Shawn Haigins | Ashwin Sanghi

Oct 7, 2011

Hi!Blitz, Oct 2011: Political Fiction

Posted by Ashwin Sanghi at 12:51 PM

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Video Trailer: Chanakya's Chant

Video Trailer: The Rozabal Line

About the Author

Ashwin Sanghi: The name “Shawn Haigins” is a pseudonym. In fact, it's an anagram of the author’s real name, "Ashwin Sanghi". Ashwin writes extensively on history, religion, and politics. "The Rozabal Line" his first novel was completed in 2007. The book was self-published in the US in 2007 under his pen name, "Shawn Haigins". The book went through several revisions over 2007 and 2008 and a revised edition under Ashwin's own name was released by Tata-Westland Ltd. & Tranquebar Press for the Indian subcontinent in 2008 and again in 2010, which went on to remain a national bestseller for several months. Ashwin's second novel, "Chanakya's Chant", a historical political thriller is was released by Westland in January 2011 and shot into the Top-10 Bestsellers of India within 2 weeks of its launch. Ashwin is an entrepreneur and holds a master’s degree from Yale and lives in India with his wife and son. He's also pursuing a doctorate in Creative Writing. Writing is his passion and, in his own words, he's "an entrepreneur by day and novelist by night".

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Chanakya's Chant of the week

Go to my blog on IBNLive to check out this week's comic strip. You'll love the contemporary twist to Chanakya.

Interview of Author on Doordarshan

Interview of Author on NDTV Hindu

Launch of Chanakya's Chant by Dr. Shashi Tharoor

Society Magazine (Jan 2011 issue)

Click on the image to see the entire article

Chanakya's Chant

The year is 340 BC. A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, cunning, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire. History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. But history, which exults in repeating itself, revives Chanakya two and a half millennia later, in the avatar of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in smalltown India who becomes puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals—including a certain slumchild who grows up into a beautiful and powerful woman. Modern India happens to be just as riven as ancient Bharat by class hatred, corruption and divisive politics and this landscape is Gangasagar’s feasting ground. Can this wily pandit—who preys on greed, venality and sexual deviance—bring about another miracle of a united India?

The Rozabal Line

On a lazy day in London, a cardboard box is found on a shelf of the SOAS library where a copy of Mahabharata should have been. When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. An elite group calling itself the Lashkar-e-Talatashar, the army of thirteen, has scattered around the globe. The fate of its members curiously resembles that of Christ and his Apostles in the first century AD. Their leader is not even a blip on the radar of intelligence agencies, yet their agenda is Armageddon. Somewhere in the labyrinthine recesses of the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears she will eliminate all who do not believe in her twisted credo. She loves to kill-again and again. A Hindu Astrologer spots an approaching conjunction of the stars and nods to himself in grim agreement. It will happen on the very date he had seen as the end of the world. And it’s not far off. In Tibet, a group of Buddhist monk search for a reincarnation, much in the way their ancestors searched Judea for the son of God. In strife-torn Kashmir, a tomb called Rozabal holds the key to a riddle that arises in Jerusalem and gets answered at Vaishno Devi. An American priest, Father Vincent Sinclair, has disturbing visions of himself and of people familiar to him, except that they seem located in other worlds, other ages. Induced into past -life regression, he goes to India to piece together the violent images burnt onto his mind. Shadowing his every move is the Crux Decussata Permuta, a clandestine society which would rather wipe out creation than allow an ancient secret to be disclosed. In The Rozabal Line, a thriller swirling between continents and centuries, Ashwin Sanghi traces a pattern that curls backward to the violent birth of religion itself.

Archives of Posts on Shawn's Blog

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  - TOI, Dec 25, 2011: The Retell Market, by Archana K...
  - Spark Magazine Interview: Filling the Blanks with ...
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  - Nov 27, '11: Future of fat books, By Rohini Nair
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  - Indian Express, Aug 8, 2011: For Old Times' Sake
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