The secret life of Kavitha Nair

We all know her as a host and artiste, but Kavitha Nair has another side to her that only her Facebook followers know of. These thousands, whom she has never met, know her as a poet and short story writer. A blogger for the past three years, Kavitha has collected the stories into a book, added some more, and titled it Sundarapathanangal.

A compilation of 20 Malayalam short stories written in a span of three years, the book which looks at nostalgia, romance, memories, relationships and death will be launched on March 5. The preface has been written by superstar Mohanlal. A completely unplanned work, the book is something she intended to distribute only among her friends.

Talking about how the book evolved, Kavitha says, “For the past three years I have been maintaining a blog and though I did not initially spend much time on it, I used to intermittently write in Malayalam based on  my memories and interactions with people.”

“I have three Facebook friends — Ashitha Varghese, Jyothi and Sreeparvathy, one of whom I have not even met, but they have been constantly encouraging me to write. In fact, I had become lazy and stopped writing my blog twice but the third time around, I decided to actively write and by God’s grace, it is going good and reaching a lot of people who do not know me as an artiste.”

The initial blog that paved way for Kavitha’s book has been borne from her personal life. She reveals, “For two years, I was busy anchoring programmes, mainly to earn a living, though my dream has always been cinema. For some reason, I even lost out on a few film offers. I was going through a see-saw in my career and my personal life — my parents were worried about the way my career was going and also added to it was the pressure of getting married. The blog was my way of escaping and running away from reality and I channelised my positive and negative energy into my outpourings. Happiness and sadness, which I treat as equals, are a part of my writings including some dark ramblings.”

The response for the short stories she wrote was beyond what she expected with mails from unknown people wishing her well and encouraging her. Shortly, Kavitha got married to Vipin Nandan and her husband gave her the space and time to continue blogging.

Talking about her husband’s support, Kavitha says, “Born and brought up outside Kerala, he does not read Malayalam and his mother read out the first story to him since we were not married then. He is someone who talks more than me but he got emotional and speechless, which is very rare for him, after listening to my stories. The respect that he gave me then is still there in our marriage today.”

Kavitha is very excited about getting Mohanlal to write the preface and she adds that her association with him was when she acted with him in Mampazhakkalam and interviewed him during her stint as a TV host.

She narrates, “During the filming of Mampazhakkalam, I was doing my graduation and he had asked me about my hobbies and I replied that I read. He had suggested some books for me to read that changed my style of reading from travelogues to short stories and now short stories is the genre I am most comfortable writing.”

Explaining how Mohanlal wrote the preface of her book, she says, “I met him on the sets of Pulimurugan and gave the draft to him telling him that these were the short stories I was planning to compile into a book. I actually left it at that hoping that he reads it someday. But he called me in one week and told me that he had completed reading 20 stories and mentioned that my language was very readable and gave me a lot of compliments. Those words, coming from a person who writes so well, were a huge compliment. I asked him if he could write a preface and the actor who is so super busy took the time out to write one. Then everything moved very fast and here I am.” Soon there will be another new tag to her name — an author.