The first thing that strikes me about Amy Chua is her energy in speech. She speaks nineteen to the dozen — pausing hardly for a moment in the course of our meeting — making it difficult for me to keep pace with her vigour. But the author-professor admits that she is always trying to do too much in too little time, and has no intentions of ever lazing on a beach.

To top it, she is on the defensive — seeking to clear the image of a “Tiger Mom” that’s stuck to her like a leech ever since she wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The 2011 book dealt with the way she brought up her two daughters in a strict disciplinarian environment. Fascist, her critics called her — though the book went on to become an overnight bestseller.

Chua has been trying to clear the air for a year now. But the condemnation continues to follow. “How can a fascist laugh at herself and admit her shortcomings,” she replies to the criticism. Indeed, her book is often self-deprecating, pokes fun at Chinese and American parenting styles and questions her own beliefs towards the end.

“It’s not a parenting book,” she repeats for the umpteenth time. She has said it earlier and will say it again. “In fact, it’s a complex memoir,” she says with a wry smile. “I think 90 per cent of the people writing about it haven’t read the book,” says Chua, a professor at Yale Law School.

But then there are passages in the book that can be deemed hair-raising. When her then four-year-old daughter Lulu gifted Chua a handmade birthday card, the mother said: “I want a better one — one that you’ve put some thought and effort into. I have a special box, where I keep all my cards from you and Sophia [her elder daughter], and this one can’t go in there.” This, Chua stresses, is the “Chinese” method of rearing children.

Chua in vast detail recounts the code of conduct that she imposed at home — no television or computer games, no playdates or sleepovers, no break from academic and extra-curricular activities such as piano and violin practice even on holidays, no school plays. Chua’s style of parenting often dismayed her Jewish-American husband. “But then my husband — who believes childhood should be fun — played an important role. So he was always there for the balance.”

It’s hard to believe that the petite woman sitting opposite me at the Jaipur Literary Festival could ever be termed a dictator. She is dressed in a brown leather jacket, a floral print shirt, denims and vertiginous heels. Chua will turn 50 later this year but she looks a decade or so younger. Her “monster mom” tag seems unreal for she comes across as an affectionate and understanding mother, quick to laugh at herself.

The daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants, she grew up in America in a strict environment. Her father would accept nothing less than a first position from her in a class of 350 graduating students. “He worked till 3 in the morning every day wearing the same pair of shoes for eight years. I knew he had earned the credibility to be strict with me,” says Chua, who was allowed to go out alone in the evening for the first time on her prom night on the condition that she returned home by 9pm.

Chua argues that her book shouldn’t be read as “one-size fits all” parenting manual. “In China, the entire education system is too authoritarian; there is too much memorising and little creativity. There you shouldn’t put more tiger parenting — kids there need more freedom to make choices. But in the West, you need to create pressure for the right balance.”

Indian parenting, she adds, is similar to the Chinese model. “In the US, Indian children are the top children, better than the Chinese children. I know there must be a lot of similarities between our parenting because I know what it takes to get to the top.”

Her own methods have yielded results. Her daughters are academically and musically accomplished. When Sophia was 14 she played the piano at Carnegie Hall in New York; Lulu was 11 when she auditioned for violin for a pre-college programme at the famed Juilliard School. Today Sophie, 18, is studying at Harvard, while Lulu is in high school. “Now they both make their own choices,” says Chua.

Tiger mom isn’t what Chua was always known as. At Yale, her students identify her as a nurturing teacher with whom they can discuss career issues. She has written two critically acclaimed books — World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability and Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall. Does she feel that her achievements have been over-shadowed by her last book?

“Actually, a side benefit of the firestorm is that a lot more people are reading those two books too. Many people — oddly enough, 80 per cent of them are men — have written to me to say that they decided to read my other two books after hearing them being mentioned in passing, and ended up loving the books.”

Chua has now put up a website which urges people to figure out the humour in the 2011 book. “I came up with the website three months after my book was published, but it was way too late. If I had known, I would have had my website in place instead of the media dictating the narrative. Oh well, live and learn!”

How did she move from serious tomes on the economy to a memoir? The book, she says, was therapy. “It was a catharsis for me. I wrote the first two-thirds of the book in two months.” Every single line that she wrote was shown to her daughters, husband, parents and her three sisters. “This book is a family project, an expose.”

She had met her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, also a professor at Yale, when they were students at Harvard Law School. Her father fiercely opposed her marrying anybody who was not Chinese. “But I am a rebel, just as my father who left Asia and never went back, and just as my daughter Lulu who picked up tennis, much to my displeasure.”

Chua wants to instill qualities of hardship in her kids, something which she imbibed from her parents. Having worked as a waitress, saving money for her own education, comfort did not come easily to her. “Neither do I want to make things easy for my kids. They should know what struggle is,” confesses Chua. So at the age of seven, when Lulu hated mathematics, she didn’t take it lightly. She spent endless hours making Lulu practise worksheets, almost at the verge of a breakdown, both for the mother and child. “But today, maths is Lulu’s favourite subject.”

She talks eloquently about generational decline. The first generation parenting comes with “no sugar coating”, she says, stressing the word “no” to make her point. “They are preparing their children for a successful future. Then the next generation is more successful. You spend a little more, waste a little more and don’t save everything,” she says. “My daughter’s generation is the generation I am losing sleep over. I worry that they are going to be selfish. This generation is too powerful to resist,” she laments.

The feeling dawned on her when she had a public spat with Lulu once at the Red Square in Moscow some years ago. “She said the most painful things that anyone has ever said. She said, ‘Everything you say you do for me, is actually for yourself’. That hurt. And it just took me aback.”

Soon she started retracing her steps. “I began to question myself. It was also a time when one of my sisters was suffering from cancer.” Chua gave space to her daughters and often had therapeutic conversations with them. And she started writing her memoirs in 2009 to understand where she had gone wrong.

But today her daughters are not just her biggest admirers, they would even like to replicate her style of parenting. “Before my book was published, my daughters said to me that nobody was going to read the book, because it was a memoir and I was not a famous person,” she says, with a giggle. But the response was unimaginative. “I just couldn’t understand the explosive reaction.”

The author is pleased with her daughters too. “I am very proud of them — they are both happy and confident,” she says. “Lulu has high self-esteem. I have to accept that she is going to come home late, is louder and social. But then, I am also always going to say to her that her skirt is too short.”

Some things will never change, not for Chua and not for her daughters.

And no, her next book will not be on parenting or anything remotely close to rearing children.

“I’ve learned parenting is a more explosive topic than ethnic conflict in the Middle East,” she says as a parting shot.