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You’re 17 and want to get into US’ Harvard University, but first what do you do about those infernal jumping hormones that every gal goes through post-teens. Being an Indian, you don’t indulge your sex-oriented daydreams (study first, pleasure later). So the next best option is to pen them to paper and get rid of the hots.
In a huge first, US born Kaavya Viswanathan did exactly that and more. Little Brown & Company, a respected 109-year-old publishing house offered Kaavya a $500,000 two-book deal with the first one to be out next spring titled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In. Considering that first-time writers get $10,000, Kaavya sure made a killing.
The New York Sun reported that it is about an Indian girl in US, driven academically (a la Kaavya?) but gets bad vibes from a Harvard admissions officer on her personal performance, gets disappointed, gives her feelings free rein and goes into a Made in America kid kind of frenzy. She gets drunk, kisses the boys and dances on the table (the last seems to be a shoot-off of the Jodie Foster rape film The Accused).
"I still cannot believe this. I never expected this would happen," Ms. Viswanathan told The New York Sun. "I had only vaguely thought of becoming a writer. But a book contract? From a major publisher? This is so incredibly unbelievable. It's so hard to believe that I'm going to be able to walk into a bookstore and see something that I wrote on display there."
The only child of her Indian-born parents, Viswanathan Rajaraman, a neurosurgeon, and Mary Sundaram, a gynecologist says, "Everybody in my family, including my parents, won science prizes. I was the one with the writing gene - and I've no idea where that came from. My parents (holidaying in India) are still in a state of shock.”
‘Don’t indulge your pleasures, make them pay,’ that’s the route to success that Kaavya has adopted and she is laughing all the way to the bank and to Harvard. |