Law Love amp Life at Law School Amrita Suresh on her first novel When a Lawyer Falls in Love

Debutant author Amrita Suresh’s novel “When a Lawyer Falls in Love” narrates about life at law school rejuvenating one’s memory of the five years of life at their alma mater.

Friends, Law Professors, one hour classes that seemed like an eternity, life at hostel, lazy weekends, stepping into the library the day before the exams, thick law books that remained unopened, numerous case laws, debates and moots, internships, aspirations to make it big in law firms, falling in and out of love! All this put together culminates into five years of strenuous law school life, like any other college life at any campus.

These are the exact things that debutant author Amrita Suresh’s novel “When a Lawyer Falls in Love” narrates rejuvenating one’s memory of the five years of life at law school. The novel does not, however, limit itself to the academic lives but also goes ahead to narrate the personal and professional lives of lawyers and how they find the perfect love at the end. The simple yet free flowing language used by the author just adds to its charm. The book has been published by Offshoots, an imprint of the publishing house Wisdom Tree.

Speaking to Bar & Bench, Amrita shares her experiences while penning down this particular book, at the age of 19. She had gone to attend a friend’s wedding which took place at a small temple in the middle of the night. This temple overlooked a lake and she remembers feeling the late evening breeze and thinking how beautiful it was that one could write a book! One thing led to another and she ended up writing ‘When a Lawyer Falls in Love’.

However, Amrita says that it was not a piece of cakewalk; she had her share of struggle but her sister, Archana Suresh and Shobit Arya of Wisdom Tree ensured that the book was not simply going to languish on her computer as a manuscript. They realized the spark in the book and brought it to a national platform. Raja Konduru, her husband has constantly encouraged and helped her too. When asked whether any specific person motivated her to write this book, she reminisces about her classmate Suchita Ambadipudi, an alumnus of National Law School of India University, Bangalore; who she truly admires. She believes that female lawyers have a certain aura about them and that ought to be captured in a book.

As to why the book has been kept low profile, she says, “On the national platform you have these established authors and quite naturally there is a lot of publicity and hype. As a new writer it’s difficult to generate that amount of interest in the media…but I’m getting there”. Amrita, also states that being a Leo she fishes for more compliments when people compare her writing with the likes of Chetan Bhagat!

Every other book that is released these days generally has an engineer or doctor as its central character but Amrita decided to live her once upon a time dream of becoming a lawyer through this book. She also felt there has been enough of lawyer bashing, it was time someone portrayed them in a warm, endearing light. Amrita says that she feels flattered when a law school graduate tells her that the novel was like an exact depiction of his life on campus and anyone who has had a fun time in school will be able to relate with the book and hence has been written for a wide audience.

Believing the book belongs to genre of humour more than romance, she says that the law school is just used as a backdrop, it relates to more about life on campus and that could be any campus like her own huge lazy, leafy green campus and hostel life as a student of Hyderabad Central University and EFLU (The English and Foreign Language University). She believes that a student’s mentality essentially remains the same over a period of time and her stint at IIIT Hyderabad only helped her in the whole endeavor.

She expresses that change is constant in life; every education system needs to change with the change in times as has been stated in a book by Napolean Hill called ‘Outwitting the devil’, and this applies to all fields, not only law.

Going forward, with as many as seven other novels stored in her laptop she plans to write something in the non-fiction genre, mostly "in the self help space". After her first novel, she shares what she has learnt from it all, “My mind is bubbling with ideas; the important thing is to get it all on paper. Writing, I’ve come to believe requires discipline more than anything else, so that’s something I’m working on.”