'My new novel spunky, stylish'

German author Roswitha Joshi, who has made India her second home, uses a spicy Indo-German love story to depict different outlooks and attitudes regarding marriage, women, social position, professional aspirations in her new novel in which her personal experiences play a big role too.

"I wrote Indian Dreams in as spunky a style as I could muster, because I hate being bored while reading or writing," says the versatile writer who has lived in India for the past 30 years.According to her, Indian Dreams it is an attempt to depict the power of love, its limitations and challenges as well as the background and endeavours to overcome preconditioning that form characters and provide them with the guts to do what they do."It is also my attempt to show the potential of tourism that adds value to traditional wealth instead of destroying it and presenting a female protagonist, who does not whine away her life as a martyr but makes an effort to shape her own life," Roswitha told PTI.

Indian Dreams, published by UBSPC, is her second novel. Her already published books are: Life is Peculiar (a collection of mainly humorous anecdotes), On the Rocks and Other Stories (a collection of short stories), Once More! (a novel) and Fool's Paradise (a collection of musings).She says her new novel is the "result of two years of romancing a computer in a room facing the widening crown of a mango tree in an almost self-contained world, where vague memories and wild fantasies, gradually, settled into a collage devised in equal measure by a frisky adventure spirit and the desire to tame it." The plot as such does not relate to incidents in her life, says the mother of two who is in her 50s."I moved, however, with my Indian husband from Germany to India in the seventies and try to instil the flavour of those times into the novel. And my personal experiences play a big role - what I saw, what I heard, what I read.Since I know a bit of Hindi - which is hardly appreciated in Delhi but very helpful while travelling outside - I could talk to people of all strata of society. And I loved it. And they loved it," she says.

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