Episode 13: Vikram Chandra- Decoding a Writer’s Mind
About Vikram Chandra:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is the world-renowned author, professor and tech entrepreneur Vikram Chandra. His first book ‘Red Earth’ and ‘Pouring Rain’, published in 1995 was received with outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. In 2006, he published Sacred Games, which won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction and a Salon Book Award. In 2016, ‘Sacred Games’ was chosen by Netflix to be their first original series from India. Vikram has been teaching creative writing for 25+ years first at George Washington University and now at UC Berkley. He is the co-founder and CEO of Granthika Co., a revolutionary software startup that is re-inventing writing and reading for the digital age.
I enjoyed speaking to Vikram about his early life, his work and his entrepreneurial journey.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: Who is Vikram Chandra?
Vikram: That's hard to describe. So, I guess if I look back a long way, I was always this nerdy kid, and never any good at sports. And I was the first kid in, I got these tech coke bottle glasses in the third... in grade 3. That was my really defining. I was like that person in my class. And then when I went to boarding school, this was a Mayo college in Rajasthan, and that was a very sort of strange mixture of kind of Rajput machismo and then British public-school machismo.
And so, all the heroes of the school were the sportsman and you looked up to them and stuff. But I was... I mean, I was very lucky because I found my niche... niche as a storyteller. So, my first semester there, I was writing sci-fi. I was very influenced by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, so I starting to write sci-fi stories. And my friend, Nelesh, read one of the stories which I had in the back of my notebook and he said, “You should give this to the mayor,” which was the student magazine and it got published there. And then it was great because like some of those sports dudes were coming up to me and saying, “I liked your story.”
And I always want to tell... I mean, even when I was younger than that, I used to make up long, long epic stories in my head. So, that was my identity from a very young age. And my mother's writer. She... when we lived in Delhi, this was very early, after I was born, she would write plays for election and television and All India Radio. And my earliest memories, some of them are seeing her sitting at the dining table writing on these foolscap pieces of paper.
So, then I finally like I had a good time. I mean, I like Mayo, because I'm some of my friends were some of these guys and I'm very close with them actually. I'm still in What... I just got last year into a WhatsApp group. We have the, you know, remote once-a-month hangouts, we chat and have drinks or something.
And then after that I started going to college, still wanted to be a writer. Went to my undergrad in California was a major in English with a minor in concentration in creative writing. But I knew that... that making a living as a writer was impossible. So, and I've seen that in my mother's life. So, I then decided I'd always been passionate about film, and was an avid movie watcher, read about movies. And then we had moved to Bombay when I was in 11th grade. And my mother got involved in the film industry there. And her first film that she wrote the story for came out, I think in 1981, or something like that. So, I thought that would be a place where I could make a living, because you can always... I could... I had an end, and I could get a job as an assistant to an assistant director.
So, I went to film school at Columbia in New York, and then figured out fairly quickly in that first year that I was not built for film. It's even in that level where you're making a graduate student films, it's intensely collaborative from the first day. And I am reclusive. I am an introvert. So, it was very clear to me I wasn't going... it wasn't going to work. And also like it... it requires industrial amounts of money to make a movie. And, again, at Columbia, I saw that there were some people there who happen to have money. And on the student films, the final things that they presented at the end of the 2-year program, they would spend like $25,000 on that film, and on 16-millimeter movie. And obviously, what they did ended up looking really glossy, at least. Not necessarily better, but had professional sheen about it.
So, for all these reasons, so then I... luckily, I was in the Columbia library one day and these 2 books caught my eye. It was like this kind of when I talked about this, it sounds like this mystical moment from a movie. So... and so I reached up and picked them off, and it turned out to be the translated Autobiography of James Skinner, secondary Skinner, who was an Anglo-Indian soldier, early 19th century. So, I took that back to the dorm and to my room and started reading it. And I just got obsessed with that. I knew I wanted to write about this guy, but I knew the kind of big, magical realism that I had in my head, I could do in a novel, but it was... I wasn't going to get funding for that. So, then that's how I ended up writing that first book through 2 graduate writing programs. One in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, the other the University of Houston. So, I don't know if this is actually explaining who am. I guess in some small way, it is.
Pritish: It is, it is. Because that's how the evolution happens, all these anecdotes of books. Actually, I was trying to look for that book myself, but I think there's only 1 hardcopy somewhere. So, I couldn't get my hands on it. Most of your books and work that you have done has a very strong reflection of India. How would you describe India?
Vikram: Oh... I mean, this is kind of cliché again to say this, but huge contradictory, full of things that drives you crazy, hurtful things, the suffering that you see on a daily basis that you can't avoid, and also really inspiring. We have this old civilization that has its great parts, the intellectual activity, the artistic tradition, the philosophical tradition is stunning. And then but also along with that goes all kinds of horrible things. I guess that's true of any civilization. But in the Indian context, the usual misogyny, the horror of caste that is still alive.
So, I guess for me, I'm so deeply embedded in that, but so that I can't help writing modern. Although the fiction that I'm working on now, it still has Indians in it, but it'll move beyond the shores of India. So, again, that's a change in some sense.
Pritish: You have been teaching creative writing for 25 plus years.
Vikram: Yeah.
Pritish: What has teaching taught you about writing?
Vikram: Oh, a lot. I mean, I should start with saying that... that in grad school, even before that, in Bombay, I got a little bit of a connection with Nissim Ezekiel who’s great in the input. And one of the things that drove me to the United States was that I couldn't see how I could find people that I could actually sit with who would formally teach me writing. So, Nissim, although he didn't have time, he just gave me a couple of comments that were really encouraging. And then I was, both as an undergrad is a poet named Robert Mezzi. And then grad school, I got to work with 2 amazing American writers from the 20th century John Barth.
I mean, these are giants, and they're both extraordinarily generous to me. And what I realized then was that... that sitting in a classroom with them, and it's not necessarily about getting instructed by them or having them look at your work, it's watching them work on other people's work as well. And so, Boris had this amazing sense of plot, of the structure of a story, or kind of architectural sense and then watching. Donald Dawn like work on somebody's sentence, it was just extraordinary because he just... you knew there was something wrong with that sentence, it was lengthy, it would clang in your ear, but he couldn't tell why. And then Don would remove 1 comma and it would sing. It was just like complete education like a meta education in what a classroom can do for you.
