EP-157 | Mythology and History, Art of Storytelling, Sanatana, Bharat vs India with Ashwin Sanghi

in our country we we will appreciate a beims josi but then we also have a Zakir Hussein and we love his tah but ask yourself why did this tradition not establish itself in let's say Pakistan the reason for that is because we are a sanatani country if you are genuinely sanatani then I think it is the it is the absolute fundamental form of liberalism uh it's so strange that the Liberals of this country somehow seem to be anti-satan you can you know worship the Sun the moon a cow a mountain a river or be a non worshipper and or a non worshipper atic nastic tantric spiritualistic ritualistic uh or simply fantastic people were doing Puja arti offering uh you know their prashad and flowers there when I looked closely I realized that the portrait was of amitab bachan you can have 300 versions of the ramayan and your version doesn't negate mine if there wasn't some great man called RAM and ravan and sitha or lakshman if these characters did not exist then why would 300 versions be written for the longest time we've been fed this Narrative of the Arian migration Theory a satellite mapping was carried out we found that the vast majority of the settlements were actually along the bed of the the dried up Saraswati River there is a lot of stuff that we don't know I want that to be brought into public discussion for 70 years we've had one narrative and now for the next 10 years there's an effort to try and correct that narrative in some ways thanks to my friends like Vikram saath ideally I would not like the old narrative to be discarded we like to treat history as fact and we like to treat mythology as fiction when people ask me what is it that you do I say listen you know I take two words one is a word called myth yeah uh and one is a word called history and I try and bring them charging towards one another at a very high speed so that they Collide and they become mystery if you're going to tell a lie then tell the lie as close to the truth as possible there are always people who will say is I'm probably one of the most rejected authors you're one of the best sellers how come it took me 2 years to get published the first book the first book wow Namaste J hind you're watching or listening to another edition of the Ani podcast with Smith prakash thank you for liking and subscribing and sharing it with those who you think will benefit from these conversations we really value the fact that you give us your time in listening or watching these conversations my guest today is is a popular fiction writer Ashwin sangi he has written several bestsellers the rosabel line chanakya's chant the Krishna key The calot Saga keepers of the kalchakra The Vault of Vishnu and The Magicians of Mazda in the bhat series and two New York Times best-selling crime Thrillers with James Patterson private India sold in the US as the city on fire and private Delhi sold in the US as count to 10 Ashwin seamlessly Blends fiction and mythology and engage aes's readers from the first page to the last joining me in this conversation is my colleague at a Ani ishan prakash Ashwin G thank you so much for coming to our podcast uh I've been looking forward to meeting with you and speaking to you about your books firstly to find out what is that magic wand you sell so many of them so but uh thank you so much uh looking forward uh I suggest all of you buy this it's a quick read and it's great fun it's the latest book we'll get to the book uh but first let me ask you about uh how you feel when people call you the Dan Brown of India so first of all thank you for having me here smitta it's Delight to be here and I've followed your podcasts from day one thank you uh and I was wondering when you would ever call me oh dear uh but I'm delighted to be here uh I I think for me it's a little bit of a sort of a strange sensation because you know I just happen to be at the at the right place at the right time uh because my training is not in writing uh uh my I have an MBA in finance so I I I don't have any sort of literary pedigree or degree uh numbers man goes to become a words man huh absolutely word Smith absolutely and uh I happen to be in uh uh Kashmir uh sometime around 2002 2003 and I was there to actually attend a wedding uh of a family friend and uh my flight got cancelled uh the return flight got canceled and you know it was the peak militancy time so so I told the driver I said take me to some place he said I said I've been 8 10 times already I don't want to go there and he said shank I said I've already done that many times so he said r I said Ros he said no now you come so we went through all the winding alleys Into the Heart of Shri nagar and out there there is a tomb which is known as rosabal and it's a very simple sort of Tomb in fact uh uh when you go in it's basically got whitewashed walls and uh there is a grave uh it's attributed to a Muslim peer from the 13th century nasirudin but what is very fascinating about that tomb is that there is an earlier burial underneath the top bual and while the top burial has the head facing towards Mecca the burial underneath is an East West axis which is the axis that used to be used by the ancient Jews to bury their dead and outside there is a metallic plaque uh which uh has uh the depiction of a pair of human feet with little cross marks indicating where nails for a crucifixion would have been hammered and the common folklore around this is that a person called yuz Asaf came to Kashmir uh at the turn of the Millennium so somewhere between 0o and 100 uh and settled down there and preached love and peace and this was none other than Isa masi uh now which nobody knows where yeah so I wanted to actually connect that back to the gapers uh and there was a Russian scholar by the name of Nicolas natovich uh who had talked about visiting a monastery in hemis uh which where he found an ancient scroll that talked about a young boy called Isa who came all the way from Judea uh to study under the Buddhist Masters and I wanted to link those two stories uh and there are you know uh I have always joked with my author friends that you know people think that we as writers or storytellers we go out looking for stories the truth is that stories come looking for [Music] us and uh this was a story that came to me I hadn't written anything longer than a couple of pages before that uh and I spent the next year year and a half researching it so the research began after you saw the shrine yeah because I wanted to talk to anyone who was familiar with the shrine I wanted to talk to people uh uh you know there were American researchers who had uh talked about linking the DNA material in that Shrine with the DNA material in a place called Mari which is on the Pakistan border India Pakistan border where it is believed that mother Mary was buried and uh there were a whole bunch of things I ended up reading 30 40 books during that year research was anthropology it was science it was it was mythology theology everything put together absolutely and some conspiracy theories also I'm going to come to that too yeah so but at the end of it it wasn't as if I was planning to write a book I was just interested in the topic and then about a year and a half later my wife told me she said that you know Ash do you realize you've become a real B because the only thing that you talk about is this particular tomb and uh she said you need to get this out of your system we were on a trip in Goa and she gave me the laptop and she said write something about it maybe it'll just help it'll be a therapeutic process of getting this story out of you and I started writing up a nonfiction document where I just wanted to connect the dots I wanted to put down my research in a cogent form to be able to say okay these are these are the connections between the various threads and then I gave it to my wife to read I said what does it feel like next morning she said congratulations I said AA that means it's good she said no you found the cure for insomnia so I said ke that boring she said no one's going to read this you'll have to present it as a story and that's when I started writing up that research in the form of a story correct okay and in fact I'm probably one of the most rejected authors uh seriously seriously you're one of the best sellers how come yeah but it took me two years to get published the first book the first book wow is that why you use the pseudonym so I I I'm I'm just going to sort of get to that bit uh I I couldn't find a publisher uh uh most of the Indian as well as foreign Publishers had already said no literary agents were turning down the manuscript saying that listen this doesn't have a publishing future uh and I self-published it in 2007 at that