Shawn Haigins | Ashwin Sanghi

The Hindu: 'A Thrilling Voice' by Sohini Chakravorty

2012-01-13T17:39:00.002+05:30

When it comes to The Godfather, it is difficult to judge whether it is Mario Puzo's edgy book that compliments Francis Ford Coppola film starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino or the way around. Film makers have always found inspiration in popular fiction for their films and the stupendous success of franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight series is a proof of that. Though few Indian fictions has been adapted on the cinematic screen by Hindi film makers in the past, things have changed with the growth in the popular Indian fiction market. Ashwin Sanghi's whose book Chanakya's Chant will be adapted in a Hindi film by UTV Motion Pictures is among authors like Chetan Bhagat, Anuja Chauhan, Amish Tripathi whose books are being adapted into films.

Explaining about the eternal conflict between the written word and the cinematic interpretation he says he is not afraid to experiment with the script and the story, if the film is in the right hands. “An author entices the readers with their words and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw Anna Karenina on screen I didn't like it at all whereas The Godfather was legendary,” he adds.

While the author believes that one cannot take liberties with classic characters like Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, but films based on popular fiction definitely increases the reader base. “We can't deny that films have a bigger reach. After the popularity of the Slumdog Millionaire a lot of people started reading Vikas Swarup's Q & A. From a business sense, films are a good tool increase the number of readers,” says the businessman turned author.

Ashutosh Gowariker is believed to have been roped to direct the film. Steering clear from issues on credits, Ashwin says, “There are some things like names which are very sacrosanct and I wound not budge on that. But I have already moved on to my next novel and will be involved very little with the script of the film. I will definitely help out whenever required.”

Whether in his first book The Rozabal Line or Chanakya's Chant, his books deals with characters from history and mythology. His love for thrillers is translated on print. He says that the story lines don't change but the characters and props keep changing, therefore many interpretation of history and ancient stories are bound to happen. “It is important to retain the original flavours with a graduated shift in storyline. When working on a period it is the finer details that evoke imagery that helps in cinematic adaptations,” he says. Apart from his next novel, the author is also working on a screenplay based on his book The Rozabal Line.

His next book will be a fast paced business story spanning across three historical periods – the Mughal, Maratha and the British. “I want to make sure that my writing leaves the readers by the hook,” he says.

Film adaptations

l One of the best selling novels of recent years The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi has been picked by Karan Johar's production house Dharma Productions. The announcement has elicited a mixed response from the fans of the Shiva trilogy but many believe that it has the potential to have the cinematic grandeur of the Lord of the Rings.

l Chetan Bhagat is a favourite among Bollywood film makers. After Five Point Someone, One Night @ The Call Centre, his two other novels the film adaption of 3 Mistakes of My Life will be directed by Abhishek Kapoor of Rock On fame and Vishal Bhardwaj is working on 2 States.

l The filming rights of Anuja Chauhan's chick lit The Zoya Factor is bought by Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment but details about the cast and director is not clear.

l Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is one of the most awaited films of 2012. The film boasts of an impressive star cast.

TOI, Hyderabad, Jan 13 2012: 'I'm Not a Movie Buff' by Sarah Salvadore

2012-01-13T17:35:00.001+05:30

It's been almost a year since Ashwin Sanghi's second book "Chanakya's Chant" released and entered all major Indian national bestseller lists within a span of two months. But the buzz surrounding the book refuses to die. And it's all thanks to Bollywood. The Yale graduate, who published his first bestseller, "The Rosabal Line" under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins, is excited about the prospect of his book being made into a film, to be directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar. On a whirlwind trip to the city, Sanghi finds time to chat with TOI. Excerpts.

What brings you to the city?
There is a student in ISB who read my book a about year ago. She wrote to me at that time and told me that my book had inspired her to write a manuscript of her own. About three weeks, ago she wrote to me again informing that she had completed her manuscript and found a publisher too. She wanted me to come to the city to launch the book and I couldn't refuse her. Hence the trip to Hyderabad.

Your book, "Chanakya's Chant", is being adapted into a film...
Yes. Siddharth Roy Kapoor from UTV read the book and passed it on to his team saying that he felt it was written in a cinematic style. His team too responded in an overwhelming manner. They unanimously agreed to adapt it into a film. I honestly, did not go out there looking for production houses to adapt my book. It just fell into my lap. I received a call from the production house asking me to come for a meeting and two weeks later, I signed the contract. It was as simple as that.

How do you feel about Ashutosh Gowarikar helming the project?
As far as Ashutosh is concerned, it's totally between the production house and the film maker. I have no clue as to what the understanding between them is or whether they do have an understanding at all. All these things take time to cook. But yes, I did have a chance to chat with Ashutosh during a literary festival. We are a mutual admiration society because I absolutely loved "Jodha Akbar" and he loved reading "Chanakya's Chant".

Are you going to be involved in any capacity with the movie?
No. Although the production house did offer me the chance to co-write the script, the reason for me backing out are various. As a writer, you love every word you've put on paper. And then it becomes tough to take the right decisions in a rational manner. I have read great books which did not translate into great films. "Anna Karenina" and " The Da Vinci Code" is the best examples. But at the same time, you have something like "The Godfather". Mario Puzo's book was nice, but it was the movie which made it a cult classic. A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack.

Since you've fleshed out each character in the book, whom would you like to see playing the main protagonist?
Actually, I'm not much of a movie buff myself. My attention span is very limited and I watch just one or two movies a year. So, I have never thought about the actors who could play the different characters from my book.

This whole trend of adapting books of Indian authors into films has been on the rise. What do you make of it?
I think it's a healthy trend. I hope it carries on. Over a period of time, hopefully there will be a better structure of arriving at an agreement between the writer and the production house because that is one area where we have had a lot of heartburn for no rhyme and reason. If those things were contractually obligated in a better way, then we won't have so many issues later. Cinema has matured too. We are moving away from the formula culture. Today, there is a huge appetite for different stories. That's where the books of Indian authors come in.

How do you rate yourself as a writer?
I'm getting there (laughs). For me, the critical element is if I can keep the reader hooked to a story. I even pay attention to stuff like chapter length and if I feel it's too long, I cut it short. I'm not the type to write, sit back and admire my prose. I want my writing to reach people. I don't write for a market. I write from my heart, something that appeals to me. The marketing, segmenting etc., can be done by your publisher, not you.

IBNLive: 'Calling on the Machiavelli of India' by

2012-01-13T17:29:00.003+05:30

Think Chanakya and the first thing that would pop into anybody’s mind is the work Arthashastra. Considered as the architect of emperor Chandragupta Maurya’s rise to power, the simply-dressed hermit looking man is somebody that not many would give a second thought to.
However, author Ashwin Sanghi’s fascination for the clear brilliance and fore-thought of the man coupled with his ever-imaginative mind brought forth the book Chanakya’s Chant.
Set in two separate era’s, the book tells the story of Chanakya’s scheming genius that sets Chandragupta on the emperor’s throne. Two and a half millennia later, a Brahmin teacher Gangasagar Mishra rises to the same heights of cunning and conniving in the hopes of steering his ward, an intelligent slumchild to the same pedestal that the Maurya king was placed upon. But will he succeed? As the book blurb reads, will Chanakya’s chant work again?
“The man was a genius. He was magnificently ahead of his times. While we live in an age where we think twice about accepting things like prostitution, Chanakya had listed out a set of rules and guidelines that would govern the brothels of that age. He had concoctions listed out with specific ingredients and quantities for cocktails to avoid and check adulterated liquor. He planned roads such that there was enough space for one chariot to out-maneuver another while not blocking the way for a chariot coming in the opposite direction. We barely see such thoughtfulness in out modern society. The maximum we plan for is five years ahead,” exclaimed the author.
The two-novel old author is a business-man by day time and a writer by night. Part of the family business since he was about 16 and having graduated from Yale at the age of 22, took to writing around the year 2005. His first novel Rozabal Line was released under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins. At this point its interesting to note that the Rozabal line fictionally speculated about Jesus surviving the crucification and settling down in India. So ask him if there was any particular reason that his pseudonym somehow ended up sounding more Christian than intended and he smilingly replies, “My family had no idea I was writing. Hence the pseudonym. I wanted it to be as far-fetched and remote from who I really was. I guess writing for me, had become a form of rebellion and it was my own time on my own computer with my own story. Plus, Shawn Haigins was the most convenient anagram for my name.”
Talking about his book and his inspiration, he says, “Chanakya was the perfect grey character - one never really knew where he stood. The relevance of that grey character and the Arthashastra is so strong in today’s world, I couldn’t help but write based on it. It was in 2009 actually the idea for the story came about when I saw the politics that was occurring between Karunanidhi and Sonia Gandhi. It took so long to form the government, I was astounded.”
“Politics hasn’t changed much in all these years and that is where the idea to juxtapose Chanakya’s period with that of Gangasagar came from.”
Considering that Sanghi was the master of the story, it was interesting to see that when he applied the Chanakya equation to the present, he chose to do it in a similar format of a kingpin egging his pawns on the chessboard and not have the main character both practise and preach to himself.
“I believe Chanakya’s greatest flaw was that he was extremely chauvinistic. To counter that, I had Gangasagar choose a girl as his road to success.”
Well, whether his final act does justice to the Hindu Machiavelli or not, there’s only one way to find out.

HT, 31 Dec 2011: Chanakya's Chant in Top-10 bestsellers of 2011

2012-01-04T12:02:00.003+05:30

Since May this year, readers of HT Read have been tracking the bestsellers in the Indian book market through AC Nielsen's Bookscan Top 10 list. In the period since the Nielsen Bookscan India panel set up shop (October 2010), the number of retailers from whom they cull data and sales figures have grown three-fold. On the last day of 2011, HT sheds some light on writers and publishers who got lucky, selling the maximum number of fiction and non-fiction titles in the 12 months from January 2011 to December 2011.

FICTION

1. Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
2. The Secret of the Nagas by Amish Tripathi (Westland)
3. The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi (Westland)
4. 2 States by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
5. Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer (Pan)
6. Chanakya's Chant by Ashwin Sanghi (Westland)
7. The Three Mistakes of My Life by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
8. I Too Had a Love Story by Ravinder Singh (Srishti)
9. Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
10. Life is What You Make It by Preeti Shenoy (Srishti)

NON-FICTION

1. I Have a Dream by Rashmi Bansal (Westland)
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Little, Brown)
3. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal (IIM)
4. Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight by Rujuta Diwekar (Random House)
5. Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha by Rujuta Diwekar (Westland)
6. Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis (Goyal)
7. Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal (IIM)
8. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma (Jaico)
9. Corporate Chanakya by Radhakrishnan Pillai (Jaico)
10. The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate)

TOI, Dec 25, 2011: The Retell Market, by Archana Khare Ghose

2011-12-26T14:16:00.001+05:30

Fantasy fiction as a genre is one of the most unexplored in Indian writing and if good story tellers continue to pay it serious attention, there is no reason why there can't be more celeb young authors like Ashwin Sanghi and Amish. Sanghi's Chanakya Chant, published last year, has sold 1,00,000 copies so far and has opened the door for many more such out-ofthe-box views on our luxuriant history.

Sanghi, who is on a sabbatical in Goa these days writing his next book, says that it was the machinations for seats of power during the formation of UPA II in 2009 that inspired Chanakya's Chant. "The goings-on were so evocative of Chanakya the historical character that this story started brewing in my mind," he says. And if Chanakya can be a hit, then why can't Akbar or some forgotten tale of the rich court lives of the Mughals, or may be the Cholas, or even those closer to us in time than the 3rd century BC architect of the Maurya empire? One of the best books ever written in this genre is The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, a text that extrapolated the past and the present of the Mahabharata brilliantly.

Spark Magazine Interview: Filling the Blanks with History and Mystery!

2011-12-06T11:36:00.002+05:30

In a conversation with Anupama Krishnakumar, bestselling author of two works of historical fiction, Ashwin Sanghi, talks about his journey as a writer, his books and his views on writing. Ashwin is the writer of the month of this edition themed ‘Time Machine’.

Today, we know Ashwin Sanghi as a widely-read author of two bestsellers. But, how did it all begin? What prompted you to undertake the writer’s journey?

When I was studying at the Cathedral & John Connon School in Mumbai, I contributed a few articles to the school newspaper but they were not very enthusiastically received. When I went to Yale for my Masters’ I wrote a column for the school’s monthly magazine and several people told me that they enjoyed my casual yet brisk style of writing. I returned to India and immersed myself in my family’s business affairs and my urge to write manifested itself in terms of a few uneventful business-related articles in scattered journals. To a certain extent, my business persona seemed to be dictating what I could or couldn’t write. I did not realise then that I was killing my passion by writing business-related articles—especially when Writing was my route to creative expression and I needed to write about the things that interested me. In 2004, I was going through a difficult patch in my life and my wife suggested that I try writing a few pages during a short holiday. At the end of the five-day break, I had written over 10,000 words and since then, there has been no looking back.

What made you choose historical fiction?

It was Edmund Burke who said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” I find that when I observe current events around me, I instinctively correlate these with events that happened in the past. When I read about modern-day conflicts between Islam and the western world, I can’t help thinking of the religious Crusades that were fought for most of the 300 years following the 11th century. When I read about the Nithari serial killings, I begin to mull over the terror that Jack the Ripper caused in England in 1888. When I watch the IPL allegations on TV and the consequent damage that it may have done to the reputation of cricket, I think about the Black Sox scandal that almost ruined baseball in 1919. When I hear about scams like those of the CWG or Telecom, I correlate them to the Railroad Bubble. History inevitably repeats itself, one simply needs to observe the patterns. This pattern is what interests me, not the history in itself and this is what is central to my fiction.

When many novels published today are set in the world as we see it today, your novels travel back to a time that we did not live in. How challenging is it to weave history and fiction?

There indeed exists a segment of readers who wish to read fiction that resembles reality. What I do is to simply fill in the blanks. For example the assassination of JFK is a historical fact but who was actually behind JFK’s death is something that is open to speculation. It is in those “grey areas” that we fiction writers have the greatest flexibility to weave a story. It is this flexibility that gives me the creative wiggle room to spin my yarns! History, mythology, conspiracy, mystery and suspense are the nucleotides of my writer’s DNA. I cannot imagine myself writing outside this comfort zone.

How did your first book The Rozabal Line happen? What inspired the storyline of the book?

In 1999, I read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. A couple of years later, I read Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived in India and was fascinated by the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. I began to wonder whether I could marry the two theories i.e. he survived the crucifixion and travelled to India and that he left behind a bloodline. I spent the next two years reading each and every book that I could acquire on topics that I wanted to explore viz. the possibility of Jesus having spent his missing years as a youth studying in India, the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he was whisked away to safety, and the notion that Jesus travelled to India to reunite with the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in Kashmir. In all, I read around 40 books during this time besides scouring the Internet for any information that I could possibly find. I started writing The Rozabal Line in 2005 and finished it 18 months later.

Religion is a sensitive topic to write on. How did you handle the criticism that might have come your way when you published The Rozabal Line?

The Rozabal shrine contains two graves. The most recent is of Syed Naseerudin, a Medieval saint whose life is fairly well documented. However, the earlier inhabitant—Yuz Asaf—was buried there in 112 AD and this was 500 years before the advent of Islam. Yuz Asaf was a charismatic preacher who arrived in Kashmir from Israel and his name means “the healer” or “the shepherd”. So is Rozabal a Christian place of worship or a Muslim one? Surprisingly, both Christians and Muslims dismiss the idea as blasphemy. Both religions say Jesus Christ was taken by God into heaven, while some Islamic and Christian sects say there will be a “second coming” of Jesus Christ. But the story of the tomb in itself was not where my interest lay. I wanted to explore Buddhist influence on early Christianity; I wanted to tie in the lost or missing years of Jesus into this story; I wanted to examine the ancient connections between India and the Lost Tribes of Israel; I wanted to explore the worship of the sacred feminine across cultures. This was a book that I simply had to write. I genuinely believe that those who have read this novel understand that the aim was noble—to unite via the exploration of common origins. As regards controversy, there are those who can find something controversial in Mary Had a Little Lamb! I’ve decided to ignore that fringe.

And the second novel, Chanakya’s Chant. Was the idea a sudden realisation of sorts or were you planning it for a while?

It was the Indian General Elections of 2009 that inspired me. The UPA had won the elections but cabinet formation was held up due to jockeying for posts by alliance members. I thought to myself: was politics always this messy? Chanakya’s Chant was simply the answer to that fundamental question.

In Chanakya’s Chant, the narrative travels back and forth in time. Writers tend to dwell in the world they create when they are in the process of writing. How did you approach this whole idea of dwelling in two different times and weaving them together and implement it?

I am often asked this question. The honest truth is that I didn’t give it too much thought. The three most important elements of my novels are plot, plot and plot. I spend hours developing and fleshing out the plot. Plot drives my characters. Plot drives pretty much the entire book. Once I have a detailed plot outline for the entire story, I know what backdrops, elements, character traits, twists and historical or mythological facts will be needed to propel the story forward. I don’t need to relive the world that my characters inhabit. I simply create the world that my plot demands.

How much of a role has research played in writing your books? What are some of the materials you looked into for The Rozabal Line and Chanakya’s Chant?

The research involved in writing The Rozabal Line was much more exhaustive than that of Chanakya’s Chant. This was simply due to the fact that one had to tread very carefully when writing fiction that touched upon someone’s faith. I had less concerns when it came to writing about the political confabulations of Chanakya.

With The Rozabal Line, I found that there was a wealth of information that I could dip into. Some of this information was available in excellent books that had covered various issues such as the Jesus in India hypothesis, the historical Jesus, and the interplay of mythologies and religious beliefs in the evolution of the character of Jesus. Books such as Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten, Jesus in Kashmir: The Lost Tomb by Suzanne Olsson, The Fifth Gospel by Fida Hassnain, The Unknown Life of Jesus by Nicolas Notovich and The Lost Years of Jesus by Elizabeth Clare Prophet were very important in building the framework of the story. Other books such as The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by S. Acharya and The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviours by Kersey Graves were important from the angle of building the “alternative hypothesis” around the canonical Jesus. I spent most of 2003 and 2004 reading every book that I could lay my hands on (around 40+). These books are listed at the back of my novel. I only started writing in 2005 after I had completed reading these books.

With Chanakya’s Chant, the research was at two levels because, as you know, there are two parallel stories in this book. The first one traces the rise of Chanakya 2300 years ago and ends with him having succeeded in installing Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second traces the life of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher from Uttar Pradesh who makes it his life’s purpose to turn a girl from a slum into the country’s Prime Minister. The ancient story required historical reading, including the Arthashastra as well as several other books penned on Chanakya. I also read an English translation of the Mudrarakshasa—a historical play in Sanskrit by Vishakhadatta who lived in the 4th century. The modern-day story simply involved lots of newspaper reading. The drama of politics is enacted before us each day in the front pages… one doesn’t need to stray any further!

Chanakya’s Chant recently won the Crossword Best Book Award in the popular category. Did you expect it? What do awards mean to you?

To quote a famous Hollywood actor: “I’ll take any trophy. I don’t care what it says on it.” Jokes apart, although I knew that Chanakya’s Chant had touched a chord with readers, I had no idea that it would lead to the Crossword Popular Choice Award. I have been overwhelmed with the sort of response that I have received for Chanakya’s Chant.

Speaking of your writing endeavours, will you attempt non-fiction some time? What would such a work focus on?

Seven years ago, I had started writing a work of non-fiction that traces the roots of Indian business, but it has remained an incomplete manuscript. I am currently in the process of reviewing it and developing it as the backdrop for my third work of fiction. At present, fiction is what allows me to escape from the humdrum of my otherwise boring and uneventful life. I do not see myself straying away from fiction for a while.

Lastly, what is the next one coming from Ashwin Sanghi? We would like a teaser!

As mentioned earlier, I am currently working on a third novel, as yet untitled. It straddles the past and the present. With my first novel, I explored a theological riddle. My second novel focused on politics. My next novel shall be about business. It’s business as usual!

You can download the PDF of the entire magazine at http://www.sparkthemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/spark-december-2011.pdf

Nov 27, '11: Future of fat books, By Rohini Nair

2011-11-28T17:17:00.002+05:30

Another genre that is benefiting regardless of the high page count is the thriller. Ashwin Sanghi’s The Rozabal Line and Chanakya’s Chant have been bestsellers despite their 500-plus pages. “When I was growing up, if one wanted to read a fast-paced thriller, one would turn to a Frederick Forsyth or a James Hadley Chase. But now you have books like the Meluha series, like Chanakya’s Chant,” he says.

BusinessToday: Corporate honchos are also writing popular fiction

2011-10-25T13:48:00.001+05:30

Until recently Amish Tripathi was National Head, Marketing and Product Management at IDBI Federal Life Insurance. Ashwin Sanghi is an entrepreneur with interests in automobiles and real estate. Ravi Subramanian is President and CEO, Shriram Finance (Non Chit). Vikas Rathi is Finance Manager for the Asia Pacific Region with Procter & Gamble Healthcare. Jvalant Nalin Sampat runs Cross Pollinate, a consulting firm that helps NGOs raise funds from industry.

What do these five top executives have in common? They are all successful novelists as well. During the day and they are busy officegoers with high pressure jobs. They spend about 12 to 14 hours daily at their work stations dealing with clients, employees and crunching numbers. But back home they seamlessly put on their storytelling hats.

Their novelistic concerns are diverse. Two of them, Tripathi and Sanghi, have the Indus Valley civilisation or even the mythical Puranas as the backdrop of their stories, Sampat uses World War II, Subramanium tells intriguing contemporary tales of love, corporate politics and money laundering, while Rathi's is a coming of age work - a youngster stepping out of university to join the real world.

Hi!Blitz, Oct 2011: Political Fiction

2011-10-07T12:51:00.000+05:30

AsianAge Sep28 2011: In the limelight: The award goes to...

