrote the book to cash in on Eat,Pray,Love. That’s nonsense. I’d been working on it for three years when one night,I ran into Gilbert,who said she was about to take off for India to research a book. Boy,that woman is fast,” says Rich. Already,filmmakers have come calling. “If Danny Boyle can make a movie from an Indian perspective,I don’t see why an Indian can’t make a movie from a western perspective” says Rich. Bahut khoob.