time the only self-publishing outfits were in the US Kindle hadn't come into existence at that time uh so it was a pod print on demand type of thing where your book would get listed on Amazon and the moment a person triggered a one book would be printed and sent to them so there was no inventory of that book and two years down the line I genuinely uh you know isan I genuinely begun to think that Ashwin Sid can't sell uh so and I used to love playing Scrabble so I would I took all the letters of my name Ashwin sangi and I jumbled them around and I came up with an anagram which was called Shan Haggins so I published it in the US under the name of Shan Haggins and uh the initial reviews were terrible I mean someone wrote that you know this book could have been a lot shorter maybe he should have stopped writing on page 10 you know I mean uh yeah so it it was terrible and but by then I was able to eventually find a publisher in India and uh the publisher in India uh uh said that listen we are happy to Lish it but you need to write it under your own name because uh we can't Market it under a pseudonym this has to be Ashwin sanki and so I like to joke that the very first murder that happened was of sha Haggin because Ashwin sangi came into the picture so it's only the first book that you had sh only the first but there were periodicals or whatever that you wrote in with that pseudonym right uh a few a few a few but the once it was published then uh at that point of time uh the very first review that came out of the book and I was very terrified because you know you're not used to the to being in the public eye you're not used to people expressing a public opinion about your work and I'd already been through two years of this torment uh of seeing the sort of reviews that were emerging and uh one of the first reviews that happened was the literary review from the Hindu so you can imagine how terrified I was that you know I don't know what type of reviewer are they from the same genre yeah uh will they be able to even understand the context of this book and uh the gentleman who was reviewing it he said that we do a great disservice to Ashwin sangi by comparing him to Dan Brown because he is so much more and then went on to write half a page as to why it's an outstanding book okay that's great yeah so I was like oh wow you know this is incredible but then the Dan Brown connection stuck because Dan Brown had just become very very popular with The DaVinci Code it was all about Mary Magdalene and uh the Royal bloodline as it were and this one also covered Mary Magdalene and the Lost Years of Jesus Christ but that's how I reached your book yeah I reached your book because of Dan Brown I read Dan Brown and also the secretive societies absolutely I think that Common Thread was very much there this was 15 years ago I think 2018 2008 so that's how I reached your book the first time I read your book was like that it took from Dan Brown to you exactly when it was in America were you worried because see one of the primary sources that I went back to your bibliography which is rather vast yeah huh some in Rosa Shin some 180 180 200 sources you have cited something like that yeah uh one of the books you cited was Jesus in India yeah that H that book was panned a lot yeah right it was like it was basically said conspiracy theory sort of a pseudo sort of interpretation of history and the fact that it was in the west where your book was first done apprehension some fear that it might be received in a negative way uh to a certain extent I knew that I was working within the realm of fiction uh so I mean I have I think to a very great extent what happens is if you ever let go of your AAR you know understanding what it is that you do when people ask me what is it that you do I say listen you know I take two words one is a word called myth yeah uh and one is a word called history and I try and bring them charging towards one another at a very high speed so that they Collide and they become mystery so you understand that listen you're a Paperback Writer you're a conspiracy fiction writer and that you're simply using a bunch of facts from the World of Science and History and anthropology and uh geog graphy and so on and what have you and you're trying to use that in the context of a fictional Tale the moment you start believing too much in the seriousness of what you have written and you start saying no no this is real this is real that's the time when controversy occurs yes so the moment you know that listen I'm a fiction writer and what I write is fiction but I use facts in order to prop up my story of course uh because there is there is that old proverb which says that you know uh I remember when the rosabal line was written uh a young journalist asked me you're an MBA in finance and with a training in business and suddenly you decide to write a theological Thriller you know what are your qualifications to write it and I said that you know during my growing up years my mother always used to say that I'm a bloody good liar uh that I can tell a lie with pretty much a straight face and that's what fiction Writers Do We spin Yar but the coroller to that is that if you're going to tell a lie then tell the lie as close to the truth as possible because then the LIE becomes that much more believable yeah there's a quote I have uh from an article it says uh sanii was uh ironically honest in admitting that he often lies in his books but he tells a lie uh he said and I quote the LIE must be as close to the truth as possible so L uh like you said that there's a difference between fiction and uh imagination fiction and Truth fiction and lies where do you feel there is dishonesty at what point does dishonesty come in lies need not be dishonesty yeah right but uh do you feel that uh at times uh it could be twisted to become dishonest so for example if you see there are seven books till now which I have written in the bhat series uh and all of these are based on uh these are all based on some element of history or spirituality or philosophy uh and so on and so forth um I am very clear uh typically each of those books uh it it takes me a couple of years to actually bring from start to finish for each of those books uh of which the first 8 months to 12 months is entirely on trying to figure out as to what is the story idea and what is the sort of research and groundwork I need to do in order to be able to attempt that story uh once I'm done with that then I'll spend pretty much about 3 or 4 months in terms of plotting it out and developing the characters but at that stage I'm very clear that what I'm doing is I'm constructing a house where the foundation and the columns and beams are based on fact so uh I could be delving into history or uh I don't like using the word mythology but nonetheless uh what we consider as mythology uh ithas prefer that word uh or for that matter uh the world of uh science uh or the world of politics uh and I'm building up that structure of columns beams and foundation and then the gaps in that narrative is where I will do my brick and plaster and that brick and plaster is my fiction so I I try and maintain that balance so in other words if if the commonly accepted narrative in history is a then I will not try and push it to b or see I will keep that narrative intact but what is happening in my fictional story may change yeah I guess that's where the AMA bin ladan link came uh in the rosabel shine because he was there 2008 I mean definitely the hunt was on to find him so and the war on terror was the news news cycle and you w that into uh your book absolutely and and that always happens so I mean contemporary events when I you see that line in all your books in fact yeah so for example people even the last one even today ishan people ask me that uh uh who was the politician uh that your chanakya's chant figure ganga Sagar Mishra was based on and they think that it it was Amit sha MH they don't realize that Amit wasn't there on the scene when I wrote chanas chant it came out in 2010 he was nowhere on the national scene at that time probably he was running around trying to avoid court cases uh and uh uh but for me the inspiration came from somewhere from Nimar somewhere from atal bihari vajpai somewhere from Ahmed Patel somewhere from mayavati uh and I took character traits from each of these people and I combined them into ganga Sagar Mishra yeah so the what is happening in in what is playing out in the newspapers is very much a part of the direction that I'm going to end up taking in terms of my books absolutely yeah because Coalition politics was a huge part of your chanaka uh book absolutely because they it seemed like the up and Bihar seats would tilt the uh balance of power and you kept talking about that and when