2011-10-03T12:13:00.001+05:30

The jury for the Man Booker Prize may have given an Indian author (or an author of Indian origin) a miss this year, but the celebration of the Indian writing in the subcontinent continues with undiminished gusto. It’s a celebration that manifested itself at the recent award functions to laud, recognise and reward the outstanding literary figures from our part of the world. The Vodafone-Crossword Book Award 2010 raised a toast to the Indian writing in English at the NCPA in Mumbai on September 2. Omair Ahmad and Anjali Joseph were declared the joint winners of the award in the Indian fiction category for Jimmy, The Terrorist and Saraswati Park, respectively. V.S. Ramachandran’s cerebral work, The Tell Tale Brain, won the award for Indian non-fiction. Ashwin Sanghi bagged the Popular Award for Chanakya’s Chant.
A jubilant Sanghi said: “For me, personally, it’s a vindication of sorts. Many observers told me that my brand of historical, mythological and theological fiction would never have mass appeal. This award has proved otherwise.”
While Vodafone-Crossw-ord Book Award has limited itself to only Indian citizens, other awards are more open. The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, for example, has earlier awarded Pakistan’s stellar writer Mohammed Hanif for his savage satire on General Zia, this year another Pakistani figures on its shortlist: Jamil Ahmad for The Wandering Falcon. Also vying for the prize is Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka for China-man. The borderlines are already blurring as Indian publishing is becoming one big celebration of voices from multiple regions in Asia. The longlist for the second edition of the DSC Prize for South Asian literature includes The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi. Based in Afghanistan, the novel was originally written in French and then translated into English. It is one of the three translated novels longlisted for this year’s prize: The other two includes U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Bharath-ipura (OUP), translated by Susheela Punitha, and Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books), translated by Manisha Chaudhry.
Manhad Narula, founder of the DSC Prize, says: “This year we saw close to a 20 per cent increase in the number of submissions that we have received and that too from newer frontiers. The entries received this year are from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan amongst others.”
Ira Pande, chairperson of the jury for the DSC Prize, feels that as far South Asian writing is concerned, there’s greater confidence in experimenting with language and narrative styles are emerging. Some of the themes in the 60 novels submitted this year include: terrorism and political violence; migrations and the rural-urban divide.
Sivaraman Balakrishnan, marketing manager, Crossword Bookstores, says the next logical step for the Vodafone-Crossword Award would be to “recognise” writing in the Indian subcontinent.
For the writer, every award has its own rewards. The most visible is the increase in sales of every prize-winning book. Balakrishnan says that after Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City won the Vodafone Crossword Prize, its sale went up by 50 per cent.
Agrees Shireen Quadri, manager, marketing & promotions, at the Simon & Schuster India. “After Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger made it to the Man Booker, the demand for the book, which was published in the US by S&S, went up by about 30-40 per cent,” she says.
While the literary awards in India are giving a fillip to writers, curiously, they face a quintessential dilemma: How exactly do you define Indian writing? With more and more awards being instituted for Indian writing in English, it is all set to be redefined.

Mumbai Mirror, Oct 1, 2011: Ashutosh Gowarikar to direct UTV’s next

2011-10-03T12:02:00.001+05:30

Ashutosh Gowarikar and UTV Motion Pictures are reportedly all geared up to work together on a film based on the best seller book Chankya Chant by Ashwin Sanghi.

A source informed us that UTV had bought the rights of the book sometime ago. And so, now the production house has brought Ashutosh on-board to direct the film.

The source said, "Chankya Chant was released on January 26, last year and became a national best seller within two months. UTV recently bought the rights and after giving it much thought they decided that Ashutosh Gowarikar would be the best person to direct the film.

UTV and Ashutosh previously worked together in Swades, Jodhaa Akbar and What's Your Rashee. The officials of the production house have already met with Ashutosh, who loved the book. As of now, the technicalities are being worked out. The rest of the details are yet to be finalised."

When contacted both Ashutosh Gowarikar and officials at UTV remained unavailable for comment.

People Mag, Oct 7, 2011: Catching up with Ashwin Sanghi

2011-09-26T11:25:00.000+05:30

The Hindu, Sep 13, 2011: Revisiting History

2011-09-16T14:55:00.001+05:30

Indian fiction in English is going through its own coming-of-age moment where new authors are experimenting with different genres and are not scared of promoting their books with the distinct Indianness instead of aping their western counterparts. Moving beyond college romance or chick lit stories, readers are also welcoming the historical and mythological thrillers that authors are dishing out. . Ashwin Sanghi is one such author.

Businessman to author: With a management degree from Yale University and a stable family business Ashwin Sanghi penned his first novel The Rozabel Line, under the pseudonym of Shawn Haigins, which explored the idea that Jesus hadsurvived the crucifixion and eventually settled down and died in India. Explaining the choice behind his pen name, Ashwin Sanghi says, “I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing I wanted to keep my literary identity separate. But later it became a marketing hazard as I did not want my readers to be shocked to see a Marwari when they were expecting a Shawn Haigins.”

After a religious thriller, his second book Chanakya's Chant was a political thriller revolving around the life of the political strategist Chanakya during the rule of emperor Chandragupta Maurya, with a contemporary twist. The book also won the Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award 2010. The businessman-turned-author admits that he wanted to look beyond a mundane balance sheet and explore his creative side. After a prod from his wife, he began his literary journey. “Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to,” he says. But commenting on a full time writing career he quips in, “My worry is, if I don't have a day job my writing will become a part of my mundane boring life. I like to wear the boring hat in the morning and the exciting one in the night when I am writing.”

Ashwin feels that history and historical figures will never lose their relevance and that's why these characters are being reinvented in various literary works. “The central tenets of politics remain the same, so Chanakya's politics will still find resonance in the contemporary set up,” he explains. Is it easier to work around characters that readers are already familiar with? Certainly not. Treading on historical facts and weaving a fictional story around them is a challenge. “Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.”

Think contemporary: An avid reader of fiction right from Leo Tolstoy to Irving Wallace, Ashwin says that the Indian fiction scene is going through a generational change. “We have finally shed our colonial hang-ups where the target audience is Indian. The readers want to read more about their own roots. In fact, fiction was only limited to family sagas or individual struggles. But now writers are experimenting with thrillers andwhodunits. Instead of reading an espionage story on the Soviet Union why not read on India-Pakistan,” he points out. However, he stresses that the primary aim of a good writer is to keep the interest of the reader alive throughout the plot.

He credits the changed attitude of the Indian publishers to the growth of Indian fiction. However, commenting on the frequent usage of Indian English he says, “I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.”

Continuing his romance with thrillers, Ashwin Sanghi's next book will deal with the world of business and economics slated for a next year release. “The subject is close to home for me,” he says.

SOHINI CHAKRAVORTY

Mail Today: Shahid & Ranbir in a 'Royal' Race

2011-09-13T12:31:00.000+05:30

UTV has already bought the rights of Ashwin Sanghi's best seller Chanakya's Chant and are searching for the right guy to play the role of Prince Chandragupta Maurya. Rumours are that the production house might approach Shahid Kapoor or Ranbir Kapoor to essay the role.

Though, Shahid seems to be a better contender. It is said the makers are willing to cast someone who is young and has proved his acting abilities to the audience.

Moreover, it is a character of a king and is set in the medieval era so the person should be able to manage the look. He also needs to have a suitable body.

The production house feels that both Shahid and Ranbir fit the requirements perfectly so within a few days the final announcement will be made once it is finalised who will play the lead role. One will have to wait and watch if it will be Shahid or Ranbir who will grab this powerful character.

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/shahid-kapoor-ranbir-kapoor-prince-chandragupta-maurya-mausam-rockstar/1/150937.html?cp

Tehelka: A gripping fictional narrative of Chanakya’s life and times

2011-09-13T12:21:00.000+05:30

Pavan K Varma on Books: Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant deals with the life and times of Chanakya in a credible yet gripping manner. It is hard to find well-researched fiction by Indian authors on Indian history. Sanghi dexterously interweaves a story of modern India with Chanakya’s life. This book is a refreshing change from our usual derivative creative writing.

Times of India, CREST, Sep3, 2011: Booking Business

2011-09-05T12:47:00.001+05:30

It also helps to tap the new media. "Newspapers and magazines are rarely interested in reviewing self-published books. So, for the publicity of my first book I targeted non-traditional media such as blogs. I would write to blog owners and offer them a copy of my book if they would agree to review it, " says Ashwin Sanghi, whose two books, the self-published The Rozabal Line and the second Chanakya's Chant (Westland) have done good business. Sanghi also created a three-minute YouTube video for his debut novel and publicised the link on the web.

For his second book, too, Sanghi went the YouTube route. He roped in a young composer to set a chant that is central to the book's narrative to music and put it out there, also making it available for download in MP3 format. "Even before the book was released, the music clip had been downloaded over 20, 000 times, thus increasing the odds that those who had heard the clip would feel comfortable moving ahead with the actual purchase, " says Sanghi.

Ideas are in short-supply within the publishing world, believes Sanghi, and most publishers have very little bandwidth to devote to a single title given the number of authors they publish. Creative ideas must necessarily emerge from the writer.

IANS, Sep5, 2011: Vodafone book awards for Sanghi, Joseph

2011-09-05T12:10:00.002+05:30

Emerging writer Ashwin Sanghi has won the Vodafone Cross-word Book Award 2010 in the popular fiction category for Chanakya’s Chant. The award, decided by readers’ votes online, went to the contemporary political drama for logging the highest sales in 2010.
Sanghi, who also wrote the bestselling The Rozbal Line, was given the prize in Mumbai on Saturday, a statement said. The award for the fiction category was shared by Omair Ahmad for Jimmy The Terrorist and Anjali Joseph for Saraswati Park. V.S. Ramachandran won the award in the non-fiction category for The Tell Tale Brain, while Ranjit Lal won the award for the best children’s book, Faces in the Water. In the translation category, N.S. Madhavan and Rajesh Rajmohan were awarded for Litanies of Dutch Battery, translated from Malayalam.

Times of India, Sep4, 2011: A fresh new narrative

2011-09-05T12:00:00.002+05:30

Like every form of narrative, storytelling also tends to lose its way and ours did too. For a long time, our stories tried to look outward. Our literature was just a whole world of want and longing in one form or the other. But now, authors have taken a look at the motherload of all stories. Look at it for intrigue, wisdom, philosophy or even quirky humour; but our indigenous literature speaks in diverse volumes.

Ashwin Sanghi is another author who tasted success by exploring historic themes. With his Chanakya's Chant being picked up by a major production house to be adapted for the screen, the author is excited about the response he's received for his work. Ashwin believes that there is a spate of growth of authors who write specifically for the Indian audience. "In a country where over 50 per cent of the population is below the age of 25 and with absolutely no connect to the British rule, why are we still so caught up with this colonial hangover of ours?

With Chanakya's Chant, which shuttles between the time periods of Chanakya, the genius of a statesman who put down the tenets of good administration with his epic work Arthashastra, to the modern age, Ashwin Sanghi has recreated an age and society that are long past. "The Indian audience has one simple need - to be entertained while also being educated. Nobody has the patience to go through heavy history textbooks to learn about their own history, heritage and culture. Instead, narrate your tales with an apt plot, develop your characters and present it to the readers and you give them what they want, information and entertainment," he says. The bestselling author adds that Indian authors are writing specifically for an indigenous audience over an international one. "That is why books which explored our colonial past did well with an international audience. Well, look at it this way; why are we so captivated by JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling when we have a bank of fascinating tales and characters of our own? Let's talk about our history and narrate our tales to the world. I'm sure everyone else would sit up and pay attention."

The Pioneer, Sep1,'11: 'My Wife Told me to Quit Moping'

2011-09-02T11:21:00.002+05:30

To balance 27 years of security in a mundane career, selling cars, entrepreneur Ashwin Sanghi sought excitement with a parallel profession, as a versatile writer. He tells Shana Maria Verghis that his second book, a political saga is being scripted into a film by UTV

Born in the Baniya community, whose profession has them worship at the altar of the God of business, Ashwin Sanghi was baptised in the workings of his family’s automobile dealership, when sixteen years. While still at school, he was learning intricacies of managing debit and credit for the firm.

Reflecting over how his life panned out since, this author of two books brooded, “Things were predetermined in a way. It was decided I’d go to a certain college for MBA. And I would marry at a certain age. Even who I would marry was almost foreknowledge.” He added, “My future was mapped out. Pardon my French. This gave one plenty of security. But the trade-off was, boredom also followed.”

UTV recently traded with Sanghi over his second book, Chanakya’s Chant (by Westland), which is being scripted for a movie. So how did this entrepreneur wind up writing a best-seller set across two time-zones? One is in ancient India, involving Chandragupta Maurya and his canny PM Chanakya. The other is in modern India, where a neo-Chanakya mentors a young girl into state craft.

Sanghi today splits his life, between two worlds. His business, which he says “is the mundane part, although it benefits my family, in terms of financial support.” And his recently started, writing career. He described the latter as “food for my soul,” and its wheels began turning for him around 2001.

Sanghi’s love of books, however, was a gift from his grandfather, who once ran a Rolls Royce dealership in pre-Independence India. The older man used to send his grandson expensive books, hoping to get him to read. But he soon realised the boy was interested in books only as collectibles.

So putting his business brain to use, he struck a deal with this descendant of his.

“My granddad told me he would send me new books, only if I sent him postcards writing about what I had read. This gradually got me to start reading seriously. And we went on this way till I was 24.” When at Yale, he contributed articles to the campus paper but after that life detoured to business.

“I actually spent 27 years with the firm, before I became a writer,” he mused. “Most people do not think of a parallel career in their 40s. But business over the years, provided little excitement or an outlet for creativity. There was hard-earned money involved. It sets limits to what one could do. And my imagination wanted adventure, though I first thought of writing about my business background.”

He said that things probably came to a head when his wife and he were on a holiday.

Life and work were in the doldrums for him at that point. And then, “Over a glass of wine, my wife told me to quit moping and do something about it.” Sanghi remarked, “She told me I had been yakking over so many stories I had in my head. Why not put them down?” During time-out in Goa, Sanghi’s wife “thrust a laptop at me,” and four days on, he was tapping away thousands of words. What he wrote then, hasn’t been printed yet. Instead he wrote The Rozabel Line, a book based on theories of Jesus’ visit to India. Then came Chanakya’s Chant. After religion and politics he’s back to more familiar territory. Economics. The stuff he wrote in Goa will become part of his book three.

Sanghi’s first novel to get published, happened through a print-on-demand website. He did not incur much in terms of investment he said, except for blogging about it and creating a Facebook page. The Rozabel Line was primarily inspired by Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived In India and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, where Dan Brown found a story for The Da Vinci Code. This was where he had cut his teeth writing. “I was less bothered about the traditional story mode in this book, than with exploring diverse themes,” he remarked. “So I wove in a lot of facts. Because I wanted to do justice to the story of Jesus in India. It got a lot of brickbats, since I connected it to the Lost Tribes of Israel and also wrote that Jesus was buried here. But I got a lot of positive feedback as well.” He concluded, saying, “Chanakya’s Chant, meanwhile, set out to be a page-turner, about how little politics changed over centuries. And it doesn’t have parallels with the TV versions of Chanakya by Chandraprakash Dwivedi or Chandragupta Maurya.” He concluded, “UTV signed film rights about two months ago.”

Indian Express, Aug 8, 2011: For Old Times' Sake

2011-08-31T10:47:00.001+05:30

Some years ago, Chetan Bhagat did the unthinkable: he made young and restless Indians read his tales of urban India in conversational English. Soon, Indians were craving for stories of the country by home-grown authors. This need is now being met by writers who are giving Indian history and mythology a contemporary twist. The result has been rewarding — Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant, Anish Sarkar’s Benaami, and The Immortals of Meluha by Amish rule the bestseller lists.

Though authors such as Devdutt Pattanaik, Ashok Banker and William Dalrymple have retold stories from Indian mythology and history, the trend of using these for commercial fiction seems to be a recent one. Sanghi believes that these stories establish an immediate connection with the readers and make for gripping backdrops. “The initial hook for a commercial fiction paperback in this genre must necessarily come from the ancient. Once the reader is hooked, then it does not matter if the story is history-oriented or not,” he says.

When Sarkar wanted to write a thriller with a historical thread running parallel to a modern-day plot, he revisited the mutiny of 1857. “The mutiny was a momentous event in our history, full of legend and intrigue and yet there is not enough literature and little or no fiction around it,” he says.

The present political situation made Sanghi wonder if Indian politics was always so messy. His exploration of past politics resulted in two parallel stories — one of Chanakya 2,300 years ago, and the other of Pandit Gangasagar Mishra in the present day — in Chanakya’s Chant. “The present day story is entirely fictional. Many of the political strategies and characters, however, are drawn from real life events,” he says.

Indian Express, Chennai, July 18: Exploring ancient legends

2011-07-23T13:08:00.002+05:30

CHENNAI: Call it by a thousand fancy names, dissect it, analyse it, poke at its dimensions – but essentially, India is the home of a thousand legends, gods, bizarre creatures and philosophies, but most of all – the best stories ever to be told. That fact was touched upon repeatedly in the panel discussion, Discussion on Indian Myth and Mythology, that was held recently at Landmark in Apex Plaza.

The panelists were Amish Tripathi (author of The Immortals of Meluha), who is now bringing out its sequel, The Secret of the Nagas and Ashwin Sanghi, (The Rozabal Line and Chanakya’s Chants), moderated by author Shreekumar Varma, (Maria’s Room and Lament of Mohini).

Amish Tripathi set the ball rolling with the various myths that abound in the world.

“There is a set of myths which existed in the pre-Abrahamic era, that is the Greek myths, Roman myths. I guess I would classify even the Egyptian and Celtic myths in the same kind of worldview because they do interact with each other and look back on each other. And there are, of course, the Semitic myths, the myths that got created out of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and they’re all quite similar. Moses in Christianity becomes Moosa in Islam. So I think the myths of Hinduism actually bear a lot of similarities to the old Greek, Roman and Celtic myths, in terms of attitude, the way gods were approached,” he explained.

He also discussed how myths were, in essence, a direct response to events that happened at a particular period: violence, for one thing.

A thousand years from now, if all literature had vanished and only a few bare essentials were left, chances are that legend would abound of a short wiry man who walked with a stick and threw salt over his shoulder and ended a huge empire. And that man was called Mahatma Gandhi.

Sanghi pithed in with a humorous repartee, “There are lots of people who would say god was not Gandhi, but Rajnikanth,” to much laughter.

Talk soon turned to the authors’ respective books, and their path towards publication.

“For Amish, it is Shiva but for me, I can safely say that it’s LSD. Goddesses Lakshmi, Saraswathi, Shakthi and Durga,” said Ashwin, tongue in cheek.

Sanghi also described his own book as a conglomeration of both old and new, combining Chanakya’s Arthsasthra with the thought processes of a modern day Uthar Pradesh pandit, Gangasagar Mishra.

“It’s time for us to revisit all of these ancient myths, legends and history; its time to refresh these things because it’s so relevant even today,” he added. “I think it’s important for us to talk about these myths that have so many common factors. The Koran mentions, for instance, that Jesus was a prophet,” he said, as Amish assented.

“So its time back for us to start going back to stories that remind us of unity.”

Sunday Mid-Day, 17 Jul: "I Think Grey is the Most Interesting Colour"

2011-07-17T12:32:00.004+05:30

UTV Motion Pictures recently announced that it has bought the rights to best- selling historical thriller, Chanakya’s Chant. SOWMYA RAJARAM speaks to author Ashwin Sanghi on why he believes an evolving Bollywood will translate his grey characters to celluloid quite easily.

Did you, while writing the novel, imagine that it would lend itself to a film?
I had not written Chanakya’s Chant with a film in mind but my very first reader, my editor, told me that the story was visual and that she could imagine each scene playing out.

The book moves quickly from one location and time span to another. How do you see that communicated in the film?
I believe geographical transitions will be easier to handle than time transitions. The story moves along two parallel tracks — the present day and 2,300 years ago. The only link is a single Sanskrit chant. If this element is handled with finesse, the rest will fall in place effortlessly.

Are you at all involved with the adaptation?
A screenplay is a very different animal to a novel. As a novelist, I can jump 2,300 years, leap across thousands of miles and also describe what is going on inside a character’s head. A screenplay writer needs to work with several limitations. He needs to convey the story within a limited number of hours and within a specified budget. That’s not my cup of tea. But I do know that UTV is considering the possibility of having the same actor play the role of Chanakya as well as Gangasagar Mishra to reinforce the connectivity between the past and the present.

History and political events have been fictionalised in the novel. Do you anticipate a further dilution of facts?
History is nothing but a commonly accepted view of ancient events, those events usually having been narrated by the victor. So how much should we view history as fact? Tulsidas rewrote the Valmiki Ramayana and succeeded in popularising it, but the story was substantially different. I’m sure our ancestors viewed the Puranas as ancient history even though we don’t see it as such today. Were our ancestors wrong, or are we wrong? There is a very fine line between fact and fiction and that has always been the case.

Your characters are grey. Hindi cinema, however, hasn’t had a great track record there. Many are simply black or white.
You are right. I believe that Hindi cinema is in a state of flux. We are seeing stories that are new and innovative also becoming commercially successful. In the right hands, there should be no difficulty in managing the portrayal of shades of grey. Grey is often called a dull or boring colour. I have always considered it the most interesting!

Any apprehensions?
No. The UTV team and I share a great rapport. Mutual confidence and trust is key in producing a quality product. I’m quite sure they will do justice to the book.

Any last thoughts?
Nathaniel Hawthorne famously said, easy reading is usually damn hard writing. I know how tough it is to write a page- turner, a book that you don’t want to put down even at 2 am. I guess the same rule applies to movie making too.

Outlook, Jul 18, 2011: The New Aam Janata Writers

2011-07-10T16:51:00.004+05:30

I am absolutely delighted that the latest issue of Outlook magazine (July 18, 2011) has featured me (along with Amish Tripathi and Rashmi Bansal) on the cover. Million thanks to my readers, fans and friends, whose good wishes and blessings made this happen.

Financial Express, July 10. 2011: From the Bookshelf to the Box Office

2011-07-10T16:05:00.002+05:30

When production house UTV recently announced that it had acquired the feature film rights of Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant, which has been on the bestseller lists, it didn’t come as a surprise. Stories are in short supply in Bollywood. For UTV, which had tasted success with a political drama like Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti, the story of Chanakya’s Chant with its political overtones seemed a perfect second film on the subject of politics. “Chanakya’s Chant is one of those rare books with a storyline that has the potential to be translated into a superbly-cinematic and immensely-entertaining screenplay. The tale is about the underbelly of national politics, which the book superbly exposes, where strategies developed by Chanakya thousands of years ago are still valid in the modern day political scenario,” says Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO, UTV Motion Pictures. At UTV, the film is currently in its scripting stage and talks are on with top writers and directors to work on it.

