ASHWIN SANGHI, CHETAN BHAGAT, and PRIVATE INDIA
Bestselling author of Private
India, Krishna Key and Chnakya’s
Chant, Ashwin Sanghi had recently complemented one of my book reviews.
@Anulalindia many thanks for the great review. Glad you liked Private India. :) @JP_Books
— Ashwin Sanghi (@ashwinsanghi) August 29, 2014
Replied Ashwin Sanghi to my book-review tweet that involved his
latest thriller, Private
India, in
collaboration with the American Bestselling author James Patterson. This book
review has been one of the top discussions in Linkedin too.
Private
India is
the first novel co-authored by Ashwin Sanghi. His previous three novels were
written solo and were sold in large numbers in the Indian-English fiction market.
Ashwin Sanghi is acclaimed to be one of the fastest selling authors in India.
In the post-Chetan Bhagat era, only a few writers made authentic records as
successful authors in English, although the market is teeming with English books
by Indian authors. Ashwin Sanghi’s name appears among the very few successful
writers.
Indian writings in English had always been an academic business,
ever since that book by Rushdie that won him a Booker. Many Indian authors
brought home the Booker Prize from that day onwards. But a real bestseller was
born in India with the arrival of an investment banker on the page. He wrote a
new chapter in selling books and writing stories that catch the minds of
non-academic readers.
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| Image Courtesy: Ashwin Sanghi |
Although several writers attempted to break into the
contemporary romance genre, success came only to some of those books. One
writer took a different route from them all. He took to historical fiction, the
same genre that Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and others have kept solely
academic. This writer’s creative voice wasn’t so elitist, like his predecessors.
He wrote books that were modeled closely on the American author Dan Brown’s
bestsellers.
The result of this non-academic reversal in writing was the success
of his three books, The Rozabal Line,
Chanakya's Chant and The Krishna Key. All three books (not
accidently), were modeled on Dan Brown’s narrative style. Although there are
criticisms that these books, as many others, were nothing else but low quality literary
misadventures, the bright side is quite luring.
 |
| Image Courtesy: Chetan Bhagat |
The increased interest in English books written by Indian
authors in India has given many publishing giants a new hope to sustain their
businesses. Many of them have already established their permanent domains in
the Indian market. The recent success of You
Should Know How I Feel…, a collection of contemporary romance, inaugurated the arrival
of the publishing and retailer giant Amazon in India. You
Should Know How I Feel… is published by BW Publishing, an India-based publisher, in
collaboration with Amazon’s print-on-demand company Createspace.
Trough Ashwin Sanghi’s successful collaboration with James
Patterson, the NY Times Bestselling author, Private India created a new chapter
of thrillers in India. The lukewarm and tiring panorama of thrillers written by
Indian authors has taken a step backward with the publication of this new book.
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| Image Courtesy: James Patterson |
Ashwin Sanghi’s contributions in Private
India
seem slender, within the mythical motifs that appear (sometimes, with no purpose
other than to show his mythological awareness) in the book. Private
India
follows a typical James Patterson plot and story structure. Short chapters,
unexpected acts of crime and petty homicide fetish stand out as original Patterson
techniques. They appear in Private
India too,
in wholesale. Perhaps, this is what happens when one co-authors with another
successful author, whose success is relatively more glossy that yours.
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