“I love connecting with people; I get direct access to their souls. I can identify with people and I am grateful to know that I am not all alone out there, facing issues, conflicts and challenges,” candidly confesses writer and editor of the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul books, Raksha Bharadia.
The 38-year-old Raksha was born in Kolkata and moved to Ahmedabad, the opposite corner of the country as she prefers to term the city, after marrying her sweetheart. A student of economics, she started writing after realising she “didn’t know what to do in life.” She adds, “When I started writing, actually compressing 650 pages into 50 wasn’t really that difficult for me. With Chicken Soup, I decided to avoid generic writing and focus on specific issues. 1,200 words sometimes are enough to tell a story.”
However, not any story would make its way into a Chicken Soup — Raksha says it must touch her heart. She explains, “I think I work in layers. When I say yes to a story, it would have touched my heart. Sometimes, grammar or the length of the story doesn’t bother me much. If I get goose pimples while reading a story, it goes in.”
While the international editions of Chicken Soup are popular the world over, Raksha says that the Indian edition has its own space in the literary domain. She points out that concepts like close-knit families, domestic helps and academic pressures are synonymous to the Indian culture. The author adds, “The level of tolerance that Indian contributors show is amazing. I have just finished with the Indian Soup for Fathers and where else would you hear such amazing tales about the love of a grandfather?”
Though in the past, the Chicken Soup series has had stories about the who’s who of Tinseltown, Raksha says some of the most fantastic stories come from the most ordinary lives. “The secret is to find extraordinary story in an ordinary person. Even if they are not known names, they have so much to teach to their readers,” she ends.
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