It’s important to create an environment of trust, said an insider. Something Sanghi seemed to be certain of while dealing with UTV. “UTV has a robust creative team capable of pathbreaking marketing campaigns and has a strong network in both domestic and international markets. UTV has always backed content that they believe in and I believe that it is the only studio that will do justice to the terrific story presented in this novel,” he says.

Chanakya’s Chant, a political thriller, was released by Westland in January and narrates two parallel political tales, one in Chanakya’s times thousands of years ago and the other in post-independent India. While the ancient story is based on Chanakya’s rise to power and the tactics he uses to install Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, the modern story is fictional and follows Kanpur’s Pandit Gangasagar Mishra who draws inspiration from Chanakya to get his protegee Chandini Gupta appointed to the highest office in India.

With Raajneeti a success, UTV is confident of a second political drama with Chanakya’s Chant. But ask the players if Bollywood will pick stories from books rapidly, and most admitted adapting from books is still a tricky prospect and that the industry hasn’t yet nurtured a robust screenwriting process, which is key to adaptations.

Sunday Pioneer: Chant of All Good Times

2011-07-04T11:32:00.003+05:30

The makers of racy political thriller Rajneeti are back in action. This time with Chanakya's neeti. Known for their path breaking cinema, UTV pictures are all set to mould Ashwin Sanghi's best selling novel – Chanakya's Chant into a big screen drama. Deebashree Mohanty chats up with the author about his novel and his perception.

What inspired you to write Chanakya’s Chant?

As a fiction writer, I find the personality and character of Chanakya very interesting. Here’s someone who penned reams of statements on Government policy, Statecraft, strategy and diplomacy almost 1,800 years before Machiavelli! Chanakya was efficient yet ruthless, principled yet amoral, intelligent yet devious, magnanimous yet vengeful. In short, the ideal complex character for a novel!

What kind of research went into this novel?

The research was at two levels because there are two parallel stories in this book. The first one traces the rise of Chanakya 2,300 years ago and ends with him having succeeded in installing Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second traces the life of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher from UP, who makes it his life’s purpose to make a girl from a slum into the Prime Minister.

Are Chanakya’s neetis relevant today ?

Too much attention is being given to the political machinations of Chanakya but not his seminal work, Arthashastra, which was about good governance. To answer your question: Yes, Chanakya’s neetis are more relevant now than in his age.

UTV will be developing this into a motion film... are you confident they will do justice to the novel?

I am more than happy that UTV will be making the film. They are known to have produced cinema across genres and I am confident that they will do justice to the plot of my book. They produced Raajneeti, which was a political yet entertainment thriller.

Who is going to direct this film and who are in the lead?

They are in the process of scripting it and scouting for a director. They are looking for an actor who can play both Chanakya and Gangasagar Mishra, and he will be someone significant.

What are your forthcoming books?

The typical elements that get my attention are history, conspiracy, religion, mystery, and mythology. My next novel will be a mix of these.

Entrepreneur by day, novelist by night. How does that work?

I started working for the family business in 1993 after completing my MBA from Yale. I was encouraged to read all sorts of books by my grandfather. He would always say that there are some things one does in life to feed one’s family, and other things that one must do to for the soul. For me, business is the former and writing novels the latter.

Are you coming up with a book on finance anytime soon?

Never! Every writer has a unique DNA. The nucleotides of my DNA are mystery, history, religion, myth and conspiracy. Ask me to deviate from my DNA, and I wouldn’t be me any longer.

What is your favourite novel and author?

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is my all time favourite.

Times of India, July 2, 2010: UTV to make film on the book Chanakya’s Chant

2011-07-03T11:36:00.001+05:30

UTV Motion Pictures has recently acquired the rights to Chanakya's Chant which shall soon be seen on the big screen. The interesting fast-paced story based on politics in two radically different eras will now be adapted into a film by the studio.

Ashwin Sanghi, author of Chanakya's Chant said, "The response to the book has been phenomenal. UTV has a robust creative team capable of path breaking marketing campaigns and has a strong network in both domestic and international markets. UTV has always backed content that they believe in and I believe that it is the only studio that will do justice to the terrific story presented in this novel."

The book narrates two parallel political tales, one in Chanakya's puranic Bharat 2300 years ago and the other in post-independence contemporary India. While the ancient story is largely historical, based upon Chanakya's rise to power and the clever tactics applied by him towards installing Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, the modern story is mostly fictional and tells the tale of Kanpur's Pandit Gangasagar Mishra who draws inspiration from the master strategist Chanakya and employs his strategies in a modern context to get his protégée Chandini Gupta appointed to the highest office in India.

Chanakya's Chant at #3 on AC Nielsen's Top-10 Bookscan

2011-07-02T09:18:00.003+05:30

It is so very heartening to note that even after 22 weeks of release, Chanakya's Chant continues to remain in the AC Nielsen Top 10 (this week at #3 in Fiction). I am absolutely delighted that the novel has piqued the interest and imagination of so many readers. Many thanks to all of you.

Chanakya: From novels to big screen

2011-06-19T16:40:00.003+05:30

The exploits of Chanakya, the master strategist of ancient India, can soon be seen on the big screen. UTV Motion Pictures has acquired the rights to novelist Ashwin Sanghi's book Chanakya's Chant, a fast-paced story based on politics in two radically different eras.

The book, published by Westland in January, narrates two parallel political tales - Chanakya's puranic Bharat 2300 years ago and post-independence contemporary India.

While the ancient story is largely historical, based upon Chanakya's rise to power and the clever tactics applied by him towards installing Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, the modern story is mostly fictional and tells the tale of Kanpur's Pandit Gangasagar Mishra who draws inspiration from Chanakya and employs his strategies in a modern context to get his protegee Chandini Gupta appointed to the highest office in India.

"'Chanakya's Chant' has huge scope for a film. It has a cinematic story and great role for actors," says UTV Motion Pictures CEO Siddharth Roy Kapur."Lot of filmmakers have shown interest in the project. We are right now figuring out who should write the screenplay. Once that takes place, other things like choice of actors and music will follow," Kapur told PTI.

He hopes that Chanakya's Chant has the ingredients of the next big political drama after Raajneeti.

Sanghi is more than delighted."UTV is known to have produced differential cinema across genres, and I am confident that they will do complete justice to the plot of the book. This novel combines history and politics and given that they've been involved in both Jodhaa Akbar as well as 'Raajneeti', I think they are ideally suited for Chanakya's Chant, the author says.

He sees his book as delicately balancing the ancient and the modern."The transitions between the historical track and the contemporary track are crucial. I would hope that the fundamental DNA of the book is maintained and that the essential wit and charm of the story is preserved. I am extremely excited about this project and eagerly waiting to see the book manifest into a movie. The movie will reach a much wider audience apart from the people who loved the book," says Sanghi, whose debut work The Rozabal Line, a thriller swirling between continents and centuries, was compared to The Da Vinci Code by critics.

According to Sanghi, UTV is contemplating one actor who could play both roles of Chanakya and Gangasagar Mishra, and it will definitely be someone significant in the industry."Each of these two characters is hugely difficult to pull off thus it would need to be someone of incredible capabilities to carry off both roles."

Sanghi chose Chanakya because "so little is actually known about him." According to him, the name Chanakya is not mentioned even once in the Arthashastra. While watching all the 47 episodes of the famous TV series on Chanakya, directed by Chandraprakash Dwivedi in the nineties, Sanghi was struck by the many of the political strategies described that could easily be adopted in modern-day political drama.

Hindustan Times, New Delhi, June 15: Chanakya on Big Screen

2011-06-15T12:26:00.006+05:30

Author Ashwin Sanghi's latest bestseller, Chanakya's Chant, has been acquired by UTV Motion Pictures for a big screen version.

Juxtaposing two eras, it highlights Chanakya's efforts in helping Chandragupta Maurya become the emperor of Magadha and that of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin in post-Independence India, who decides to mentor a girl from Kanpur's slums and groom her to become the Prime Minister. “When I was approached for this one to be made into a movie, I didn't even have to think about it,“ says the author.

“The focus of the book has primarily been to show that history inevitably repeats itself. Just locations and backdrops change but ultimately the strategies remain the same,“ adds Sanghi, who is also working on the screenplay of his first novel, The Rozabal Line.

Ask Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO of UTV, about the cast of the movie, and he says, “It's a great role for any actor. We're considering the same actor could be playing Chankaya as well as the present day character, Gangasagar Mishra. We have two or three options in mind. It will be someone big.“

The Hindu, June 7 2011: Facts of Fiction

2011-06-08T08:06:00.002+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi talks about his latest book, Chanakya's Chant, and his fascination for the historical thriller to Mini Anthikad-Chhibber

After the fast-paced “The Rozabal Line” (2007) Ashwin Sanghi's next book “Chanakya's Chant” (Westland, Rs. 195) is another historical thriller switching breathlessly between 340 B.C. and the present. The book tells the story of Chanakya and his role in the making of Chandragupta the ruler of the Mauryan Empire. The book also follows the story of Gangasagar Mishra, a teacher who becomes a kingmaker in Independent India.

“I think Chanakya is a phenomenally interesting character,” Ashwin says settling down for a quick chat. In town to launch the book at Reliance Time Out, Mantri Mall, the writer says: “It is a pity Chanakya was called Machiavellian, when Machiavelli, who lived between 1469 and 1527, actually borrowed from Chanakya.”

After “Rozabal,” Ashwin decided to do something different. ‘“Rozabal' was theological while ‘Chanakya' is political. Unlike ‘Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of ‘Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA of course is history.”

History always fascinated Ashwin who says: “History is always an integral part of me. I enjoyed reading Amar Chitra Katha and Asterix comics.”

Ashwin says “Chanakya” was easier to write than “Rozabal” because the latter “dealt with matters of faith. I was roasted alive by believers. The worst that can happen to me over ‘Chanakya' is I would get roasted by critics!”

Negativity doesn't pull Ashwin down. “What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don't write for me. I write for my readers.”

Admitting that labels are not for him, Ashwin says: “My greatest fear is being slotted. This way I have the freedom to write what I want.”

Bread 'n' butter

Speaking of researching the novel, Ashwin says: “More than 70 per cent of my research involved reading the “Arthashastra”, “Nitishastra” and “Mudrarakshasa”. The skeleton of my novel is always built from solid research. I look at recorded facts as historical goal posts. These are the slices of bread for a writer of historical fiction. It is the writer's job to make the filling and the sandwich!”

The Mumbai-based writer continues, “Vishakhadatta wrote the historical play ‘Mudrarakshasa' on Chanakya. The series on Doordarshan is based on it. The ‘Arthashastra' is a treatise on governance. It is dry but fascinating nevertheless. There is no moral judgement and even has details on recipes and how to manage gambling!”

The 42-year-old says he started thinking about the book “in 2009. After six months of research and television watching, I took six months to write the book.”

When I last spoke to Ashwin, he spoke of finalising the script for “Rozabal.” “It is a complicated story spanning different time frames and countries. I have a friend in the United States who is fascinated by the book and is looking to developing the screenplay.”

The entrepreneur by day says his approach to writing uses business tools. “I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spread sheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.”

Ask him what next, and unlike most people who would prefer a break to recoup Ashwin says: “I find it difficult to take a break! I have three stories in mind and need to freeze on one. There are three things I look for in a story — it has to be a thriller, I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection, otherwise the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between ‘Rozabal' and ‘Chanakya'.”

Hello! (May 2011): History Retold

2011-05-12T18:58:00.001+05:30

Retelling Indian mythology with a trendy twist is the latest flavour on home turf. Hello! speaks to some bestselling authors.

HT, May 7: Chanakya's Chant #3 on AC Nielsen's all-India Bookscan

2011-05-07T08:02:00.002+05:30

Confused about bestseller lists in publications never matching? Here's a comprehensive weekly list at last. Culled from the sales figures of retailers across India, online included, the HT-Nielsen Bookscan Top-10 list is exclusive to readers of HT Read. By the way, Chanakya's Chant is at #3. :)

Deccan Chronicle, May 2, 2011: Epic of the Modern Era

2011-05-04T16:50:00.002+05:30

Check out these stats — Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi has been doing brilliantly across India. Number one on the best-seller list. The first print-run sold out in eight weeks.
The same is the case with Radhakrishnan Pillai’s Corporate Chanakya which is already in its third reprint. Jaishree Mishra’s Rani is a best seller and so is Parva a Kannada novel based on the Mahabharata!
The reason? Readers, especially young readers want a mix of history, politics and thrillers, all in one, without the boring bits, feels young author Ashwin Sanghi, “I think that we have tapped into a segment of readers who wish to read history that is presented in a fast, entertaining and gripping fashion.”
And this is probably what attracts entrepreneur Meghna Vakada to these novels. “Anything historical appeals to me as long as the characters and stories are well treated and depicted,” she says.
Author Jaishree Mishra adds that it is a complex but interesting situation. Her Rani did well despite the UP ban. “The relationship between historical fiction and young people is a complex one because, by and large, young people think of history as boring and regressive. However, as they generally also want information in small and easily digestible packages, historical fiction offers an easy route in,” she explains.
Her thoughts are mirrored by musician Nathan Harris who says, “I have always been fascinated with Indian mythology and historical characters. It is more fun to read about them in a novel format than some boring history textbook!”
Among other novels that have attracted the young and the restless is Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel which also juxtaposes contemporary and the Mahabharata. Mrityunjay, a look through Karna’s eyes, and Yajnaseni — Draupadi’s take on what happened.
Ashwin believes the curiosity of the youth is what keeps these novels on the bookstands. “I do believe, however, that there is curiosity among the youth about ancient historical characters. The fact that my novel attempts to correlate a character with the messy and murky nature of the modern Indian political landscape is what may have struck a chord.”
Jaishree adds, “Young people are more forgiving, I’ve found, of the ‘elasticity’ offered by historical fiction while older people tend to be more purist in their views.”
Whether it is the contemporary track or just curiosity, this definitely seems to be the flavour of the season.

Chanakya's Chant in all bestseller lists of May 2011

2011-05-03T15:34:00.002+05:30

Interview with Oxford Bookstore

2011-05-03T14:41:00.003+05:30

Sutanuka: You are quite a successful entrepreneur; what has been the primary inspiration behind becoming a writer?

Ashwin Sanghi: I was born and brought up in a business environment. I started working when I was 16 and completed my MBA when I was 22. My passion for reading was ignited when my maternal grandfather would bombard me with books that were far ahead of my time. He would insist that after reading every book I must write a letter detailing what I liked and what I didn't. In the beginning, it was a tedious process but my imagination and knowledge increased over the years. In 2004, I had reached a plateau at work and I found that nothing was exciting me anymore. That’s when my wife suggested that I try writing instead of merely reading. We were on a week long vacation in Goa and at the end of that trip I had written around ten thousand words. There was no looking back.

Sutanuka: Your pseudonym, Shawn Haigins is supposedly an acronym for your name. How has choosing a pseudonym helped you?

Ashwin Sanghi: The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalize my life so that my entrepreneurial dimension would remain distinct and separate from my literary one. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym to use until I actually completed my first novel—The Rozabal Line. As you know, there's an abundance of anagrams in this particular novel and the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my real name as a pseudonym? Hence my first novel was written under the name "Shawn Haigins", an anagram of my real name "Ashwin Sanghi". When Tata-Westland decided to publish the novel in India they insisted that it had to be published under my real name given the fact that the novel in question involved a sensitive subject. As it turns out, that wasn't such a bad idea. My publishers now joke that I was originally a businessman who was also an author and that now I'm an author who is also a businessman. I continue to use the pseudonym “Shawn Haigins” on my Facebook page but my books are marketed under my real name only. My readers still find it fascinating to discover that the pseudonym is an anagram—it remains a curiosity, part of my persona.

Sutanuka: Chanakya’s contemporary moniker - Gangasagar Mishra's character development is amazing, how did you contemplate it? Has there been a real life Gangasagar Mishra to have inspired you?

Ashwin Sanghi: Gangasagar Mishra is a product that has been derived by melting the personalities, character traits and behavior of many real life politicians down the ages into a single unifying character. You will find elements of virtually all Indian politicians is this one single person. What inspired me was not Gangasagar Mishra or any modern-day equivalent of him, but Chanakya himself. Too much attention seems to be given to the political machinations of Chanakya whereas insufficient attention is paid to the fact that his seminal work, the Arthashastra, was mostly about good governance. I was absolutely amazed to find that the Arthashastra even specifies how grain should be stored, how a treasury should be constructed, the ideal form of taxation, maintenance of law and order, the preferred width of a carriage road, and virtually every aspect of sensible government policy. It's unfortunate to see that what plagues India today is simply a fundamental lack of governance. I think the lesson for all of us is that we need to pay more attention to Chanakya's lessons in governance rather than his lessons on realpolitik. Chanakya is truly someone that we should attempt to emulate in order to govern ourselves better.

Sutanuka: How did you connect both the modern with the medieval timelines together so skillfully?

Ashwin Sanghi: It was Edmund Burke who said, “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” I find that when I observe current events around me, I instinctively correlate these with events that happened in the past. When I read about modern-day conflicts between Islam and the western world, I can’t help thinking of the religious Crusades that were fought for most of the three hundred years following the eleventh century. When I read about the Nithari serial killings, I begin to mull over the terror that Jack the Ripper caused in England in 1888. When I watch the IPL allegations on TV and the consequent damage that it may have done to the reputation of cricket, I think about the Black Sox scandal that almost ruined baseball in 1919. When I hear about scams like those of the CWG or telecom, I correlate them to the Railroad Bubble. History inevitably repeats itself, one simply needs to observe the patterns. This pattern is what interests me not the history in itself and this is what is central to my fiction. Once one observes the patterns, it becomes rather easy to find modern day parallels to ancient tales.

Sutanuka: Writing your debut novel on Jesus Christ has begotten you criticisms of being a Dan Brown Wannabe along with several appreciations. Is Chanakya's Chant an attempt to prove those critics wrong?

Ashwin Sanghi: I think that my greatest advantage has been the fact that I do not have formal training in creative writing. It was Somerset Maugham who said, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” I was genuinely unaware of any rules and this lack of formal training allowed me to write in a very distinct style that was uniquely my own. With my first novel—The Rozabal Line—my aim was to coalesce disparate threads of the Jesus in India story and present them in a cogent aggregated form. Whether this made for an entertaining read was inconsequential in my mind. With my second book—Chanakya’s Chant—I was testing my abilities as a storyteller. I simply wanted to see whether I could get my readers hooked till the very last page. Writing Chanakya’s Chant was much more about testing my abilities as a storyteller rather than shaking off the Dan Brown tag. When I die, I hope that I will not be called a writer, novelist or author. I hope that I will be called a storyteller because that is the area in which I’m seeking perfection. As has been oft said, easy reading is damn hard writing!

Sutanuka: Why did you pick Chanakya as a central character for your novel?

Ashwin Sanghi: Chanakya is often called India’s Machiavelli, although my personal view would be that Niccolò Machiavelli was Europe’s Chanakya. Chanakya was probably the greatest political strategist that ever lived and was credited with having engineered the downfall of the Nanda dynasty and the installation of Chandragupta Maurya to the throne of Magadha around 320 BC. As a writer of fiction, I find Chanakya’s personality and character extremely interesting. Here's someone who penned reams of statements on government policy, statecraft, strategy and diplomacy almost 1800 years before Machiavelli! Just as a photographer searches for the perfect picture, I find myself searching for complex characters... preferably characters that are multihued and thus difficult to characterize as good or bad. Chanakya was efficient yet ruthless, principled yet amoral, intelligent yet devious, magnanimous yet vengeful. In short, the ideal complex character for a novel!

Sutanuka: What kind of research went behind your book, Chanakya's Chant?

Ashwin Sanghi: The research was at two levels because, as you know, there are two parallel stories in this book. The first one traces the rise of Chanakya 2300 years ago and ends with him having succeeded in installing Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second traces the life of Gangasagar Mishra a Brahmin teacher from Uttar Pradesh who makes it his life's purpose to make a girl from a slum into the country's prime minister. The ancient story required historical reading, including the Arthashastra as well as several other books penned on Chanakya. I also read an English translation of the Mudrarakshasa, a historical play in Sanskrit by Vishakhadatta who lived in the 4th century. The modern-day story simply involved lots of newspaper reading. The drama of politics is enacted before us each day in the front pages... one doesn't need to stray any further!

Sutanuka: You are considered among one of the successful Thriller novelists of India. How hard has it been for you to achieve this status?

Ashwin Sanghi: I could never have imagined that my novels would be so successful when I wrote them. When I completed The Rozabal Line in 2005, I spent a year trying to find a publisher. I was unsuccessful in my quest and out of sheer frustration decided to self-publish the novel so that it would become available on international book retail sites. I had never imagined that this particular self-published book would fall into the hands of Gautam Padmanabhan and Hemu Ramiah at Westland and that they would love it. Even when Westland decided that they would publish the book in 2008, I could not have imagined that it would become a bestseller. Chanakya’s Chant hit the #1 spot last month on India-Today’s bestseller list. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that happening to one of my books. It has been rightly said that the journey is the destination. Rather than spending too much time worrying about the destination, I try to enjoy the journey.

Sutanuka: What are you currently reading? Name some of your all time favorite books or authors.

I’m currently reading “The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. However, I was brought up on a diet of commercial fiction and thrillers for most of my growing years: Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Irving Wallace, Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, Ken Follett, Arthur Hailey. In the past decade, Dan Brown, John Grisham, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin and countless others were added to my list. Among Indian authors, I enjoyed Salman Rushdie, Ruskin Bond and R. K. Narayan.

Sutanuka: Here are some questions that your fans would love to know the answers of:

Ashwin Sanghi:

* Your favorite author? Jeffrey Archer
* Your favorite past-time? Spinning Beyblades with my son!
* Your Pet superstition? I’m “touching wood” constantly!

Sutanuka: What are your plans for your third novel? What is the current project you are working on?

Ashwin Sanghi: I’m working on my third novel and I hope to complete this by March 2012. I wish I could tell you more but if I did I would have to kill you. It was Benjamin Franklin who said that “Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead!”

Asian Age, 18-4-2011: Meet the 'Past' Master

2011-04-19T07:20:00.002+05:30

When Ashwin Sanghi started the process of writing Chanakya's Chant, the only thing he had in his mind was to break away from the "desi Dan Brown" title which his first book The Rozabal Line had earned him. "I wanted to test my ability as a storyteller and see if I could write a book that compels my reader to get to the conclusion," he says. Looking at the stupendous success CC has met with, one can safely say that he has achieved his goal...

