The Author
VarunNagella
I didn't set out to become an author.
Writing found me unexpectedly — and eventually led me to the people, places and unanswered questions of ancient India.
The Journey
Fromtechnologyto storytelling.
I am an MBA graduate who began my professional life as a software engineer. Over twentyone years in the IT industry, I worked in many different roles — from team leader and project leader to project manager and head of operations.
Today, I work as a consultant and also run a successful e-commerce business.
Writing was never part of the original plan.
The journey began with something much smaller: a fairytale I wrote as a birthday present for my younger daughter. She loved it. Soon afterwards, my elder daughter wanted a book of her own.
She was considerably harder to please.
That second book involved research, drafts, redrafts, abandoned ideas and more than a little frustration. Eventually, I finished it. My daughter said she liked it. I still suspect she was being kind.
But by then, I was hooked.
The Beginning
It started witha world.
One of the books that left a lasting impression on me wasThe Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
I was fascinated by the way Tolkien could build an entire world and make a reader feel that it existed beyond the pages of the book.
I never imagined creating anything on that scale. What stayed with me was something simpler: the desire to make a reader feel that they had entered another world.
Eventually, I realised that the world I wanted to explore already existed.
It was ancient India.
The People
History remembersthe great.
History tends to remember great kings and queens, celebrated warriors, inventors and people whose achievements changed the course of events.
But they were not born great.
Before the victories, the decisions and the names that survived, they were ordinary people making choices — sometimes difficult ones — without knowing what history would eventually make of them.
I am drawn especially to the people whose stories were overshadowed, barely recorded, or survive only in fragments.
An ancient object can fascinate me for the same reason.
Imagine a piece of pottery made thousands of years ago. Someone shaped it, chose its design and decided how much effort to put into making it beautiful. Today, an archaeologist may carefully study that same object.
I often wonder what the person who made it would think if they could see that happening.
Would they wish they had made a better design? Would they have tried harder? Would they ever have imagined that their ordinary work would survive for thousands of years?
Those are the people I want to bring back to life.
Why I Write
The question is always:what really happened here?
A source may tell us where a person went, what they did, or how an event ended.
What interests me is everything in between.
What made that person choose one path instead of another? What were they afraid of? What did they want? What circumstances shaped the decision?
If a small group defeated a much larger force, I want to know what decisions made that possible. What defences did they have? What did they understand that their opponents did not?
The recorded event is the starting point. The human story behind it is where my imagination begins.
The Research
Before the story,the world.
When I write about a particular period, I want the reader to experience more than the plot.
I research the world around the characters — clothing, food, weapons, architecture, trade, occupations, geography, social customs, language, religion, politics and everyday life.
I enjoy the research as much as the writing itself. Every book becomes an opportunity to discover things I did not know before.
My hope is that when a reader enters a story set two thousand years ago, they don't simply watch it happen.
I want them to feel as though they are living there.
The Work
Different people.Different stories.
I don't want to be confined to one kind of story.
Ancient India contains too many people, places and possibilities for that.
Some stories may become historical fiction. Others may be character-driven journeys, adventures, or treasure and relic hunts. Some may grow from a fragment found in an ancient text. Others may begin with a historical mystery that refuses to go away.
The genre can change.
The fascination remains the same: finding a story that deserves to be known and asking what might have happened behind the version that survived.
Selected Works
Stories fromancient worlds.
ĀKHYĀNA
The project grewfrom the obsession.
Over time, my fascination with these stories became something larger than individual books.
That became ĀKHYĀNA — a literary project devoted to rediscovering stories, characters, ideas and traditions from ancient India and bringing them to modern readers.
It is a place for the stories I keep finding, the questions I keep asking, and the worlds I keep wanting to explore.
A Final Thought
The past left usfragments.
I want to listen carefully enough to imagine the people who left them behind.
Explore the Stories →