Vikram Chandra: India’s Trailblazing Scribe

Vikram Chandra quote graphic

Vikram Chandra was born on this day in 1961. He studied in the US and today lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.

His first book Red Earth and Pouring Rain revolved around James Skinner, an Anglo-Indian soldier. This was the beginning of accolades. He won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. He was also recognized for his short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay. He always had his pulse on the plot and worked on film scripts in Bollywood too.

What Vikram Chandra is loved for is his voluminous work Sacred Games featuring the Mumbai underworld and peopled by characters like Sartaj Singh and his Ganesh Gaitonde who jump of the page. His magnum opus is about Mumbai and the layers of possibilities that it has laid on its characters. Sacred Games took Chandra eight years to write and it was later adapted as a popular web television series by Netflix. His non-fiction book Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty  was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He’s also the founder of Granthika, a great author resource. Since Chandra faced many hurdles while trying to keep track of his characters and their complicated timelines in a setting like Mumbai, an almost living entity, he wanted to find an easier way to digitize narration and simplify the author’s work.

Happy b’day Vikram Chandra!

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