New Indian Express, Bangalore, 18-4-11: Sanghi's New Mantra

2011-04-18T18:35:00.004+05:30

After the phenomenal success of his controversial debut, The Rozabal Line, Ashwin Sanghi, an entrepreneur by profession, is ready with his second book, Chanakya’s Chant. Shashi Tharoor while releasing the novel in Mumbai called it an “enthralling, delightfully-interesting and gripping read with historical research that is impressive.”

The story moves between the past and the present, tracing the lives of the great Indian statergist Chanakya, the power behind the king Chandragupta Maurya and Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher from a village in present day India, the brains behind thrusting a little slum girl to become the Prime Minister of the country. We find out more from the author.

In The Rozabal Line you were dealing with a more sensitive topic (Jesus coming to India). With Chanakya’s Chant, do you think you will attract less attention from the critics?
I’ve never written for the critics. There was once a review that said, ‘Ashwin Sanghi should have stopped after page 10.’ But you can’t listen to all that. You have to just keep writing.

But readers, especially Christian readers, were not happy with The Rozabal Line. What is the worst criticism that you received from them?
We are a country sensitive about religions and faith. Even when it comes to historical characters, it has a tendency to set off sparks. Unfortunately, we can deal with bad roads and bad governance, but not faith. People either hate my books or love it. Of course, there were many criticisms. There is a gentleman who till today sends me his blessings to ‘save my soul’.

The Rozabal Line was tagged as ‘the desi Da Vinci Code’. That was pretty unfortunate considering your book was not much like that of Dan Brown’s.
True. That tag turned out to be negative for me. The final turn my book took was not like The Da Vinci Code. Rosabel Line left you with a philosophical ending. A lot of people found the two books completely different. But if there is anything written about Jesus, people naturally link it with The Da Vinci Code.

Do you think you did not find publishers because not many Indian authors write historical thrillers?
The fact is that Indian authors were ‘not supposed to’ write historical thrillers. There was no benchmark when I had to self publish The Rozabal Line. But that scene is changing now. There are many authors who have started experimenting with different genres. We have started filling the layer between the two slices of bread – award winning literature and chicklets.

So, what made you come up with Chanakya’s Chant?
I wanted to write a fast-paced fiction this time. A couple of years ago, I was sitting in the airport in New Delhi and watching TV. The UPA government was coming into power. That was when I thought, ‘has it always been this messy to create a government?’ Was it this messy 2300 years ago? Yes. The dynamics were the same then. The only difference is that, then, kings went into battle and now people go to elections. So I wanted to explore the topic. Secondly, I was brought up in a business background. So anything remotely associated with the game theory fascinated me. I’m a fundamental believer in the power of Shakti. I wanted to explore that too. In the book, the power of Chanakya is your’s to take, provided that you use it for a woman. And today, is the age of women power.

The dangerous thing about writing historical fiction is that you can end up diluting history. How did you manage to strike the balance?
You need to have an internal barometre. I saw that more when I was writing The Rozabal Line than Chanakya’s Chant. But when you are dealing with the very ancient, it gives the author full play. But having said that, the principle I’ve worked on is ‘do no harm.’

You have shown Chandragupta Maurya as a subservient man. But that was not the case in reality.
I needed to do that. In the book I had to focus on two characters – Chanakya, from the past and Gangasagar Mishra from the present. I needed to make them the be all and end all. The historical bit in the book is also fiction. I have taken liberties in timelines and and ancillary characters.

DNA, Apr 18 2011: Chanting the Success Mantra

2011-04-18T17:19:00.002+05:30

Comparisons are odious — and author Ashwin Sanghi has had enough of being called ‘India’s Dan Brown’. True, his books qualify as page-turners every bit as Brown’s religion-secret society-symbolism thrillers do, but Sanghi believes that’s where the similarities end. “In fact, that particular comparison did a great disservice to my first book The Rozabal Line because many people picked it up expecting something like Brown’s thrill-a-page books. In fact, it is nothing like that and has a very deep philosophical core,” says Sanghi.

At the same time, Sanghi, like many writers belonging to a new breed of Indian authors who are not apologetic about writing genre fiction, is unabashed about his love for thrillers and the fact that he’s written two particularly successful ones. His first, The Rozabal Line, dealt with the premise that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion and was whisked away to Kashmir, where he spent his last days and was finally laid to rest at the Valley’s Rozabal shrine. Sanghi self-published the book in 2007 under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins (an anagram of his own name) after being rejected by several publishers; the book was subsequently picked up the Westland and became one of their top-sellers.

Sanghi offered them his second book Chanakya’s Chant and was, of course, snapped up. The book is following in its predecessors footsteps by doing great business - it has consistently been among the top five on all best-seller lists.
A history buff, Sanghi says he has always been drawn towards the character of Chanakya. “The Arthashastra is a fascinating book.

The attention to detail given to every area of governance is astounding. We like to think of Kautilya as a political strategist, but in the Arthashastra, he has laid down rules for everything, from how wide chariot wheels should be to how deep under the earth a king’s treasury should be located to maintaining hygiene in brothels,” informs Sanghi. “Yet, even today we can’t be sure if the man we severally know of as Chanakya, Kautilya (the author of the famous Arthashastra) and Vishnu Gupta (assumed to be Chanakya’s original name) were one and the same.”

The narrative of the book shifts between 320 BC, when Chanakya’s protégé Chandragupta Maurya ruled over the kingdom of Magadha, and the present time when a wily old politician called Gangasagar Mishra plays kingmaker with a girl from humble origins, whom he vows to set up as the country’s prime minister.

Very Jeffery Archer, yes, and Sanghi is the first to acknowledge that his writing sensibility has been strongly influenced by authors such as Archer, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum and Sidney Sheldon, whom he grew up reading thanks to his mother who had an enviable collection of novels by these authors and who “never questioned the judgement of letting a teenage boy read them.”

“For years, the yardstick by which we judged fiction written by Indian authors remained the same. It was always expected that we would produce literary fiction, award-winning fiction. These expectations are being proven wrong,” says Sanghi. According to him, there is a wide reading public reading in English in India today, and it wants well-written, fast-paced books that are more ‘rooted’ in Sub-Continental history and events and not remote ones such as the Cold War.

Sanghi attributes his success in equal measure to intelligent writing and some savvy marketing. The entrepreneur with a degree from Yale does not undervalue the latter, and has been promoting the book on online forums as well, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube.

A chant from his current book, which is central to its narrative, has been set to music by young composer Ameya Naik. A video has been created to accompany it and been uploaded on YouTube.

“With my first book, I was a bit of a babe in the woods. I left it to my publishers, didn’t want to be too intrusive. But social media allows an author to take his book out there, and publishers are more than happy to let him to that, because who can talk about a book better than the person who’s written it,” asks Sanghi.

Religion, history, politics and mythology: these form the DNA of his books, and Sanghi means to weave his narrative strand around these elements in future books too, with one element getting bigger play than the other in each book. He is also obsessed by the blurring of lines between fact and fiction and past and present. “We tend to think Indian politics are messy today, but if you look at history you get a sense that it has always been so.

Earlier wars were fought on the battlefield and bloodshed was real; these days, they are fought in Parliament, in courts and on TV channels,” he says.

Deccan Chronicle, Bangalore, Apr15,'11: "Savage and poetic, it is a book that you cannot put down."

2011-04-16T16:51:00.002+05:30

Harmony, Apr 2011: "Simply written; thoroughly enjoyable."

2011-04-11T14:48:00.001+05:30

Indian Express Chennai, Apr 10 2011: Filling the Gaps in History

2011-04-10T19:07:00.002+05:30

Since he wrote The Rozabal Line, a book that explores the last years of Jesus Christ and a theory that he may have travelled to India, businessman-turned- writer Ashwin Sanghi has often been seen as an Indian competitor to Dan Brown. It’s a title that does not sit lightly with its holder and Sanghi seems both bewildered and resigned when it comes up.
“Rozabal (2006) is nothing like The Da Vinci Code, but I tend to get clubbed with that. I wouldn’t want to be a desi Dan Brown because it establishes an expectancy in my readers that every book will be a theological thriller. That’s not where I’m coming from.”
Sanghi says he wants to explore different topics, though a couple of things will remain common. One: elements of mystery and conspiracy. “I need that to get my adrenaline pumping. I’m a businessman by day and any book I write requires at least six to eight months of research. So, if the topic doesn’t hold my interest, I may abandon the project midway.” Secondly, it “has to involve the ancient, because that’s essential to my DNA”.
Rather than write historical fiction then, Sanghi is more interested in the way history relates to the present, and in turning that equation into a page-turner.
The Rozabal Line, for instance, is not all abstract history—the narrative continually shifts to the present day to incorporate elements as diverse as the Lashkare- Taiba and Opus Dei.
The book’s success has ensured that Sanghi’s second effort, Chanakya’s Chant was both much-awaited and well-received. It currently tops the bestseller list.
It was by 2009 summer that Sanghi started looking for a new topic. That time, UPA II was coming in to power in Delhi and a tug of war was going on for Cabinet berths. “That’s when I decided I want my next book to be 180 degrees away from religion—and set in politics.”
Chanakya’s Chant is based on two parallel constructs: a historical story on the political machina tions of Kautilya in establishing Chandragupta Maurya as emperor, and a contemp orary thread where a history teacher in UP is struggling to find a protege whom he will guide to become the prime minister. “I like to write in those areas where there are gaps in history.”

Deccan Chronicle, Apr 3, 2011: A tryst with the past

2011-04-08T15:49:00.002+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi’s latest literary endeavour can best be described as a historical thriller and a political drama. Combining two genres of writing is a challenge, not a child’s play but Ashwin Sanghi has met it more than adequately done just that with a flourish and panache!

Chanakya’s Chant is a page-turner that chronicles the machinations of Chanakya and the protagonist, Gangasagar Mishra. A remarkable follow-on to Sanghi’s hugely successful Rozabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant essentially delves into the past to find prototypes for the present following the success of his previous book Rozabal Line.

“Chanakya has spawned so many clones amongst the movers and shakers of the present,” says the author. “There are traces of Chanakya in the likes of Mayawati, Narasimha Rao, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Indira Gandhi.” Commenting further on the inspiration for the book, he says, “I really didn’t need to look very far. I think there is enough material in the newspapers to weave a story.”

Ashwin Sanghi says he was at a great advantage while writing a book on ancient times. “There are huge gaps in history, so I could convincingly fill them up with fiction,” he explains, adding, “People always tend to comment on the good old days of the past. But I feel things were just as unstable in the past with multiple kingdoms fighting against one another. I think it is similar to the present day scenario and the battle strategies have not changed.”

The author is obviously fascinated by the Machieavielliain protagonist as he jocularly remarks, “I would love to possess the power of Chanakya his intellect and ruthlessness.”

The Hindu, Chennai, Apr 7 2011: Best of Both Worlds

2011-04-07T15:33:00.003+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi's latest book “Chanakya's Chant” blends fact and fiction in an engaging way

The protagonists of Ashwin Sanghi's latest book “Chanakya's Chant” came to life against the background of tumultuous ocean waves. The trailer, screened at Vivanta by Taj, Connemara, introduced the audience to Chanakya, whose wisdom, cunning, and strategy made him a kingmaker 2,000-odd years ago, and Gangasagar Mishra, his contemporary version.

Parallel stories

History with a modern touch, the book tells parallel stories, revelling in the ingenious schemes of both men. While Chanakya's plans eventually win Chandragupta Maurya the throne of Magadha, Gangasagar helps a girl from a slum become the Prime Minister of India. Ashwin's previous book, “The Rozabel Line”, was also based on history with a parallel, contemporary story running right through, but the author seems to have given “Chanakya's Chant” a twist.

“There is a need to demystify mythology and history. Many Indian readers want books rooted in Indianness and history and I believe ancient tales told in a contemporary context is a trend that's catching on. Youngsters today don't want to hear the same old stories. They want a rational explanation for everything,” he says.

While the Yale graduate spends his mornings running his family business, his nights are spent spinning thrillers. As for “Chanakya's Chant”, he always began work on the book each day with prayer and incense. “My kind of writing involves research; so I usually give myself an 18-month time-frame to complete a book. Six months for research, six for writing and another six for editing and production. But this time, everything came together in a year, which was a pleasant surprise,” says the author.

To develop Chanakya's character, Ashwin not only spent months researching the kingmaker but also read his work, the “Arthashastra”. “All the fundamental elements in my story are true. Chanakya was a Brahmin who studied in Takshila. He was a well-documented historical figure but the advantage that writers like me have is filling in the gaps between the records. That's where the element of fiction comes into play. Chanakya or Kautilya's character is based on what I read in his own book, the science of wealth. I wanted to see what it would be like if a person in the present-day context had Chanakya's powers,” Ashwin explains.

While many of the plots in the story are inspired by real-life events that Ashwin picked up from the newspapers he read every morning, he says he strives to be an engaging storyteller. “I don't want to be a writer but a storyteller. I'd like to provide a story that keeps you engrossed. If you told me that whatever research I did was great, I would be happy, but if you told me you went late to work because you couldn't put my book down, that's its real success,” he smiles.

ET Madras Plus: Of Chanakya's Legacy

2011-04-06T11:38:00.001+05:30

Times of India, Chennai, Mar 31, 2011: Turning Heads

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Ashwin Sanghi strongly believes in the adage of history repeating itself. That’s probably why both his books, one on religion, and the other on Chanakya, have a blend of history in them. “When I looked at the scams, political upheavals and corruption
prevailing in society today, it struck me that these incidents didn’t occur out of the blue. They have happened in the past and are bound to repeat themselves. Only the backdrop and the people have changed,” begins the writer who has a fervour for history and conspiracy.
“Conspiracies fascinate me. When I visited the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar before writing my first book, I remember thinking that the person enshrined there was no ordinary mortal. History is rife with mysteries and that visit ignited a fire to unveil some of them,” remarks Ashwin Sanghi. The entrepreneurturned-writer goes on to say, “Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But, they manage to grab the attention of the readers, right from page one. I’ll consider myself a good storyteller, the day people believe it’s OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines, just to finish reading my book,” says he.
Ashwin isn’t particularly fond of the tag that comes with being an author. “Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I’m alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle,” says Ashwin, who has also been an entrepreneur for the last one decade.
He is all praise for namma Chennai. “If there is one city apart from Mumbai, where I would love to settle down, it has to be Chennai. Although the city has grown leaps and bounds today, the people’s warmth remains the same and they appreciate the little joys in life. And that’s what makes them stand apart,” concludes Ashwin Sanghi.

India Today, Apr 4 2011: Chanakya's Chant at #1 on Bestsellers List

2011-03-27T11:47:00.002+05:30

I'm delighted to inform each one of you, my friends, that as per the latest India Today Bestseller list (April 4 2011), Chanakya's Chant has now reached the #1 spot. It would not have happened without the good wishes, blessings, support and affection of each one of you. Thanks a million times over!

The Punekar: Reviving The Past

2011-03-25T10:54:00.001+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi was recently in town for the launch of his second book Chanakya’s Chant. Previously launched in Delhi and Mumbai, the book has already become bestseller and ranking second in Crossword and Landmark book stores. The book launch was arranged by the Tossed Salad book club at Crossword, Senapati Bapat road.

Ashwin Sanghi is an entrepreneur by profession but a writer by passion. His first book, ‘The Rozabal Line’ got him fame and recognition as a well accomplished writer.

The launch began with a book reading session, where the author read three interesting passages that were persuading enough to pick up his copy. Chanakya’s Chant is a historical thriller that revolves around ancient and modern day politics.

The brilliance of this novel is that it takes us back to the 340 BC era and again connects to the present day scenario, maintaining the basic theme as Politics. The Shakti mantra that appears throughout the book is like a treat to the readers. The double tale of Indian politics has been nicely put together by Sanghi in Chanakya’s Chant. According to Sanghi, there is very little that has changed from the past and the basic political scenario remains the same.

The book has been compiled after a thorough research. Sanghi studied the entire series of Chanakya tales that was telecasted years back on Doordarshan. He also read several books consisting of Chanakya’s Arthashastra and biographies.

Ashwin Sanghi has used liberal language all throughout and has even being questioned by his friends for doing so. To that he has only one thing to say, “I do not write for children but adults. Also being liberal has helped me write in my own voice and be true to myself and readers. “

Sanghi who is pursuing a PHD in creative writing, has already started penning his thoughts for the next thriller and promises to come out with one book each year.

Indian Express, Mar 24 2011: Turn The Page

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Ashwin Sanghi resurrects Chanakya in his latest historical thriller

ASHWIN Sanghi's new book, Chanakya's Chant, takes the readers to 340 BC -with vivid descriptions of life in Magadh and Takshashila. However, as they turn some more pages, they are shifted to the contemporary world. What remains constant is the story of Chanakya, who is reborn as Gangasagar Mishra in a small Uttar Pradesh village nearly, 2,300 years later.

Sanghi -the author of The Rozabal Line, a thriller about Jesus having survived the crucifixion and settling down in India -with his second novel, once again, fictionalises history to come up with a page-turner. "I have always been intrigued by Chanakya. During my research, I felt that the political setting 2,300 years ago was not too different from what it is now. In fact, after reading nearly a dozen books on the subject, watching a series and talking to experts, I felt that there is a recurring pattern.
History does repeat itself."

The book uses colloquial terms generously in its narrative. "The reality of the world is something that I do not want to ignore. I cannot describe a street accurately without describing the filth it has. I have been asked a lot of times to tone down the language, but frankly, this is what the world is like, so why do we refrain? My readers are not children, it's a grown-up audience I address my writings to," he explains The Mumbai-born author is currently basking in the achievement of being on the Indian bestsellers' list. An entrepreneur by profession, he writes on history, religion and politics. Talking about his fascination with Chanakya, he says, "The present-day Chanakya's character is very interesting to understand. How his mind unfolds is something I loved to deal with."

Like him, many Indian writers are now dealing with stories set in Indian contexts. "For a very long time, we were writing for western audiences. But I see a change now. My generation does not have colonial legacies to deal with. We, as a generation today, love to read voices that are Indian." The writer is currently working on another historybased novel. "I have finished writing 30,000 words for it, the DNA of the book is steeped in history," he says.

Chanakya's Chant at #3 on Top-10 of Free Press Journal

2011-03-14T17:10:00.000+05:30

Financial Express, Mar 13 2011: Chanakya's Chant on Top-5 Fiction Bestsellers

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Asian Age, Mar 9 2011: Chanakya's Chant in Top-10 Fiction Bestsellers

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Flipkart Blog: Interview, March 2011

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An author who thrives on the amalgamation of history and fiction - Ashwin Sanghi (AKA Shawn Haigins) knows just the right formula to write an addictive thriller that keeps you at the edge but also provides you with juicy nuggets of historical factoids. In his first book The Rozabal Line, he puts forth the possibility that Jesus could have spent his latter years in India; at the same time, tying in a story of jihadis with similarities to the 12 apostles. In his latest book Chanakya’s Chant, Sanghi explores a fascinating personality from India’s history - the wily, genius, political strategist Chanakya and in parallel, ties it in with the story of Gangasagar Mishra, Chanakya’s fictional contemporary moniker.

With an abundance of research under his belt, Ashwin Sanghi is an inquisitive writer, who can flawlessly bound a fast paced plot structure with the rich factual background of his real life characters. His books are essential for a reader who enjoys modern thrillers, just as much as they enjoy a well written piece of history. It’s easy reading with a fine balance of entertainment and knowledge.

In an exclusive interview with Flipkart - acclaimed author Ashwin Sanghi talks about his inspirations, ‘fiction that sounds like fact’, his two historical thrillers - The Rozabal Line and Chanakya’s Chant, the similarities between Machiavelli and the great Chanakya, his pseudonym pen-name Shawn Haigins and much more!

Who is Ashwin Sanghi and what makes him tick?
The person in question suffers from multiple personality disorder. One of his personalities is Ashwin Sanghi, who is a Mumbai-born businessman with an MBA from Yale. That is his boring avatar. At night, however, Ashwin Sanghi morphs into Shawn Haigins, his alter ego. A peg of whiskey and a notebook computer rule his world each night for several hours. What makes the author in him tick? It’s probably the whiskey!

An entrepreneur by profession, who or what has inspired you to become a writer?
My passion for reading was ignited when my maternal grandfather would bombard me with books that were far ahead of my time. He would insist that after reading every book I must write a letter detailing what I liked and what I didn’t. In the beginning, it was a tedious process but my imagination and knowledge increased over the years. It’s precisely for this reason that I believe in the blessings of my ancestors moving my pen.

In a nutshell, how would you describe yourself as a writer?
The things that fascinate me are usually rooted in history, mythology, politics and religion. I’m assuming that this fundamental DNA would not change in my future novels. Although these topics pique my interest, I do not see myself as someone who can simply write historical or mythological fiction unless the subject has some relevance to the present day. Even though The Rozabal Line explored the possibility that Jesus Christ may have survived the crucifixion and may have traveled to India, the story was propelled forward by the modern-day story of a group of Islamic terrorists who are funded by the Illuminati. Similarly, with Chanakya’s Chant, it’s not the simple retelling of a historical tale but the linking of that ancient historical tale to present-day Indian politics that excites me.

You talk about ‘fiction that sounds like fact‘ — sounds like a genre on its own, can you elaborate?
Think about it. You switch on the TV to watch the evening news. Which news channel are you most likely to see? Provided that you do not have a pre-determined channel affinity, you are probably going to see the channel that happens to be breaking sensational news. Increasingly, we want to hear fact that sounds like fiction, which is precisely why stories like the Jessica Lall murder case, the Nithari serial killings, or the Arushi Talwar double murder interest us. They all sound like the plot of an Ian Rankin murder mystery. The converse is also true. Not only are we more interested in fact that sounds like fiction, we relate better to fiction that sounds like fact. So, if I have to create a plot in the present-day, it should be as close to the sort of story that you would read with your morning cuppa.

How does history play an integral role in your brand of fiction?
In the eighteenth century, it was Edmund Burke who famously said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” I find that when I observe current events around me, I instinctively correlate these with events that happened in the past. When I read about modern-day conflicts between Islam and the western world, I can’t help thinking of the religious Crusades that were fought for most of the three hundred years following the eleventh century. When I read about the Nithari serial killings, I begin to mull over the terror that Jack the Ripper caused in England in 1888. When I watch the IPL allegations on TV and the consequent damage that it may have done to the reputation of cricket, I think about the Black Sox scandal that almost ruined baseball in 1919. When I hear about scams like those of the CWG or telecom, I correlate them to the Railroad Bubble. History inevitably repeats itself, one simply needs to observe the patterns. This pattern is what interests me most and this is what is central to my fiction.