And it also became very clear to me that this is a very long tradition in India. We've had this system of Guru and shisha or Ustad and Shagird that, again, goes back thousands of years. And the purpose of this is that the student comes to the teacher and then you not only learn about the craft, you're introduced into the (unclear) [08:26]. You learn about stuff by being inside that world. And so, that was also really, really helpful to me.
And, so both... and then as a student, and then like when you turn it around as a teacher, I hope my students are getting some of the same like some fraction of that from me. And then what's great about teaching is that... that the kids, the young people challenge you. You don't... they don't allow you to get comfortable. And every book I've written like, in some sense, the ideas that I've put in the book, the structures that it's... it's like a lab. I test it out on the... on the students, and they have varied taste. They introduced me to writing that I would never read on my own. And then also like apart from that, being around young people as you become an uncle in the Indian vernacular, they keep you abreast of like cultural trends. Like, what do I know about Tik Tok? But they keep me... I get some sense of what's happening, what's important to them.
So I mean, it's... it's been... like you were saying, it's been a central part of my life, along with the writing side by side with that, and the research I've moved to the writing, side by side with that has been this connection to the world through the students. And what I... what I think about is with them. So, it's like I guess this is something teachers say sometimes that, “They teach me even more than I teach them.” And I'm very grateful for this.
Pritish: So, the highest pleasure is listening to a good story. What is a good story?
Vikram: See, one of the things that I've learned over the years is that that varies intensely. It varies widely. And I mean, I'm obsessively going back to the Indian tradition now since you asked me about it. But I wrote about this in ‘Geek Sublime’, that there's these wonderful aesthetic philosophers, those are the ones that I think was a student from about the 8th to the 11th century. And they had this idea of the sharadiya who is your... your ideal viewer, or listener or reader. And so... so, this is a person who is sort of educated in the... in the medium that you're producing in, and that has similar... it literally means something like same hearted, who has empathy for what you're trying to do, and then understand... they resonate with it as it were, and therefore then, they can appreciate it. And so, your perfect viewer might be very different from the next person's.
So, I mean, my wife and I were talking about it today, Melanie, and like this TV stuff, and the films and the series that we like to watch are so different. Like, in some ways, I mean, we like to exchange opinions, and she tells me eagerly, “I’m watching this thing. It's great.” And then I started watching it, I'm like, “Mel, can I just like watch 1 episode?” So, but... but in my... in my world, what makes a good story is, I mean, I've been very fond of plot, just like a driving sense of cause and effect of tension, of curiosity that is driven by plot. And when somebody puts together that with, I guess, what you could call it a certain thickness, create sentences, a great architecture in terms of just like chapters that lead me on from one to the next.
And then complexity of character and complexity of imagination and thought. I mean, it's like a feast. And I should say also that it doesn't... although I write long books, it doesn't depend on length and size at all. There's some writers like Don Bartholomae, he would write this amazing. 2-and-a-half-page story and it left you feeling full and joyous. You knew that you had been in the presence of something great and something that fulfilled you. And I'm jealous of those people, because they can make it work in like that tiniest space. It’s like what watching a miniature painter at work, and it takes me pages to get to the end of my stories.
Pritish: What inspires you to write anything? And what is the technique behind it?
Vikram: It's mainly curiosity, always curiosity, I should say. So... so, I'll start thinking about something and then I won't know very much about it. And I've seen this happen to me time and time again. So, for instance, with ‘Sacred Games’, the big 900-page cops and gangsters and spies in India book, I mean, we... like I was saying, we moved to Bombay in the early late 70s. And then through the 80s and 90s and in the early parts of the 2000s, I watched organized crime become more and more powerful. And then as the economy grows, they start warring over the cake, as it were. And then the weaponry moves from knives and cricket bats, they’re suddenly automatic weapons being fired on the streets of Bombay.
And there's a famous shootout actually that later got it made it to a film called ‘Shoot... Shootout at Lokhandwala’. We live in that neighborhood at the time. And my father and I were driving back from town. And we were on the main Lokhandwala Street, and suddenly, we hear automatic weapons fire echoing of the buildings. And it was really like loud. It sounded like a small war, like a... like a combat. And we couldn't tell where was coming from. And so, we get home and then like it's on the news. So, I started to get curious about what is this happening? I didn't... I don't understand this.
And all I know about crime at this point, I'd written 1 police procedural short story for 11 long in Bombay, which is a story before this. But that was like your traditional detective story, cop story. There's a dead body in the beginning, on the first page, and then by the end of it, why the body is there, and who did it. But I didn't know anything about this stuff, except what I'd seen in the movies.
Pritish: Hmm.
Vikram: So, during the writing of the short story, I've gotten to know a friend of mine, we've become... we've since been like close. He's like my brother who, Hussain Zaidi. And he's 1 of the 2 people that that book ‘Sacred Games’ are dedicated to. So, he's... he's one of India's most prominent crime reporters and now, crime writer. I like to call him the Dean of crime writing in India. So, I asked him, I said, “Look, can you tell me what's going on? And can you introduce me to people who will talk to me about this?” And so then like what I always end up doing is when I meet with somebody, I say, “Can you introduce me to somebody else?” So, it spreads like a network or a web.
And so, then the curiosity keeps me going. I'm just trying to understand what is going on. And in the sort of, it's a well-worn saying in the writing world, but I think you should write what you don't know. Because you're learning. And then it's very important that you be passionate about what you're writing about. Like, it takes me a long time to write a book. But even if it takes 2 or 3 years for somebody else, getting bored in the middle of a project like that is really deadly. Because it means that there's no energy there for you and you feel like... then you feel exhausted. But when you're working on something that you're... you're excited about in this way of curiosity, like you wake up every morning, and you.... you want to get out into the field. And then like, I don't know, the viewers won't be able to see it, there's big piles of books behind me. And so, then also there's this exciting sense of you're meeting with people, you're reading secondary sources, and you're learning.
So, that's how like my stories have come to me. And then... then the big task is when you've got all this material, you've got your characters, how do you shape it into a coherent whole, into something that has, I mean, dare to say, like a beauty in its shape that is appealing and engaging for the reader?
Pritish: True. Is writing and coding the same thing for you, but different mediums of expression?
