Vishwas Mudagal’s debut novel was born out of his own experiences. He talks to Divya Kaushik about living the journey that he could not undertake through the story of his book
If an idea stays in your mind for too long or makes you uneasy, take it as a hint that there can be an opportunity waiting for you. Vishwas Mudagal has always believed in this and is governed by instincts. Same thing happened to him when he was writing his debut novel, losing My Religion (Fingerprint). He did not start writing it to see it as a popular novel some day, which it is at present, but just for his own satisfaction. “I didn’t want to follow any genre and write in any familiar style because I was writing for my own self. And when I was writing I kept in mind that as a reader it should entertain me, should be thrilling and so engaging that I can’t leave the book without completing it. I have been writing as a child and it has been a hobby so the story of losing My Religion (lMR) was something I was doing for my own self. It took me five years to write it. There was a time when I was writing on computer. After a while, I was stuck so I decided to pen down the entire book. After completing it, I typed it again. Then I took small breaks while writing it. There were times when I would not feel happy about the story or its flow and I would rewrite,” said the writer.
lMR is a commercial potboiler that combines entertainment with substance and has a cracker of a storyline. When gamer and entrepreneur Rishi Rai sets out to revolutionise the gaming industry, something somewhere goes terribly wrong and everything in his life is disturbed. An unexpected meeting with Alex, an unpredictable, crazy American hippie, changes his life forever, as he decides to quit everything and join him on an unplanned, uncharted journey across India. From getting irrepressibly high in the mysterious Malana Valley in the Himalayas to starting a shack on the bewitching Om Beach on the West Coast, they do it all. But their adrenaline-charged adventure takes a turn when Rishi meets Kyra, a beautiful and enigmatic gamer. As passions surge and sparks fly, Rishi gets drawn to Kyra, unaware of who she is and where she comes from. The end of the story is the most intriguing and unexpected. The novel is inspired by his own life and experience. “The first half of the book, when Rishi (the protagonist) gets into revolutionising the gaming industry and he fails and is completely heartbroken when he meets this American hippy, is from my own life. I was an entrepreneur and started my own venture. Initially everything was great but we could not find financers as only a few understood the scope of technology and computers then. I was financially and emotionally bankrupt. It is said once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, so was true in my case. I was dealing with confusion when I got the call from an ex-colleague who offered me to come for a road trip for a year across the world. I thought I should be doing this. But then I got from a MNC with the offer and I accepted that. So that journey never took off, but that idea remained in my mind. I wanted to live that journey through a story and that was when I started writing lMR,” he shared. When Mudagal wrote the first chapter of his book and gave it to his wife to read, she suggested he should not write. “I was hurt and I thought of giving up writing. But later I thought that you only feel hurt about something you love, so decided writing again. After writing over three chapters I gave it to my wife again. She just loved it and said, ‘You have to write this,’” he added.
The writer’s next will be about a man in future and he is only toying with the idea at present. “Technology, romance and entrepreneurship will always be part of my writing. I will always maintain that whatever I write moves the readers. A good story should be such that it stirs your emotions and prods you to think,” he ended.