Let There Be Light!

Rtn. Tara Deshpande talks with author Ashwin Sanghi and co-author PP Rtn. (Dr.) Mukesh Batra on their book 13 Steps to Bloody Good Health!

Tara: Ashwin, tell us more about the title.

Ashwin: I hold the world record of most rejected authors in the world; 47 publishers rejected my first book and I was very depressed. My father’s friend once asked me ‘beta kya hua, you look depressed!’

I said, ‘47 publishers have rejected me’. He said, ‘Toh kya hai, ek do aur ko apply kar lo’. I told him, ‘uncle, there is no one left’. So then he said, ‘beta, life mein it is 99 per cent about good luck.’ So, I asked, ‘but what about that 1 per cent?’

He said, ‘that 1 per cent is bloody good luck!’ It was there on mind that I would write about bloody good luck at some point. Ten years later, when I had become a best-seller, my publishers asked me to write another book and ‘13 Steps To Bloody Good Luck’ seemed like the natural title. After luck, came wealth. Then I received an email from Doc (Dr. Batra) saying that health is more important than wealth. So I told Doc I am a good storyteller, I’d be happy to do the storytelling but the book would be essentially his.

Mukesh: I told Ashwin, ‘if you don’t have health, you need luck and wealth both to keep yourself alive’. The other challenge was that all this while he had been writing fiction, now he would have to write the truth. He took the challenge very well.

Tara: Three authors – Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi and you – have brought business back to books. Comment.

Ashwin: We are good friends. With Amish, especially, it is not only just the business of books but also thoughts, ideas and philosophies. We both started at around the same time. The only difference was that Amish started under his own name while I started with a pseudonym.

Publishing agencies still do give people an easy break. It is almost an agnipariksha. There is an old saying that writers can write a book faster than publishers can write the cheque; that is the problem.

Things are changing in that we are no longer just writers but we also know the business. You need to be shameless to sell your book. In 2008, when The Rozabal Line had just come up, I went to the Crossword near Kemps Corner, Mumbai. They had three copies in a corner no one went to. I picked them up, dusted them, brought them to the front and put them on the bestseller rack. This is what distinguishes people like Amish or myself or several others, that we are shameless.

Tara: There is a lot of non-fiction available online. Do you think this affects sales?

Ashwin: Ten or 15 years ago, if you wanted to write in India, you either wrote a book on how to make the best biryani or you wrote a saga which had literary merit like Amitav Ghosh or Arundhati Roy. The idea that an Indian can be a commercial thriller writer in a fictional genre! If I went to a publisher and said, hey, listen I have written this theological thriller on the possibility that Christ lies buried in Kashmir, they would feel I am crazy. That is no longer the case.

Tara: You talk about stress and depression in your book. Tell us more about it, Mukesh.

Mukesh: According to the World Health Organisation, India is the most depressed country in the world. It has the highest number of suicides amongst young people in the world. I also do a web series in which my first episode was on depression. It got 2 million views on social media.

When researching, we also tried to translate this into other languages. To our surprise, the highest search was in Tamil. The second highest is Telugu, followed by Hindi and then English. It is so common today but nobody wants to talk about it or recognise it.

The second challenge is that people suffering from depression do not want to be treated. It has the poorest patient compliance among all diseases. Patients take prescriptions from me and thrown them into the dustbin on their way out because they don’t want to be classified as mental health patients.

Tara: The British broadcaster, Clement Freud, said, ‘If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer.’ In similar lines Henry Youngman said, ‘when I read about the evils of drinking I give up reading’.

Ashwin: The golden rule is: take everything in moderation, including moderation.

ROTARIANS ASK

Do you have a ghost writer?
Co-writing is a great way to reach out to a wider audience. The 13-step series is a step towards that direction because there are so many people who have vertical domain expertise. For example, Dr. Batra might be an expert in health but may not know how to go about presenting it in a smart and witty manner, which is where my skills come in. The Bharat series I am famous for, the historical and theological stories, are books that I live with and craft for almost two years. I have a team of people who help me research, translate, understand manuscripts etc. It is almost like making a movie.

Every book of yours is a representation of myths; how much of this do you think is true?
My biggest nightmare is that the world heads for an apocalypse and all books get destroyed except for one by Ashwin Sanghi which becomes the de facto history for future generations. History is a version of events.

As George Santayana, novelist and philosopher, said, history is a pack of lies about events that never happened and written by people who were never there. So you are just presenting a perspective.

I don’t have a problem with existing theories but what I propose is to give alternative theories. I do not believe in rewriting but in extra writing which means that we need more words. I work with history to the extent that it becomes a mystery.

People are always more curious about the ‘What ifs’. For example, we have a temple of Amitabh Bachchan in Kolkata where people do Puja and there is an Amitabh Chalisa, a prayer book.

I thought to myself, that if I am knocked out at this very moment and am born a thousand years later. And, the cult of Amitabh Bachchan has really caught on. Now, there isn’t one but lakhs of temples of Amitabh.

Someone taps on your shoulder and asks, do you think Amitabh was a real man? Today, this question is foolish because we know the reality, but it may not be foolish a thousand years later. That is precisely the question we are asking about Ram, Krishna and the others.