Vikram: No. I would say they’re similar in some aspects, but no, I wouldn't call them.... I wouldn't follow the same. I mean, so I wrote about this in the last book I published, the nonfiction book called ‘Geek Sublime’. Because this is a comparison that often get made but I think is very limited and What I mean by that is several things. One is that when I write, and I think this is true a lot of writers and also artists and other medium.... media, you don't know what you're working on. You have absolutely no idea where... what the shape of it is going to be what the project is about.
And so, it's unlike, you have an idea for a piece of software that is going to find... that has utility for users. You might not know like what stack you're going to use to build it. And you try to put together like an architecture for it. But and then I guess what is similar is the iterative nature of doing both kinds of work. You.... you write something, you write lines of code, and then you realize that they're not working the way that you want them to. So, you come back and revise them and then you keep going like that. Which to me at least feel like completely different processes. I do both and both of them feels like a relief from the other one. Because part of the problem of writing is this fuzziness. E.L. Doctorow famously said that, “Writing a book is like driving a car through the night. You can only see... in the headlights, you can only see 6 feet ahead. But if you keep driving, you eventually get there.” And that feels a lot to me. Like what happens.
And then the other thing that that I think is very different is what are the aesthetics of the... the lines of language that you're writing. So, there's some sentiment which when I see beautiful code, I appreciate it. It looks beautiful to me, and I can see its virtue as it were. And sometimes I'm moved by that. If you see something really, really elegant and clever, without making myself sound smarter than I really am. Is that like, if there's like some functional code that some intense like Einstein have a programmer writes, like it'll take me an hour to just parse it, right?
And whereas on the other hand, when you're writing literary prose, it's a very different thing. So, I should say also that in code, the most deadly thing is ambiguity, because you're giving instructions to a machine. And it has to be absolutely clear to the machine what to execute. And if it's not clear, if there's some fault in the architecture that puts it... that makes it ambiguous, and it goes off in a surprise direction, you can end up killing people or possibly causing a war. But in literary writing, what you want to achieve is a kind of directed ambiguity. And what I mean by that is that, so the Indian guys that I was talking about, the aesthetic philosophers and thinkers had a whole aesthetics built around this.
So, they would say that look, the example you'd like to give was a village on the Ganges. So, first, you have the denotative meaning which is... and then that denotative meaning doesn't make sense. How can they be a village on the Gan... on the river? So, then you work out the connotative meaning, which is, it's a village next to the river. That's what that means. But then, in the mind of somebody who's listening to this, that image will conjure up a cloud of other images around it. So, in their time, they will have thought of it as sanctity, as beauty as fresh air. In our time, it probably conjures up ideas about pollution and dirty water, yeah, plastic.
So, they said that the purpose of poetry is to move into that third level of meaning, so that you write a sentence, you write a 2-line verse, but because it's suddenly evokes all those other meanings, you can live in that forever. So, each time you come back, we might read it when you're 16. Next time you're 25, you’ll experience 2 different meanings. And they call this the dhuani, which literally in Sanskrit and Hindi means vibration or resonance. And so, they compared it to the sounding of a bell, so that it's a sound that then echoes and echoes and echoes. And the other image they like to use for it is like a needle falling through a pile of lotus leaves. And so, you get 1 layer and another layer, another layer.
So, producing that ambiguity is, I think, what the writers task is. And it's difficult to do. And when I feel it happening in some great piece of art, it's really extraordinary. So, that's what I meant, like the relief from both kinds of... of work is that one, writing fiction or poetry is fuzzy. And then the other thing is that the effect you're trying to achieve is very different. In one, you want clarity, the opposite of ambiguity. In the other, you want ambiguity of a particular sort.
Pritish: One is more imaginative outcome. The other one is a more definitive outcome.
Vikram: Yeah, or at least I think both involve imagination, creativity. But I think on the literary side, the effect you want to produce is intensely and primarily and first emotional. You want to engage your... your listeners, readers, the central part of them, the emotional part of them, the part of them that is affected by all their lives through childhood, everything that they've learned, their literary heritage. And if you're lucky, once in a lifetime, you can do that. So, yeah, so... so, that's what... I mean, I expanded on this more in ‘Geek Sublime’.
Pritish: And this actually comes... this question actually comes from that book, and I was listening or reading some pieces of it, and I realized that I think how you see it and how it actually comes together for you is quite unique. And that actually leads me to your tech startup, Granthika, which is to my understanding is a combination of your 2 obsessions, writing and coding.
Vikram: Yeah
Pritish: So, what is Granthika? What does it do? And what is the technology underneath?
Vikram: So, it started as like a kind of writer’s need. And what that was, is that when I started writing ‘Sacred Games’, it was my third book. So, I understood that one of the major tasks that I've been facing in the last 2 books and that was going to frustrate me on this one was managing all this information, like the books behind me that I collect along the way. And not only that my notes about the research, but my notes about my characters. And then one of the most difficult part is handling timelines. So, event comes after this event and then I like to write where real events from history are mixed in with the fictional events. And so, that becomes difficult to manage in terms of time spans.
So, you're putting Sartaj as a first responder to the bomb blast in Bombay. And then I realized, “Well, can he really do that? Wouldn't that make him 9 years old when he joined the police force?” So, to manage all these things. And then when you change something upstream, everything gets shifted downstream. And so, I'm sure somebody had written software to do this. It's such a like an obvious thing. And I was surprised to find that nobody had and. And so, I was in Israel on a reading tour, and I ran into this... the editor... the publishers that I was... that were my Israeli publishers took me to a bar in Tel Aviv. And I ran into this Israeli thriller writer. And I'm afraid of lost his name, because it was a fairly inebriated evening.
But we were talking about this problem, and thriller like he wrote really tight thriller, this matters even more, because it's minute to minute, the plot depends on, “Could he have driven from here to there in 16 minutes?” And so, we were complaining about this to each other and he told me used Microsoft Project. I don't know if you've ever encountered Microsoft Project, but it was like a piece of software that you use if you're building a bridge and you need to manage like the shadows of 300 workers and deliveries, but you can associate people in materials with events. And that's what he was using.