you go back at that time feel sometimes I feel so Eerie at times you that it came out almost that you know chanakya's chant I I wrote about a small software company which makes a chip and that chip can be hacked and at that time the possibility of AVM hacking was not even being talked it wasn't even a thing yeah okay but now irrespective of whether it happens or not that's a different question uh I firmly believe that it probably doesn't happen but it is a thing which is discussed yeah yeah uh the that's what that's the universal universality of a book is that even if it's written 10 years ago it's valid even now like you can pick up chanakya's chant even now and you'll find today's characters are playing out are playing out again or you know like I remember when I read it at that time what the the names you're mentioning some people were saying you talk about R davan you talk about kames Mish I think bries Mishra was there at that time he was he was still around but I'm talking about 15 years before that you know so they were characters who were who were relevant even then let me get back to um you know the mythology bit where you said that I don't like to use the word mythology i' prefer IAS where do you differentiate in the Indian system uh history telling where you know we history she has traditionally been written with mythology woven in with storytelling woven in and you know you can't separate the two so tell me where do you how do you see it so for example I find it difficult to believe that we have an epic called the ramayan and that people would write 300 versions of the ramayan if there wasn't some great man called ra RAM and ravan and or lakman if these characters did not exist then why would 300 versions be written so to my mind um the way to think about this is that we like to treat history as fact and we like to treat mythology as fiction but you know one of my uh favorite quotes on history is George santena who said that history is a pack of Lies about events that never happened written by people who were never there so in that sense I don't know whether we can treat history as the gospel truth in fact even the gospel truth is no longer the gospel truth because there are four gospels and the narratives and there are the Gnostic Gospels which which are sort of outlawed or Blasphemous which in any case are not sort of part of the Ken Mary magdalene's life exactly yes or the the Gospel of Judas yes uh uh or the Gospel of Thomas so you know and within the four uh gospels again there are variations in terms of the story so I don't know whether the gospel truth is the gospel truth let's go just with Matthew so the somewhere along the way I I began to question history because it's very difficult to separate the narrative from the narrator there is bound anyone who says that this is an unbiased account uh I find it difficult to believe because there it's not possible to not have the narrator's bias creep in uh so you have an event which happened in 1857 which children in India are taught was the Great Rebellion of 1857 or the first war of Indian Independence Independence correct yeah uh now that event is not even taught uh in school or college in the UK uh you will probably come across that event in in the event that you're doing a you're a history major then you may end up covering that and even if you do it will be called the sepoy mutiny of 1857 one of the many rebellions the British Empire had to face yes of course so now the point is in other words it's the same event but the perspectives are entirely different uh so I have always been the sort of person who believes that actually history should be taught the way you go for a uh for a movie a 3D movie where you put on a pair of 3D glasses and the reason that image becomes 3D is because multiple beams of light are coming at you and you are able to combine them and make sense of them and see them in a holistic fashion uh which doesn't happen unfortunately for 70 years we've had one narrative and now for the next 10 years there's an effort to try and correct that narrative in some ways thanks to my friends like Vikram samat but the point is that ideally I would not like the old narrative to be discarded I would like the old narrative to be there along with the new narrative multiple narratives okay right so somewhere along the way I feel that there is a lot of fiction in history and there could also be a lot of fact in what we call mythology because mythology was never concerned about the so-called absolute truth it was more concerned with the fundamental Truth uh I I remember uh uh it was CS Lewis who said that a myth is a lie that reveals a truth so at the core of it there is probably something some great event that happened or some great person that lived which then became the basis of multiple retellings and obviously every generation added on their own layer so for example uh we had a work called the J which had 25,000 verses which then morphed into something called the bhat which had double the number of verses which then became something called the Mahabharat which was 100,000 verses now I find it difficult to believe that every successive generation did not add their own layers B based upon the times that they lived in but does that take away from the historicity of that particular great event which must have happened that so many successive Generations kept on talking about it and now there are these excavations which have happened in yeah absolutely right where he talked about the Arian Invasion Theory at that time in his books he talked about how it was essentially discarded that a greater civilization existed in the Saraswati Delta the sarasti reg in your books you talk about it today today in sonali the digs have happened in the podcast we had an ASI over there and they found chariots with an lbam and everything that that say that these chariots were used by Warriors indigenous to this land to bat at that time exactly so in other words you see I think the advantage for me as a fiction writer is that I can tread into areas where Scholars are scared to trade where nothing to lose scholarship will eventually follow that's the way at least I see it that probably we can go one step ahead and say Hey listen this is a hypothesis so for example uh when I was writing the Krishna key I came across this very interesting uh scholar by the name of Professor narhari achar from the University of Memphis and uh uh I was trying to pin down the Mahabharat event in terms of where does this event actually happen yes constellations were used and uh he created this entire uh software in order to uh recreate the night skies over kurukshetra and look at what were the constellations that would have been observable by the naked eye uh over 20,000 aors and uh in the Epic we of course have Rishi vas going and meeting drash and saying that listen don't fight this war because and uh of course the war still takes place but vas explains what he has seen in the night sky uh what are the what are the astronomical formations that he has observed which lead him to this conclusion and so narhari achar then goes back with his software to see what was that one particular date where those formations could have been observed from kurukshetra and he finds that the date is 367 BC and so that becomes then the the central date in my book so I think to a very great extent this is what tantalizes me this is what fascinates me uh people say that Ashwin is a mythological fiction writer uh I've never been really interested in that I'm interested in the tantalizing overlaps I'm interested in questions like what if that's a very delicious question what that's what I want to ask you didn't you didn't stop there though these dates it was essentially a discussion amongst two characters in your book explaining to each other but you didn't just stop at one uh sort of model of this professor Krishna you used other models to further sort of triangulate the exact date can you tell us what sources you used to figure that out so one of course was the fact that uh Professor narhari achar came up with this number then for example uh the the the thought I had was that for the longest time we've been fed this Narrative of the Arian migration Theory uh and uh whereas actually when you when uh satellite mapping was carried out we found that the vast majority of the settlements were actually along the bed of the dried up Saraswati River so it was much more of a Saraswati civilization now there are those who in order to continue to propagate that theory of the Arian migration they said well probably the vdas also came with them so it has come to us from outside of India but then I was wondering to myself that the rig describes the Saraswati River the mightiest of the mighties but the river