Debutante author Kanika Dhillon's first novel is about an aspiring filmmaker from Amritsar who lands in Mumbai to tell her stories, but ends up on the parapet of her balcony a year later, contemplating suicide. Is Bollywood as bad as it is made out to be, we ask the author and Om Shanti Om assistant director

Every Mumbaiite knows that Bombay Duck is a fish, but for first-time visitors, it becomes an apt metaphor for the way the city stumps them silly, says first-time author Kanika Dhillon.

Not surprisingly, it inspired the title of her debut novel that hits stands by the end of the month.


Kanika Dhillon

Bombay Duck is a Fish charts the journey of Neki Brar, a 25 year-old top scoring MBA graduate from Amristar, who comes to Mumbai since she'd rather make films than market toothpaste. It starts rather dramatically with the protagonist sitting on a parapet of a wall contemplating suicide, after a failed relationship with an actor.

Dhillon, who is also from Amristar, left London in 2006 to work in Bollywood. The 28 year-old began as assistant director on the sets of Farah Khan's 2006 film Om Shanti Om, and followed it up with Irrfan Khan-starrer Billu in 2008.

Dhillon then turned to scriptwriting and worked on superstar Shah Rukh Khan's upcoming magnum opus Ra.One. She now heads the Creative Content division for his production house Red Chillies Entertainment.

In a freewheeling interview with Sunday MiDDAY, Dhillon tells us how her book tracks the underbelly of Bollywood ufffd from "the drivers and spot dadas to overworked assistant directors" ufffd to reveal the difficulty of negotiating the big bad world of Hindi cinema.