So, I went home to DC and I started doing it. And I managed to do it, actually. I mean, not in a very clean way, I was clumsy and hard to change. But then after ‘Sacred Games’ was finished, I had downtime. So, I got back to thinking about this, like, “How do you do this?” And it turns out that it's much harder problem than you might think it is up front. And the reason... and people surprising me from the Humanities have been trying to do this for a long time. Because as soon as they discover computers, they want to ask questions like, “How often does Hamlet speak in the play as opposed to Ophelia?”
So, the markup... the idea of text markup has been around for a long time. But one of the problems that it has is that it is invasive mark... if you think about XML, it puts the tags into the text. And because of that, the systems built around it are... are hard to construct. And then, as far as I know, they've never been widely adopted, at least in the Humanities, right? I know there's the text encoding initiative, which is in use by museums and stuff, and but at least to me, there was nothing available.
And I asked actually a couple of years back, people in my department, I sent around an email saying, “Have you ever heard of the text encoding initiative? And how many of you... if you've heard of it, how many have used it?” and it was like some... I think out of the 20 odd people responded, like 6 had heard of it, and like 3 or 4 had used it. So, anyway, that... that was a tangent.
So, I obsessed about this for many years, and then one night in this house, I was like half asleep, and I got the glimpse of a possible solution. And what occurred to me is that using hypergraphs, maybe you could do this. And the idea being that, if you think of text as a graph, so each letter becomes a node in a graph, and there's an edge leading to the next letter, and then the letter behind it, that's 1 graph. And then what you can do is you can layer hypergraph over that, and meaning that hyper graph is different from graph. And your listeners will notice a traditional graph connects 1 node, if you can make a connection with 1 node pointing in with another graph. A hyper graph can touch many nodes at the same time, and that's what makes it hyper.
So, then the hyper graph can represent, for instance, like the appearances have a character at various parts in the text. And so, then you keep layering these things over each other. And in this layering, you can construct knowledge, you can make this web of knowledge. So, that's what we've done is, what it does is it takes the text of the manuscript, and makes it part of a knowledge graph. And the advantage of doing that is that you can attach any number of nodes in this knowledge graph layers in this knowledge graph. And then what's exciting about it is that... that you can... you can... you can then pull in these facts that you assert in the form of this knowledge graph, you can reason over them, you can pull in outside pieces of knowledge. So, if there's a database on the web that is... that is... that is amenable to this, you can go out and link that in.
So, it's really very ambitious. I mean, we haven't had the resources to execute much of this. The most intelligent part of it is now this events thing, because that seemed urgent to us like setting up logic between events. So, if the inquest follows the murder, then the inciting incident has to come before it. And so, you set up these streams of... of like you can... you can get a tempo reasoner working overview. And so, but... I mean, and so I'm making it sound like it's complex, but we've worked very hard to at least keep the surface, the UI simple, because we want to get, quote/unquote, the ‘ordinary writer’, the non-techie writer be able to work transparently through this. And as far as we know, our youngest user now is 7 years old, and she's using it to make her stories.
So, I mean, like I was saying, there's a great deal of potential contained in the technology. And I should say also that all of this is like way above my paygrade. I mean, I can construct like sort of crowd apps, but that's about my level. So, although like I had this like fuzzy idea of how to do this, I was very lucky to find... found my co-founders Borislav Lordanov. And Boris is this kind of mad like tech genius who's leading a very talented small team of very talented programmers, and he's able to execute it. And he's worked in this kind of knowledge, database knowledge creation. He's the... he's the inventor of the creator of an open source database called HyperGraphDB, which is... when I saw that thing, I knew, I said, like, “Maybe this is practical, it could be done.”
And I emailed him, and he very nicely answered the questions that I had. And then he said, “What are you going to use this for?” and I sent him back my software proposal. And he emailed back saying, “If we get funding, I want to work on this with you.” Because he got it, because we were like coincidentally had been thinking about the same thing for years.
So, anyway, that's... that's what it is. And so, it's like a weird... if you want to think about it, it's a weird marriage between a text editor, a database, and a timeline. And so... yeah, so that's... that's what it is. And like what I'm working on my new fiction with it, and what I like about it is that I don't have to like spend all this time doing what feels to me like double entry bookkeeping manually. If I'm... if I'm in my manuscript and I want to learn about something that I've noticed... that I've made months before about a character, I with 1 key shortcut in the characters and record, so to speak, and then another shortcut, I'm back where I started. So, it's much quicker, and I'm not splitting my attention.
And then one of the thing, internally, we sometimes have talked about this as an integrated writing environment like an IDE. So, this... this is something that programmers have had access to for a long time, and writers haven't.
Pritish: So, actually, that brings me, when I explored the product, it definitely made sense to me for ‘Sacred Games’, because there is a number of characters growing up going to different instances. But at the same time, there is a series now going on Netflix called ‘The Dark’. I don’t think you’ve watched it.
Vikram: No, I haven't watched it yet.
Pritish: Yeah. And I was watching It and these days, time loops and Russian movies... sorry, series like the Russian doll, all of them go into different loops and their different characters and different time zones, or other time zones, I would say, but in the future past and present. And ‘Dark’ is such a complex story that you really need to remember. Because there are instances where one of the actors technically is actually kissing his sister. Because if you go back... and he realizes it, because he went to that time period in the past, and he figures out. So... and I could see so much value in having a product like Granthika, actually put that... and not only for the writer, but also for the consumer.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah.
Pritish: Because when we watch it, it becomes really tough. And if you're into it, you really want to figure out which character is doing what.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. So, I think like from the writer’s point of view, this is exactly what I'm talking about, the ability to handle multiple timelines, the ability to... to alternative universes in a sense. And, I mean, I think sometimes of the comic book industry, they do this to a mad... at a mad scale. And what I actually discovered when I was writing my software proposal, that Marvel apparently has this internal product because they have this like, what, like 80-year-old universe now with has meta universe which has multiple universes within it. And at some point, they were planning to expose it apparently to the outside world, but I've never heard of that.
So... so, absolutely, that plan. And then also from the reader’s point of view, there's this... Bret Victor’s had this long time... he's had this project going and he's demonstrated some of the idea of book as program. So, mainly what we read on the Kindle or any other e-book reader is like... it's many ways similar to a digital scroll. So, you scroll through this thing, you can now like click on a word, and it will give you a definition and a character note. But like, we want to do things like alternate reading methods, like so that let's say you're seeing the entire novel from one character's point of view. You.... you give them a drop-down menu, they choose one, and suddenly, the whole novel is now from another point of view. You embed music, you embed multimedia. And this is actually in our pitch deck.
