A seminal moment of romantic awakening is observed in every girl’s life with the dawn of the Mills & Boon era. Escalated to cult status by ardent teenage devotees or derided by hardcore feminists, these books are a force to reckon with. Milan Vohra’s story submission for the Mills & Boon, Passion Writing Contest may have been minutes before the deadline but her bond with the M&B series has been a long and memorable one. “The ultimate relaxation, after board exams, was to grab a coke, your Mills & Boons and just stack up and read. The best thing about these books is that like Karan Johar’s movies, you know what to expect,” Vohra relates with a characteristic flamboyance and spontaneity.
Winning the competition has been an immensely wish-fulfilling occurrence for Vohra. “It has been a very exciting opportunity to live my simple childhood dream. When I read these novels, at one point in time I thought what fun it would be to actually write an M&B,” she recollects, comparing her emotions to those expressed by the late Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture where he talks about the realisation of his childhood ambition to become a imagineer at The Walt Disney Company.
Vohra consistently attributes “fun” as the driving force behind her achievement in fiction and a story titled The Love Asana instinctively promises to (primarily) deliver just that. What actually is the ‘love asana’ is something “the reader will only come to know at the end of the book,” Vohra informs.
Mills & Boon launched the Passions Writing Contest, exclusive to India, in December 2008 inviting online story entries in their search for the 'World's Next Big Romance Author' and provide aspiring Indian authors with a global platform. The results were announced in February 2009 and Milan Vohra secured first place among the four acknowledged winners. The Love Asana will be published in the Mills & Boon Modern Series in India (as a Special Bonus feature) and on the Mills & Boon website as well in May 2009.
Vohra's entry explores a growing romance between a heroine who is a yoga trainer, besides having a corporate career, and a nonchalant NRI younger man who is her yoga student and is deliberately slow in picking up in class. “The yoga class gives me a great opportunity to set up chemistry between the characters,” the author impishly discloses as the narrative is replete with flirtatious dialogue and witty repartee. When choosing a name for the story, ‘Love Asana’ “was the most ideal word” both Vohra and the publishers (Harlequin) could think of. “I wanted to bring in Indian elements into it and what is more Indian and conversely more international than yoga? So many celebrities in the West, Madonna, for instance, have their yoga masters to train them,” she states.
Introducing an innate Indianness within the M&B matrix does however go beyond just the setting of the Taj Mahal for Vohra who strongly feels that the “Indianness should be part of the character(s) rather than merely a situation in the story.” The possibilities for delineating hues and shades of love and romance are profuse in the Indian context since “as people I feel we have romance in our blood, from Hindi film songs to Urdu poetry which is part of our everyday life,” she claims. Moreover she feels it is about time Indian nuances of romance are highlighted and proliferated in M&Bs.
“Like Chicken Tikka Masala which is now part of world cuisine, there is no reason why people abroad should not be saying janemann instead of (the some what exhausted) amore mio to their lover,” the author reasons. Vohra is looking forward to working closely with editors in England to develop The Love Asana into a novel as well as spawn several sagas on Indian romance.
Returning to her old love after a substantial hiatus, Vohra observes a prominent evolution in the M&B series with huge differences from its precedents. “The Mills & Boons genre (in the West) has reinvented itself. They have contemporised the characters and urbanised the context,” the author analyses. In her own story as well, she focuses on a “modern-day conflict” that revolves around the woman’s insecurities about being involved with a younger man. A major shift, she continues, is that the genre has acknowledged that sex is a part of life and also that it precedes love, rather than representing pristine, idyllic love and lovers walking off into the sunset in the end. The challenge in this case lies in employing the appropriate language in describing a romantic/sexual gestures and caresses. “Even in order to break down the simple act of kissing, you need to do it in a way that is exciting and also tasteful,” the author explains.
Vohra dispels the cliché regarding Indian prudishness in matters concerning sexuality, and cites that “M&Bs are being devoured all over the place and one of the largest reader bases is in India where men comprise 40 or 50 per cent of the readership.” It was, in fact, quite enlightening for the author to discover that an appreciable number of men had entered the Mills & Boon competition (which included “heavy duty professors”) and thereby displacing the monopoly women have supposedly held in this realm of fiction.
On this front, one of the most striking developments has been the revamped portraits of the heroine in these novels. The new lot of M&Bs brings forth “a class of women who want love on their own terms and as equals (with their partners). It's no longer the damsel who is need of rescue,” insists Vohra. She does however, qualify that “In reality even if you are a very capable independent successful woman, you want a guy who can cope with situations. That doesn’t not mean the woman needs rescuing.”
In order to establish a balance and presumably escape gender bias, Vohra was clear about wanting to use both the male and the female voice in her story. Writing, based on its style and treatment of characters has always been assigned a gender and “sometimes you can tell that the author is male or female” the author agrees. In response to the rather recent coronation of chic–lit as a representative form of women’s writing, Vohra maintains that even though she is averse to any kind of labelling, “many of the chick-lit authors that I have enjoyed reading share a brand of wit and humour that women can relate to much more and a guy may not be able to get into those shoes.” Yet she is quick to affirm that “boxing” literature exclusively in one particular category becomes derogatory. “It is as silly as saying that women directors should only make films on women.”
Milan Vohra’s venture into the world of prose may be new but she has a gamut of written works to her credit that span from advertising to event concepts, television programmes and travelogues as well as a musical comedy called Maid in India during her involvement in Mahesh Dattani’s theatre group. Training as an actor (as she is now), has helped the nascent writer profoundly, by teaching her “to observe people; their external characteristics, internal workings, gestures and mannerisms a lot more. As a writer it is essential to come up with dialogue that seems authentic and flesh characters that seem real when constructing a clean plot.”
Film writing (screenplay) is still unknown territory for Vohra who would “love to write comedy”. About the possibility of adapting her own work into a script for the movie, she responds with “I don’t know, maybe…you are giving me ideas.” I suppose I could take that as one of my productive contributions.
Personalities 
A seminal moment of romantic awakening is observed in every girl’s life with the dawn of the Mills & Boon era. Escalated to cult status by ardent teenage devotees or derided by hardcore feminists, these books are a force to reckon with. Milan Vohra’s story submission for the Mills & Boon, Passion Writing Contest may have been minutes before the deadline but her bond with the M&B series has been a long and memorable one. “The ultimate relaxation, after board exams, was to grab a coke, your Mills & Boons and just stack up and read. The best thing about these books is that like Karan Johar’s movies, you know what to expect,” Vohra relates with a characteristic flamboyance and spontaneity.
“Like Chicken Tikka Masala which is now part of world cuisine, there is no reason why people abroad should not be saying janemann instead of (the some what exhausted) amore mio to their lover,” the author reasons. Vohra is looking forward to working closely with editors in England to develop The Love Asana into a novel as well as spawn several sagas on Indian romance.