On The Rozabal Line

What is The Rozabal Line about?
In 1999 I read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It was through this book that the notion that Jesus may have left behind a bloodline first came to my attention. A couple of years later, I read Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived in India and was fascinated with the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. I began to wonder whether I could marry the two theories i.e. that he survived the crucifixion and traveled to India and that he left behind a bloodline. In a nutshell, that’s the core of The Rozabal Line.

Why did you pick Jesus Christ as a central character for your first novel?
I don’t think that I picked the topic, as much as the topic picked me. After visiting the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar, I spent the next two years reading each and every book that I could acquire on this particular topic and related material viz. the possibility of Jesus having spent his missing years as a youth studying in India, the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he was whisked away to safety, and the notion that Jesus traveled to India to reunite with the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in Kashmir. In all, I read around forty books during this time besides scouring the Internet for any information that I could possibly find. By the time that I was done with my reading, I did not have any alternative but to find a way to present all the disparate threads of information via a single book. I started writing The Rozabal Line in 2005 and finished it eighteen months later.

Was there a specific message you were trying to convey with this book?
I’m not a religious person. I’m spiritual in the sense that I believe in the essence of “do no harm” as well as the theory of karmic debt, but that does not translate into being someone who prostrates himself daily inside a temple. I am equally comfortable inside a church or dargah as I am inside a temple. In fact, it is this openness that allows me to explore the question “Where did this idea emerge from?” Thus, The Rozabal Line is not a story about Jesus Christ surviving the crucifixion and traveling to Kashmir; it is a story about how human beliefs and ideas have been freely absorbed and assimilated down the ages, and how such inter-faith borrowing has shaped our ideas and beliefs in the present day. This was the primary message of the book. Unfortunately it ended up being seen as a desi Da Vinci Code by some.

Are you of the belief that Jesus moved to India after the crucifixion?
My personal belief is that it is irrelevant whether Rozabal is indeed the actual tomb of Jesus or not. For me, personally, Rozabal represents an “alternative story”. It is representative of the possibility that the story contained in the four canonical gospels may be the truth but not necessarily the whole truth. It is also symbolic of many facets of the Christian faith that have been obliterated down the ages. The fact that the lost tribes of Israel certainly had a connection with India, the fact that early Christianity drew inspiration from other faiths such as Buddhism, the fact that Jesus may have been one the greatest men that walked on earth, but a man nonetheless. As a writer of fiction, I find the notion that Jesus traveled to India extremely exciting — even romantic. Having read virtually every book on the subject I can freely admit that there are enough arguments favouring both sides of the debate and hence what you conclude from the book is usually a matter of personal faith.

What has the reaction for the novel been like? For some it could make for a fascinating story, for others it could be considered grossly blasphemous…
I am now quite used to being blessed and damned, praised and criticized, believed and disbelieved, all within the span of a single day. I could never have imagined that my novel would be so successful when I wrote it. When I completed it in 2005, I spent a year trying to find a publisher. I was unsuccessful in my quest and out of sheer frustration decided to self-publish the novel so that it would become available on international book retail sites. I had never imagined that this particular self-published book would fall into the hands of Gautam Padmanabhan and Hemu Ramiah at Westland and that they would love it. Even when Westland decided to publish the book in 2008, I could not have imagined that it would become a bestseller. The Rozabal Line is a book that you will either love or hate, depending upon your own beliefs and values; love it or hate it, you cannot ignore it.

On Chanakya’s Chant

Tell us about Chanakya’s Chant’s plot?
There are two parallel stories that are narrated in Chanakya’s Chant. The first is the story of Chanakya, 2300 years ago. It is a fictional retelling of the political machinations that brought Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second is a modern-day tale of a Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh—Gangasagar Mishra—who decides that a poor girl from a Kanpur slum is the ideal candidate to be made Prime Minister of India. The contemporary tale describes the strategies employed by Gangasagar to bring his dream to fruition.

For those who might not know, give us a little history on your main character—Chanakya. What was it about his character that you found fascinating?
Chanakya is often called India’s Machiavelli, although my personal view would be that Niccolò Machiavelli was Europe’s Chanakya. Chanakya was probably the greatest political strategist that ever lived and was credited with having engineered the downfall of the Nanda dynasty and the installation of Chandragupta Maurya to the throne of Magadha around 320 BC. As a writer of fiction, I find Chanakya’s personality and character extremely interesting. Here’s someone who penned reams of statements on government policy, statecraft, strategy and diplomacy almost 1800 years before Machiavelli! Just as a photographer searches for the perfect picture, I find myself searching for complex characters… preferably characters that are multi-hued and thus difficult to characterize as good or bad. Chanakya was efficient yet ruthless, principled yet amoral, intelligent yet devious, magnanimous yet vengeful. In short, the ideal complex character for a novel!

How did you go about developing Chanakya’s contemporary moniker - Gangasagar Mishra.
That was easy! All one had to do was to study some of the political strategies that have been adopted in the past twenty-five years and coalesce them into the strategies of a single character. Gangasagar Mishra is a product that has been derived by melting the personalities, character traits and behavior of many real life politicians down the ages into a single unifying character.

The story has been written in parallel time lines - how have you connected the modern with the medieval?
The ancient story ends with a riddle and a mantra — a chant. That chant holds the power to actualize a leader in the present. It’s the chant that connects the past and the present, hence the title— Chanakya’s Chant.

In 140 characters - what can the reader expect from Chanakya’s Chant?
“It’s a fast-paced page turner. A political thriller inspired by the machinations of Chanakya. Masala fiction with a splash of history.”

General

Tell us the story behind your pseudonym, Shawn Haigins. Why did you choose to use one and how did you come about choosing the name? Has it made a commercial difference?
As you know, I am not a writer by profession. I was born and brought up in a business environment. I started working when I was 16 and completed my MBA when I was 22. By the time that I completed writing my debut novel, The Rozabal Line, in 2006, I had already been in business for over 20 years. The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalize my life so that my entrepreneurial dimension would remain distinct and separate from my literary one. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym to use until I actually completed the novel.

As you know, there’s an abundance of anagrams in my novel and the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my real name as a pseudonym? Hence my first novel was written under the name “Shawn Haigins”, an anagram of my real name “Ashwin Sanghi”. When Tata-Westland decided to publish the novel in India they insisted that it had to be published under my real name given the fact that the novel in question involved a sensitive subject. As it turns out, that wasn’t such a bad idea. My publishers now joke that I was originally a businessman who was also an author and that now I’m an author who is also a businessman. I continue to use the pseudonym “Shawn Haigins” on my Facebook page but my books are marketed under my real name only.

How is one able to blend nonfiction with fiction convincingly for the readers?
What makes a good Martini? Is it the vodka or the dry vermouth? I like to think that the fiction in my books is the vodka and that the nonfiction is the vermouth. In a Martini, if you add too much vermouth, it won’t be dry enough; add too little and the Martini won’t be as smooth. The key lies in introducing the vermouth in perfectly calibrated amounts. In like fashion one needs to pepper fiction with nonfiction just to the extent that it makes the fiction sounds plausible. Overdo one or the other, and you’ve killed the story… and that’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but vermouth!

What kind of research went behind your two books, essentially the backbone is history…
The research involved in writing The Rozabal Line was much more exhaustive than that of Chanakya’s Chant. This was simply due to the fact that one had to tread very carefully when writing fiction that touched upon someone’s faith. I had less concerns when it came to writing about the political confabulations of Chanakya.

With The Rozabal Line, I found that there was a wealth of information that I could dip into. Some of this information was available in excellent books that had covered various issues such as the Jesus in India hypothesis, the historical Jesus, and the interplay of mythologies and religious beliefs in the evolution of the character of Jesus. Books such as Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten, Jesus in Kashmir: The Lost Tomb by Suzanne Olsson, The Fifth Gospel by Fida Hassnain, The Unknown Life of Jesus by Nicolas Notovich and The Lost Years of Jesus by Elizabeth Clare Prophet were very important in building the framework of the story. Other books such as The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by S. Acharya and The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviours by Kersey Graves were important from the angle of building the “alternative hypothesis” around the canonical Jesus. I spent most of 2003 and 2004 reading every book that I could lay my hands on (around 40+). These books are listed at the back of my novel. I only started writing in 2005 after I had completed reading these books.

With Chanakya’s Chant, the research was at two levels because, as you know, there are two parallel stories in this book. The first one traces the rise of Chanakya 2300 years ago and ends with him having succeeded in installing Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second traces the life of Gangasagar Mishra a Brahmin teacher from Uttar Pradesh who makes it his life’s purpose to make a girl from a slum into the country’s prime minister. The ancient story required historical reading, including the Arthashastra as well as several other books penned on Chanakya. I also read an English translation of the Mudrarakshasa — a historical play in Sanskrit by Vishakhadatta who lived in the 4th century. The modern-day story simply involved lots of newspaper reading. The drama of politics is enacted before us each day in the front pages… one doesn’t need to stray any further!

Advice to people who would like to start pursuing writing as a secondary career?
My advice is as follows: (A) Choose the right time in your life to pursue writing as a secondary career. It’s impractical to do it if you are financially insecure or are at the very beginning of a career graph. There’s not much to be earned financially as a writer, especially in the early days, and hence this is an option better pursued when one is better settled in life.
(B) Having chosen to pursue a parallel career in writing, do not allow either of your professions to eat into the time of the other. Both are equally important and it does not make sense to allow your literary pursuits to creep into your daytime job or vice-versa.
(C) Be clear on which job feeds your stomach and which one feeds your soul. Without that clarity in place you are more likely to end up dissatisfied with both careers.

Do you have any quirky habits when it comes to getting down to writing?
If I write in the morning, I light an incense stick for a minute of prayer, brew a mug of coffee and then sit down to write. If I write late at night, I light a Hoyo de Monterrey cigar to start the contemplative process, pour myself a finger of whiskey and then sit down to write! Notice the pattern?

Three books that changed your life and why?
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren: It was the one that got me interested in politics.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: It taught me about wine, women and song—and God!
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: It made me realize that there isn’t much difference between sex and politics!

What are you currently reading?
The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

Chanakya's Chant now on India-Today's Fiction Top-10

2011-03-09T12:23:00.001+05:30

The Telegraph, March 6, 2011: Retelling the legends

2011-03-06T16:34:00.002+05:30

Take a look at Ashwin Sanghi who recently released Chanakya’s Chant — a contemporary political thriller with a mythological base about a modern-day Chanakya, who chants the Shakti mantra to become powerful. Sanghi’s earlier book, The Rozabal Line, takes as its point of departure the myth that Jesus is buried in Kashmir — in a shrine called Roza Bal. “A younger crop of authors are writing commercial fiction, and are also reinterpreting mythology in a certain way,” says Sanghi. And Sanghi’s research ranged from reading up numerous non-fiction writings that argued that Jesus is buried in Roza Bal, to researching the Arthashastra for his latest book, Chanakya’s Chant. Indian mythology is vast and varied and, as yet, only a handful of books have come out. It’s a safe bet that many more will be on their way in the not-too-distant future.

The Book Lovers' Review: Chanakya's Chant

2011-03-03T22:40:00.001+05:30

Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, continues being one of the most interesting and intriguing person till date. Chanakya’s policies have been debated, discussed and his strategies have kept people fascinated and interested even now.

Chanakya is well known as a master strategist who crafted Chandragupta Maurya’s ascent to the king of Bharat. Ashwin Sanghi’s latest book Chanakya’s Chant excellently blends Chanakya’s Bharat and today’s Bharat (modern day India). The thriller also proves that Chanakya’s neetis are as relevant today as they were in those days.

The book takes the reader right into 340BC where Chanakya, a Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome death of his father by the King of Magadh, Dhanananda. Chanakya grows up to become a master strategist who, through his, calculating and cunning tactics seeks his revenge and also, at the same time, manages to thwart Alexander the Great’s plan to invade Bharat. But his most stunning victory is yet to come when by using all his crafty means and pitting the weak forces against each other he manages to anoint Chandragupta Maurya to the throne of Magadh and forming the first empire in India, the mighty Mauryan Empire.

In today’s Bharat, almost two and a half thousand years after, we have Pandit Gangasagar Mishra living in Kanpur ,draws inspiration from the master strategist Chankaya, to get his protégée Chandini Gupta appointed to the highest office in India, that of the Prime Minister. As was with Chanakya the same is with Pandit Mishra, there is no rule that can’t be broken or mended, no price too high to pay and absolutely nothing that can stop you from reaching your goal. There were four mantras that Chanakya believed in Saam, daam, dand, bhed (Equality, enticement, punishment and sowing dissension) and so does the modern day Chankaya aka Pandit Mishra.

The book excellently flits between the two periods and keeps the reader hooked to read what comes next in the political drama. Will Pandit Mishra succeed in his mission to take Chandni to the top? Will he be the king maker he so desires to be?

Though, at times, while reading the modern day events unfold, I felt that some incidents were highly exaggerated and could have been toned down a bit. And some of the decisions that Pandit Mishra takes come across unconvincingly.

Yet the book continues to keep the reader engaged and enthused enough to read through to the very end. A well paced political thriller that will keep you riveted. It should be in your must read list this month.

Sakaal Times, Pune, Feb 27 2011: An Indian Political Saga

2011-03-03T18:10:00.002+05:30

Curious Book Fans: Machiavellian Conspiracies

2011-03-03T18:04:00.003+05:30

Chanakya’s Chant follows very definitely in the footsteps of The Da Vinci Code and other historical thrillers. Ashwin Sanghi brackets past and present to create his page turner, throwing in an ancient chant as a leitmotif. It’s amazing that no one thought of using India’s Machiavelli as the subject or partial subject of novel before, but Chanakya with his king making strategies and devious mapping of power works as the main character of a conspiracy thriller – which is a form that has not really been explored by Indian writers of English.

This is Ashwin Sanghi’s second novel in the genre – the first The Rozabal Line was self published in America under the pen name Shawn Haigins and then published in India by Westland in Sanghi’s own name, where it promptly caught on.

Chanakya’s Chant opens dramatically enough with Paurus – better known to students of history as Porus – succumbing to the seductions of a Lamia steeped in poison who puts a prompt end to his life. The Lamia or vishkanya has been trained and sent by Chanakya.

There follows an abrupt shift to today’s Kanpur and to Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin, whose father dies when he is 15 and he discovers a mysterious stone with Brahmi inscriptions on it, a tribute to the power of the feminine. Chanakya also loses his father to the rope at an early age and concentrates his entire being on revenge.

Jumping between the centuries we follow the lives of Gangasagar and Chanakya. Both Gangasagar and Chanakya follow parallel power lines as they seek to put their candidates at the helm of affairs – in Chanakya’s case, Chandragupta Maurya, in Gangasagar’s the beautiful Chandini Gupta – her name echoing Chandragupta’s deliberately – who is on the way to becoming Prime Minister. Gangsagar is, of course, a reincarnation of Chanakya minus the ugliness and modern India and that ancient country known as Bharat seem to share the same manipulations of power proving that the more things seem to change, the more they remain the same.

The characters who haunt Bharat, readers of history will immediately recognise – Alexander the Great, Seleucus Nicator, a rather disappointing Megasthenes – and among the historical set pieces there is that famous confrontation with Paurus that is made much of in the Indian history books. Not that Paurus emerges as much of a ruler after uttering those famous lines. Nor do we actually get many insights into Chandragupta’s capabilities or even Chandini’s barring her beauty, but since the book is a racy page turner, that lack of in-depth characterisation does not really matter. Occasionally in fact it gets so racy that the page is peppered with two paragraph incidents, but Sanghi does tie up his loose ends wherever possible, though the reader’s head is also likely to spin as conspiracy follows assassination follows plot follows conspiracy again.

Indian Book Reviews: The Chant That Changed The World

2011-03-02T10:28:00.002+05:30

If you love history, you’ll love this book. If you love controversial protagonists, you’ll love it. And, if you love a fast-paced, intriguing and well-plotted novel, you’ll cherish it. Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant takes you on a journey across two time zones, the link being the chant which Chanakya had inscribed around 2,300 years ago.

History knows him as Chandragupta Maurya’s mentor and Magadha’s political strategist. He used the alliances and fall-outs between various kings as well as Alexander the Great to move his pieces on the board. This fiction thriller goes deeper into this Brahmin’s childhood and past, analyzing how and why he became the person he was. Simultaneously, Sanghi takes us to the present day, where Pandit Gangasagar Mishra, a lowly Kanpur Brahmin boy discovers the Chanakya’s chant and uses it to scheme up games in the Indian political scenario. You can say he’s a reincarnation of Chanakya, but more cunning and crooked to the point where he has no accepted morals and will do anything and everything to achieve his goals. People are like pawns on his chess board, just mere tokens whose lives are his to be decided.

Gangasagar will not put his hands into something whose result he does not already know. He’ll first make sure that he’ll be the ultimate triumphant in the deal – emotional or material – and only then enter into it. Chanakya’s motto that “end justifies the means” is clearly seen in his actions as well as in Gangasagar’s. While Chanakya uses his cunningness and capabilities to unite a Bharat that stretches from the Indus and the Hindu Kush mountains to Kalinga in the east, Gangasagar uses his farsightedness and astuteness to play his political games to unite India.

Gangasagar’s crafty, calculative and definitely patriotic. This maverick of a strategist takes up courses that might shock the average man or woman of his times. He trains his protégé, a slum girl, to take up powerful reins. What follows is a typical game of cat and mouse played by different politicians, all of whom are somehow controlled by Gangasagar himself. Age does not seem to mellow him. And like a Kind Cobra, the older her gets, the poisonous he is. At times, he turns out to be outright ruthless. But you gotta hi-five the author for striking up a character who you hate so much that you love him to no extent. You tend to wonder how a history teacher can be so meticulously ruthless and cunning. The reader is kept at the edge of the seat as she turns the pages of history to unfold a series of events that have devastating effects.

Just when you think you’ve found a pattern in Chanakya’s or Gangasagar’s thinking, he would’ve changed his tactics. Now that’s someone you’ve gotta be careful about – you can’t mess with someone whose mind you cannot read! Sanghi has handled characterisation beautifully – each of the characters do not come out forthright with all their features mentioned in the first half of the book. In fact, including the major characters, we find that there are intrinsic features of the characters that are revealed up to the end of the story, much to the delight of the reader.

For someone who prides in Eastern philosophy and science, this book comes as a breather to me. The military and political strategies that the great Chanakya taught and practiced are still used today. The author has used good judgment to give an arresting thriller.

Although the author admits in his acknowledgments that he has used quotes from popular portals, the overdose of certain clichéd quotes and retorts tend to irritate a little. Maybe more so because the rest of the novel looks spic and span, using words of that of the author alone.

Ashwin Sanghi’s debut novel, The Rozabal Line, was a historic thriller, too. And a controversial one at that! He continues his brilliant work in Chanakya’s Chant, weaving magic in the minds of his readers. You can also check out the haunting chant sung and performed by a band, on YouTube.

INDIA READS BOOK REVIEW: The Chant of Power

2011-03-02T10:20:00.002+05:30

Sometimes you pick up a book that just compels you to write a review; that agitates your mind so much that you know that you need to share the various thoughts and sentiments that it kindles in order to be at peace. This is what happened when I picked up Ashwin Sanghi’s latest offering, Chankaya’s Chant.

Why did I pick up the book from the horde of new releases that pass my table every day? Not sure really apart from the fact that the synopsis on the back cover seemed interesting and different. Also as one of our regulars on the blog pointed out, I do seem to have a soft spot for historical fiction. But Chankya’s Chant is different from the other books in the genre. It is both historical as well as contemporary. For there run through the book, two parallel stories – one that is based in current times and another that dates back 2300 years. Taken individually both these stories are complete and do full justice to their own genres. And that is one of the strengths of the book. None of the narratives leave the reader feeling short changed. Both are fact paced, compact and use the language of the era they are situated in. In Chankya’s Chant they come together as two equals, their union sanctified by the (un)holy quest for power that consumes the main protagonists. The reader is left with the distinction impression that when it comes to politics and power play, not much has changed in the last two millenia.

So 2300 years ago when a young boy is forced to flee after his father is insulted and beheaded for protesting against the excesses of a philandering king he pledges revenge. He distances himself from every emotion and relationship and embarks on a single minded quest for power. He chooses a young, eager and promising boy – Chandragupta -to instrumentalize his revenge and to save Bharat from the clutches of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander. And as “ends justify the means” he uses any and every trick conceivable – and mostly inconceivable – to get to his goal. No price is too large, no sacrifice too big and no relationship sacrosanct.There is only one rule in his game- winning. So he willingly sends off the only woman he loves in to the arms of men he detests; forces his protegee to seduce a Macedonian princess; poisons a well used by common people and cattle with white arsenic; plans political assassinations; encourages kingdoms to fight one another, creates religious differences that lead to the murder of many innocents – all in the name of the greater good. Of course, having followed his actions through the book one can’t help wondering if his purported goal of unifying Bharat is simply a guise to hide his all consuming need for revenge and power; to keep his force of “righteous and wronged” would be emperors on his side.

The second story revolves around a history professor from Kanpur who uses the exact same tactics that Kautilya employed 2300 years ago to wrest power in today’s world. From being a mere professor Pandit Gangasagar Mishra goes on to become the most powerful man in the country. How? The answer is quite simple – by doing whatever it takes. He firmly stands by what Chanakya told his beloved students: “In the world of politics you can ill afford luxuries such as a clear conscience.”

Reading Gangaprasad’s story is like watching the politics of today. From deals with corporations and scams that topple governments to fake and real assassination bids; from liaisoning with mafia dons to bribing the judiciary everything is part of the script. At times you can almost draw parallels with contemporary events and people. The characters, settings, maneuvers are all very real and this is what makes Chankya’s Chant a very compelling read. It is much akin to reading a blow by blow account of Indian politics today. Of course as Chanakya’s story so aptly shows, it is not very different from Indian politics 2500 years ago either. So really the scams, scandals, corruption, collateral damage, war mongering, innocent deaths, communal riots – all the ills that we accuse the modern day politicians of -are nothing new. Nor is their use for gaining power a particular characteristic of our “depraved” leaders. Power has always come at a price and the price as Chanakya points out is not just one’s emotions but one’s conscience as well. This is the message that flows out of Chanakya’s Chant. Every page of the book builds towards this message and carries many interesting pointers calmly stated by the astute Vishnugupta aka Chanakya and the wily Gangaprasad. To cite a few:

“Politics is war without bloodshed and war is simply politics with bloodshed.”
“Everything is always all right in the end. If it isnt all right, then it isnt the end.”
“Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you in motion but gets you nowhere.”
“Chanakya loved anger. It was a wonderfully productive emotion that could be used very productively if channeled in the right direction.”
“It’s foolish men who die for their country. The intelligent ones make others die for their country instead.”
“War is all about deception. Direct force is a poor solution to any problem. That’s why it is used only by little children.”
“You can only stab someone in the back if you are standing behind him.”

