Dr. Sreelatha Chakravarthy Uses Poetry and Prose to Communicate Her Struggles with Schizophrenia, Thoughts on Love, Mind and Body

The Hindu recently published an in-depth feature about author and medical practitioner, Dr. Sreelatha Chakravarthy. While in Africa--with very little creative writing experience in her past-- Dr. Chakravarthy began blogging as a way to tap into her own creativity. The resulting text, An Eternal Romantic, published by Leadstart Publishing, is an exploration of love, schizophrenia, mind and body.

It took boredom, and Africa, to elicit words from Sreelatha Chakravarty’s pen. In the summer of 2006, she began writing a blog after her family moved to Ghana for she had little else to do. The vulnerability of personal blogging got the better of her though. So she opened another space under a pseudonym, this time writing only poetry. A year into writing at least a poem a day, Sreelatha realised her words had unconsciously carved the narrative of a young girl in love. She worked some of the poems into prose, left others as they were, wove some more fictitious incidents into the protagonist Indira’s life, and thus wrote her first book - An Eternal Romantic.

Published by Leadstart Publishing, the book traces Indira’s life from adolescence through middle-age, into love and out of it, and the consequences thereof.

The binding theme is that of schizophrenia and Indira’s battle for control of her mind - not surprising given that Sreelatha is a general medicine practitioner herself. Exploring disease through words was a means for her writer and doctor identities to coalesce. “I’ve always been interested in the connection between mind and body. How physical is your disease, or how psychological is it? Indira’s schizophrenia needed a trigger and in her case, failed love was it,” says Sreelatha. She adds that it was vital for her to create a schizophrenic character who could still be considered as a whole person, normal and capable of overcoming her troubles.

An Eternal Romantic follows an unusual structure in that parts of it are poetry and others, poetic prose. “Since I began writing from the body of poems I had created, I sorted them out into chapters and drew from them as I wrote. So even the paragraphs of prose in the book were once individual poems,” says Sreelatha. Her writing pays tribute to Rabindranath Tagore and most frequently to Meerabai whose worship of Krishna reflects in Indira’s diary entries addressed to the god. Sreelatha says her influences haven’t always been high literary ones though. “I love Erich Segal's Love Story as much as I do Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things,” she says.

Continue reading Dr. Sreelatha Chakravarthy's story at The Hindu.