India is like a writer’s dream: Julia Regul Singh

While she was growing up in Germany, author Julia Regul Singh’s parents always encouraged her to look ueber den tellerrand (over your plate’s edge). So, in high school she took up the opportunity to study abroad and lived with a host family in North Carolina in the US for one year.

For her high school graduation in Germany when she was just 19, her parents also gifted her around-the-world air ticket. “But when I came to New York to study urban planning, I doubt they expected me to fall in love with a man from India, but they took it as yet another adventure in their daughter’s life,” says Julia who has been living in India for the last six years.

Her life’s experiences motivated her to write her first novel, Leap Of Faith, which tells the story of one Christina von Hoisdorf, a young sociology professor at the New York University whose chance encounter with a handsome Indian investment banker turns her life upside-down.

Although like Christina, Julia lives across the three countries mentioned in the book and is married to an Indian, she insists her story is less dramatic than Christina’s.

“But like her, I followed my husband from New York to New Delhi. India is an amazing place which challenges my every sense every day and it is like nothing I have ever experienced before. A writer’s dream you might call it! So when I moved to India, to start a new life as a mother and wife, I took this opportunity to reinvent myself and decided to write more seriously,” says Julia, whose days are incomplete without writing something or the other.

The author, who has taken a liking to writers of Indian-origin like Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Vikram Seth, hopes that her book makes readers ponder about cross-cultural relationships and friendships.

“Every story has more than one side to it, especially when people from different countries meet. And we should talk to each other and make the most of our differences. For me Leap of Faith is a lesson in diplomacy in an everyday family setting,” she says.