Do some of these sound familiar? Don’t worry towards the end of the book Sanghi not only acknowledges that many of these pithy sayings are inspired or taken from others, he even cites sources. Nonetheless these “strategy pills” administered at frequent intervals in adequate doses – the author does not over do it- keep the reader engaged and engrossed.

With well etched characters, tight writing and an intriguing storyline that is bound to appeal to a generation disillusioned by the 2G and other scams, Chanakya’s Chant is definitely a recommended reading. It touches upon many contemporary issues – from communal riots to guerrilla warfare. In fact in one scene Chanakya patiently explains to his student what guerrilla warfare is and why it is a good strategy (and not an unhonourable one). It even has some very interesting and innovative suggestions for managing contemporary problems – like use of enunchs for debt recovery and handing over salaries to the wives of bus drivers to prevent accidents due to drunk driving. Are these solutions practical? Will they work or will they simply reinforce stereotypes about heterosexuals and lead to an increase in domestic violence? I do not know but they are definitely worth mulling over. Yet for all its strengths I found Chanakya’s Chant to be oddly depressing. Perhaps it was the tone of inevitability in the book. The suggestion that the scams, the killings, the power plays that continue to make headlines in our world are here to stay. That everything in this world is about give and take – there are no free lunches. That those who are honest can not be a part of the system -they are either converted or bumped off. That success can only be attained by carefully studying people, identifying their weaknesses and then playing them; by backstabbing and lying. That even the “good” deeds carried out by politicians are really just means to an end- the end being power. Perhaps I am too much of a romantic. Perhaps I still believe in the innate goodness of human beings – in their ability to not just hurt but to heal. Perhaps my discomfort is born of the fact that the book very effectively- and at times, almost cruelly -destroys all illusions. I do not know.

Before I end the review however, there is one more thing that needs to be acknowledged – the sheer strength of Sanghi’s main protagonists (at the expense of other characters like Chandragupta Maurya, for instance). The two characters are so real that even as one loathes their actions one can’t loathe them. Yes they are ambitious, yes they are ruthless, yes they are wily. And perhaps a little strangely they are always successful. Yet they are human. So even the seemingly heartless professor who did not hesitate to get his own protegee shot twice or to get one of his dearest friends arrested could not help exclaiming, ” As God’s my witness, I loved the rogue.” Perhaps therein lies the hope.

All in all a must read. Buy/rent Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi from INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.

Free Press Journal & The Tribune (Delhi) (Feb 27)

2011-02-28T18:57:00.002+05:30

People Magazine (March 2011): Book Review of Chanakya's Chant

2011-02-26T13:19:00.002+05:30

Business India (Mar 6 2011): Entrepreneur by day, novelist by morn

2011-02-22T14:48:00.002+05:30

It is not common for a business family scion to take up fiction writing and pursue it with such passion. Ashwin Sanghi hails from a business family that has interests in manufacturing, real estate and retail. As a good entrepreneur, he is armed with an MBA from Yale. All through, there was in him a suppressed writer, who finally saw his first book published under a pseudonym. Sanghi has vivid memories of knocking at the doors of many a publisher before he self-published his work in the US. Published by Westland, his book was released in India, to wide acclaim. He tells Suman Tarafdar what led him to write Chanakya's Chant, his second book, a political page turner, the research it involved and the challenges of managing work and writing.

What inspires you about Chanakya?

Personally, I'm not inspired by Chanakya. He was far too ruthless to serve as inspiration for me. However, as a writer of fiction, I find his personality and character extremely interesting. Here's someone who penned reams of statements on government policy, statecraft, strategy and diplomacy almost 1800 years before Machiavelli! Just as a photographer searches for the perfect picture, I find myself searching for complex characters... preferably characters that are multihued and thus difficult to characterize as good or bad. Chanakya was efficient yet ruthless, principled yet amoral, intelligent yet devious, magnanimous yet vengeful. In short, the ideal complex character for a novel!

What lessons can modern politicians draw from him?

Too much attention seems to be given to the political machinations of Chanakya whereas insufficient attention is paid to the fact that his seminal work, the Arthashastra, was mostly about good governance. I was absolutely amazed to find that the Arthashastra even specifies how grain should be stored, how a treasury should be constructed, the ideal form of taxation, maintenance of law and order, the preferred width of a carriage road, and virtually every aspect of sensible government policy. It's unfortunate to see that what plagues India today is simply a fundamental lack of governance. I think the lesson for all of us is that we need to pay more attention to Chanakya's lessons in governance rather than his lessons on realpolitik.

What about Indian politics made you want to write a novel on it? Can there ever be a time when politics actually works transparently for the people, or are cynical machinations a must?

In my novel, the key protagonist says that "clean politics is an oxymoron", in effect telling the reader that one can either be in politics or one can be clean. There is one side of me that wishes to believe that it is indeed possible to have clean politics but the cynical part of me tells me that I'm being naive. It's precisely this unsavory nature of politics that makes for enjoyable reading! As regards your question about transparency: let's face it, government is a little bit like a theatre production. You sit in the audience and watch the actors play their parts but you never get to see what is happening backstage. You do not get to see the prop boys moving backdrops or the lighting assistants shifting spotlights.

What kind of research was involved in writing this novel? You have obviously enjoyed Yes Minister. Were there parts you enjoyed writing / creating most?

The research was at two levels because, as you know, there are two parallel stories in this book. The first one traces the rise of Chanakya 2300 years ago and ends with him having succeeded in installing Chandragupta Maurya to the throne. The second traces the life of Gangasagar Mishra a Brahmin teacher from Uttar Pradesh who makes it his life's purpose to make a girl from a slum into the country's prime minister. The ancient story required historical reading, including the Arthashastra as well as several other books penned on Chanakya. I also read an English translation of the Mudrarakshasa, a historical play in Sanskrit by Vishakhadatta who lived in the 4th century. The modern-day story simply involved lots of newspaper reading. The drama of politics is enacted before us each day in the front pages... one doesn't need to stray any further!

You had mentioned your grandfather as the one who inspired you to reading. How did the urge to write come from initially?

When I was studying at the Cathedral & John Connon school in Mumbai I contributed a few articles to the school newspaper but they were not very enthusiastically received. When I went to Yale for my Masters' I wrote a column for the school's monthly magazine and several people told me that they enjoyed my casual yet brisk style of writing. I returned to India and immersed myself in my family's business affairs and my urge to write manifested itself in terms of a few uneventful business-related articles in scattered journals. To a certain extent, my business persona seemed to be dictating what I could and couldn't write. I did not realize it at the time but I was killing my passion by writing business-related articles. Writing was my route to creative expression and I needed to write about the things that interested me. In 2004 I was going through a difficult patch in my life and my wife suggested that I try writing a few pages during a short holiday. At the end of the five-day break I had written over 10,000 words and there was no looking back.

Why did you choose to write your first book under a pen name?

As you know, I am not a writer by profession. I was born and brought up in a business environment. I started working when I was 16 and completed my MBA when I was 22. By the time that I completed writing my debut novel, The Rozabal Line, in 2006, I had already been in business for over 20 years. The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalize my life so that my entrepreneurial dimension would remain distinct and separate from my literary one. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym to use until I actually completed the novel. As you know, there's an abundance of anagrams in my novel and the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my real name as a pseudonym? Hence my first novel was written under the name "Shawn Haigins", an anagram of my real name "Ashwin Sanghi". When Tata-Westland decided to publish the novel in India they insisted that it had to be published under my real name. As it turns out, that wasn't such a bad idea. My publishers now joke that I was originally a businessman who was also an author and that now I'm an author who is also a businessman.

How easy is it to take out time for writing from your business and other work? What kind of time are you able to take out?

I think that everything becomes easy if you are passionate about it. I usually write early in the mornings well before dawn. This allows me to have a full and productive day at work. My evening hours are usually reserved for my family. I'm not a very social person and this means that I rarely have late nights. I usually write for around three hours in the mornings before I leave for work. I also write whenever I'm on a flight or on a trip. I continue to jot down story ideas on my Blackberry even when I'm sitting in my car!

The Rozabal Line, back again on Asian Age's February Bestsellers List

2011-02-22T12:20:00.002+05:30

The Hindu: Chanakya Again

2011-02-21T12:59:00.001+05:30

As most book launches go, this too was a routine affair – the unveiling of Ashwin Sanghi's “Chanakya's Chant” at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi recently. But it was the panel discussion which followed that attracted attention. Not only did the Manmohan Singh Government draw flak from the panellists for its falling credibility, they were unsparing of the media too. The media was blamed for creating a ‘scare' that prevented the Government from taking any decisions for the fear that it may result in another scam. Asserting the need for the implementation of ‘Chanakya-niti' as a solution to the problems faced by modern India, theatre personality-cum-socialite Suhel Seth in his signature one-liners likened the current scenario to an Ekta Kapoor scam serial!

Questioned if the modern Indian State is soft when judged by Chanakya's standards, the panel agreed on the inefficiency of the Indian procedure in bailing out justice. Cherian emphasised the need to establish the rule of law and Seth suggested a more demonstrable means of justice and the need for society to differentiate between right and wrong.

This is Sanghi's second book, the first one, “The Rozabal Line” written under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins, was a bestseller and he said he expects a similar response from his current venture.

The book was unveiled by Seth and image guru Dilip Cherian. Renowned theatre personality Sunit Tandon read excerpts from it.

Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO, Westland, the publishers of the book, mentioned the success of Sanghi's first book and took credit for bringing to fore the writer of the bestseller.

The book, priced at Rs.195, flows through two-and-half millennia simultaneously, one of Chanakya and the other of modern day Uttar Pradesh where Gangasagar Mishra, a teacher in a small town , becomes the puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals. The book is priced at Rs.195.

The Hindu "Print Picks" Feb 15 2011: Chanakya's Chant

2011-02-21T07:39:00.001+05:30

Indrajit Hazra: I’m thoroughly enjoying the rollicking 2,300 years-back-and-forth-per-chapter historical thriller Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi

2011-02-21T07:32:00.002+05:30

Now, I can’t imagine a reading life without my regular fix of straight-up forget-after-you’ve-shut-the-book racy reads. Right now, I’m thoroughly enjoying the rollicking 2,300 years-back-and-forth-per-chapter historical thriller Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi.

Chanakya's Chant Contest

2011-02-20T15:45:00.004+05:30

We're giving away 100 free copies of Chanakya's Chant to Ashwin Sanghi's fans. All that you have to do is send an email to chanakyaschant@gmail.com. Please state your name, full postal address (only within India), and contact phone number. Then complete this statement "If Chanakya were alive today, he would..." in 25 words or less. The best 100 answers will get a free copy of the novel couriered to them at the address stated on their email. Please note that the decision of the judges is final. Multiple submissions from the same email ID and/or bearing the same postal address will be disqualified. We reserve the right to close the contest no sooner the best 100 answers have been chosen.

Chanakya's Chant in Sunday Mid-Day & Sahara Time

2011-02-15T08:05:00.002+05:30

HT Cafe, Feb 4, 2011: Booked!

2011-02-04T13:33:00.003+05:30

The launch of city author Ashwin Sanghi's sophomore book, Chanakya's Chant, was held at the live music venue, Blue Frog.

With guitars and drum kit onstage, the gathering comprised of culture vultures rather than the nightclub's regular audiophiles.
An audio-visual presentation kickstarted the event, where Sanskrit shlokas took over the soundscape. The star attraction of the launch was Shashi Tharoor, who was seen sporting his signature jacket and kurta. Tharoor displayed his gift of the gab, as he launched the book with his wife, Sunanda.

During his discourse on Indian writing in English, Tharoor confessed to not having read the book entirely, and compared Sanghi's latest attempt to Amish Tripathi's The Immortals of Meluha. Chanakya's Chant takes the ancient story of Chanakya and sets in the present-day India. “Like Amish's writing, this book too offers a fresh, new voice to contemporary India,“ said Tharoor. “These authors write with an Indian sensibility for an Indian audience. The book is a brilliant account, backed by historical details of the practices and prejudices of a bygone era.“

Tharoor also made light of the IPL controversy he was embroiled in. “Chanakya is someone the society cannot ignore at its own peril. In my political career recently, many have compared me to Chanakya and his manipulative ways. I'm sure this book will offer some valuable tips to me,“ he laughed.

Sanghi, an entrepreneur by day and novelist by night, feels this book is a rereading of a familiar tale. “It's a thriller with all its key ingredients. I just take ents. I just take Chanakya and unveil the machinations of the current political system,“ adds the author.

Hindustan Times: Ashwin Sanghi's cracker of a page turner, Chanakya's Chant

2011-01-29T09:21:00.005+05:30

Take Prakash Jha’s movie Raajneeti. Chuck the boring bits out and make the Chanakya-like character played by Nana Patekar the protagonist. Keep the internal monologues and descriptions as taut as a-held-by-the-thumb sacred thread and we have Ashwin Sanghi's cracker of a page turner, Chanakya's Chant. Two narratives flow like the Ganga and Yamuna, one located 2300 years ago in the kingdom of Magadha where Chanakya seeks and gets his vengeance; the other in the slightly distant future (the 18th prime minister is being sworn in before the narrative goes into flashback) where Gangasagar Mishra gets down and dirty to play the kingmaker in India's politics. Sanghi peppers his novel with quotes from folks as disparate as Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde and Mao Zedong but for the reader of this brisk technicoloured thriller, here's a book that will be familiar in its details for all desi observers of politics and the psycho-drama behind it all.

Chanakya's Chant in Financial Express's 2011 fiction picks

2011-01-03T11:44:00.003+05:30

Hindustan Times Brunch includes "Chanakya's Chant" among "the next big things" of 2011

2010-12-30T12:33:00.002+05:30

Asian Age: 2011 Write Noises

2010-12-30T10:36:00.002+05:30

Besides these, 2011 will see the release of Amitav Ghosh’s second book in Ibis trilogy, Tarun Tejpal’s The Village of Masks, Aravind Adiga’s The Last Man in the Tower, Patrick French’s India: A Portrait, David Davidar’s Ithaca, a richly layered and poignant novel about the publishing industry. Anita Nair will be out with yet another (as yet untitled) novel. The year will also see the release of Jaishree Misra’s third and the last one in the Secrets series, Mukula Deva’s last one in the series that began with Lashkar called Tanzim, and Ashwin Sanghi’s historical-political thriller, Chanakya’s Chant (Westland) and Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Penguin).

Swagat Magazine, Dec 2010, Author Interview: Ashwin Sanghi on The Rozabal Line, an action-thriller based in Kashmir

2010-12-15T12:16:00.004+05:30

Mail Today (NewDelhi): Coming Up Next: Our Critic's Pick of Books to Look out for in the Coming Weeks

2010-12-13T12:00:00.004+05:30

Thriller writer Ashwin Sanghi made his debut with his 2007 novel, The Rozabal Line , which he published under the pseudonym of Shawn Haigins. Westland- Tranquebar Press published the revised edition of the book in 2008, and now the publishing house has released Sanghi’s next book, Chanakya’s Chant . Set in the year 340 BCE, it is about the Brahmin Chanakya who was instrumental in installing Chandragupta Maurya on the throne of Pataliputra and then sewing up ancient India’s first empire. The story fast forwards by 2,500 years, and Chanakya’s avatar , Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in small- town India, enters the scene. And it turns out that modern India, like ancient Bharat, is just as riddled with class hatred, corruption and divisive politics. Can this wily pundit pull off another miracle and unite India? Read to find out.

The Asian Age: Thriller Leaps Through Faith, History

2010-12-12T16:03:00.003+05:30

In The Rozabal Line, Ashwin Sanghi mixes all the ingredients of a thriller in a narrative that careens through cultures and continents and travels through Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, culminating at Vaishno Devi in Jammu
DAN BROWN has spawned a slew of thrillers that synthesise history, science and religion to give us some swashbuckling reading pleasure. In The Rozabal Line, Ashwin Sanghi does a Dan Brown by mixing all the ingredients of a thriller — Crusades, action, adventure, suspense — and pulling off, with dexterity and ease, a narrative that careens through cultures and continents, religions and cults, and travels through Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, culminating at Vaishno Devi in Jammu. Sanghi builds his narrative around a rather astounding hypothesis that Jesus Christ survived the Crucifixion, travelled to India where he was buried in Kashmir’s Rozabal Tomb, thus playing with faith and history that identifies the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem as Christ’s tomb.

Originally published in 2007 under his pseudonym Shawn Haigins, The Rozabal Line’s revised edition has been published by Westland under the author’s real name. Three years after it was originally published, the pacy thriller continues to pique readers’ interest and whet their curiosity, a fact which finds reflection in almost all bestseller lists.

The genesis of the book, says Sanghi, goes back to 1999, when he chanced upon Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. A couple of years later, when he happened to read Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived in India, he was fascinated with the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. “I began to wonder whether I could marry the two theories, i.e. Jesus Christ survived the Crucifixion and travelled to India and that he left behind a bloodline”, says Sanghi, adding that he spent the next two years reading every book he could find on topics he wanted to explore — the possibility of Jesus having spent his missing years as a “youth” studying in India, the theory that Jesus did not die on the Cross and that he was whisked away to safety, and the notion that Jesus traveled to India to reunite with the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in Kashmir.

After poring over 40 tomes on the subject and scouring the Internet for countless hours, Sanghi started writing The Rozabal Line in 2005 and finished it 18 months later.

Part of the research, of course, were several visits to the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir. Sanghi’s parents often used to take him for holidays to Kashmir during the Seventies. “During these visits, we would do all the touristy stuff — including visiting Rozabal.

As a child, however, I did not fully understand the significance of the tomb. It was only when I started reading Jesus Died in Kashmir by Andreas Faber Kaiser that I realised that the tomb was a vital slice of history, irrespective of whether one believed that Jesus Christ was buried there
or not”, says the author.

The tomb, unfortunately, has been allowed to decay. Many of the vital artefacts have gone missing. After the publication of The Rozabal Line, many foreign tourists flocked to the tomb to see the purported tomb of Jesus Christ. This resulted in the tomb administration shutting down the tomb to visitors completely.

Sanghi says: “I have pledged that every rupee that I earn as royalty from sales of the novel shall be donated to the upkeep of this world treasure.

Unfortunately, due to the present problems in Kashmir, the tomb has once again become a low priority for the state. Let’s hope the situation improves and we can actually do something for the tomb to preserve it for future generations”.

The Rozabal shrine, says Sanghi, contains two graves. The most recent inhabitant, Syed Naseerudin, was a medieval saint whose life is fairly well documented. However, the earlier inhabitant -Yuz Asaf -was buried there in 112 AD, 500 years before the advent of Islam. Yuz Asaf was a charismatic preacher who arrived in Kashmir from Israel and his name means "the healer" or "the shepherd". "So is Rozabal a Christian place of worship or a Muslim one? Both Christians and Muslims dismiss this question as blasphemy. Both religions say Jesus Christ was taken by God into heaven, while some Islamic and Christian sects say there will be a `second coming' of Jesus Christ... But the story of the tomb in itself was not where my interest lay. I wanted to explore Buddhist influence on early Christianity. I wanted to tie in the lost or missing years of Jesus into this story. I wanted to examine the ancient connections between India and the Lost Tribes of Israel. I wanted to explore the worship of the sacred feminine across cultures”, says Sanghi.

Sanghi says his aim in The Rozabal Line was to unite people of different faiths via the exploration of common origins of their religions. The four subjects that fascinate Sanghi are history, religion, politics, and mythology. “In that specific order of preference”, he adds. “And, funnily enough, all four are inextricably linked to each other.” In The Rozabal Line, it is this inextricable link that Sanghi explores.

History and mythology may fascinate Sanghi, but he doesn’t see himself as someone who can write plain-vanilla historical fiction. “For me the real excitement lies in being able to use history as an explanation for a present-day event. Unless there is some relevance of history to the present or the future, I do not find the subject interesting enough for further exploration”, he says.

If Sanghi’s The Rozabal Line is a modern-day thriller that combines religion and history to weave a backdrop, his next novel treads similar territory, using a combination of politics and history. Called Chanakya’s Chant, it attempts to analyse how politics has not changed much over 2,500 years. When the second thriller from Sanghi’s stable, set in 340 BC, releases in January 2011, it’ll be interesting to see how the political intrigue of ancient India compares with our present-day plots and scandals.

How mythology stood test of time after being reinvented

2010-12-01T07:46:00.003+05:30

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

The Literature Live! Festival in Mumbai opened on Friday with a discussion titled Mythology Redux in which writers discussed how mythology has constantly been reinvented and passed on and thus stays alive in our consciousness. Amish Tripathi, author of the bestseller The Immortals of Meluha, a book which looks at Shiva as a man and a warrior, as distinct from a God, said that for the longest time, Indian mythology was accessible only to children through Amar Chitra Katha. Or, then, there were the religious texts churned out by Gita Press, Gorakhpur. But there has been very little available for the contemporary English-speaking adult market which is now looking for a new way of connecting to its collective past. “As India grows more confident as a country, we want to know more about our myths,” said the management consultant.

Ashwin Sanghi, a businessman, who has written The Rozabal Line, drawing connections between Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, said, “We live in an age of remixes. Books like these are presenting the same information, but in a more palatable form. We want our heritage served to us, not in a katori or patra, but on a plate, with a fork and knife. As we modernize as a society, we want to our explore our ancient connectivities.” He pointed out that myth has always been open to reinterpretation, especially as it is an oral tradition that gets passed on. But like Chinese Whispers, with each generation adds its own ‘tadka’ to the daal, so to speak.

Columnist and brand specialist Santosh Desai noted that even Hindi cinema has strong elements of mythology in it – there are staple characters, like the hero is always the same Vicky Malhotra and the heroine is the same and the mother is the same – and there is always the theme of anxiety and separation, much like vanvaas. There is another reason that mythology resonates in contemporary times. “It has an element of magic in it,” he says, which fits in with the hypertechnology and digital times we live in.

