A Cocktail of love and power

It’s a love story set in a place one wouldn’t quite associate with romance — the corridors of power. Amitabh Pandey, the author of Love in Lutyens’ Delhi, having been part of Lutyens’ Delhi himself always wondered if love was at all permissible in an environment surrounded by power brats. “Love in Lutyens’ Delhi is not completely born of my imagination. I have seen these kind of love stories almost 30 years back and wondered why such things were happening. I felt there was a need to talk about them. And in current times, they are even more relevant,” shares Pandey, at the launch of his book at Oxford Bookstore in the capital, where he was in conversation with Neelima Dalmia Adhar.

The core story revolves around the love angle of Akku (Akriti Patel) and Sanju (Sanjay Saran) that started as a friendship and blossomed into love. Sanu’s parents are bureaucrats — a world of power, privilege, and entitlement, while Akku is brought up by a single mother who is a renowned surgeon and her aunt, a known books editor — the two worlds are mutually exclusive, yet consistent. “I have always noticed the very dismissive nature of bureaucrats towards the world that is beyond them. Somebody once commented on someone’s son, ‘Mumbai mai kisi company mai hai’ (he works in some company in Mumbai). But who knows, he could have easily been the CEO of a big company but the bureaucrats always looked down at the world.”

As the protagonist, Sanju’s mind is in turmoil as he chooses to abandon his dreams and, like his parents, looks to the Civil Services for what he thinks will be a meaningful career. Meanwhile, Akku, armed with a BTech from IIT, is off to California, land of systems design and fun-loving computer geniuses. The follows their story as it struggles to survive the test of time

Once Pandey decided what he wanted to write about, all that was left was to create characters and weave the story around it. “I tried to create three strong women characters — Akku, her mother Gayatri and her sister Abha. How far I have succeeded in it, I don’t know. But it was definitely an attempt to connect with the millennials.”

All three female characters have their own baggage to carry but they come out triumphant at the end. It was challenging for Pandey to put himself in the shoes of the three ladies. “Also the fact that it had to be appealing to the youth as it dealt with the love story of two millennials, getting a hold of their language was excruciating. In the earlier drafts, it was a conversation over letters but I ended up experimenting to bring a contemporary twist with use of email communication replacing love letters,” adds Pandey who personally feels he hasn’t aged beyond 25.

Before venturing into the world of writing, Pandey studied Economics at St. Stephen’s College, and Delhi School of Economics. He went on to teach Economics at an undergraduate college of Delhi University, following which he joined the Indian Railways where he worked for 24 years. He is known for the conceptualisation, implementation and managing of the Railways online ticket reservation system at Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation. But this phase of life is something Pandey does not plan to pen down. “Railway is an excellent framework for a thriller story but writing about the system is too depressing a thought,” he says.

In 2007, Pandey shifted to the private sector and spent five years building business software. He now lives in Noida. He started his literary journey with Himalayan White, a crime thriller published in 2016 and is now working on the third book in the series.

“I am also working on a small book on e-commerce — on lessons I have learned over the years.” However, he refuses to have a part two of Love in Lutyen’s Delhi which has a predictable climax — heartbreak, “I personally don't like the character Sanju and have decided not to redeem him,” adds Pandey at the end of the end of the book launch at the Oxford Bookstore.