So, like, I’m saying, it's a hugely ambitious project. I mean, if we survived, we have the usual startup terrors of... of diminishing runway. We want to execute on this, but it's an open question, like we released in November, and we're in that startup paradox of, we need to find users, but to do that, we need to be able to have resources through the marketing. But we can't get those resources unless we have enough users. So, we’re stumbling along trying to learn. And, I mean, I'm a reclusive writer, Boris is this tech guy. We have programmers, we have 1 person who has a PhD in software requirements gathering.
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: And so, the net result is our marketing is pretty crap. This is too much information.
Pritish: So, actually, that leads me to 2... 2 questions. How was your experience fundraising?
Vikram: Well, I was... I was... it was lucky. So, what happened... I mean, I have this friend in India, Akash Kapoor, who is another writer techie. He writes... the book that he's working on now is really interesting, it's about utopia... utopias. He wrote a book about India becoming and it was about this sort of sudden change in the Indian political and social landscape with the economy and new media and all that stuff.
So, Akash was in San Francisco, and he and I had lunch, and I told him about this idea that I had, and stumbling around looking for ways to do it. And he had happened to have worked with Roy Bahat at Bloomberg Beta. And he said, “You should talk to Roy.” And... and Roy is a... he's a really interesting guy, like he's very unusual, according to me in the VC world. So, the... the stated mission of Bloomberg Beta is to think about anything that changes the nature of work. And so... so, Roy's primary focus through the fund is this, and which means that they're interested in things like what we're doing. Because we could apply this to other domains like tech documentation, scientific writing, anything that where you're trying to represent a complex universe through text.
So, I went into the city and had lunch with Roy and I told him about this, and I guess I pitched him story really. Like, it's I realized in the last few years like how much of the tech world is kind of like the film universe, you know? You walk in and you pitch an idea, and it's all like in the air. But if you can tell a convincing story, right, there's a chance of getting funding for it. So, Roy was really great. He said, “I think it's an interesting idea, but obviously you need somebody else to execute this, somebody to execute it with.” And then that was the time when I found... I found Boris through my... through my internet explorations, looking for the technology to build this on top of. And so, most of the institutional money has come from Roy, and then the rest of it has been friends and family; I guess the usual path that people take.
Pritish: Yeah. Actually, that makes me conclude that actually every startup is a work of fiction...
Vikram: Yes.
Pritish: ... which turns into a nonfiction.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah, that is so good. Yeah. Wow, you should write that down somewhere.
Pritish: We talked about Netflix, obviously, ‘Sacred Games’ has been such a huge success and of India's first original series. How has platforms such as Netflix helped writers, filmmakers, as actors to express themselves and potentially do it in a less restrictive format?
Vikram: Well, I mean, it's been huge. I've seen it in... I mean, the industry that I know best is in Bombay. And it's been like a big seat change. The traditional way of filmmaking in Bombay that I grew up around, so you either made the big blockbuster thing with big stars, and then because you have a big budget, you get hemmed in as a certain formula that you have. Just like the big superhero tentpole summer movies here, they follow that... there's a kind of, I don't recall a cookie cutter, but there's elements that you have to put in.
And then the other option, if you wanted to make small, adventurous, experimental movies in those days, which is getting funding from the film's division, which was supposed to fund better cinema. And you got this tiny budget, you couldn't find distribution. I mean, I was... the way I met my brother in law who's now this big producer, director Vinod Chopra was that I worked on an early script with him. And he was just coming off making these small movies and he would tell me about like, “You've got this movie, you've made a good movie, and then you can't find anybody to show it. And it's been like a big sea change, but the traditional way of filmmaking in Bombay that I grew up around. So you either the big blockbuster thing with big stars. And then because you have a big budget, you get hemmed in. There's a certain formula that you have just like the big superhero, tentpole, summer movies here. Follow that. There's a kind of. I don't want to call it cookie cutter, but there's elements that you have to put in. And then the other option, if you wanted to make small adventurous experimental movies in those days was getting funding from the films division, which was supposed to fund better cinema. And you got this tiny budget. You couldn't find distribution. I mean, I was the way I met my brother-in-law was now this big producer director I've been with Chopra was that I've worked on an early script for them and he was just. Uh, coming off, making these small movies and he would tell me about like, you've got this movie, you've made a good movie and then you can't find anybody to show it.
So, when TV started in Bombay in the 90s, that was one kind of opening up. Because again, on TV, mostly you were making really formulaic, bad stuff. But at least they were friends of mine who were actors who now had steady work. It wasn't as this big industry. And then the multiplexing of that industry across the country made another change, because now you had all these screens. And the funders, now that the banks have gotten into the game, they would then... the studios were willing to make big movies and like 4 small ones. And it's like a lottery from the producer’s point of view. You make 3 small ones, maybe 1 of them goes big and you get all your returns.
But it was fairly restrictive because of the Indian sensor system. In terms of content, you have to stick... to tip-toe the line. And so, the coming in of Netflix and Amazon and these other streaming services has done a bunch of things. One is that it's... it's completely obliterated the old restrictions on the content and what you could talk about, and the method in which you talked about it. Although there's a backlash now. I guess we should have expected this, right, the resentment of this. And especially the governmental like uneasiness with what's going on.
Secondly, the amazing thing has been finding global distribution which is a small array... like a smaller budget film would have never gotten before, except through the festival circuit. And suddenly, like the day that one of the streaming services puts you on, people all over the world potentially watching your work.
And then for me, what was very exciting was that we could make ‘Sacred Games’ in a multilingual way. And that sounds really small, but nobody's ever been able to do this in India. And what I mean by that is that as we speak languages, multiple languages naturally in India. And if I walked down from our house, and then walk down the street to the neighborhood, like the pawn shop at the corner, I might hear 3 or 4 languages before I get to the end of the lane. But in the text, the book of ‘Sacred Games’, I tried to play a lot with this with this multiplicity, but in books you can't have subtitle. Unfortunately, that's another thing that we could put in the book program.
