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Indian writer Advaita Kala has a knack for reinventing herself, and each time she just gets better at it. She found fame as a pioneering Indian chick-lit author and is now recasting herself as a screenwriter and restaurant spokeswoman.
Kala wrote the script for the Bollywood romantic comedy, Anjaana Anjaani (Strangers), directed by Siddharth Anand and set for release this month.
The idea of becoming a Bollywood screenwriter - something she never dreamed of - followed the success of her best-selling debut novel, Almost Single, three years ago as doors started opening for the native of India's northern Uttar Pradesh state.
'Initially, I was approached by several directors,' she says. 'But I was ambivalent about it, not knowing anything about the movie industry.' 
Kala eventually agreed to work with Anand, who directed the blockbuster Salaam Namaste,  because she liked his story idea. Anjaana Anjaani is an unconventional love story of a young couple who meet at a bridge, where they have come to commit suicide, and fall in love.
Kala says she enjoys the collaborative scriptwriting process because 'you have an editor on call at all times, which is great'.
Last month, Kala teamed up with another director, Sujoy Ghosh of Aladin fame, to work on the script for his new film, titled Kahaani.
If all the attention she's getting from Bollywood is unexpected, the explosive sales of Almost Single came as an even bigger surprise. The book is about the angst faced by many educated single women in India today as they juggle fast-changing values about love and marriage. 
It's a humorous, semi-autobiographical account of a feisty 29-year-old Delhi hotel manager who turns to alcohol, five-star restaurants and friends for comfort when her desperate search for  a husband overwhelms her, as do anxieties over her large frame and constant fighting with her mother who wants her to marry. The novel has sold more than 55,000 copies and was released last year  in the US  and Europe. 
Observers say Kala's 'golden run' with Bollywood reflects both good timing and the fact that Almost Single has been such a phenomenal success. 'Until the mid-90s, Bollywood used to be a closed society and there were only three or four established screenwriters in the field,' says Manimugdha Sharma, an editor at The Indian Express. 'But now, film directors are experimenting with new ideas and are actively looking for success-story novels written in the common man's language.' 
That helps explain why popular fiction writers such as Kala are so sought after as screenwriters these days, he says.
Kala has a strong sense of self-awareness, which she attributes to having lived overseas. She first left India in the mid-1990s on a scholarship to complete a BA degree in philosophy at Berry College in the US. This was followed by seven years working abroad, including a stint in Dubai as a hotel executive. These experiences helped turn her into a keen listener and observer, she says. Upon returning to India, she decided to take a break and spent eight months writing  the novel.
Although there's huge pressure on Indian women to get married before their late 20s, Kala says more middle-class women are staying single longer as a result of better education, more working opportunities for women and what she calls the 'power of choice on  our own terms'.
Kala, herself single, is a prime example. Born in the late 1970s and weaned on MTV and US sitcoms such as Doogie Howser, she's from an in-between generation that still remembers India before economic liberalisation in 1991. It was a turning point that fostered a growing middle class that allowed its daughters to work without a chaperone in cities away from home, she says. Now women in this age bracket are making money and experiencing freedom like never before. 
Now an executive at an international news magazine, Kala is taking advantage of the changing climate and new opportunities. She has not only managed to reinvent herself as a screenwriter, but has also morphed into a food columnist and spokeswoman of sorts for five-star restaurants.
Yet despite her success, she is not about to become a full-time writer. 'I wouldn't like the pressure of depending on [the salary of] writing alone,' she says. 
Rather, she prefers to be guided by 'doing things that I love and just enjoying the process.'



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