On Winning Write India...

The extraordinary year long literary journey that began in India in 2015 is over.  
Write India Stories is now available online on Amazon as well as Flipkart.

Write India started off as an idea, the root of which was the belief that there is no shortage of literary talent in India. Readers and authors across the world acknowledge the skill required to bring beauty to prose within a caged word-limit. The difficulty invariably is in selling a product with unknown faces, irrespective of their talent.

That is where the Times Group stepped up with an initiative unlike any seen before in the Indian literature industry.

 

The Initiative

For the first time ever, 11 of India's bestselling fiction authors got together to be guides and judges for this huge event. Every month, one of the eleven authors would give out a paragraph as a prompt and ask the people of India to draw inspiration from that paragraph and write a short story.

 Look at the list of judges for Season 1 of Write India:

Amish, Chetan Bhagat, Ashwin Sanghi, Ravi Subramanian, Preeti Shenoy, Tuhin Sinha,

Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta, Madhuri Banerjee, Jaishree Misra, Anita Nair

Can you imagine what that entails? 11 months of entries pouring in from all over the country with no restriction of age or any other bar; your talent was the only criteria. 11 authors who had sold more than 16 million books between them judged the entries for their individual months, whittling the number down from a few thousands to 3, including a winner for their month. 11 winners.

I was the winner for the month of February. 

 To quote Robert Frost, '... and that has made all the difference.' 

It would be pedestrian of me to blandly jot down the events of the book launch. I think it is far better to share with you snippets and visuals from the weekend that was for the winners of Write India Season 1.

The literary workshop

With all of us flown in from different parts of the country to Mumbai, our weekend began with the promised literary workshop at the Times of India office. Following a warm welcome and introduction by Vinita Nangia (Associate editor of The Times of India & the director of Write India), we were left in the able hands of Dipankar Mukherjee (founder of Readomania).

Dipankar helped us deconstruct the very art of storytelling, showing us the layers that go into the process and engaging us with many an interactive creative session so that we understood the nuances. And trust me, I do mean interactive creative sessions. If you have any doubts, you can ask the other winners about my quickly cooked-up mystery of 'a Thailand prostitute who wakes up on top of the Himalayas'!



Madhuri Banerjee (author of the bestselling 'Losing My Virginity and Other Dumb Ideas' in addition to being a film writer, a columnist and presently in the television industry) was her vivacious self as she peppered her session on character development with plenty of examples, showing us how to flesh out our protagonists better.

Taking a break from class for a group selfie. 

Kids, that's how winners do it! Now go do this in school too with your favourite teachers!

Mahendra Jakhar (author, screenplay writer for Manjhi & Shagird) went the cavalier route, asking us to think outside the box instead of colouring within the expected lines of our story's genre.

The icing on the cake was a wonderful session with best-selling author Ravi Subramanian. Honest, self-effacing and polite-to-a-fault, he regaled us with many a tale of the industry (and various author) secrets. We literally turned off the video camera at least half a dozen times just to get these juicy details from him!  
 

Authors Mahendra Jakhar and Ravi Subramanian with 

the winners Rohit, Shailesh, Nikhil, Kena Shree, Samah, Dr Kuheli & little ol' me.

The Book Launch Venue: St Regis, Mumbai

Images courtesy: MakeMyTrip

The country's tallest hotel tower, St Regis in Mumbai was luxury personified. Every floor shone with regalia. One of the authors who was a judge said it best when he told me this - 'The scale of this launch is something I have never seen for any book in India. Leave aside short stories, we haven't seen anything like this even for our novels.' 
He was absolutely right, of course.

No expense was spared for this book launch right from our travel and accommodation and the wunderbar event itself to a final gala buffet dinner for all the winners along with the judges at the amazing Seven Kitchens restaurant.  

'I will have one plate of everything, Mr Chef Man.' 
The magnificent Seven Kitchens, St Regis

Images courtesy: MakeMyTrip

Meeting the authors you have loved reading

It is a giddy feeling to be in the same room as celebrities you adore, is it not? Now imagine having a dozen of them in the same room and they are all here to congratulate you. Yes, the surrealism of it takes awhile to sink in. We maybe doctors and experienced lawyers in real life but over there, we were initially giddy teenagers gawking and pointing as we saw each of the best selling authors walk in.

It took awhile to get used to the idea that they were here for our book launch. With no starry airs, we had a wonderful time interacting with them individually.

To make a heartthrob look even more awesome, have him stand next to someone

 who looks like a well-fed potato. Durjoy Datta knows this dictum well.

 

Eight years ago, I attended the launch of Preeti Shenoy's first book in Pune. 

It is awesome to see how far she has risen since then. My prediction of her

'taking her first steps to being a famous author' back in 2008 did come true!

One of the biggest 'blogger turned author' success stories ever, if you ask me.

 

Anjali Khurana & I first got to know each other because we won

a national short story contest in 2012 and were co-authors in Ravinder Singh's

'Love Stories That Touched My Heart'. Today, we finally got to meet him! 

 

A pleasant surprise to meet Shatrujeet Nath. Till date, he is the only author

whose entire set of fiction I have reviewed at the blog. 

 

With author Anand Neelakantan (Asura, the Bahubali trilogy).

It is a coincidence that the lighting makes me look like an Asura, I swear!

 

Author Madhuri Banerjee has to be extra radiant in this picture to make up

for my deer-in-the-headlights look. 

(For the record, I had seen a waiter go by with a plate of cheese so I was distracted.)  