But... but so what happened with Netflix is that I have talked with a bunch of studios in Hollywood about this project before then. And we spent... like my then producer and writer, we had done the rounds of the circuit, we spent a couple of years in development hell, like where they take... they sign an option, but they keep giving you notes and it never gets made. And I always got the sense that one part of their uneasiness was that, “Are you going to make a movie with all Brown people speaking other languages? Because that... is a Western American audience specially going to watch that?”
And with Netflix had proved out this model of local content for global audiences, and with a series like Narcos, some of those episodes are like 90% Spanish, and the it went big across the world. So, in an early meeting, they said quite clearly, “You can do as many languages as you like.” In the series, there are scenes that are in Marathi, there are scenes are in Punjabi. And it's wonderful because you can get an attachment on that thing. So, this is freedom in several ways, linguistically, in terms of content, the kind of budgeting that you get is... is... allows you to make a glossy looking film with good production values. It's not all... I mean, it's not all upside. Like, it's... like everything, it can work out to be a devil's bargain.
I mean, and what I mean by that is that for one thing, in the traditional like studio system, if you're a filmmaker, you could make a backend deal. Like, the agreement was once you make and then you get this percentage of the net after as long as the thing runs. But with the streaming services, you don't get that. The money of the table is... on the table is generous, upfront, but they will not release a single figure. You don't know whether like 200 people watched it or 200 million people.
And so, not only there's no profit sharing, but also you don't... unless there... you get renewed, you don't know whether (unclear) [44:01]. And then the cancellation can come on a dime, like you think you've had 2 successful seasons, and then suddenly the word comes down, “You’re... you're done.” And then there's the whole sort of I guess what you'd call the economic angle like a multinational corporation with huge resources like Amazon Prime comes in. Especially if you're like... we have a history of colonialism and exploitation, you... this is natural to think about like, “What are the implications of this for local content makers?” Well, the Indian film industry has been very successful at maintaining itself in the face of like American Hollywood, kind of the roller... the steamroller. Especially as compared to like several industries in Europe where they've had to put sanctions to keep the industry going.
And in fact, in the sense... in other sense, in... in another filament economic universe, the... the Indian industry has been the one that is feared by other people. So, in Pakistan, there's always this anxiety about like, “You're taking over our screens. Our industry is suffering because of this.” But... but with this like sort of international exchange, like the huge engine of... from coming in from the outside, it's really exciting to be in the middle of all this. But you also have to think about like, what exactly is happening? And what are the implications of this for the future?
Pritish: True. You started off writing ‘Sacred Games’ even before Netflix was in... in the makings. Netflix actually launched in 1999.
Vikram: Yeah.
Pritish: And I think you started writing ‘Sacred Games’ even before that.
Vikram: Yeah.
Pritish: So, what actually primed you writing the book? So, what were the initial thoughts? Was it... did you ever think of actually making into a film when you started off or it was just a book?
Vikram: For me, I've always... I mean, I've always thought of my writing as just fiction. And... and, I mean, I've been very close to film and television. And I like I said, I'm a big cinephile. I like watching movies. But... and even close to the industry, my friends are in the industry, my relatives are in the industry. But it's been right here to me that, like I was saying, that's not what I do. And so, I'm always surprised... I mean, not surprised. I understand why, but people often tell me, “Your work is really visual. It seems filmic somehow.” And I get that because when I'm writing, I... when I’m... I imagine I like a filmic scene, like I have a sense of lighting, and the rain on the... on the ground. And then my job is to translate that into prose.
So, no, I always think of it just as books. And then when ‘Sacred Games’ was finished, there was a like idea, “When is it going to become a movie?” Because at that time, I guess it released in 2005, HBO It was already in its upswing, right, like the wonderful like series on HBO had started. But even then, like 900-page book to turn in... and it is complex in terms of its timelines, and this split structure of like this 1 narrative going on in the past, 1 in the present, I didn't think it could be done. And then even before it released in 2005, we got inquiries from filmmakers, actually in Hollywood and... and in India.
And then there was 1... there's 1 company that I really liked, Focus Features. And they were... they still put out wonderful stuff. And so, I had lunch with one of the people from that done in Los Angeles and he said, “We want an option,” and I said, “Look, I don't understand how you think you're going to do this, but sure. Like, 2-hour movie, 3-hour movie, whatever.” And then... and then they... they hired this very successful, very talented British to have a go at it. And then, for whatever reason, it didn't work out. And so, then I just like, let it out of my, like, “Okay, this is never going to...” And I'm fine with that.
And then years later, must have been like 2014, 15, I get this call from my agent and he says, “This producer was sitting in my office, and she wants to know if you want to work on this as a series.” And by this time, all the streaming services had started. And I said, “Yeah, let's go for it.” And then that whole thing started of we involved a writer and she wrote a pilot, and then we did the rounds of Los Angeles with our boards of images. We did a pitch in many of these things. We got a development deal with AMC. And then again, I was like, “Okay, maybe this is not going to work out, and then just like... it's like everything else, like you make these fits and start and then Netflix came in. And I stopped partnering with those people because it became clear to me that this had to be an Indian project. We had to get people from there who are familiar with the streets.
And then Netflix actually got Phantom Films, and Vikram Motwani, who I met for the first time and had a meeting in Los Angeles in the Netflix office. And then it just all came together. So, it... it's like... it felt like these... the time was the people were and then we found these... this amazing team they put together in Bombay. And so, it all feels like really wonderful, like some kind of like miracle that it all happened, and then it turned out the way it did. Because all of us felt like we were doing something exciting. It wasn't the first series that Amazon had made; I think a couple of series before that in India. But this was the first Netflix thing and we were all excited, but then the way it went across the globe, and it won awards. And I'm boasting now, but like I feel so proud of these people that I should applaud them. This year, the New York Times did a list of the 10 Best International series of the decade, and ‘Sacred Games’ was 1 of them.
Pritish: Wow.
Vikram: And then plus that, like the, the audience that it's found like that's... this is what I was saying about finding a global audience through this kind of network. It's astonishing. One of my school friends, my WhatsApp group guys is... he works at a bank in New York. And his boss suddenly came up in one day, “Hey, I've been watching this ‘Sacred Games’ thing on TV, on Netflix.” And then Ajayi says to him, like, “I grew up with that guy.” And so, that guy like has his mind blown. And then Ajayi calls me like, immediately after that and says, “And I had my mind blown.” Like, art has a weird way of traveling. Like, you never know when some... where something is going to end up.
