Interest‌ ‌in‌ ‌comics‌ ‌leads‌ ‌to‌ ‌satirical‌ ‌novel‌ ‌writing.

I had been a fan of comics since childhood. From Raj Comics to Diamond Comics to Amar Chitra Katha to Gotham Comics, I read almost everything that I could lay my hands on. In fact I was so much into comics, that I would often tear pages of my school notebook and write and doodle comics all over it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get any opportunity to write comics until school. When I was at IIT, I tried approaching different publishers for writing stories, but my efforts went into vain. There were three problems I realized: 1) Frequency of comics was going down month on month for every publisher. 2) Stocks weren't available enough at railway station stalls and other places. 3) Content was going stale.

When I finished college, I joined Flipkart as campus placement. At Flipkart, I was amazed at one interesting aspect - in one of our offices, the meeting rooms were named after Indian superheroes. Such passionate people! And yet the comics market was going down. All of us comics lovers were shifting to reading Japanese mangas online. I even tried suggesting some publishers about how they can sell more stuff online, but I quickly realized that lot of old publishers were not comfortable with new age business models and marketing opportunities. They were still preferring traditional brick and mortar format for sales. Evidently because of this strategy, India was getting deprived of the rich comics culture that had thrived for over three decades.

Making‌ ‌comics‌ ‌across‌ ‌different‌ ‌genres‌ ‌and‌ ‌languages.‌

During this time, I started writing a corporate satirical novel - "Get Corporated before you get fired!" It was a comedy on office life - bosses, HR, marketing etc. I found a publisher in Mumbai and we launched it in March 2015. In the course of one year, I got several fan responses asking me that why had I not written it in comics style format like Dilbert. This seeded the thought of launching my own comics. I had switched to Xiaomi by then and was writing a superhero story at that time. I quickly scanned my Facebook friends list and found Tanushree, who was kind enough to illustrate my first comic book - "Ved". Both of us had no idea of comics publishing at that time, but I wrote, she drew; and we eventually launched our first comic as a hobby. It went on sale on 2nd July 2016. Within fifteen days, it became a bestseller on Amazon in comics category and that's when it really stuck me - perhaps this genre has lot of potential.

Very soon we got contracts from Balaji Motion Pictures and later Ajay Devgn FFilms to create comics for their Bollywood movies – ‘A Flying Jatt’ and ‘Shivaay’ respectively. That’s when I quit my job at Xiaomi and started this venture full-time.

Today, we make comics across eight genres and six languages - Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, Marathi and English and have fans all over India. Our comics are supplied by Jio Chat on its digital platform. (We just crossed 100K subscribers on the platform).

Turning back, I sometimes wonder how did the magic happen. Dedication? Perseverance? Timing? Hardwork? Or combination of all? Or the team that we have today? I cannot say for sure. Perhaps this is what's called experiencing serendipity.