60 years of independence and 6 decades of life -Shobhaa De

At 60, nothing seems to have changed for Shobhaa De. She is still tremendously vital, still beautiful, still outspoken and outrageous – and through it all, still one of India’s biggest success stories. The critics love to hate her, but Shobhaa remains one of India’s icons –she has been known to move tens of thousands of books in a matter of days, and her columns have appeared in almost every Indian newspaper and magazine of note.

Currently in town for the Colombo Vogue Lifestyles Weekend, the one-time model and magazine editor talked to The Sunday Times about her latest book ‘Superstar India’ -what it’s like to parent six children and her new line of clothing.

She was initially perhaps best known for her work on Stardust, where as the sly, knowing voice in the column Nita’s Natter, she gave readers the low down on Bollywood. Made editor when she was a mere 23 years old, Shobhaa re-invented the ‘fanzine’ for India, and her fresh perspective made the magazine an instant sensation. Looking back today, she says, that much like herself, Stardust “broke all the rules”. To date, Shobhaa describes herself as a magazine junkie – “you can take the woman out of the magazine but you can’t take the magazine out of the woman.”

However, her obvious success hasn’t stopped the critics from having their say. With a great love for alliteration, the media bestowed nicknames like the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica and the Princess of Pulp on the Bombay socialite. But if mocking titles and the scathing reviews have had any effect on Shobhaa, she’s not letting on, in fact, as far as she’s concerned the entire furore is “so predictable”.

“Regardless of which book I bring out, the reviews all read the same” she says. “They could apply equally to my first book as to my fifteenth book. So today I can just shrug them off and say, ‘guess who’s chortling all the way to the bank’… and it’s not you guys.”

To say she revels in her non-conformity would be untrue, for Shobhaa, this is simply the way she is. “It’s not even something I think about, in my act of writing there is no self consciousness, it is not a performance, and it is not an affectation… this is it, this is the way I write. This is who I am”, and who she is continues to fascinate the world.

“I feel like, if what I’m doing is not serious enough, then surely the world’s universities wouldn’t be studying me and surely there wouldn’t be over a 100 doctorate thesis and dissertations on my work which are available in libraries around the world” she says, adding emphatically, “but all that is not my concern, for me it’s as simple as if this is the book I want to write, than is this the book I want to write.”

‘Superstar India’, her fifteenth and newest publication, is being billed as a candid and thoroughly readable work. The author says when she realized that the country would be celebrating its sixtieth year of independence the same year that she herself would mark six decades of living, the thought struck her, “surely my life has taken the same trajectory as the country’s”

Reflecting on the book, she says that while there’s a great deal, including a booming economy and India’s now inevitable superpower status to celebrate, the book isn’t just about a mindless hurrah. “I’ve seen a lot of change –some of it good, not all of it good, and the book is a very honest and truthful reflection of that change… some of it pains me, it actively hurts me, and I’m saying, these are things we can do something about… Why aren’t we doing it”?