Saraswati started drying up more than 5,000 years ago probably closer the starting point would have been 7,000 probably because during the time of the Mahabharat uh krishna's brother balam does not fight the battle and he goes out on a TI yatra pilgrimage uh and he is not traveling along a river he is traveling along a series of lakes smaller Lakes which means that the river had already started drying up uh and so then uh it comes to my mind that okay if we have to put a date on the drying up of the Saraswati River then what would that have been and surprisingly uh uh you know uh the I think it was Baba Atomic research you know you can do carbon dating for wood and earn wear and all of that uh but what they did was something very interesting they they actually dug wells in places like Jessel Baner in the middle of the desert uh in order to be able to tap into the dried up channels the sarasti trajectory the trajectory and they tried to to figure out when when was the last recharge of that stagnant water because uh either water is moving or it is not moving but when was the last movement in that water you can identify and it came down to 3,000 odd BC so which means Riga before that absolutely which means Arian civiliz it didn't come which means a a huge civilization existed it wasn't an indust Valley Civilization that was the earliest known over there there was a more uh you know Antiquated civilization that existed a very knowledgeable civilization a very Advanced civilization I am I don't know uh to my mind I think there is a lot of stuff that we don't know and uh I want that to be brought into public discussion uh so uh like for example people ask me why do you why do you call it the bhat series uh because there are there are stories which deal with China there are stories which deal with Persia but um disregarding V saara's definition of akand Bharat as it were just going into what is my conception of bhat it's much more about a Vic Arc that there was an overall Arc of viic influence uh you know I mean today from where to where so honestly speaking we are still finding out because we are still finding things like Ganesh Idols in South America uh or for example uh uh if we look at just the expanse of Europe uh where does the word Iran come from it comes from a word called Aran V Aran V what does it mean it means land of the Arians uh or for example we have a treaty being signed by two tribes the hites and the mitani sometime around 1380 BC where they are signing this peace treaty but invoking vun and Mitra where are they signing this is modern day Syria and turkey uh similarly Ania I think was or for example you take for example the rigc Mitra uh who who becomes the most Ardent devotee of Mitra the Romans uh and of course when you have Mitra uh then you will also have varuna because varuna and Mitra pretty much go together and then what do the Greeks do with varuna they adopt him and they make him Uranus I mean the number of linkages that you you see all the way into Asia he baruna statues and he talks also about Z and zutra you know those link links also that's Persia again you talk yes or but then you Greek and Persian after all we we you know I mean we we look at Chinese civilization but we don't realize that after all martial arts went from the Pala Kingdom uh kalari payu and cam were transferred from South to China through Bodhi bodhidharma uh or for example U the the the fact that you had two Indian monks uh who eventually went to China and even today you have a temple there known as the White Horse Temple which is where they sat and they translated the first Buddhist scriptures for the Chinese people yeah I I was in Taiwan recently and you see the influence of Buddhism where communism hasn't eradicated it in Taiwan and I mean it it feels like you know the bhutanese civilization it feels like uh you know when you see that there's so much from agarbati to you know everything and this was the hinana form of Buddhism that don't you consider I think the fact that there was a lot of flight of Buddhists from India one of the greatest trategies was that that it was adopted in other countries but India was a Buddhist kingdom was a budhist land also but it went away slowly and not only that we in within the within the world of satatam we are fun sanatan we are adaptive right so we we transform constantly so for example uh when you have the rise of a Buddha then you simply adopt him as the ninth ofar of V so by the end of it or for example the influence comes in as a result of which you have a new offsho called tantric Buddhism so uh we we are constantly transforming uh if you are if you are genuinely sanatani then I think it is the it is the absolute fundamental form of liberalism uh it's so strange that the Liberals of this country somehow seem to be anti-satan but I can't for the life of me figure this one out because um uh you can you can uh you know worship the Sun the moon a cow a mountain a river or be a non worshipper in or a non worshipper atic nastic tantric spiritualistic ritualistic uh or simply fantastic I mean the the point is that you know you'll instinctively bow down when you pass a a mosque or a or a gurara because you ingrained within you is the idea that all the paths lead to a Divine there's an energy uh you will uh you know uh you may call a stone a shivling and I may call A shivling A Stone but we are both welcome uh you know you may believe in shaki or biti uh you know you may think that the path is yantra Tantra Mantra each one can follow their own path Mo D whatever how does it get more you can have 300 versions of the ramayan and your version doesn't negate mine yeah uh it so so in that sense I don't think necessarily that Buddhism would have been driven out as much as absorbed and adapted and it would have taken on new forms so for example uh the the entire deal with let's say vegetarianism might have been an outcome of the Buddhist influence and so on and so forth so there are many many things like that uh which probably we are we are now practicing we've emed but we just don't realize where it came from absolutely ashin how do how do your peers uh take your books like when you started writing about this uh the whole sanatan uh debate hadn't begun uh there was no space for people who were talking like you right uh today there is um those who were talking about uh uh that about what you were saying about sanatan there was no space for that so when you started writing did you get invited to the litfest did you get invited to the the Sheik Society events that happen where uh where the so-called Liberals are invited to I think it's our prime minister who said so I think in some ways guys like let's say Amish or me have pretty much done that in some ways because the problem that anyone can have uh would only be in the event that I was saying that I'm the greatest I'm not saying that I'm saying that this is one amongst many paths and that we've always had this ability to be able to absorb uh undoubtedly there were always the ners uh and there are always people who will say from day one and that at at the time I started out SII was not didn't have this connotation by the way 2008 my surname was a very normal surname now people just sort of look at me in Twitter and they say uh but uh those who have read me they know where I'm coming from that at heart I am really one of those who believes that vasuda kutumbakam uh and that comes across very clearly in my writings that that uh um that India you know there are too many people in the Next Generation who believe that India is India because of a word called secular in our constitution but first of all many of them don't understand that it wasn't there it was an addition in 1949 when the Constitution was adopted but more importantly they don't understand that that India is secular because it is Hindu because there is the ingrained sanatani philosophy you know in our country we have this beautiful can't the two exist coexist like you have a ji deep who says that secularism is the bane of our society that it's because we are secular that we don't accept sanatan we don't that we are embarrassed and even to the extent of being ashamed of Our sanatani Roots so uh he's his view is that that we need to get rid of that so it it is a very strong point of view uh there are some centrists who feel that both can exist what is your I've always believed that we never were secular to start out with first of all we didn't have the word in the Constitution and who were the framers of our constitution the leaders were ambedkar and Neu and so many others there must have been a reason why they left out that word so consciously because I think somewhere they knew that if they use the word they would be using it rather fictitiously they would be using it