Love makes worlds collide

Almost as soon as you stumble into your adolescence, with a newfound attraction towards peers, and the ideas of romance blooming in your head, you hear the phrase ‘opposites attract’.

But do they really? As the honeymoon period wears off — no matter what age you are — and reality hits, you start to wonder if opposites can really sustain the attraction. And this is the exact question that got author Sachin Garg thinking of writing a story about it.

“The idea came from seeing several couples around me,” says Sachin, talking about his new book, When Opposites Meet. “This was combined with the question we’ve had since we’re teenagers — do opposites attract? I decided to explore the theme with three couples, where the partners are opposites of each other in three different ways.”

So, there’s the wheelchair-bound Ritwika, drawn to Chetan, a national level athlete; Aditi, who seems to bring a sort of cheer in Jayant’s life after the death of his parents; and a happily divorced Indu, who finds love in the reclusive Lokesh. Sachin says he usually finds his inspiration — just like he did for this book — in the people around him.

 

“I’d like to believe I lead a highly stimulated life,” he grins. “I read a lot, watch a lot, and try to talk to some really smart people. It is this environment that gives me most of my ideas. I strongly believe that every person is the average of five people he spends most of his time with. So I just try to make sure I’m surrounded by smart people. The rest takes care of itself.”

Sachin has simultaneously been working on a podcast, an episode of which went viral with Priya Malik in it. “It’s a purely intellectual pursuit,” he says. “I’m just doing something I really wanted to, and extending my own understanding of the world we live in.”

The author, who recently moved from New Delhi to Mumbai a year ago, says it’s been an experimentative few months for him. “I’ve been exploring different mediums, and experimenting with different kinds of writing. Some of them have panned out well, and some haven’t. In the middle of this madness, the book took longer than it otherwise would have,” Sachin explains, talking about the yearlong gap between his last book and this.