Sarna’s Love Story-Renu Mittal

We Weren’t Lovers Like That.  With a title like that author Navtej Sarna couldn’t, but excite the curiosity of the Bold and Beautiful Page 3  crowd which dominates Delhi’s social  scene.   The cocktail launch of the fiction penned by the young and articulate spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs was an affair splashed across the Page 3 columns of the leading city editions and with this has been born the newest writer on the bloc.  His novel is being seen in the modern, the post-modern genre and deals with the society around, human relations, love loss, memory, guilt, hope, etc, etc.

The turbaned Navtej Sarna is an Indian Foreign Services (IFS) officer who succeeded Nirupama Rao  as the MEA spokesperson.  And by a strange co-incidence, both Rao and Sarna highly visible on the television screens for their foreign office briefings, were in the news for other reasons.  Rao for holding a concert where she sang Western classical and  jazz and Sarna for the release of his first novel.   Both  during the same month, events which showcased the talents of these young officers.

How does Navtej Sarna handle the two parts of his persona, the writer and the high pressure MEA spokesperson’s job?  Well, he says they are two different parts of the same person.  One  can do  a good day’s job and at the same time pursue a  hobby, a passion.  “The response to my book has been kind and generous and I hope  people have liked it”, says the budding new star on the literary firmament.

Navtej Sarna who has a degree in B.Com from the Sriram College in Delhi University and a law degree from the Law Faculty in Delhi is a product of the national capital and is not new to writing.  He has written a number of short stories, a book on the folk tales of Poland, literary journalism (book reviews, etc) and “my novel which is a work of fiction is a natural progression, a great challenge to move from the short story genre to what the critics have called a post-modern novel”.

And surprisingly, Navtej’s next release is a non-fiction work on the life and times of Guru Nanak, part of a series being brought out by Penguin.

The IFS part of his life has taken Sarna on postings to Washington, Tehran, Geneva, Moscow, Thimpu and Warsaw and the experiences gathered there have intermingled with the raw stock present in the writer and the process can be likened to a “coffee-grinding machine” which grinds the experiences and “sometimes surprises the writer and makes him wonder whether he actually wrote what he did”, admits Sarna.

Deeply influenced by writers like Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald and Indian writers like Vikram Chandra, Amitabh Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor and Vikram Seth, Navtej sees his Indian counterparts as sustained and established writers who have won accolades internationally and are here to stay.

Navtej Sarna by all accounts is yet another link in the long chain of Indians making their mark in the English language and competing with the best internationally.

And like the Page 3 crowd, here’s toast to a writer who looks all set to cross new frontiers.