falsely uh because you could not have taken over thousands and thousands of Hindu temples under the charit endowments act and appropriate revenues of Hindu temples to the ex cheer if you were truly secular how would you have done it uh you could not have created a wak board or a Hajj committee if you were truly secular how did you codify the Hindu uh personal law uh if you were truly secular because secular means complete separation of State uh and uh religion but so they knew that we were not uh that word was was just added by a lame duck parliament in 1975 but the point is that uh ingrained within us continues to be that bow which is that I mean this country has prided itself on that so-called ganga jamuna T yeah right so uh in our country we we will appreciate a beims ji but then we also have a Zakir Hussein and we love his Tah rendition or for example you'll have a rabindra tagor but we'll also appreciate Mah galib so we have that wonderful unique blend but ask yourself why did this tradition not establish itself in let's say Pakistan after all it's the same land no same subcontinent so why not ganga jamuna there or why not in Bangladesh where there has been a consistent fall in the minor minority population over the years the reason for that is because we are a sanatani country because there is a Hindu majority in this country so if you really want to preserve what you consider to be not secularism but pluralism then you need to preserve sanatan I wish the late Tarak fate was here to explain what pakistanis think of themselves as over here they think they are descendants of Arabs yeah and he gives he used to give them a nice dose of reality absolutely I loved the man yeah yeah he God bless him whatever he is he said that he was Sani or he was Indian uh by uh by the essence of his being he was Indian um but because of partition and then subsequently um let me come back to this um the material research that goes into your books and you were talking about how you get it from various sources and then you build it you explained it very well um how difficult is it or to sift out propaganda to uh sift out misinformation when you start working on this well uh uh one is of course I I do believe that it's a good idea to try and find multiple sources but very often even those multiple sources can be uh can be actually simply quoting one another yeah and you can have a problem there uh so typically what I try and do is I talk to people who are far more knowledgeable than me like for example one of my greatest handicaps is the fact that I don't read or write Sanskrit uh so for example when there are original texts then I have to depend on not one but about three or four different people to try and actual meaning because simply a translation very often is not enough uh and the nature of your research also needs to be multi-dimensional of course uh so it's not good enough that you you simply just read a few books or you've gone back and looked at a few research papers take a book like let's say for example The calot Saga uh it's it's about two individuals who grew up post 1947 right up to the present day so it's about 70 years of their lives uh if I really want to make that story sound authentic first uh then uh without listening to people who have lived through those ages uh it's not going to sound real uh so if you see the original outline for The calot Saga it's on an Excel sheet uh and every Row in that sheet has a year 1947 1948 all the way up to I think 2010 and in every year then my two characters what are their ages and what would they have been doing in their lives at that time the restaurants the hang out places at that time mentioned you read that book and uh uh then what was the sociocultural historical backdrop during that time of course have you read difficult daughters it's yeah right it's the same kind of a thing you know like where um two sisters Amritsar Lor and uh when I read you know I was thinking that way that it's it's exactly like that that Sal type you know the only difference 15 kilomet apart exactly but the the the life in Lor there are parallels yeah so you know you people who wanted to party would go to Lor and then come back uh to Amritsar so the food in Lor the food in Amritsar the two uh things so uh there was this uh like difficult daughters there was Zora seal and usra and uh two sisters you know one lives in Pakistan one lives in India Zora seal India part of the freedom struggle and then there's tinani they Unite when they were on stage when you know zor seal of course batnam dancer and all that you know so very expressive face and uh she was with Ravi Shankar you know so that there's Grace there was Grace in her even when she was in her 80s her eyes would speak but it's that it's that like your calot you know it's that partition the when you read a book on partition you want to understand the milu the culture the similarities and the dissonance exactly so that doesn't come from Simply reading about it very often without talking it's impossible to get that sort of a flavor in uh if if I'm talking about one of my characters uh let's say taking his girlfriend out for PKA uh in Kolkata then what was the best place for PKA and the price what was the best price that you could get it you know so all of that that brings in that entire flavor If he if you were if I'm doing a mafia shootout uh in the in the 1950s uh you know outside Ambassador Hotel then which was the restaurant that that Dawn would have been going to yeah that's why when we were reading this book I mean both of us were talking to each other when we were reading this book and saying so much of profanity that's because it's St in today's India exactly so you will not find that for example in the bhat seies but but this the you know uh this is something which I picked up when I did two books with James Patterson um I wrote One in 2014 one in 2016 uh and both were crime Thrillers uh but both were targeted at a at an international audience um and uh he told me he said less is more so uh you know when you write the plot anything that you feel doesn't move the plot forward just cut it out eliminate and he said where where there is meant to be action bring it faster bring the F uh the the action faster so if uh with with if if it's a crime Thriller then within the first two pages there should be a killing um and yeah kakam and sacred games and I could see a lot of parallels over there his his main sort of character in in this book it seemed like this book is made for TV as well so uh currently uh uh two of the books in the bhat series are at various stages of adaptation this one as of now we've not yet signed a deal but it's on the cards where where both of us said that I think when we were reading the second chapter both nflix going for Netflix on this because you know I I grew up reading uh a lot of actually my my reading was very varied because can I go back a little bit into that absolutely you do but before that can I say one thing sorry sorry we were talking about this Saga research how did you figure that out for the chanaka chant so chanakya chant of course there were two aspects as you know there are parallel stories in chanakya ch so there is one story which is happening in the current day and there's one story which is happening 2,300 years ago uh and uh the 2,300 year old story is the story of Chandra gupt Maia and chanakya and the present day story is ganga Sagar Mishra and his prot of a girl called CH who he says that I will make this so uh uh one part of it was getting the the the old story right uh which was actually a pretty much a reading of the arastra first the arastra and the Niti shastra uh and then you know while while chanakya has written a lot uh in terms of his own work on economics and uh politics and statecraft uh but there is rather little written about him uh so uh for that you need to actually go back to a Sanskrit play called mudra rakas chandraprakash dedi I think is so he he is the one who directed that first dur dasan series and uh acted in it also yeah but essentially you have to go back to the mudra rakas now the problem with the mudra rakas is that it is a play written for performance and it's written 700 years after chanakya had already cease to exist uh so there is always going to be that doubt in my mind that was was vishaka Data an ancient day Ashwin sangi taking fact and fiction and merging it together so you have to pick up bits and pieces and see what sort of resonates with the writings of chanakya himself so that's how I pretty much worked on the ancient story The Modern story frankly isan wasy enough to do because all you needed to do was go back into 10 or 20 years worth of newspaper cuttings but what did you man did you also read any of the Greek works at that time because