Granthika: Sacred Games author Vikram Chandra begins startup journey with app for writers

Indian-American writer Vikram Chandra co-founded the Silicon Valley startup Granthika

Faizal Khan

The newest technology product from Silicon Valley owes its origins to the birth pangs of a book. Granthika, a new application to help writers negotiate the air pockets of creativity, is a startup co-founded by Indian-American writer Vikram Chandra. The app, whose first seeds were sown when Chandra was writing his third novel, Sacred Games, is turning heads in the technology world. The first investor to come on board was Bloomberg Beta, the American venture capital firm from the stable of billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg, a candidate in the US Democratic presidential primaries.

Founded in California in 2016, the official version of Granthika was released in November 2019. The app, which combines writing tools from word processing to editor to timeline-maker to database, is available on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The company offers a free trial for 14 days. Granthika, says the company website (https://granthika.co) ", intelligently manages all story elements for you, freeing you to be even more creative".

A Long Journey

The story of Granthika goes all the way back to the mid-90s.

"It occurred to me just as I was starting Sacred Games (now a Netflix series)," says Chandra, who teaches creative writing at University of California, Berkeley. There were several things he had to keep up with---pictures, photos of location, enough to fill up several notebooks. "It is a manual bookkeeping that you end up with," he adds.

There were mistakes to avoid in facts and chronology.

"People are forgiving in fiction. They are very kind and will email you about the mistakes," he says. "But it drives me nuts." How much can human beings do? That was the question he was grappling with. He soon started looking around for software that could help organise writing tools. "Nobody had it," says Chandra.

In 1999, during a visit to Tel Aviv, Israel, Chandra was introduced to Microsoft Project Management Software. Its applications were in areas like building big bridges, but the author saw that the software had the ability to attach characters like workers to products and materials.

"I came home and started using the software," recalls Chandra. Sacred Games was published in 2006, and the writer had all the time to pursue matters of technology.

Art Meets Technology

"I have a hacky programmer's brain," jokes Chandra. When he was a student in America and writing his first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra worked as a programmer. It all came back to aid his exploration of a writer's software. Sacred Games took ten years to come out. "I thought about it (the software) for another ten years," he adds.

Then, suddenly one day in his home, Chandra saw a glimmer of hope. A way to attack knowledge to text.

"I started talking about it in a boring way to people," he says.

One person who heard it was Paul Vidich, author of trade spy novels An Honourable Man and The Good Assassin. Chandra and Vidich were at the same writers' conference.

"Write up a software proposal," Vidich, who had worked with AOL, told him.

"I wrote 40-odd pages while on a tour for Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, Code of Beauty (Indian title Mirrored Mind published in 2014)," says Chandra. He first sent the proposal to Akash Kapur, Indian-American writer of India Becoming and Auroville: Dream and Reality: An Anthology. "Akash is a tech guy. He is friends with Roy Bahat (head of Bloomberg Beta that would later invest in Granthika)," he adds. Bahat now knew about Granthika and was interested.

Though the proposal was ready, Chandra still needed somebody to work with.

"Cutting edge engineering is way ahead of my brain," he jokes. He found the ideal partner in Borislav Lordanov, an American software professional and entrepreneur. Lordanov would become Granthika's co-founder and president. Lordanov had developed an open source database called HypergraphDB. "It seemed almost too perfect," says Chandra. "It is like a foundation on which to build (the writer's app)."

Chandra soon emailed Lordanov asking him a couple of tech questions. Lordanov emailed back saying what Chandra wanted to use them for. "I sent him the (Granthika) proposal."

The response was quick:

"If you have funding, I want to work with you," Lordanov replied.

Six months later, the two met in California, thanks to Bahat.

"I want to see the two of you in the same room," Bahat told Chandra.

The Way Ahead

"Venture capitalists believe writers are poor people. And that is true," says Chandra. "Almost 99.9 percent of writers have a day job." Bahat saw the potential of the app. "He is a visionary guy," says Chandra about Bahat, who would become Granthika's first investor.

The new company hired programmers and started the work, releasing the Granthika app in November 2019.

"We are a small team with scarce resources," says Chandra.

The company is focusing on educating users.

"A lot of writers are appreciative of the new app," he says. "We want to show people how it works. We are pushing very hard." The company gets many queries from India. Recently, one such was from Odisha seeking help for working on Granthika for the retelling of The Ramayana in Oriya language. "We have to make Granthika (which is available in English) multilingual," he says. "Hopefully in the future we will be able to acquire resources."

Chandra, who believes new technology is taking ancient ways and giving us new ways to work, drew from Sanskrit for naming his startup.

"The pre-modern etymology of Granthika is very interesting," he says.

Granthika is a Sanskrit word derived from Sanskrit verb root ‘granth’, which means 'to fasten, to connect" and Sanskrit noun ‘Grantha’ (composition, book in prose or verse). Granthika means narrator. A decade and half after he wrote Sacred Games, Chandra is now writing his new book, "two-three novellas", in Granthika this time.

Granthika, a super-app for writers combining writing tools from word processing to editor to timeline-maker to database, was released in November last year

The super-app owes its origins to the times when Vikram Chandra was writing his third novel Sacred Games, now a Netflix series

American software entrepreneur and innovator Borislav Lordanov is co-founder and president of Granthika

Vikram Chandra's Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, Code of Beauty about writing and computer coding was published in 2014