1. How did your journey as an author start?

Back in June 2014, my journey as an author started with the intention to help women, so they can effectively cope up with the pre-and post-marriage challenges and can live a happy and peaceful married life. As a psychologist, I’ve counselled many women, struggling with the challenges of married life who needed help and guidance to cope up with issues. Every woman comes with her own unique story but most of the issues and reasons behind those stories turn out to be common.

Though in many of my poems and articles, I tried to highlight the struggles of women and encourage them to assert their views, I never thought of authoring a book. As I always identified myself to be a healer and not as an author, so when my friend Deepika and I decided to write a book, I felt like it’s a calling to tread on the journey of book writing to serve a noble cause and fulfil my passion of helping and empowering women.

So, by co-authoring this book I got an opportunity to share my observations, knowledge, and experience that I acquired all these years to guide and help women to take the charge of their life. I believe that our effort will help women to feel more in control and empowered enough to deal positively with all the changes that come after marriage.

2. Tell me about your book: Indian Women and The Shaadi Conundrum.

Indian Women and the Shaadi Conundrum is a self-help book for women so that they can enrich themselves with all the essential information that is required for marriage. In our book, we have highlighted all the important aspects that help women right from choosing a partner to post marriage phase. The book helps a woman to build a beautiful relationship with husband and at the same time developing a rapport with marital family without compromising her individuality, self-respect and dignity. Our book gives the insight of psyche of our society and encourages women to have a realistic perspective towards the institution of marriage. Our book describes the common issues that a woman needs to take care of and gives useful tips which will help her in smoothly adapting to changes. This book is an effort to help women to mentally prepare for the pre and post-marriage challenges so that they can effectively cope up with them.  In a nutshell, this book is an effort to empower women to deal positively with the Shaadi conundrum.

3. How the idea of co-authoring a book came into the picture? How did you manage to co-write? 

The idea of co-authoring a book came into the picture, over a casual conversation with my friend Deepika Sharma, co-author of the book, as we both feel strongly about the women who are not happy in their marriages. There are many women who feel helpless in their marriages due to different reasons and do not know how to deal with the problems due to lack of proper guidance. They do not have solutions and do not know what to do. It is at that time we decided to write a book so that women can help themselves and able to live a happy married life.

As we are very good friends and have shared a wonderful chemistry, so it wasn’t so difficult to co-write. We shared the same vision to help and empower women, so to serve this purpose we also co-founded thehappywomen.com an online platform to empower, motivate and inspire women.

Before writing the book, we researched the subject and found that there is no such book available to guide and help women with issues related to marriage. We first outlined the content of the book and discussed the issues that women face related to marriage and they find it difficult to cope up with. We also interviewed around 25 women to highlight the real issues that woman face and come up with the effective solutions and the right way to approach the problems. We divided the book into different chapters based on different phases of marriage and relevance of issues and then decided to write chapters simultaneously. We then exchanged the content for enhancements.

So, book writing was wonderful journey comprised of moments of sheer joy and moments of frustration of rewriting and editing. Finally, the delight of sharing the piece of experience to empower women is priceless.

4. What are your views on Feminism?

We all are unique individuals irrespective of gender, so the need of the hour is to build a society, that is free of discrimination based on gender, where women and men are treated as equal human beings and are given equal opportunities in all aspects of life. Let men and women decide for themselves what they want to do or aspire to do. There should be no gender bias and concept of inferior vs superior or weak vs strong.  Women and men should be valued as individuals who are free to make informed and responsible choices about their lives. 

5.A message which you would like to convey to the readers. 

I have co-authored this book with the only purpose to help women with the knowledge and experience that I acquired all these years. I believe we all have the ability and responsibility to contribute to our society. So, if you get an opportunity to giving back to society go ahead and serve the true purpose. 

Read this book to empower yourself and spread the word by recommending it your friends so that women can get benefited and are able to live a happy married life.