of course so for example The Works of meganes and so you do need to find the reference points uh where your story will intersect with what is factually known uh so I did do that sort of a groundw work uh uh or for example the the the reference to uh in m mastes is the time when we get a reference to actually the worship of Krishna uh uh so and they refer to him not as Krishna but Heracles right uh and so then again uh the Krishna key that that comes back so in fact a lot of research which you do for one book ends up bleeds into the other beds into another one yes uh and uh in addition to of course reading and talking to people I would say the third most important is probably travel so for example The Vault of Vishnu I was writing in a situation where I didn't know very much about China so without making at least two or three trips into China I couldn't really attempt that book wow uh so I I I think but that's the joy temples absolutely wow absolutely because again you know when you look like for example Krishna I went to dwarka bet dwarka I went to matura I went to vavan uh uh and you know what you would normally call the Krishna circuit as it were of course uh because again when very often you'll come across something at a particular location uh somat for example there is an arrow pointing uh in the south towards the South uh and that Arrow supposedly directly points towards uh uh towards that path in the ocean where there is no land mass between uh between the temple and uh the South Pole uh so in other words it's it's a very interesting little nugget and then you figure out as to how you can weave that into your story so that that's the great advantage of doing travel that that you come across things I guess that's where you got the fact that dwara may be an archipelago of small little Islands instead of one continuous land maybe that was sapwe correct maybe that was sawe so so you like you said connecting the dots yeah so pre ice AG melt this is what maybe the Indian Land mask would look like and you triangulated that with liar well I guess you took a little bit of yeah but now they're using lar for figuring out what is underneath structures you're right yes but I was referring to Liar honestly speaking that technology was in its nent stages like I said prant now we can instances when now we seeing was most zaap isan when I wrote rosabal line and I talked about uh a boat coming from the coast of Gujarat uh with a bunch of terrorists on it I know uh in order to carry out coordinated attacks 2611 happened and then 2611 happened and I was like you know sometimes it it feels scary because you're wondering what what part of f f fact is inspiring you to write fiction and then how that fiction has in turn probably inspired someone else to you know write fact God what about this book where how did this come across oh this is pure and simple Maja that's all I've done with this book I've had a blast writing it there's been very little research except for little with with any book that I write some amount of research will always happen like when you were talking about that first page itself the murder happens it it reminded me that killer soup with con you know in it and it was like one murder the second murder the third murder is it is it a serial killer what is she you know so that question keeps coming and that but I have this habit Smith even with a crime like for example when I was writing private uh private India with with Patterson uh you know he said I want you to retain the local flavor don't make it into a CSI uh because that's not the way it works so then actually I spent time with some of my friends who within the within the police force that you know how do forensics work for example uh I went and visited the morg at Cooper Hospital uh just in order to understand what are the sort of conditions that they work under Because unless and until you try and figure that one out it's not it's going to sound contrived and as I said when you even tell a lie you need to tell it close to the truth so that means he also went to nightclubs in Bombay yeah all in the name for research flavor for research the flavor yeah to understand and the JEA and things like that happen gambling gambling Dan which happened but then you can actually I I mean I could like I would think n you know like for me this book was very visual she's casted your first hero also for your Netflix series for me it was a v very visually uh you know like a movie like you're reading it it's a quick read and uh but with most of my books what I try and do is I visualize scenes so for me a chapter is a scene so you'll rarely have a chapter in my novel which uh has two or three scenes in it it will typically be that one scene and that one scene then I will try and work on it again and again and again till the time that I've have Amplified all the character traits that I want to amplify and till the time that I've managed to say it in the minimal number of words rarely will you find a book of mine which has a chapter which is more than 7 800 words chanakya's chant is one exception but otherwise mostly each chapter is less than a, words because I want to I want I want you to change the scene as quickly as possible and I want to leave you on a hook uh because I you know and my editor yeah with my editor she she you know uh we were having a discussion one day and she said you know uh I love your stories and I said listen you know I love the way you the way you transform my language because otherwise I wouldn't be understood because my language is atrocious uh and in what way in the sense that it needs lot of work by the editor to bring it to publishing standards because and she said you know what Ashwin you can find a dime a dozen people who will edit your work but there aren't too many storytellers and that's the difference because an editor cannot become a Storyteller so in some sense instinctively now I know where I need to where I need to uh change the pace on what line should I leave you so that you turn the page uh you know I've always believed that easy reading is damn hard writing so you have the reader in mind always when you write always always and uh typically um my my effort will be that I don't want you to turn the page I want the page to turn itself I want you to be uh you you know it was the it was the Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock you know he said that the length of a movie is related to the endurance of the human bladder because you can only sit for that much time you saw a Bollywood [Music] movie no but that's the difference when I uh you know after this period of after covid sitting in a movie Hall um and forcibly watching a like when I saw Oppenheimer frankly you know it's a long movie and you know though it's a very gripping movie I was getting irritated in between that I can't get up and go out and not that it was for bladder reasons but but it it is difficult to sit and that discipline to sit and watch the same way with the book The discipline of reading a book even if it's a crime Thriller to read a book and in between not get into inst and scroll exactly so attention spans have shrunk yeah and so the way I like to visualize when I'm writing is that there are 10 people sitting in a room and I'm telling them a story and in that lot of 10 there are three or four who really need to get up and take a bathroom break but they don't get up and take that break because the they don't want to lose out on the Kahani so can you create that sensation in in in your book now of course with the book you can always put it down and you can go to the but the point is that I want to create that sense of anticipation for to come back to the book to come back and and and take off where they left off yeah was the Rosel when you wrote the Rosel Shrine was that the format you use or the editor intervention no no that was pretty much the format that I used short sections very short you know breaks coming frequently change of scene change of year frankly I mean one of the editors first uh who was working on the rosabal line before she gave up uh uh she asked me what were you smoking when you wrote this uh because it was very difficult to make head or tail of that story and I still find it difficult to understand Smitha how that book became a success chanakya's chant I can understand because it was very coherent it was an easy read but the rosabal line was a very difficult read keepers of the kalchakra is a very difficult read um you know I would say amongst the easiest reads were uh chanakya's chant the Krishna ke The calot Saga uh but then after that keepers of the kalchakra is a tough read because its quantum theory meets vant yes this isn't hard either uh and uh Vault of Vishnu was relatively easy magicians of Mazda is