Later in the evening, veteran journalist BG Verghese and Kumar Ketkar, a prominent
newspaper editor, discussed the former’s new book, First Draft: Witness to the Making of Modern India in a session titled ‘The Insider Book’. Most of the discussion hinged on the politically tumultuous 1970s. Ketkar reeled off a list of upheavals: the Bangladesh war, Salvador Allende’s assassination, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s assassination, the Emergency, the Vietnam war and so on. As Ketkar wryly put it, “Most of the political leadership did not die natural deaths.’

Verghese in the 1960s had served as press advisor to Indira Gandhi till he realised that he was expected to be more of a public relations officer than advisor. “When I walked out of South Block on December 31, 1968, I felt liberated,’’ he said. He recalled the ’70s as one in which the light of democracy that had been lit after Independence was extinguished and lit again. He was referring to the Emergency when the press was severely censored and Indira Gandhi’s subsequent electoral defeat.

Verghese also spoke about his experiences of working in the country’s three top papers: The Times of India, Hindustan Times and the Indian Express. He topped off the event by reading a couple of passages on the corruption spawned by Prohibition, a time whose repercussions can be felt even today. The last passage was a fun anecdote on the stern Morarji Desai, who was once persuaded by his colleagues to pay an educational visit to a nightclub where, to his horror, a “dame’’ sat on his lap.

The festival of the loquacious

2010-12-01T07:38:00.001+05:30

‘Literature Live’, Mumbai’s first-ever literature festival, kick-started on Friday at Tata theatre, NCPA. A wonderful concoction of poets, novelists, journalists and actors took part in this fest. The day was splintered into five sessions, each focusing on one aspect of literary expression.

The first session took an eye at the resurgence of mythological themes in contemporary Indian literature. Conducting the session were writers Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi and Santosh Desai.

The Rozabal Line back on The Hindu's Printpick

2010-12-01T07:27:00.001+05:30

Whose line is it?

On a lazy day in London, a cardboard box is found on a shelf of the SOAS library where a copy of the 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. Their leader is not even a blip on the radar of intelligence agencies, yet their agenda is Armageddon. In the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears to kill - again and again. A Hindu astrologer spots a conjunction of the stars that signifies the end of the world: The Rozabal Line.

EconomicTimes: Playing By The Book (Oct 24 2010)

2010-10-24T11:37:00.005+05:30

To most of us, the word ‘writer’ evokes an image that is akin to a frail body in a tweed jacket, an unkempt beard and a riot of salt & pepper hair—a typical blend of Orhan Pamuk, VN Naipaul and JM Coetzee. But Ashwin Sanghi, 40, fares miserably on this scale in spite of The Rozabal Line—a moderately successful, da Vinci Code—style thriller set in Kashmir-to his credit and he another work of fiction ready for the press. Sanghi does not write to earn a living. Instead, he heads a family business, associated with automobile, real estate and industrial gas manufacturing, which employs staff in excess of the 1000-mark. It is anybody’s guess how he finds time to research, write and market his books. “If you are passionate about something, you will find time for it,” says Sanghi, adding with a quip: “But it does worry me what if I won’t get enough time if my works became very popular. I am sure I would not be ignoring my business life, which is essentially bread & butter for my family. I am a pucca Marwari businessman.” For once, his generous girth appears to be in line with his financial pursuits.

Sanghi’s first book didn’t flow as easily as his fortunes in the automobile industry. “The idea to write a book first came to mind in 2003-04, on a trip to Goa,” he says. The Blackberry addict wrote about 25,000 words during the break but wasn’t pleased with the outcome and abandoned writing for a while. “The next idea came in the form of a thriller about the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir. The topic of Jesus resurrection and his passage to Kashmir has been dealt with in at least three dozen books, all of which I read thoroughly. I decided to belt out a thriller woven around all the information which was scattered on the subject and present them in a pacy style.” The idea clicked, and how! The Rozabal Line sold over 20,000 copies in multiple editions.

Sanghi’s experiences echo with Amish Tripathi, an IIM-C graduate who heads marketing & product management at IDBI Federal Life Insurance. Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, much like Sanghi’s book, is a mix of mythology and history. Interestingly, when Tripathi set about to write his first work of fiction he followed a management mantra he was used to meeting corporate targets. “I created an excel-sheet file, and drew up sections, sub-sections that defined plot, characters and the central thread,” says Tripathi, smiling at his learning curve. “Also, there were deadlines to finish each column and everything neatly arranged, as in a powerpoint presentation. It didn’t work at all.” What did work was his pursuance of his passion, not only in writing but also in seeing it go through the press. Finally, when The Immortals… came out in print, it created a minor ripple at bookstores across the country.

Similar challenges lay before Amitabha Bagchi, whose Above Average has often been repeatedly compared with Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, though Bagchi likens the two works as an apple and an orange. “It was very difficult finding a publisher. It took me two years from the point when I had finished the first draft of Above Average to the point when I signed a contract with HarperCollins, India,” says a soft-spoken IIT Delhi alumnus. “When you are a first-time writer, most people pick up your manuscript expecting it to be junk. When that happens then nine times out of ten you will get rejected because if someone is looking to find faults then faults will be found. It isn’t easy to get a foot in the door.” According to Bagchi, the idea to write a fictional work requires less research and more imagination. The idea to write Above Average, for example, sprang from a short story he had written about a local guitarist. “I quickly realized that the stories I was telling were all related to ambition and upward mobility. From this realisation came the idea that IIT should come into picture, which was an unusual one at the time because Chetan hadn’t yet published Five Point Someone.”

There are cases where the success of a work of fiction led to a professional finding full time vocation in writing industry. Advaita Kala, who wrote her debut ‘chick lit’ Almost Single and is working on its sequel and Anuja Chauhan, who recently published Battle for Bittora after her successful first with The Zoya Factor (2008), are two such names. Kala worked as a hotelier with Orchids and Taj group before she realized that the money from a successful novel would see her through decently. Chauhan, an ad professional for 15 years, too has found solace in the writers club. There are bureaucrats who have wielded pen to write fiction and made a name for themselves. Diplomat Vikash Swarup, whose Q&A was turned into Slumdog Millionaire, IRS officer Sadhna Shanker who wrote Never A Disconnect, and JP Das who drafted a right to information bill for Orissa, generated critical praise for A Time Elsewhere, are a few examples.

So what drives a successful businessman or a professional to scribble an imaginary tale? “It is generic in me. Every time I see a news item in a paper, I start imagining a story on it; that’s how my mind works or reacts to my surroundings,” says Sanghi. Others too find writing an obsession. “There is a story to be told, or it keeps boiling inside,” says Tripathi. Life, as they say, is stranger than fiction indeed.

Book Review by V. Haricharan

2010-10-23T11:51:00.003+05:30

This book gets a whopping 8.5/10 from me. Period. We get such books perhaps once in a decade. This is one such book. Man !! What a book... Out of this world is an understatement. If there is any book that deserves to be rated higher, then they would be Da Vinci Code and Judas Strain.

This book starts where Da Vinci Code ends and takes it up from there. Right from the framing of names, like Lashkar-e-Talatashar (Talatashar is Arabic for Thirteen) to the ordering of events, the book has you in its grips right from the first page.

The story, as fictionally told by Ashwin, is that the Lashkar-e-Talatashar is a team of 13 people or rather terrorists who are hell bent on destroying the world and showing to the world, that US is not the only country that can defend itself. How innumerable characters, all interestingly interlinked, bring the ordeal to a conclusion is the story.

The packaging is fantastic. The story does not happen over a period of 24 hours or 48 hours as with the other two novels that I have mentioned before. This one is slightly elaborate. The story line has been interesting conceived, with flashing back between Present, and Past and sometime in the Middle. Excellent work there...

IBNLive: Author Interview

2010-10-20T12:56:00.003+05:30

1. How many people have tried to draw similarities between The Rozabal Line and The Da Vinci Code? What has been your response to them?

Such comparisons are inevitable whenever one writes fiction that has Jesus Christ or Mary Magdalene as a backdrop. In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth. I had spent almost two years reading every book that I could find regarding the Jesus in Kashmir theory. I knew that there was a story that needed to be told but I did not wish to follow the rules of a formulaic thriller. There is a rather precise Dan Brown formula: provide a hook to the early chapter that becomes the central thriller plot, with its one character facing challenges that increase in severity while stakes are raised for two-thirds of the story or more, followed by a few plot twists, the main character winning (or at least partially winning), his opponents losing (or partially losing) and a satisfying resolution for the readers a la Dan Brown. My aim was to not merely provide a story but also to explore the ancient connectivity between world faiths. If that meant that I had to compromise the formula, so be it. Thus you find frequent jumps in time and geography because the aim of the novel is to explore connections between apparently unrelated events, beliefs, rituals, people and places.

2. What’s the back-story to the writing of The Rozabal Line?

My parents used to regularly take us for holidays to Kashmir during the seventies. During these visits, we would do all the touristy stuff—including visiting Rozabal. As a child, however, I did not fully understand the significance of the tomb. It was only in 1999 that the very notion that Jesus may have left behind a bloodline came to my attention when I read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. A couple of years later, I read Holger Kersten's Jesus Lived in India and was fascinated with the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. I began to wonder whether I could marry the two theories i.e. that he survived the crucifixion and traveled to India and that he left behind a bloodline. I spent the next two years reading each and every book that I could acquire on topics that I wanted to explore viz. the possibility of Jesus having spent his missing years as a youth studying in India, the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he was whisked away to safety, and the notion that Jesus traveled to India to reunite with the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in Kashmir. In all, I read around forty books during this time besides scouring the Internet for any information that I could possibly find. I started writing The Rozabal Line in 2005 and finished it eighteen months later.

3. Is there some personal belief behind the novel? Is religion a personal interest or merely the backdrop to the book?

Surprisingly enough, I am not a religious person. I am spiritual, in that I believe in the essence of “do no harm” as well as the theory of karmic debt, but that does not translate into being someone who prostrates himself daily inside a temple. I am equally comfortable inside a church or dargah as I am inside a temple. In fact, it is this openness that allows me to explore the question “Where did this idea emerge from?” The Rozabal Line is not a story about Jesus Christ surviving the crucifixion and traveling to Kashmir; it is a story about how human beliefs and ideas have been freely absorbed and assimilated down the ages, and how such inter-faith borrowing has shaped our ideas and beliefs in the present day.

4. Why did you originally publish this novel under a pseudonym? And that too one that made it sound as though the book were not written by an Indian? And why under your own name now?

I am not a writer by profession. I was born and brought up in a business environment. I started working when I was 16 and completed my MBA when I was 22. By the time that I completed writing The Rozabal Line in 2006 I had already been in business for over 20 years. The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalize my life so that my entrepreneurial dimension would remain distinct and separate from my literary one. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym to use until I actually completed the novel. As you know, there’s an abundance of anagrams in my novel and the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my real name as a pseudonym? I had always been a fan of Jack Higgins, the master of thrillers who began his career with The Eagle Has Landed. I tried shaping my pseudonym in his likeness. What I did not realize at that time was that I had not written just any other book but a book that was trying to coalesce different religions by connecting the dots. A close friend sent my self-published book to a reputed journalist in Kashmir who loved the book but she commented that “writers and authors ought to use their real names and not take refuge behind some sort of a camouflage. For, then, where's the connectivity, where's the bonding?” By then Tata-Westland had already decided to publish The Rozabal Line as an Indian edition and their management team had concerns about the difficulties in promoting the book under a pen name. Hence, the Indian edition was directly published under my real name rather than my pseudonym.

5. How long was this book in the making? Where were you when you wrote it? How did you do all the research?

The Rozabal Line saga is a never-ending one. I began to think about writing the novel from 1999 onwards but never got around to it. I started seriously reading up on the subject from 2002 onwards but it was 2005 by the time that I actually started writing it. I completed it eighteen months later and then spent a year trying to find a publisher. I was unsuccessful in my quest and out of sheer frustration decided to self-publish the novel so that it would become available on international book retail sites such as Amazon, WH Smith and Barnes & Noble. My problem, however, was that the book was unavailable to Indian audiences. I began sending out my book to Indian distributors hoping that they would agree to supply my stock to Indian bookstores but I soon realized that they were not interested in promoting anything other than books by established authors. Luckily for me, my book got noticed by Westland and they decided to publish an Indian edition on the condition that I was willing to spend another nine months editing it. I agreed. The book was introduced to the market in 2008 and went on to remain a bestseller for several months. We have now released a reprint in 2010. As we speak the book is also being converted into a screenplay. The novel is also being translated into Hindi, Turkish and Spanish. I genuinely believe that we are not at the end of this saga but at the beginning.

6. Which authors do you admire and / or have read everything of?

I was brought up on a diet of commercial fiction and thrillers for most of my growing years: Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Irving Wallace, Jack Higgins et al. I was most impressed by the voluminous research that Arthur Hailey would do for his novels and that strongly influenced my style which is research-oriented. Amongst Indian works, I loved Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and The Guide by R. K. Narayan, but given that I was never drawn to literary fiction, most Indian authors—who mostly wrote literary fiction—were outside my subset of preferences.

7. What’s next from you?

History and mythology fascinate me, but I do not see myself as someone who can simply write historical fiction. Unless there is some relevance of history to the present day, I do not find the subject interesting enough for further exploration. As we speak, my second novel is under editing and should be released by January 2011. The Rozabal Line was a modern-day thriller that used a backdrop of religion and history. My next novel, on the other hand, is also a modern-day thriller, the primary difference being that it uses a backdrop of politics and history.

Goa Herald: Did Jesus Travel to India?

2010-10-13T13:07:00.004+05:30

Troubled Kashmir has not seen many western tourists over the past few years, but a small nondescript shrine in Rozabal locality here continues to quietly attract inquisitive visitors from abroad. Rozabal is the shrine of medieval Muslim saint Yuz Asaf, but several alternative theories floated in the West describe it as a tomb of Jesus Christ. Of late, a flood of literature, including a Da Vinci Code-type potboiler called The Rozabal Line by Ashwin Sanghi, has had tourists flocking to the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar in recent months.
Such was the popularity that its caretakers were forced to close the shrine for Western tourists lest it “hurt local sensitivities”. Some believe Jesus survived crucifixion, traveled to Kashmir, adopted the name of Yuz Asaf and is buried at Rozabal. The shrine as well as Ashwin Sanghi’s thriller, The Rozabal Line, has found mention in the Lonely Planet Guide — a bible for most tourists — leading to renewed interest in the West.
At the crux of Sanghi’s fictional plot lies the possibility that Jesus survived the crucifixion and traveled to Kashmir. Sanghi's thriller, which has remained a national bestseller for several months consecutively, shocks the reader at almost every page, but the author takes pains to assure his audience that his book is a good old yarn and that they should read it as a story, not history.
Did Jesus travel to India? Was Mary Magdalene from Maghada? Were Abraham and Brahama the same entity? These are just some of the questions that novelist Ashwin Sanghi has sought to answer via the new paperback edition of The Rozabal Line. The fictional element in the book, an amalgamation of comparative religion and conspiracy theories, has been compared with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code although the historical basis of the novel draws from several other books on the subject including Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten and The Unknown Life of Jesus by Nicolas Notovich.
The Rozabal Line is a thriller that is inspired by the author’s obvious fascination with linkages between the world’s religions. Sanghi’s novel travels from Mesopotamia to Magadha, Jerusalem to Rome, highlighting the manner in which religions have learnt and borrowed from each other down the ages. “I find it amazing that both Jesus and Buddha fasted for forty days and nights. I am puzzled by the similarities between baptism and the Kumbh Mela. I find the similarities between Krishna and Christna incredible,” says Sanghi excitedly.
The road to publication was a difficult one for Sanghi. “I couldn’t find a publisher,” he says matter-of-factly. He was forced to self-publish the first edition. Luckily Tata-Westland saw merit in his novel and published the second edition in 2008 and this went on to remain a bestseller for many months. More recently the Lonely Planet Guide to India described the novel as the core to the controversial theory that Jesus lies buried at the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar. This promptly sent hundreds of tourists flocking to the shrine until the caretakers were left with no alternative but to shut down the tomb to visitors.
Does he believe his own fiction? Sanghi smiles. “I have always loved fiction that sounds like fact and fact the sounds like fiction. The fun in this book is that you rarely know when you are switching from one to the other,” he says.
Interspersed with religion and history, The Rozabal Line has been lapped up by bibliophiles. Encouraged by the readers' response, the author is now giving finishing touches to a script adapted from his book that will be made into a feature film.
The author makes it clear (unlike Brown who tried to pass it off as secret history) that the work is fiction. Two factors drove Sanghi to write it, and in a note to readers, he says: “I am saddened to see that the tomb remains in a state of disrepair with scant international attention. The Rozabal Line is my personal tribute to this tomb and to the person who lies buried within it. If I do earn anything from this book, I hope that I will be able to contribute it to the cause of preserving a global treasure — Rozabal.” And the second and more important factor: “…to make ordinary people understand that the world’s religions are more interconnected than we have ever imagined and that this understanding is absolutely vital in today’s age of religious conflict.”

Parallel Spirals: Book Review of The Rozabal Line

2010-10-13T07:55:00.001+05:30

It is quite unfortunate that the Rozabal Line finds itself in the same rank as The DaVinci Code. This is perhaps the same situation faced by Hercule Poirot when compared with Sherlock Holmes.

The Rozabal Line is a very fast moving 346 page book. I did find the print a bit hard to read and the plot confusing sometimes.

However, I enjoyed the time hops that this book has. Thinking about it, it is perhaps the best way to present the story – better compared to paragraphs. This allowed the back story some prominence as well as helped us understand the time hops better.

Reading this book felt like being on a wagon on a smooth slope. The more you get to the bottom of the slope, more your speed increases. The more I got to the end of the book, the faster I read it. I broke my 40 pages a day rule again and again during the period of reading this book.

The book only points to certain sections of The DaVinci Code. It is not about symbols but more about factoids. The book links them together rather well interlacing the modern day religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. After reading this book, the Da Vinci Code will look like a few narrow minded views of history. It is essential to make this distinction.

"Walking the Line", Marwar, Sep-Oct 2010 (Vol 16 Issue 5)

2010-09-24T16:46:00.004+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi, author of The Rozabal Line, shares memories of the 20-year-long journey that culminated in the bestseller and finds much amusement in his being an unconventional Marwari bania. Text: Rachna Shetty Photographs: Samantha Da Cunha

Books: Hindustan Times: New Delhi, Sep 13

2010-09-22T06:48:00.002+05:30

Rama, Ravana, Arjuna, Jesus Christ, Lord Shiva, Ganesha and the epics are becoming fodder for contemporary Indo-Anglian literature. Writers say it is a new way of looking at Indian culture and draw young readers. The reprint of two popular titles - The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathy and The Rozabal Line by Ashwin Sanghi last month - brought the gods back from their heavenly abodes to play action games on earth. The books have been published by Westland Ltd. Amish Tripathy re-tells a folkore from Jammu and Kashmir about the descent of Lord Shiva in his blue-neck Neelkantha avatar from Tibet with his warriors to Meluha, a modern-day Indus Valley city located in Srinagar, to save the city. Sanghi spins a murder mystery around the supposed grave of Jesus Christ at the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir.

Interview @ Bookrack

2010-09-22T06:33:00.002+05:30

There are many books out there which never make it. Self-publishing is one way to take things into your own hands.You can say a self-published book is successful when it is taken up by a publishing house for print. "I had completed “The Rozabal Line” in 2006 and spent the next one year looking for a publisher. I ended up with almost a hundred rejections. That’s when I made up my mind to self-publish it" says Shawn Haigains aka Ashwin Sanghi the author of the book The Rozabal Line.

The book is a thriller which encompasses history, religion and politics among other things. The Rozabal Line is based on the speculation that Jesus did not die on the cross. Here is an interview with the author about the book and what inspired him to write.

(1) Your book was first self-published. What made you take that decision?

Circumstances made me take that decision. I had completed “The Rozabal Line” in 2006 and spent the next one year looking for a publisher. I ended up with almost a hundred rejections. That’s when I made up my mind to self-publish it. I was simply fed up with the traditions of the mainstream publishing business and wanted to narrate my story. My self-published novel became available on Amazon, WHSmith and B&N in November 2007. Quite obviously, the number of books that one can sell as a self-published author are rather limited given the complete lack of marketing and distribution support that a mainstream publisher brings to the table. Luckily for me, however, self-publishing resulted in my book being picked up and read by Tata-Westland, who then approached me with the idea of publishing an Indian paperback.

(2) When did the book start developing? What inspired you to take on this mammoth task?

The notion that Jesus may have indeed spawned a bloodline came to my attention in late 1999 when I read "Holy Blood Holy Grail" by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. A couple of years later, I read Holger Kersten's "Jesus Lived in India" and was fascinated with the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. Kersten’s research was meticulous, and I was soon hooked. The idea that Jesus may have spent his missing years (between ages 12 and 30) studying in India was not a new one. The Russian explorer Nicholas Notovitch had written about it way back in 1887. What I wanted to do, however, was to take that story one step further. Was it possible that Jesus survived the crucifixion and then returned to his “spiritual home” i.e. India? Could it be possible that the tomb of Rozabal really contains the remains of Jesus? And finally, could there be a bloodline of Jesus Christ in modern-day Kashmir? The possibilities were fascinating and that’s when I knew that I had to attempt putting the disparate elements together.

(3) You must have done a lot of research for your book. How exactly did you go about it?

I am neither scholar nor researcher, simply a paperback writer! But yes, I found that there was a wealth of information out there. Some of this information was available in excellent books that had covered various issues such as the Jesus in India hypothesis, the historical Jesus, and the interplay of mythologies and religious beliefs in the evolution of the character of Jesus. Books such as “Jesus Lived in India” by Holger Kersten, “Jesus in Kashmir: The Lost Tomb” by Suzanne Olsson, “The Fifth Gospel” by Fida Hassnain, “The Unknown Life of Jesus” by Nicolas Notovich and “The Lost Years of Jesus” by Elizabeth Clare Prophet were very important in building the framework of the story. Other books such as “The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by S. Acharya and “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviours” by Kersey Graves were important from the angle of building the “alternative hypothesis” around the canonical Jesus. I spent most of 2003 and 2004 reading every book that I could lay my hands on (around 40+). These books are listed on my blog at ashwinsanghi.com. I only started writing in 2005 after I had completed reading each and every one of these books.

