by Shalet Jimmy
published in The New Indian Express
April 2013

There was a time when Sreelatha used to begin and end her days with versification. The scribblings went on till she had a collection of poems. It was then that she decided to use it as a thread for writing a fiction. Thus was born her debut book,’An Eternal Romantic’.

Set in three places, Kolkata, Kerala and London, the book delves deep into the undulating emotion ‘love’. The story revolves around the ebbs and flows of the protagonist Indira’s life. She becomes a schizophrenic due to her first heart break. The story speaks about her delusional state of mind and its thoughts. But the woman dares to fall in love again. “The language is poetic. Since I have centred my story entirely on my poems, you can read both poem and prose through this work,” she says.

Ask her one of her favourite lines,

she recites

“...tell me, my love

when the grey hair shines

and the weak spine groans

all the beauty of the outside

has faded, tattered and torn

till the day I die

will you keep the romance alive ?”

Though there are autobiographical elements in her work, she says that the characters are purely fictitious. “It abound with my experiences. The protagonist is a doctor and poet like me. I have included my experiences, observations and inherent knowledge. But the characters are born out of my imagination,” she says. Sreelatha says that her debut work is absolutely different from the second book which is progressing. “ The second book is a usual prose but ‘in an eternal romantic, poetry dictates the prose,” she says with a smile.

Dr Sreelatha Chakravarthy’s creative expression was confined to a single poem she wrote during her college days. Much to her discontent, her passion had to be shoved off to the back burner as her later course of life also did not give her suffice time to think of her passion. She became a busy medical practitioner in Mumbai. But the much-anticipated break came when she had to leave her job in Mumbai and accompany her husband to Ghana, Africa.” The break was kind of a boon. In Ghana too,I was attending patients, but the schedule was not as hectic as in Mumbai. With sufficient time, I plunged into my passion, writing,” she says.

Now, Sreelatha has become a full-fledged writer. She lives in Thripunithura with her husband Krishanu Chakravarthy and children Kshitij Chakravarthy and Trishna Chakravarthy.