relatively easy so when I picked it up I like yeah why is he written this right now I'm sorry but I you know that was my thing that why not mythology maybe now ramay will come in there because he missed out on RAM so my greatest fear in life is that you will box me in uh it's it's always been there in my mind that uh because after I wrote rosabal and chanakya's chant they said this is his genre this is what he will write in this is what he's good at and I purposely wrote uh the two books with priv with patteron because of that I said I want to understand how crime Thrillers work what is the DNA of a crime Thriller uh and we wrote those two books and frankly I treated it as an education experience to be able to pick up all the little nuances of how it it could be structured better because unlike a lot of literary writing which is an art uh crime writing is a craft so a person who is let's say uh a carpenter who's making chairs his H 100th chair is going to be better than his first chair and his thousandth chair is going to be better than the H hundredth and that's pretty much what I'm trying to do that hone that that craft as it were where will they marry in which book so they in some ways they do marry actually because if you take for example A Book Like The Krishna key it is an out andout crime Thriller because there are there is a series of murders which is happening out there but it's all related back to something that happened in ancient dwarka M uh so you you know uh I have a eighth book in the bhat series coming out next year hopefully early next year and uh uh you know uh uh that one also has a conspiracy in it because again you know I that's what gets my adrenaline going so without that I don't think uh what I can tell you is that it's something that happens in 42 CE okay which uh Heritage which culture which so it's it's 42 CE and now think uh now think Far East okay and you're traveling for this uh so I've already started that process okay and uh most of my research is already done uh now it's actually I've already got a plot outline in place all I really need to do is actually flesh it out tell me the Chinese dynasties you're not going to say do the creative process does it how much does it take out of you and what is it like once it's done creativity is something that you will live through uh it's not something that happens with a button that all the time you will be absorbing like for example I'm a sort of person who maintains a separate Gmail account where I email myself every day so right now you and I are having this conversation maybe you or isan may come up with something which suddenly strikes my fancy I'll email myself so during the last 15 odd years I've even emailed myself at least 10 10 12,000 times uh that becomes my idea Bank uh and so it could be a interesting page in a book it could be a paragraph it could be a web link it could be a video uh so that creative process is on all the time the ideas for the creative process also come all the time it's not as if you can sit down and ideate at that time like for example as I mentioned rosabal happened chance visit to that Shrine uh the chanakya's chant happened in 2009 uh when uh uh UPA 2 had just come and I was watching the uh TV and I saw uh a scene where karuna nidi G had landed in Delhi he came out of his fancy van you know and uh he was met by uh the gandhis and they put a Shaw on him and then when I got onto the flight and I reached back Bombay I realized that he had gone back to Chennai because he was in a half that he hadn't been offered the sort of uh cabinet positions that he wanted and I began to think was politics always so messy uh when we talk of the good old days were they truly good uh and then it it struck me that listen you know uh politics is simply War without Bloodshed so can I bring that contrast that in the old days you settled political disputes through War today you settled it by bringing down a government yeah me Nations right so it it it was a chance sort of you know there I was at a party when Krishna Kei idea came because someone was rly drunk and he he claimed to be a last incarnation of Vishnu seriously uh at that moment I didn't take it seriously because I was also a few drinks down uh but the next morning I called in front of you Ki was in front of you next morning I called for the Ki puran and and read through it in order to and I said my God this this is almost biblical in terms of the style in which it's written and I said I have to write a book on it so the important thing in this creative process is never to shut out the world because the world is perpetually sending you signals that this could be interesting this could be interesting but most of us shut it out and you know um I've interviewed uh several artists and I I count authors also an artist because what you produce is work of art uh so uh when you interview them whether it's a musician whether it's an um whether it's an actor um they they are playing that role they are in that mold at that time and uh they become they become their characters as much as you might try to take it those or method actors or whatever you want to term them as they live that experience and sometimes like they say that our wife says that you know my wife said that you're impossible because your reaction is like your character you're rude and nasty that's not you uh you know you're impatient but they are unable to get out of that right or somebody who's writing a book on say the Taliban you are thinking like them because you need to understand what motivated them whether it's fact or fiction what happens when you are doing that because you're also writing like the in this book it's it's vigorously violent yeah um there are venomous characters out here uh you get into the dark side of uh crime and criminals and and policemen uh you know difficult uh personal relationships wife has run away gone away died suicide what is it so these kind of things that how you how do you adapt mentally I think Smitha for me at least I write about stuff that excites me because I lead such a boring life I'm I'm actually running away from the bottom in my life in some ways uh because it's so utterly ordinary I'm I'm up at 5: in the morning uh to do my my writing uh typically by 9:00 when people are starting their day my day is done because then the rest of the day is in terms of not just books but the business of books uh and then evening hours are typically reading and research which is normally between 7:00 and 10:00 at night and I'm typically asleep by 10: or 10:30 because I need to be up again at 5: in the morning so it can't get more boring than that uh and uh but I think to a certain extent yes what you're saying is right that I never let go of the the thinking process of I mean I I'll give you an example like I um many years ago after I wrote rosabal line I was in uh I was in uh Kolkata to address a bunch of students uh and I had some time in the afternoon uh uh so I told the driver I said take me around the city so he said I said sure now if you're in Kolkata you take it for granted you'll go to a dur Kali Mand yeah so he took me to this Mand uh on a street known as sharoy road so we went there it didn't look like a Mand from afar it looked like maybe the look was of a shop so I walked up the steps went went into that uh place it just had plain white walls so there was no sculpture carving anything in the middle of the room there was a green colored Throne uh and uh on that green colored Throne there was a portrait uh people were doing Puja arti offering uh you know know their prashad and flowers there when I looked closely I realized that the portrait was of amitab bachan so it's actually one of the earliest it's one of the earliest amitab temples that came up and on it is also a pair of shoes which was I think used in the shooting of koui probably so it's it's it lies there on that uh singhasan as it were so I pinched myself I said have I gone into some alternate universe is this some alternate reality uh is this a kalchakra moment what is it I walked out and I was waiting for my car and uh this little boy with a with a to came up to me and he was selling prashad and flowers and agarbattis and all the stuff that I actually would have needed while going in so but I had missed him obviously uh and then u i only picked up one thing from it was a little booklet called the amitab Chalisa it's lying in my library it's ra rather poorly printed but very much on on the ball so I'm waiting for this car to come uh and then I start thinking to myself say supposing your car comes and the brakes fail and the driver comes charging towards you and he kills you on the spot where where you are standing and now as per our kic karmic Theory I take rebirth a thousand years later and a