  

The Camaraderie between the Authors

What became obvious fairly quickly was that these celebrity authors were friends in real life. The quick wit that marks their prose was on hand too, whether it was in response to queries or simply pulling each others legs at any given opportunity. 

Ravi Subramanian: Mera number kab aayega?
Ashwin Sanghi: Bas do minute aur.

The stories behind the story seeking out stories from across the country

Courtesy Vinita Nangia and the judges, we got to hear so many interesting anecdotes about the event and what went on behind the scenes.

• We got to hear of Vinita's resolve to fight for the 'short story' and bring it back into the limelight, proving wrong the naysayers in the publishing industry who felt the genre was dying. 
• Ashwin Sanghi had the audience in splits as he told us his secret to being a good fiction writer - being a good liar as a child!
• Ravi Subramanian had to explain to us all why he chose a prompt of infidelity when he was a judge. His answer? Mid-life crisis!
  
•  There were some interesting observations too. The oldest entry for the contest came from a 90 year old man and it was a tale of second chances and looking back. 
• The youngest winner, Prapti Panda was 14 years when she wrote such an amazingly mature tale on infidelity.
• You can watch the live streaming of the unveiling of the book here at TOI Books.
• After the felicitation by the authors, Nainesh's winning story 'Palwasha's Revenge' was portrayed on stage in a brilliant one-woman play by Swati Das. Gut-wrenching, harrowing and yet uplifting, it left us all stunned.  

Being Winners of the First Season of Write India

We were doctors and engineers, lawyers and students. We were giving our board exams and had university exams the day before we sent the story. We were as young as 14 and as old as my balding head. We were as diverse a set of people as you could imagine, spanning three generations. 

But we all had one thing in common.
We beat out 25,000 entries to be the top 11. 

We were 'the Top 0.044% of all entries'.
In the years to come, there will be other winners. We know that. There will be better stories too.
But you can never take this tag away from us - Winners of the First Season of Write India, the largest crowd-sourced writing competition ever held in the country.

 Clockwise from top left:

Amish with his winner Sutapa Basu

Ashwin Sanghi with his winner Kena Shree

Jaishree Misra with her winner Ramya Vivek

Ravi Subramanian with his winner Tishampati Sen

 Clockwise from top left: 

Preeti Shenoy with her winner Samah Visaria

Jaishree Misra with the winner of Anita Nair's passage, Rohit Tandekar 

Ravinder Singh with winner Vasudha Chandna

Durjoy Datta with his winner, me!

One of the most touching moments of the book launch. Author Ravi Subramanian 

patiently going up to each of the winners and getting their autographs in his copy of the book.

 

Why Write India stands out from other anthologies 

(and why I hope you will be inspired to win the next Season)

To say that the Write India event was unlike any other writing contest ever held in India sounds like a blatant exaggeration but consider the facts.

• When has there ever been a year long short story contest held in India, featuring 11 National best selling authors as judges?
• When was the last time you had 11 authors who together have written millions of words and sold over 13 million copies of their books, flying down from different parts of the country and applauding you for your 2500 words of prose? This does not happen even for book launches of full fledged novels.
• When has a short story book launch received this kind of fanfare and publicity with support from a globally recognizable media house? 

Online Buzz:

Till date, there have been articles on the book launch at:

• Femina,  
• Business Standard  
• Times of India ( including separate posts on the literary workshop and one exclusively for the winners too) 
• Sify 
• Best Media Info

We were in the papers that Sunday, inviting Mumbai for the finale 

 The book launch made it to the news too, obviously...

• I have been lucky enough to be a part of more than a dozen short story collections prior to this, including anthologies from the top 3 publishing houses of the country. I have attended 3 book launches in 3 different major cities as a co-author over the years. So trust me when I tell you this, no short story collection in India has received the kind of media attention and grandeur that greeted us at the starry St Regis.

Keep an eye out. Season 2 is coming. I know some of the shortlisted judges but won't be telling you until the official announcements. Trust me, your skills are going to be put to the test. But then, the reward is worth it.

In the end, the simple fact is that you are never - I repeat, never - going to get an opportunity like this in your lifetime. This is the American Idol & Masterchef Australia of the Indian writing universe. One single short story can catapult you into the limelight.

Write India Stories - The Book

Understand the scale of this event. The 2016 edition of the coveted Commonwealth short story contest had 4000 entries sent in over 2 months from 5 continents. In comparison, Write India was a contest that lasted an entire year. You had a chance to write 11 times over the year. And in the end, a colossal 25,000 entries came in. 

The final product consists of the best 36 stories curated from this list of 25,000 stories. Meticulous editing and attention to detail has been the key, delaying the launch until everything was in place.

 A huge shoutout to the team behind the scenes - Gunjan, Surabhi & Kalpana who made it all happen. 

I don't know about the others but I drove Gunjan mad prior to the launch with my endless queries! The fact that she didn't lace my wine with laxatives is a true testament to her forgiving nature.

In the book, you get to see the original passage by the judge before turning the page and finding out how the top 3 entries took the prompt forward in their own unique styles. The very same prompt that elicited a poignant tale in one author brought out an energizing thriller in another. This is not 'just another short story' collection.

Only the top 0.1 % made it into the book.  Think of that.

I hope you do participate. And I hope you win. Because winning this will open publishing doors for you that no other short story you ever write could.

This is our moment, framed forever in history.

You can catch all the official pictures and videos of the book launch here at TOI Books. 

The book can be bought here on Amazon and Kindle besides being available in book stores across the country.