(4) The book takes us to places in various corners of Earth, did you travel a lot during your research?

Not really. I was clear that I must visit Rozabal in order to see the tomb for myself. I undertook the trip. The purpose was not to research but to simply get a feel of the place—the vibes. I also underwent regression therapy for myself at the SAGB (which I refer to in the book) in order to understand how past life regression truly works. Other than this, I had already visited Vatican City, Cairo, Einsiedeln and many of the other places that eventually ended up making it to the final pages of my manuscript. However, my research was mostly done by reading the scholarship of others.

(5) Your book is a work of fiction. Yet many of the historical events actually occurred. Do you think that there is a possibility that people might not be able to differentiate fact from fiction?

My book starts with a disclaimer: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Religion, history and factual narrative have been liberally interspersed with the fictional narrative in order to give context and colour to the plot.” The reason for this disclaimer is to tell the reader to view everything inside the book as fiction. The marrying of fiction and non-fiction is an extremely difficult task. It becomes even more difficult when religion is involved because one does not wish to offend the sensibilities of any given individual’s faith or personal belief. To walk that particular tight-rope was the most difficult bit in the evolution of “The Rozabal Line”. However, on a personal note, I would like to say that I love fact that sounds like fiction and fiction that sounds like fact. The blending of fact and fiction makes for very interesting reading and I think that most of my future novels will use the same fundamental principle.

(6) Tell us more about the different schools of philosophy which you touch upon in the book.

There are many and it would be impossible to list them all for an interview. However, all the material discussed within “The Rozabal Line” falls into 5 categories. The first is material that explains why it is possible that Jesus spent his missing years between ages 12-30 in India. The second is material that explains why it is possible that Jesus survived the crucifixion and married. The third is material that explains the historical and spiritual connections between India and the Abrahamic religions. The fourth is exposition of alternative religious faiths that share commonalities with the story of Christ, and the fifth is the reasons why Yuz Asaf and Jesus Christ could have been one and the same person. All of this material is then presented as part of an ongoing fiction saga and hence the enormity of the task.

(7) "Entrepreneur by day, novelist by night". How did you manage your time?

I am a Marwari businessman. I started working in my family business at the age of 16 when I was still in college. I was the youngest member of my graduating MBA class at Yale. Managing time is something that I’ve done for most of my life! The writing of “The Rozabal Line” took around four years. The first two were spent in reading books, papers and material on the internet. The next two were spent writing the book. I would put in a normal day at work and then sit down to write by around ten at night for around 2-3 hours each day.

(8) How important was the book to you personally. What did you learn while researching and writing the book?

“The Rozabal Line” is not a book that is meant for someone who wishes to read just another thriller. It’s impossible to read this book without attention else you run the risk of getting lost. If I wanted, I could have “dumbed” it down… made it more like a book that gives one a quick-fix of thrills and chills. I didn’t. Why? My aim has remained one: to illustrate that in a world full of religious and political strife, deep down there is much more in common between world religions than we can ever imagine. If we can emphasize these commonalities, it could be a way to heal divisions. This was extremely important to me and I didn’t care whether this would be liked or disliked. It was simply a story that I had to tell my way.

(9) Which is your favourite part in the book?

I think that the conclusion of the book is my favourite part. It is the last twenty-odd pages that bring together all the ancient philosophies and knits them together.

(10) Who are your favourite writers?

I’m a die-hard genre fiction fan. Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, Irving Wallace, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ian Rankin… the list is endless!

(11) What role did family and friends play?

My passion for reading was ignited when my maternal grandfather Ram Prasad Gupta would bombard me with books that were far ahead of my time. He would insist that after reading every book I must write a letter detailing what I liked and what I didn't. In the beginning, it was a tedious process but my imagination and knowledge increased over the years. Thus, I genuinely believe that it is the blessings of my ancestors that move my pen.

Thank you Ashwin for your time and this wonderful interview. I do believe more writers will take to self-publishing seeing the success of your book. We look forward to reading more from you. All the best!

The Hindu, Sep 14: Lining Up The Thrills

2010-09-15T06:58:00.003+05:30

The breathless conspiracy thriller reached India with Ashwin Sanghi's “The Rozabal Line”. In town to talk about the spanking new reprint (Westland), the Mumbai-based Sanghi said, “The notion that Jesus may have left a bloodline came to my attention in late 1999 when I read ‘Holy Blood Holy Grail' by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. I visited Srinagar and the shrine at Rozabal subsequently. That was the moment that I knew that I had to pull all the threads together and weave a story around these fascinating legends.”

Initially published in 2007 under the pseudonym of Shawn Haigins, “The Rozabal Line” was later by published by Westland, under Sanghi's own name.

The reason for this Sanghi says is because “I desperately wanted to have two separate lives, one as a businessman-entrepreneur and the other as a novelist. Creating the persona of Shawn Haigins was an ideal way to do this. However, when Tata-Westland signed up for publishing ‘The Rozabal Line' in India they felt that it would be virtually impossible to market the novel effectively using my pseudonym and I agreed to publish under my own name.”

Stepping in

The novel ventures into territory that Indian writers in English have not gone into before — the conspiracy thriller. “Genre is unimportant to me, it is the story that is. I spent my early years on a diet of genre fiction and wondered why Indian writers seemed to only write literary fiction. Satyajit Ray gave us his wonderful detective Feluda in 1965. Why did we stop writing commercial fiction — adventures, mysteries, suspense novels, and thrillers? We ended up ceding this space to foreign authors. I'm delighted to see that the scenario has dramatically changed over the last decade. I'm simply a manifestation of this evolving literary landscape.”

While Sanghi admits to being “neither scholar nor researcher,” the book has pages of foot notes that provide a fascinating starting point for all who wish to know more. “I spent around two years reading every book that I could find on the topic.”

Describing the book as one “in which multiple characters revolve around a central story,” Sanghi adds, “the book takes many little side trips to provide information in order to make the reader feel that what is being read is fact rather than fiction.”

The novel, which deals with the notion of Jesus Christ in Kashmir, spans countries and centuries in a breathless mix of fact, speculation and fiction.

Sanghi admits that there were times when he “was ready to give up the exercise altogether. The main hurdle that I faced while writing ‘The Rozabal Line' was that there was simply too much information that needed to be conveyed. At times this information can be overwhelming to the average thriller reader, but it is precisely this information that makes the book extremely interesting to those who are fond of theological-historical conspiracies that are intricately woven.”

This abundance of facts is also coming in the way of translating the book onto screen. “I am currently in the process of finalising a screenplay for the book,” Sanghi says. “This process could take several months owing to the overwhelming information that is presented within the novel.”

While the book came out after Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code”, Sanghi says he has “no qualms about being compared with Dan Brown, in fact it pleases me. Because irrespective of whether you loved or hated ‘The Da Vinci Code', you simply could not ignore it. Even though ‘The Rozabal Line' is extremely different in story, content, style and premise, it was an expected outcome that such comparisons would be drawn.”

Sanghi calls himself “a cultural oddity, a Marwari businessman who actually writes novels. Yes, I can see the shock writ all over your face! I started working in my family business, which has interests in automobiles, real estate and manufacturing when I was 16 years old and was one of the youngest members of my graduating MBA class at Yale.”

Talking about his next novel, the 41-year-old says: “My next novel is a political thriller set in ancient India. I find it exciting to weave fiction around events that may have happened hundreds of years ago. My publishers plan on releasing it by December this year.”

-- Mini Anthikad-Chibber

Economic Times of India: Mythical icons become heroes in new Indian fiction

2010-09-12T09:41:00.002+05:30

NEW DELHI: Rama, Ravana, Arjuna, Jesus Christ, Lord Shiva, Ganesha and the epics are becoming fodder for contemporary Indo-Anglian literature. Writers say it is a new way of looking at Indian culture and draw young readers. The reprint of two popular titles - "The Immortals of Meluha" by Amish Tripathy and "The Rozabal Line" by Ashwin Sanghi last month - brought the gods back from their heavenly abodes to play action games on earth. The books have been published by Westland Ltd.

Sanghi spins a murder mystery around the supposed grave of Jesus Christ at the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir. Novelist Sanghi told media: "All books that have a theological and historical theme fits into a genre." The writer, a businessman by profession, said "he was inspired to write about Jesus after reading a book on the shroud of Turin by Holger Kersten, who has also authored a book on the life of Jesus in India".

"Later, I studied the papers of Nicholas Notovitch in 1818 about Jesus Christ's visit to Hemis monastery in Leh," he said. Sanghi said evidence suggests that Christ may have returned later to Kashmir after rising from the cross "because the tomb at Rozabal is home to a saint Yuz Asaf who was buried around 112 AD". He is currently writing a fiction based on the life of economist Chanakya, the creator of Artha Shastra.

The Rozabal Line featured in Lonely Planet India

2010-09-02T17:15:00.002+05:30

The Rozabal Line has been featured in the most important tourist guide to India viz. Lonely Planet. On Page 289, the book talks of the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar and goes on to say "The small green Rozabal Shrine (Ziyarat Hazrati Youza Asouph) is a minute's stroll northwest from Pir Dastgir Sahib facing the four-level brick tower of Rozabal Mosque. Although very modest, a highly controversial theory claims that the shrine's crypt holds the grave of Jesus Christ. This claim is at the core of Shawn Haigins' 2007 The Da Vinci Code-style thriller The Rozabal Line. Supposedly a sarcophagus here features carved feet distinctively punctured by half-moon 'crucifixion marks'. The grave chamber is hidden beneath a spangled black canopy so visitors can't check. Nonetheless the very act of visiting this little place is highly thought-provoking and might inspire you to read more deeply about the fascinating subject of Jesus' historical career.

Bombay Times: "Delve Into This Thrilling Novel"

2010-08-29T07:35:00.003+05:30

Did Jesus travel to India Was Mary Magdalene from Maghada Were Abraham and Brahama the same entity These were just some of the questions that novelist Ashwin Sanghi sought to answer at an event to mark the launch of a new paperback edition of The Rozabal Line,a Da Vinci Code-style thriller that has had tourists flocking to the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar in recent months.

The lively conversation between Pritish Nandy and the author had the audience chuckling in disbelief and amazement as they discussed nuggets from the novel,which has remained a national bestseller for several months consecutively.At the crux of Sanghis fictional plot lies the possibility that Jesus survived the crucifixion and travelled to India.Sanghi's thriller shocks the reader at almost every page,but the author took pains to assure his audience that his book is a good old yarn and that they should read it as a story,not history.

The Rozabal Line is a thriller that is inspired by the authors obvious fascination with linkages between the worlds religions.Sanghis fascination was visible during his talk at Landmark store,where the discussion,like the novel itself,travelled from Mesopotamia to Magadha,Jerusalem to Rome,highlighting the manner in which religions have learnt and borrowed from each other down the ages.I find it amazing that both Jesus and Buddha fasted for forty days and nights.I am puzzled by the similarities between baptism and the Kumbh Mela.I find the similarities between Krishna and Christ incredible, says Sanghi excitedly.

The road to publication was a difficult one for Sanghi.I couldnt find a publisher, he says matter-of-factly.He was forced to self-publish the first edition.Luckily Tata-Westland saw merit in his novel and published the second edition in 2008 and this went on to remain a bestseller for many months.More recently the Lonely Planet guide to India described the novel as the core to the controversial theory that Jesus lies buried at the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar.

This promptly sent hundreds of tourists flocking to the shrine until the caretakers were left with no alternative but to shut down the tomb to visitors.
Does he believe his own fiction Sanghi smiles.I have always loved fiction that sounds like fact and fact that sounds like fiction.The fun in this book is that you rarely know when you are switching from one to the other, he says,determined to leave us equally bewildered.

The Hindu: "His first book interspersed with religion and history was lapped up by bibliophiles."

2010-08-28T08:25:00.000+05:30

Ashwin Sanghi is aware that making a film that has multiple stories and moves from one city to another will be a complicated task, says Madhur Tankha

His first book interspersed with religion and history was lapped up by bibliophiles. Encouraged by the readers' response, Mumbai-based author Ashwin Sanghi is now giving finishing touches to a script adapted from his book “The Rozabal Line” that will be made into a feature film.

Ashwin is aware that making a film that has multiple stories and moves from one city to another will be a complicated task: “Sometimes the stories narrated in the book are about 3000 B.C. and 5000 B.C. The film will have to be shot in multiple locations as the book moves from India to Afghanistan to Iran to Japan. The film-maker will have to understand all the nuances from the book to make the film relate to the audience.”

The author-turned-scriptwriter doesn't want to restrict the scope of the script by concentrating only on Bollywood. He is working on the script along with his friend Uday Gunjikar, who is based in the US and makes travelogues: “For years I was not even in touch with Uday. One fine day he called me after reading my first book that was written under my pseudonym and said we should start working on the script. He is probably one of those who know the ins and outs of the book.”

Producers or production houses would be approached towards the beginning of next year when a fully-bound script that has an international appeal is ready.

“It has to be a manageable script, possibly one that any film-maker of world-class status would like to lay his hands on. My gut feeling tells me that it will be some production house from the United Kingdom. However, the director can be someone from our country. We here have some fine Indian film-makers who are well connected with international production houses.”

Making it clear that he is not cut out for the task of directing his film, Ashwin says he is a good story-teller.

“At the end of the day, I am basically a raconteur but am not competent enough to make a film that would involve different stages of film-making and have diverse and difficult characters. But I feel that we need newcomers as far as the star cast is concerned. If we rope in a big star then he would only be playing himself. So we need a fresh face the audience can identify with. Even my book was a maiden venture and it became so successful.”

Ashwin is satisfied by the fact that his book has given a fillip to tourism in the trouble-torn State of Jammu & Kashmir.

“After Lonely Planet highlighted that my book has mentioned that Jesus Christ was buried in Kashmir, a number of tourists have been flocking to the Rozabal shrine.” The fictional element in the book, an amalgamation of comparative religion and conspiracy theories, has been compared with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code although the historical basis of the novel draws from several other books on the subject including Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten and The Unknown Life of Jesus by Nicolas Notovich.

Pointing out that The Rozabal Line was originally published in 2007 under his pseudonym, Shawn Haigins, Ashwin says it was actually an anagram of the author's real name: “I wrapped up the book towards the end of 2005. However, for the next one and a half years I was extremely frustrated because I could not find any publisher. The self-published book sold surprisingly well on Amazon.com and then caught the attention of Westland Books. The novel was subsequently published as an Indian edition in 2008 by Westland under my name and went on to become a bestseller…..”

While Ashwin is heartened by the fact that Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire has given a huge platform to Indian film-makers to rope in big international production houses, he nevertheless is in disagreement with what has been depicted in that film.

“My film is going to be different from Slumdog Millionaire. While it highlighted India's abject poverty, my film will bring self-pride among Indians. Some readers have told me that Boyle's film demeaned Indians as it showed slums and poverty-stricken people. They thought my book was packaged in a way that it was immensely readable and made them feel that India was all set to become an economic super power. It was always a spiritual super power. So this is what we have to highlight in the film,” he says.

A businessman by profession, Ashwin was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai, and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. He went on to complete his MBA from Yale University, joining his family's business interests in automobiles, real estate, exports and manufacturing in 1993. He continues to work full-time while pursuing his literary interests part-time.

Ashwin's passion for reading was ignited when his maternal grandfather Ram Prasad Gupta would bombard him with books that were far ahead of his time.

“He would insist that after reading every book I must write a letter detailing what I liked and what I didn't. In the beginning, it was a tedious process but my imagination and knowledge has increased over the years,” he adds.

A workaholic, Ashwin is also pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Wales, which he hopes to complete by 2011.

Bangalore Mirror: Debutant Ashwin Sanghi weaves in the age-old theory of Jesus surviving crucifixion and being buried at the famed Rozabal shrine

2010-08-28T06:51:00.000+05:30

The first time he brought out his book in 2007, it was under his pseudonym Shawn Haigins. And since he didn’t find any takers for the book, he had to self-publish it. Things would have stayed much the same too, only if he hadn’t chosen to write The Rozabal Line. The story that mixed history with religion and had a whiff of conspiracy surrounding it created enough noise in the online world, enough to get its current publishers (Westland Ltd.) to reach out to the author behind the anagrammical pseudonym Shawn Haigins — Ashwin Sanghi.

PLAIN VANILLA TO HOTCHOCOLATE FUDGE: A self-confessed fan of thrillers, Sanghi has a simple reason as to why he penned his first book around such a tricky topic. He says, “I am not the first person to tackle this subject. There are at least 30 - 40 books that have been written on this subject. But what I found reading them was, they were very dry. They were books you or I wouldn’t pick up at the airport. For an interesting topic as this, you have lost a huge crowd there itself.”

A Yale graduate, Sanghi has got the sure-fire formula right. He explains, “When you talk about history plus theology, you don’t present it like vanilla. What you need is a dollop of hot fudge, nuts and chocolate sauce to make it interesting.”

CONTROVERSY IS IN THE MIND: A racy page turner, the book in Sanghi’s words is “a potent combination of history and religion.” A plot line that hovers around historical characters like Jesus Christ, Osama Bin Laden, Mary Magdalene, the Illuminati and Opus Dei has the book getting the ‘controversial’ tag. Sanghi is nonchalant about it. Commenting on it, he says, “Honestly speaking, controversies are more in one’s mind.” That said, “I think the reason why my book is getting such a response might be because, for the first time, the subject has been written in a commercial format.” Even as he jokes about the various news reports about the Rozabal Shrine seeing more travellers thanks to his book, Sanghi remarks, “I think it’s not about controversy, it’s just that many people, who have not heard of the theory ( of Jesus’s life in India) and the shrine are reading about it for the first time.”

“I am probably the 101st person who is addressing the subject. The fact is that the novel then takes a life of its own, in the reader’s mind,” he opines.

CONSPIRACY MAKES FOR an INTERESTING READ: Sanghi readily agreed that he has been called a conspiracy theorist. “I am ok with it,” he admits because conspiracies make stories more interesting. As he explains, “If you just say Jesus was crucified, it’s normal. But if you say that Jesus survived the crucifixion that makes for an interesting read. JFK getting assassinated is not interesting but add that there might have been a conspiracy behind it, and that makes it interesting.”

FAN MAIL-HATE MAIL: The book as expected managed to raise the heckles of many. As he jests, “I have been called God Almighty and I have had people calling me the Devil.” The best comment he has ever got is from a reader who wrote, ‘I have read other Indian authors who write for the Booker (Prize) and are more interested in writing bad about the country. You have brought us a sense of pride.’

‘You are India’s Dan Brown,’ reads a fan’s comment on his website. Laughing heartedly about the hate mail he has received, he says, “You could fill up pages on the whacko comments I have got. I have people telling me that I am wrong and then there are people declaring that I will go to hell!”

--Mahalakshmi.Prabhakaran@timesgroup.com

Bombay Samachar & Dainik Bhaskar

2010-08-23T17:51:00.000+05:30

Pratahakal (Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur), Oct 13, 2010

2010-08-23T16:26:00.000+05:30

The Rozabal Line in Ekmat, Sanchar, Gavakari, Jai Hind, Hitvada, Tarun Bharat

2010-08-23T08:49:00.000+05:30

Shivkumar Mishra's Hindi Blogpost on "The Rozabal Line"

2010-08-23T08:10:00.004+05:30

किताब ऐसे ही न जाने कितने सवाल खड़ा करती है. जवाब भी देने की कोशिश करती है. लेकिन किताब का सबसे बड़ा आकर्षण है उसमें वर्णित फिक्शन. जबरदस्त तरीके का 'पाट-बायलर' है. एक पाठक के तौर मुझे तो यही समझ में आया. मैंने किताब की समीक्षा नहीं की है. मेरा लिटरेरी सेन्स वैसा नहीं है कि मैं इतनी बड़ी किताब की समीक्षा कर सकूँ. हाँ, एक पाठक की हैसियत से मुझे जो समझ में आया वह मैंने लिखा. समीक्षा का काम प्रोफेशनल क्रिटिक करते हैं.

New mass market paperback edition of The Rozabal Line

2010-08-21T11:35:00.002+05:30

The new mass-market paperback edition of The Rozabal Line has been released. For those who would like an author-signed copy, please drop in for the book discussion at Landmark (Phoenix Mills) on August 26th at 6:30 pm during which time the author will be in discussion with Pritish Nandy.

Launch of Mass-Market Paperback of The Rozabal Line by Pritish Nandy on Aug 26

2010-08-21T11:16:00.002+05:30

Landmark launches the mass-market paperback version of The Rozabal Line. Find out what separates myth from reality in this national bestseller by Ashwin Sanghi. The author will be in conversation with Pritish Nandy.
Date: August 26th 2010
Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: Landmark, Lower Level, Palladium, High Street Phoenix, Mumbai.
For more information, please call +91 22 6457 5323.

The Rozabal Line: Book Review by Vishesh Unni

2010-08-15T15:34:00.000+05:30

Conspiracies make good reads. They are entertaining, enchanting and enterprising.

This book is similar to Da Vinci Code in the sense that both talk about Jesus’ bloodline. Apart from that and a few more bolts and screws, this book is more engaging, conspiring and complete. The author not only makes the world look like a small place, he also makes it look young by jumping across centuries.

Small paragraphs help in keeping things short and sweet. In fact, this makes it easier for you to appreciate the complex plot and assimilating the information overload. The book flows along and has minimal descriptions, which again add to the success of the book.

The plot is well knit. To take threads of myriad colour and make something which is good, cohesive and symmetric is no easy task. The religions of the world and their subgroups, international politics, terrorism, secret societies, astrologers, past life regression therapy, temples and churches, international assassins, presidents and religious leaders- this has it all.

The finishing is quaint and thoughtful. The book might not make your heart race with anticipation, but it does make you think and appreciate. To me it became a bit ‘filmy’ at a few places- but that is quite expected in a thriller of this sort. I found the book slightly unemotional , which makes it sober and detached. This again makes the book work, as it isn’t just about one particular character. The characters fit into the plot, rather than the characters weaving one.

The book was published at lulu.com, at first. And this book shows that there are many good books out there which never see the light of print. I would say this book is better than the Da Vinci.

Overall I loved the book. It is a pretty captivating and interesting read. Conspiracies always intrigue me. Though whether to believe it or not, is a tough choice, especially considering the fact that it does not affect my personal views in anyway. But surely there is no smoke without fire. I have watched the video series on NWO and read about few of the other things mentioned in the book. My question is, if indeed there is an organization controlling the world secretly, how do they allow such books to be published?

Rating:- 8/10