Bengaluru: Bestselling author of the Shiva Trilogy and the Ram Chandra series, banker-turned-writer Amish Tripathi was in the city on Saturday to meet fans at The Bookworm. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt, he was surrounded by a crowd soon after he entered the bookstore.
Sipping chai, he answered questions about his previous books and on his latest work based on the life of Ram. “I was at the Litfest in Delhi and I remember this one person speaking crudely about Ram. One can ask questions, yes, but to hear someone speaking that way about a godly figure made me want to explore Ram’s story and that is how Ram Chandra was born.”
His next book in the series of five will be out in 2017. He said that he has plans for a series of books on Mahabharata next. “I have left clues as to what I am going to write about in the next 25 years or so, in my first Shiva Trilogy. When you see my next book you will realise that it is all connected to the start.”
Deccan Chronicle spoke to him about the survival of an ancient culture, thanks to fiction and why he only writes fiction based on mythology. For a culture to survive, it must adapt and fiction in a way helps us do that, said Amish.
“Fiction lets us take the soul of the old and add something new to it. The concept of being comfortable with multiple faces of the truth has been the Indian way and this is why we are a few of those ancient cultures who have survived till today. Fiction writing based on mythology writing is a strength that shows the many aspects of a story adapting to time.” This is why our culture stubbornly refuses to die, he added.
Amish felt mythology is something that affects the philosophy of life and it’s important that it is put forward to a wider audience. “It is essentially a story. It is a root to learning how to live no matter what age you are or which country you are from. I write fiction based on mythology because that’s what I grew up with and it interested me. I know it well and I can say this way it reaches more people.”
