Besides being a popular song by Savage Garden, Truly Madly Deeply now has another name to identify with. Faraaz Kazi is out with his book by the same name, recently launched by ad-film maker Prahlad Kakkar, model Aditya Singh Rajput and fashion designer Pria Kataria Puri, who read out excerpts from it.
He couldn’t have asked for a better start. “Writing wasn’t difficult—finding time for it was. I’d bunk my MBA lectures to type the story,” says Kazi, admitting to feeling frustrated on some days, cursing the writer’s block.
His book is a contemporary, coming-of-age story about first love, the transition of the protagonist from a careless, fun-loving boy to an obsessed maniac. “It’s different, because a story, in which a teenager’s first love grows into an uncontrollable obsession, hasn’t been attempted before. The inspiration was my school life,” he says with a laugh, adding, “It stems from a short story I had written for a national story-writing competition by a popular newspaper eight years ago. Once I won that, I knew I had the potential to make it big,” he says. People advised him against it, saying it will lose the flavor of brevity, but Kazi followed his instincts.
Hundreds of rejections later, Kazi finally saw light at the end of the tunnel. “Considering I didn’t have any godfathers, it was just me and the sombre mails alone in a room, for a while.” The moral of the story is, everyone is gifted but not everyone gets to open their presents.
And what a present it was. His debut is now being sold across the country. “Youngsters today are more interested in light romcoms than heavy duty novels. Many books have been turned into movies due to a dearth in creative script writers,” says Faraaz who is currently working on yet another romantic novel. “My journey and struggles have just started. Picture abhi baki hai mere dost,” he signs off.