In a luxurious bungalow in Ahmedabad, amidst the aroma of raat ki rani and the beauty of greenery all around, Raksha Bharadia weaves her observations of the subtle oddities and realities of life into novels that not only stimulate the reader, but also sell like hot cakes! Bharadia’s empathy and innate inquisitiveness about why people are the way they are, is best showcased when put in words that inspire and entertain.

Discovering her passion

Bharadia hails from the Killa family of Ladnu, Rajasthan. Born and brought up in Kolkata, she graduated in History, Economics and Political Science from Loretto College. “I was born in a business family that has a manufacturing unit of card cans. No one in my family has anything to do with writing. My sister is a nutritionist and the other one is a Yoga Acharya,” she says. It was in Kolkata that she mether husband, Sanjeev Bharadia, who lived in the same building as her family. A long courtship culminated into marriage in 1993 and they shifted to Gujarat, where her husband was setting up his tea business, Aishwarya Tea Company Limited. Bharadia started writing when she was about 28 years old and her second daughter was eight months old. “By then I was bored of being at home. Since my in-laws were at home, I decided to step out and enroll myself in a development workshop. This was the turning point in my life, and I distinctly remember that at the end of this workshop, I was required to fill an ‘I wish’ column in a form. I wrote that I wanted to be a writer. The next thing I did was to go to Crossword, purchased a spiral notebook and started writing,” recalls Bharadia.

Write choice

Though Bharadia has been contributing feature articles for Times of India, Femina, Marie Claire, and Midday (Mumbai) among other publications, her first non-fiction book Me: A Handbook for Life was published in 2006 by Rupa Publications. “I wanted to present to my readers a recipe that makes people move beyond the frailties of their nature towards success, growth and happiness. During the course of writing, I interviewed around 150 people from all walks of life, and read several biographies, autobiographies, psychology books and behavioral sciences books,” she explains. Assiduous and tenacious by nature, she managed to meet with icons like Javed Akhtar, Vikram Chandra, MF Hussain, Kiran Bedi, Mahesh Bhatt, Esther David, Birju