Pritish: Absolutely. I think ‘Sacred Games’ is an incredible success story. And from reading the book to actually get it onto Netflix, I'm sure it's a journey. And it is not only helping other writers, actors and filmmakers be more encouraged, but also getting the opportunity. And I think things which we're not getting onto the big screen now has an opportunity to be shown through such a massive... and as you mentioned, that I think ‘Sacred Games’, ‘Narcos’, ‘Dark’, there’s another series I watched, ‘Trapped’, which are all in regional languages, and they have done amazingly well.
And I actually find it more interesting to watch series on Netflix which are regional with subtitles, which rather than watching something in English, which is fine, which is great. I'm sure there is great content there. Bu that helps me understand a lot of cultural values of the country as well.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah.
Pritish: And how they function. So, I think Netflix has definitely helped with that. So, your closing remarks on writing, teaching technology and entrepreneurship.
Vikram: It’s all been... I mean, I feel really blessed and lucky sometimes, like how the hell did all this happen? Like, yesterday, I was 11 years old, like the nerdy guy going to boarding school and like so unsure of myself and hoping. But... but suddenly you end up in this other place. And, I mean, I've had my failures along the way, but those are interesting in their own, but... but to get to do, for a lifetime, something that you're passionate about, and then find people who love it and accept it, and... and are happy about it, that's... like, what could more could you ask for.
And it's amazing, like ‘Red Earth and Pouring Rain’ was my first book published in 1995. And to this day, I'll be somewhere and somebody will walk up to me and start talking to me about it. And then they'll ask me a question, and I haven't read that damn thing since 1996, which was the reading tour. And like, I'm like, “I have no idea what you're talking about. I think I wrote that. But it’s like another person wrote that.” And then I sometimes pretend that I know what people are talking about. But it's like, so... it's so satisfying.
And that's what I meant by art traveling in strange ways. Like one of the... and it’s happened to me a couple of times, this thing about like people leave books in hotels and in coffee shops. And then this person like a couple of months ago, before the lockdown, told me that they found it in hotel on... they were on Safari, they come back to the hotel, and in the lobby, they find this book that somebody is left on a shelf. And they just start reading it. They have no idea what they're getting into. So, that just feels like magical. And again, I mean, since we're talking about multiplicities and like various aspects of life, I'm also very lucky in that I've been able to do all of these things.
Pritish: Thank you. So, now we come to the short 2 versions section. One is a rapid fire.
Vikram: Yeah. Oh you just scared me!
Pritish: No, are a simple. And the second is I got a ton of questions from listeners when they came... they knew that you're coming on social media personally as well. So, I have a few questions that I would like your responses to hear. Great. So, let's start with the listeners first. So, the first question is from Prana, “Being a tech entrepreneur, how does Vikram see the future of entertainment business panning out, given the recent tussle between production houses, multiplex owners over the direct release of movies on OTTs?”
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, I think when we talk about destruction... or disruption, both of those things work actually. Disruption is often destruction of other people's livelihoods. And it's comfortable for, I think, for people who are on the side of disruption to say it’s good. It's very, very tragic on the other side. So, I... my... in my perfect world, both of these engagements would survive. And for selfish reasons also. I mean, it's fun to watch a movie on a big screen at home. But there's nothing like the experience of going to a huge cinema in Bombay or a small one and having the audience talk back to the... to the screen and throw, you know, coins at the screen during the song.
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: So, how it will shake out? I don't know. Finally, I hope the multiplexes don't get swallowed or killed by... by the large... like I was saying, the steamroller power of the large multinational corporations. How they'll do that? I don't know. I mean, do they get like local government support? I am not quite sure how that'll be done. And it's... again, it's kind of above my paygrade, because it involves politics. It involves power plays. It involves politicians, which is can be the worst thing of all. So... so, yeah, I have no idea where it's going.
Pritish: Jose, “What is your biggest failure? And how have you been able to turn it around? And what has been your main learnings?”
Vikram: I guess in terms of, like I was saying, I've been incredibly lucky. And I did say something. The failures that I've had, like in professional terms have been like things, stories that have started, ideas that I’ve had, screenplays that I've written that I had to throw away because I knew they were no good. They never luckily saw the light of day. I guess the one like kind of interesting one was that... that film school thing that I described. Because at that age, you're in your 20s, you're really uncertain, you pin your hopes on this one industry to save you from... from being... from being having no money, and then you figure out that you can't do. Like can't as in like you don't have any choice but to leave it, right?
So, that was really scary. But like what did I learn from it is that... that no matter how difficult it was to accept that, that accepting, knowing and having enough like sort of self-awareness to know that you shouldn't do something is as valuable as... more valuable than being stubborn and hitting your head. And so, walk away from it if... if you... if it doesn't fulfill you, if you think that you can do it. Because that other side, that leads to all kinds of madness. And I've seen it destroy people.
Pritish: Cadena, “What is Vikram’s why and his mission?”
Vikram: Well, my mission is to tell stories. I guess that's very obvious and it sounds so... such a cliché to say that. But, I mean, I've been doing it all my life, and in many ways, it's not only been the purpose, it saved my life. And a lot of writers say this, that you don't do it just out of wanting to find an audience, you do it because you need to do it. In fact, Donald Bartholomae used to say to students, and come off as really harsh, he would always have people coming up to him and saying, young people saying, “How do I know I'm a writer?” and he said, “If you... if you can't do anything else, then you're a writer.” Remember that was that... that you really have been needed and it's... it's compulsive in a lot of ways. And that compulsiveness of it is both... it’s grace, but also, it’s terror, because you can't stop doing the damn thing. And, I mean, in very ordinary ways, like when I'm... now and when I'm in the middle of working on fiction, I can't turn it off in my head.
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: It just keeps buzzing around there all day and all night. I wake up in the morning and I'm already thinking. And that's a blessing and a curse. I mean, it has an effect on your personal relationships, your partnerships. And, I mean, my daughters know when I'm doing this. And then... yeah, anyway, I shouldn't go on too long about that. It sounds like I'm complaining and whining, but it has been great.
Pritish: Venkat, “The role of education in India, storytelling has always been a part of the culture, but creative writing has not been a part of formal education. What can we do about it?”
