The One Percent Project- Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Resilience 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.
Rapid Fire:
- Most favorite comic book.
- I have to say ‘Phantom’- ‘Vetal’
- Advice that you would like to give Arthur Doyle, Sherlock Holmes?
- Get more women in there.
- A book, blog, or an author other than you who you will highly recommend for creative writing?
- 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.
- The hardest thing about your job?
- 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.”
- Is there a third season of ‘Sacred Games’?
- 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.