I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

Winning an award is a great feeling but winning the Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award is particularly exhilarating because it is based upon public voting. I find it a strange quirk of fate that Chanakya's Chant, a political tale, should end up winning an election!

There has to be a protagonist who has to overcome challenges, and there will be a race to finish.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, You cant know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

When working on a period, it is the finer details that evoke imagery that helps in cinematic adaptations.

If there is one city apart from Mumbai where I would love to settle down, it has to be Chennai.

We don't need to dumb down our stuff. And it's important to know how far we can push readers.