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(I interviewed Chiki Sarkar and Durga Raghunath, co-founders of Juggernaut. As Chiki put it across so well, “Durga is part of the change and I am part of the continuity. The combo of us would be magic. She is the creative mind of business and I am the business side of creativity.” This interview was conducted with a face-to-face meeting with Chiki Sarkar at her office and with Durga, over the phone. It was published in the Hindu Sunday Magazine digitally on 3 Oct and in print on 4 Oct Here is the url to the link: ?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication )
The recently launched publishing firm, Juggernaut, hopes to take on the big players in the field. Its co-founders Chiki Sarkar and Durga Raghunath talk about what’s in store.
The key investors in Juggernaut are Nandan Nilekani, William Bissell and Neeraj Aggarwal. Chiki Sarkar, previously publisher of Penguin India and founder-publisher of Random House India, has worked with every major writer in the country. Durga Raghunath, previously CEO, Network 18 Digital, led three news websites, a fin-tech site and mobile. She is also the founder of India’s first exclusively digital newsroom, Firstpost. Excerpts from an interview.
What is the focus of Juggernaut? What are the genres it will be publishing?
Chiki Sarkar: Our behaviour is the same as that of any great publisher but asking bold questions on the digital side.
Durga Raghunath: The good thing about mobile content is you cannot ignore your consumer. It has to be both short story and all genres that keep people coming back for, such as crime fiction and romance. These have to be very compelling reads. A beginner list will have a variety and also new authors to attract the committed book lover and the new reader — a young mobile user.
Who are the authors you will be publishing?
CS&DR: We cannot say. It will be announced early next year.
What kind of manuscripts are you seeki 10 / May A writer recently passed me along his new thriller novel for an honest feedback. Took me a quick skim to notice that while the story was excellent, the language, not quite. It felt as if he had replaced all the “easy” words he could find with their synonyms. Almost at once I was reminded of a quote from Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, where he says: “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you are maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.” And that is as much as India’s top literary agent, Kanishka Gupta of the Writer’s Side, also says: “Authors should write in a language that comes naturally to them.” Even so— writers often face this conundrum while writing, as in whether to chutnify their language or to make it flowery and verbose so their novel looks impressive to commissioning editors and readers alike. Saikat Majumdar, author of the highly acclaimed novel, The Firebird, feels that sometimes difficulty in language is a “genuine necessity”, and sometimes it is an act of “writerly self-indulgence”. “With language, often less is more,” he says. “It is not about making things easy for an imaginary ideal reader. But about making the prose the best suited for its purpose.” Author Christopher C Doyle, who has sold 2 lakh copies of his Mahabharata Series and is enjoyed by readers as young as 12, helps to put Majumdar’s assertion into perspective. “I write thrillers,” he says, “and by definition that means that the story needs to be fast paced and readers should keep wanting to turn the pages. In that case, making the language verbose would slow down the pace and al Abhijit Banerjee was 15 years old when he first cooked a meal. Those who recognise his name will know that that first meal was not the start of a grand culinary career - rather, Mr Banerjee became a renowned economist and won the Nobel Prize. But, in his own words, it was the first of "many thousands of meals" he would cook over the next four decades or so. And those experiments in the kitchen have now made for a surprising cookbook. "The joke is that Abhijit is a better cook than he is an economist," his publisher, Chiki Sarkar, says. Cooking to Save Your Life, which is out this week, is cheeky and charming, telling you not just how to whip up a raspberry ceviche or a comforting bowl of dal, but also when you should do so. The raspberry ceviche is there to impress others with your sophisticated palate; the dal for when you want something that "wraps around you like a soft shawl on a winter day", Mr Banerjee writes. The book began life as a collection of recipes the economist planned to give his brother-in-law for Christmas, but as he put them together he thought there might be something more in his instincts and insights as a cook. "Cooking is a social act," he says. "It happens in a context. Sometimes, a meal is a gift to your family, sometimes it's an act of seduction, and sometimes it's self-expression." And there are recipes in his book for all of these moments and more. A Spanish-inspired chickpea soup that may, in turn, inspire a marriage proposal; an "utterly delicious" and easy Bengali fish stew that will surprise your smug friend; a clever Moroccan cooked salad that can turn into a "conversation piece" when the in-laws are over; and a rich biryani as a salve after a night of heavy drinking. Every year, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary selects a word of the year. And this year, the word that has been selected is “surreal”. And boy, are we even surprised? From Brexit to Trump’s victory and a year of terrorist massacres witnessed in various parts of the world like Brussels, Nice, Turkey, there surely cannot be a better word to sum up this year. Surreal, meaning “unbelievable”. As we cannot wait to step into , here’s taking a look at people and things from the literary world who have helped us to “indulge our imagination in every possible flight”, in Jane Juggernaut: First Indian Book Publishing App At a time when self-publishing is becoming a rage in the global literary scenario, India this year witnessed the roll-out of the first ever book publishing app. Taking the publishing industry by storm, Chiki Sarkar and Durga Raghunath founded Juggernaut, a mobile-first digital platform for the Indian reading community. The first book was a collection of short stories by Bollywood actor, Sunny Leone, and if you purchased it, you get a new short story delivered to your smart phone every night. If you like to read at night, there is a specially designed background to reduce stress on your eyes. Murakami’s new novel was announced In the latter half of this year, fans of Haruki Murakami are told that his new novel would release in February Publisher Shinchosha made the announcement. No details of the book’s title or plot were revealed, but it has been confirmed that it will be long. The new work, which will be Murakami’s 14th title, will be published in two volumes. A very strange story. That’s how Murakami himself described the upcoming novel at an event in Denmark, where he recently travelled to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, From Brexit to Trump’s victory&#; there surely cannot be a better word to sum up this year. Surreal, meaning “unbelievab
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