By Somorita Ghosh
Kolkata :The speaker who enthralled everyone with her knowledge on the 7th day of #MediaNext 2020 that focused on Writing In Digital Time (Fiction and Non-fiction), was Sreemoyee Piu Kundu, acclaimed journalist and best-seller author. She shared with her audience about women’s sexuality, her inner inhibitions, status of single women, social hypocrisy and challenges of being an independent artiste.
#MEDIANEXT 2020, a webinar organised by Kolkata based Adamas University in association with Sharda University, Birla Global University, DME, AIMEC, LokSamvadSansthan, exchange4media, ABP Education and IndiaReal.in, The media conclave is being organised over a period of ten days from June 1, 2020 to June 10, 2020. Each day of the conclave focuses on one specialised domain of the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in that specific domain.
Her early days
She began the session sharing her journey, her good hold over English language, how she acknowledged her urge on reporting while she was in her college days. She said, “I always had a knack to reporting back then than I do now, talk to people, gain a lot of insights to their life, interview them. This is something made me interested on English journalism”. She gave up her Cambridge University scholarship in Archeology to pursue her interest. Her first job was at Newspaper house, The Asian Age in Delhi, interviewed by M.J. Akbar. Then she moved to Bengaluru where she started Features bureau. After a long illustrated career of 17 years in journalism she realised her urge to be a seeker of truth and quit the job. “I wanted to bring to force the stories and issues that were burning and needed coverage, visibly. That format of journalism was dead. Everything was about money, corny capitalism and paid media and really that was not the reason why I had started that profession”.
A new journey sets off
At that point the idea of her first and critically acclaimed book “Far Away Music” was taking shape within her mind with least clue that it will lead her up to a full time writing profession. She further shared an interview of her with a women married at the age of sixteen with a man double of her age developed the plot of her second book “Sita’s Curse”. Her interview with Nityananda a Mumbai based women of around 30 years became the backbone of Sita’s Curse.
“It became a best seller. My book brought sort of a revolution. It was compared with The Fifty Shades Of Grey. The book meant with the kind of success that it did. For me one of the challenges was that I wanted to show that India is the birth place of eroticism, as a way of life and as a of philosophy”, said Sreemoyee. She elaborated works of Kalidas who was master at crafting women sexuality, bhakti poet Adnan, Kamala Das who used women sexuality to talk about important things like consent, empowerment and liberation. She then talked about her another book “You Have Found the Wrong Girl” inspired from character of Dushantya and Shakuntala in Kalidas’s Avigyanamsakuntalam, a modern retelling of Shakuntala.
Status Single happened
She then elated her talk discussing on her another book “Status Single”, which is based on the prism of singlehood in India, the societal stereotype, the loneliness of a single women.
She has been in spotlight for her written pieces on women agenda, women with disabilities and the issue of desire in them. She illustrates how single women or the LGBTQI is looked upon in the society. She said, “When you Google single women it comes up with several dating sites. I think the society doesn’t has space for a women who is on her own without a man or with out may be even children. In my family I have got single mothers I was also interviewing women who were now buying sperms going through complicated process of IVF to become mothers biologically”.
Women and social dichotomies
She shared that no matter how successful a women be, no matter what ever they might achieve women who are homosexual or men transitioning to women or even single women they are often looked down upon by the society and questioned upon her character. She shared about her own experience, her fostered sister and how she as a single woman looks after her family. She had formed a community for women mainly focusing on single women, divorcee women, widows and women of LGBTQI community.
She stated how women are taught to be subjugated towards their male care taker. Even when they can earn their own living they are taught to accept their mail relation whether father or brother or husband as her guardian. They are supposed to remain dependent on their male relations when it comes to decision making or her maintaining finances.
She has been the recipient of the NDTV L’Oréal Women of Worth award for Excellence in Literature and the United Nations Woman, Young Achiever for Literature for her widely appreciated and critically acclaimed book “Status Single”.
Q& A Session
Sreemoyee concluded the session with a brief Q&A where she shared her upcoming projects. She has been signed up for her memoirs, Unhealed, by Bloomsbury and has just completed an inter-generational family saga set in Kolkata “All Our Other Lies”. And ended up with very good words that wheather you are fair or black ,slim or fat, doesn’t matter. But don’t just make suffer your soul from any unhappy , unsuccessful relationship, be it married or unmarried. “As status single is now the voice of 75million single women, it proves that false relationship is made to be broken”. Finally, she suggested the budding writers and students to read books especially regional language writers which would enhance their social conditioning to become rich in literature.
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