'If We Stop Appreciating Beauty, we Lose Out on Living'

Author Shobhaa De talks about her new book, The Sensual Self, young people on dating apps, and why she scoffs at the idea of an autobiography

- By JASODHARA BANERJEE

Shobhaa De's 28th title, The Sensual Self, has hit the shelves, and like all her books in the past, has gotten people talking. The book is De's rulebook to owning your sensuality, irrespective of your age and stage in life, in an unabashed and non-judgemental manner. In her inimitable style of writing, taking instances out of her own life and from those around her, she once again talks about things that are still considered the subject of nudge-nudge-wink-wink banter in hushed tones. And yet, as 77-year-old De tells Forbes India, these conversations are far more important today than ever before, given how younger generations are all too aware of their own needs while struggling to build meaningful connections with others. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Q Your first book was out in 1989, Socialite Evenings. Your 28th book The Sensual Self, came out a few weeks ago. How have you evolved as a writer and how have your readers evolved?

My readers have certainly evolved; I don't know about myself. I'm too close to it to be able to analyse my own journey in clinical terms. Each book is different, has its own rhythm and reason for being written. So, it's hard to say from the first book to this book exactly what the process has been.

But I could tell you that the readers have evolved for sure because my own contemporaries, they were kind of stuck in their own frames of reference. And so many years ago, maybe the books were shocking for contemporary society, certainly for my contemporary journalists; the critics couldn't handle it.