thousand years later the The Cult of amitab worship has really caught on now there isn't one temple in Kolkata there are one lakh temples all over India dedicated to someone called amitab and uh someone Taps you on the shoulder and says do you think this could have been a real man today sitting here we know that it was a real man it is a real man but a thousand years from from now would we know that whether this was historical or mythical so which is the question we ask ourselves about so many of the characters in our myths and in our philosophy and in our culture so where I'm coming from is that there isn't ever a moment where I am off I always on even this conversation I'm on uh because I I not only want you to get something from me but I also want to extract something from you true and this is a little Eerie just a week ago I was in Taiwan and there there was a plaque a Buddhist uh place of worship or whatever you want to call it and it said Amita and I told the person who was with me and I said that you know he's a very big actor in India yeah and here because we had forgotten right that am budhist is yeah so the Buddhist connection came in and I said oh my God yes of course amitava yeah right so so I where I'm coming from is that I people ask me where do you get your story ideas from I don't have to go looking for them they're coming all the time no but that's the difference it may be coming to me but I'm not the author the idea is coming to me but I don't know how to that it doesn't Frac defy into a a story yes it's it's something that has come but because you're the author it comes to you you know how to make it into surprisingly ma it even comes to me when I'm asleep you'll be surprised uh I was uh many years ago I I got up in the middle of the night with a terrible Nightmare and it was so bad that I was drenched in sweat so I had to change uh and take a glass of water and um the next morning I told my wife I said you know uh the dream was so real uh that I I felt I was living it and then the thought struck me that when we go to sleep and uh We've turned off the switch of our real life and we go into that dream life what if that dream life is our real life what if the dream is reality and what I'm right now doing is the dream and that thought kept on bugging me till the time it became keepers of the kalchakra you know so I that's just I I guess to a certain extent I think what happened during my early days was that when it came down to my family I come from a typical B parar so for the longest time you know I mean I I started working with my father at age 14 or 15 uh there was a marari MIM G in our office who used to teach me accounts and how to maintain the bik K uh he would only say that listen there are six lakh words in the English dictionary you only need two they are called debit and credit if you know this you've pretty much figured out everything in life and the only unique thing that was there in my life was my what I I used to call him Maj nanaji he was my n's elder brother and my maternal Grand uncle and he used to always tell me uh that beta you know you are born in this type of family so you will always worship Lakshmi but remember one thing you're blessed by sarasti he said that Lakshmi is curious about where Saraswati is ah so if she if Saraswati is in this room lakmi wants to be in this room if Saraswati gets up from this room and goes away then Lakshmi follows so he said the if even if you are objective is Lakshmi go after sarasti and he would then to go on to say that the only daty that can sit between lakmi and Saraswati is Ganesha yeah so live your life like Ganesha which probably explains why I look the way I do so okay that I didn't see that coming but but the point the point is that because of that he would send me a book every week to read and also you studied uh abroad right you went to ja but but but for finance not for literature okay and uh so uh but nana G would send send me books which were way ahead of my time in terms of age and grasping ability so I mean when others it's not just your generation you know I used to think that okay but just the other day you know I was driving past and going to the World book fair and you know there I saw not less than 10,000 people lined up at every entrance so you're talking about 50,000 people or 60,000 people standing in line to enter a book fair where in the world do you find that absolutely and they were not they were not well off people or something you could make out with the you know that that spending for a book is something that they're taking out from their savings absolutely but they are willing to do that and they taken children with them little children they've obviously changed buses Metro whatever but they're standing in light patiently the problem Smitha is not with today's generation of children the problem is with today's generation of parents uh because if I look at my own upbringing if it would if it were not for n g i mean during his lifetime he sent me a little over 300 books uh over several years and he not only sent the book but then he would expect that before the next book came I would write him a letter explaining what I had read and why I liked it or didn't like it so in other words there was a deep involvement m m in that reading process and then what was going on was that in parallel my mom was always uh uh into Pulp Fiction she the latest Irving Wallace or uh Frederick forset or uh Jeffrey Archer or Sydney Sheldon she would be reading and then she would pass it on to me so I had these two streams of books coming at me one was deep in history and philosophy and art and culture and literature and Science and politics and on the other hand there was these crime Thrillers which were coming so with my bhat series what I've tried to do is actually combine those two streams that I wanted to be stylistically very very quick I wanted to be fast-paced I wanted to be full of intrigue and murder and action but at the same time I want to be conveying deeper stuff to you through the pages yeah interesting yes but it's it's it's some of us like uh if we were to tell uh you know kids of today that uh railway station you could exchange it in the next station after a couple of hours or a day you if you were still in the train you got off and then took your James adley Chase exchanged it for an Agata Christi and paid 10 Rupees more and then for the second day you could actually take the Agata Christi uh and uh give it and pick up Frederick foret yes you know you could so you could finish three books during the course of going going for your summer vacation to your nana Nani's house which was 2 and a half days away and because there was no scrolling yeah there was nothing like that to do uh but what I'm saying is that there are children who are doing that today also which is which is affirming for authors I guess absolutely it is and and when you go particularly for uh you you started out with one of your questions about lit fests and that litera circuit but when you do when you do uh participate in that uh then you suddenly realize that actually you know you are very unaware of how much you have contributed in terms of that person's thinking uh you know I mean I had um I had an event in Kolkata where this guy came up to me and uh you know he he he put some flows on my feet and uh for for me that moment was I didn't know how to react all that I could do was bless him and say listen I'm I'm certainly not what you think I am uh and uh there have been hundreds of such instances and that is so enriching so rewarding and you realize the number of people who have been touched by your stories you know there is a there is an old proverb that says that the shortest distance between two people is a story and that's pretty much what it is that very often all the facts in the world all the research in the world may not touch a person but that story can touch a person and it can it can move mountains on that note wishing you all the best and wishing you a lot of success for your new book and uh for our young viewers and listeners do pick up any of uh ashwin's books they are so enriching they'll really add to your life skills they will add to your imagination they'll add so much to your life so I seriously suggest Google immediately which are the books which are available and pick them up online thank you so much Ashwin thank you so much smat thank you thank you for watching or listening to this edition of the Ani podcast with Smitha prakash do like or subscribe on whichever Channel you have seen this or heard this Namaste J hind click here to watch the previous [Music] episodes

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Id: CBSOELlnewM

Length: 84min 51sec (5091 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024