Bestselling author Amish is expanding his storytelling empire to children’s fiction, video games and music

MY SON FINALLY thinks I am cool,” says Amish Tripathi. Over the last year, the author, known for his sprawling fantasy and histori­cal fiction, has been working on a different form of storytelling: video games. The Age of Bhaarat, in development by Tara Gaming Ltd, a company co-founded by Amish with Nouredine Abboud and Amitabh Bachchan, is a AAA dark fantasy action-adventure game set in ancient India—the playground of Amish’s imagination. But gaming was a new frontier and he might not have taken the plunge if not for his son, an avid gamer, who urged him to do it. “I started working on it and, man, it’s been fun. It’s a completely different atmosphere. Most of us don’t realise what a huge industry it is.”

Before games, however, comes another story that Amish has cre­ated for a younger audience. This month sees the release of Dhruv- Tara & the Great Indian History Quiz, the first in a line of a seven-book middle-grade adventure series. It is also the first time he has written a book for children after years of churning out wildly popular best­sellers for grownups. “I am growing younger—discovering my younger child,” he says, laughing at this new venture. We are meeting in Delhi at Rick’s Bar, more than a fortnight ahead of the book’s launch as Amish’s publisher, Westland Books (Red Panda), gears up for the launch. Amish, a very genial man, goes around the room greeting every­one—dressed in a t-shirt featuring the children’s book cover. No such thing as too much marketing, he quips. Amish knows a thing or two about the different marketing strategies that can make for a book.

Long before Bookstagram became a rage and authors came to be deeply embed­ded in the publicity tour of their books, Amish had already made a playbook to get his books to bestseller lists. The Shiva Trilogy went on to become one of the fastest-selling book series in the history of Indian publishing—an exceptional feat for a trilogy that began in 2010 with the self-published title The Immortals of Meluha for which Amish executed his own promotional campaign.

Since then, Amish has added a string of successful books including the Ram Chandra series and the Indic Chronicles. But Dhruv-Tara & the Great Indian History Quiz is uncharted territory. “Writing for children is a lot tougher, in many ways,” he says. An adult may be polite but children will walk away from anything that doesn’t allure them instantly. Amish’s aim is to hook this “unforgiving” readership into a story that paints Indian history in an engaging light for children. “I think the way history has been presented to us in our textbooks—a really fantastic subject has been made mind-numbingly boring. It is a very interesting subject,” he says. “Can we make history interesting through a story?” The book follows two 11-year-olds, Dhruv and Tara, rivals and competitors for the num­ber one position in class. When they are selected to represent the school together in a national-level quiz competition, they must work together. In the process, they discover new nuggets of history, find new perspectives to stories they have heard before, navigate their chang­ing relationship and overcome different challenges. Amish stops here, with a spoiler alert. “I am giving away too much of the book,” he says. “I hope the kids like me as much as their parents did.”

In today’s age, books exist under a cloud of impending doom. Millions of books may be published each year but the theory lingers that readers are a diminishing entity. Young readers are posited as endangered, their lives suffused with the attractions of the screen over the page. Amish notes that he is not against any medium. “I host and produce documentaries. I am on social media; I have a podcast. And, I am making a video game,” he says. “That said, there’s a huge amount of value that books add. If your entire time is lost in your phone, you also lose something. Re­member, the algorithm is not thinking about what is good for you in the long term. It’s interested in your attention now. A book gives kids the time and space to use their own imagination. It expands your mind.”

Amish observes moves being made worldwide to curb social media access to children, but he also proposes making books (and other media) more accessible and alluring. With his previous fiction, Amish’s readership already appeals to a young adult readership. But Dhruv-Tara is hoping to lure an even younger gen­eration. “Can we make a book attractive enough that they will want to read it?” His solution is to create page-turners—a task he has proven to be adept at.

WHEN AMISH BEGAN writing his first novel, he returned to the stories he had grown up with. A degree from IIM Calcutta and over a decade of experience in the financial services did not eclipse the hold stories had over him. Since then, he has written 13 books and expanded into different genres and formats. His most daunting tryst with writer’s block came around the time he was writing Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta (2019) when a series of personal losses left him grappling with grief and anger. The book went on to become one of his fastest-selling titles. But for the most part of the journey, his process is driven by self-belief and a lifelong faith in the blessings of Shiva.

For writing his books, Amish has often turned to reading. To write Dhruv- Tara, for instance, he read children’s books for the first time in several years. It is not so much to mimic a style, but to find an expression of his own within the landscape of a particular story. “Reading a lot in the genre you want to write in, is like buying the ingredients you need for a meal,” he observes. How a writer combines and concocts the ingredients into their own recipe distinguishes their work, he argues.

Amish is always concocting some­thing new—books, games, or even mu­sic. Many years ago, as a student at IIM-C, Amish was part of the college band, belting out everything from Kishore Kumar hits to U2 songs. Later, this year, he teamed up with rock band Trilok to perform a contem­porary rendition of the ‘Shiva Tandav Stotram’. “We released it on YouTube and to my surprise, it actually took off,” says Amish, who served as vocalist for the track. “The band I have been approached to make an album of ancient Sanskrit hymns in a modern style.” There is always the prospect of his books being adapted into movies—with new headlines on rumoured production and casting every few months. And then there is The Age of Bharaat, slated for launch later this year—Amish often builds immersive worlds for his books, but creating a story for a game is an entirely different exercise when a writer must think of every plot with multiple possibilities and routes that a player must take.

As for books, the clue to what he might write next is in his reading list. Turns out, he is reading a lot of crime fiction these days with the express intent of writing one soon. “I have no idea if it will crash and burn or if it will do well,” he admits. Though it will likely not matter—the fear of failure, underperformance or criticism has rarely held Amish back.