Vikram: Well, I mean, I think it's like I was saying, we've had this long tradition of this in... in writing, in music. I don't know how they managed to do it, but this Karana system, they managed to keep it going. And in... in the other arts, we never... we lost it. We couldn't keep it fly. And then part of it is historical accident in that creative writing has never been a part of the British educational system. The University of East Anglia was the first place in the UK to have a writing program, and it was very late, like if I'm not mistaken, 78 or 79, something like that. Whereas the American creative writing system started to come up like 50 years before that.
But in India, because we have that tradition and we are modeled so closely on the British tradition, we've never had that. And what's... I mean, and that's why I had to leave because I wanted that. And I knew that, in the United States, they were writing programs. I'm like, “Okay, I’ve got to go there.” And so, what's... what's been also really obvious is that every time I'm in India, like in any city, people know that I and other people teach creative writing in the UK or the US or wherever, and we always get asked, “When you're going to teach in India?” And there's never been an institutional home for that. I've asked universities and I've been turned down. And because like they want to give exams. You can't give an exam in a creative workshop. The rigidity of that system has kept it from actually being brought alive. Although nowadays, these private liberal arts colleges like Ashoka in Delhi that are doing this, and the students are great and the students love it. But it's a start, but it's not enough.
So, there's like I know, I mean that people teaching workshops individually, the film industry has managed to do this much better. So, there's these Subash guy, he has this school that is now I think, a couple of decades old, their drama schools, there’s drama teachers, a lot of the National School of Drama where some of our best actors have come out of, that's been there. But I don't think without institutional support, you can't keep it going. Like, so I can do a workshop in somebody's drawing room, but... but that doesn't last. And it's not very good for the students because you need not just 3 weeks or a semester of... of these workshops, you need to keep going.
So, I think it'll change slowly. I think the demand is now making it... making it clear, if not to the institutions, but at least to like individual writers that this can be done and it can be economically profitable or livable. So, my friend Hussain Zaidi, he has several initiatives. He teaches creative... I mean, journalistic writing, and we're talking about doing that as a partnership in a more sustained way. But we need... I mean, like I was saying that what the institutional support provides is the logistical part of this. Because I mean, if you're going to, like what the university manages for me is I don't have to handle fees.
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: And they do the bookkeeping and all of that. You... it's... it's a venture. It's not like this private thing that you can do as one person.
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: You can do that, but you need support. So, I'm hoping that... that in some way, these private initiatives will fill in some of the gap, but I think... I mean, it would be great if it was done on a larger scale. Because what... if it's done in this kind of private fashion, it shuts out people who can't afford it. The great thing about the NSD, the film school in May is that my brother in law came from... I mean, they weren't rich, he couldn't... he could hardly pay his fees when he joined the film school. And he was able to make his way through the industry, as many directors, many actors. But if you have the sort of the barrier of cost, it destroys talent, or at least it doesn't let it come alive.
And so, that... I think that's a problem that's really urgent that needs to be solved. And that can only be done when the institutional structure kind of allows and gets away from this. I grew up with study all semester, but... the whole term, but what your tests will result of is consisted of as you learn by heart. And you'll get answered, you get these questions and you read through it and then you write...
Pritish: Yeah.
Vikram: ... what you learned, which was... it doesn't teach you anything. It teaches very little.
Pritish: True. I think MOOC, like platforms like Coursera and edX are potentially solving that.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah.
Pritish: And that's something... and I would really love to have or get access to a creative writing class by you. But again, as you said, I think it runs in close circles or in within your network. And the only way I can get access to is potentially to these platforms.
Vikram: Yeah, yeah. So, I think that is definitely been solved. The last question from a listener. “How do you decide...” and this from Nikita, “how do you decide the number of characters in a book?”
Pritish: Well, that... that is, again, something that I at least can't plan. So... so, like with ‘Sacred Games’, like when I first started writing it, I thought it was a tight little 220-page thriller with gangster inside a bunker-like, weird bunker-like house. 220 pages later, he like, “Something will happen, and then we'll be done.” But what I discovered as soon as I started working with it is that you can't write about organized crime, you can't investigate it without describing like, almost immediately that organized crime cannot exist without political support or political tolerance and support. They go hand in hand and there's an exchange of value going in both directions.
And then if you're thinking about politics, then anywhere in the world, but particularly in India, you're talking about religion and the media. And then I was in a very senior cop’s office in Bombay and I was like asking questions and he said, “Look, I can explain to you the chessboard around here, but if you really want to understand, you have to go to Delhi and talk to so and so.” And what he meant by that was that... that, in the subcontinent, as everywhere in the world, the intelligence agencies get involved, like these guys become their extra constitutional arms. If you're trying to move men and material across a border, you get your friendly neighborhood smuggler who has already has these routes set up. And if you get... get done, things done through these like... like extra-legal and semi-legal connections.
So, suddenly, I'm writing a spy book as well. And then each of these... each of these widening circles introduces a set of people in them, right? And so, then the book grows in size, but also the number of the cast of characters gets larger. And then managing them and all these layers becomes like an interesting problem that you have to deal with.
Pritish: True. Coming to the rapid fire, 1 word or 1 sentence, your most favorite comic book.
Vikram: Oh, I have to say ‘Phantom’- ‘Vetal’
Pritish: One piece of advice that you would like to give Arthur Doyle, Sherlock Holmes?
Vikram: Oh, get more women in there.
Pritish: A book, blog, or an author other than you who you will highly recommend for creative writing?
Vikram: Book, that's a tough one. I actually have a list of like 12 books. I guess, you know, I would say... okay, probably I guess I would say the book that I recommend to everyone is Janet Burroway’s ‘Writing Fiction’. It's a wonderful craft book. Absolutely, it covers the field in a really clarify... I mean, a really clear way without dumbing it down.
Pritish: The hardest thing about your job?
Vikram: Well, actually writing every day. So, I have a friend. He's a colleague in the Department of English at Berkeley, Robert Hass, Bob Hass. He's a great American poet. And he has this... this lines that he says, “Writing is hell, but not writing is also hell. The only tolerable state is just having written.”
Pritish: Brilliant. And is there a third season of ‘Sacred Games’?
Vikram: The writer is the last one to know. So, unless there’ll be an answer, I won’t know. And if I knew, I couldn't tell you because they will send their ninjas after me.
Pritish: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Vikram. This was a delight speaking to you.
Vikram: Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.