India Abroad - September 9, 2011

M6 THE INDIAN PUBLISHING SCENE

LiteratiLiterati

Ashwin Sanghi, businessman
Chanakya'sChant
‘I'm not Amitav Ghosh, and I have no pretensions to
write like that. If someone told me after he read my
book that he loved my writing style, I'd be seriously
worried. What I'd love to hear is: I read your book in
four hours and it was a bloody good story’

TheLo-TheLo-C

They are the sort of writers who couldn’t get past the security guards outside plush publishing houses. Their books were thrown routinely into the slush pile. But now, as a new genera- tion of readers, famished for books about themselves, buy them by the lakhs, smashing all bestselling records, they are
sending publishers into a tizzy. Never before perhaps in
the publishing business have so many editors got it so
wrong for so long.

Except Amish Tripathi. He was from IIM alright —
and a banker to boot — but his novel was anything but
campus romance. In fact, it was set in 1900 BC — a fan-
tasised story of a real man, a Tibetan tribesman who
migrates to ancient India and is recast as the god of gods,
Shiva. Clueless about high literature, and a sports enthu-
siast in school and college, Amish threw in touches that
nobody had tried before in mythological retellings:
adventure, plot, romance and dialogues straight out of
the campus novel everyone was publishing. The few pub-
lishers — out of the 20 he approached — who deigned to
respond, told him to go back and write a campus novel,