‘A very rare human being who treated editorial work as art’: Remembering publisher Krishan Chopra

I was 21 when I first met Krishan Chopra in the offices of Penguin India in Delhi’s Nehru Place on a balmy October morning in 1997. I had been interviewed by David Davidar a few months before and was offered the job of a sales executive, based in Chennai.

Nehru Place wasn’t particularly swank. Paan-stained staircases and a lift that more often than not failed. The office was dank and always carried the remnants of fumes from the generator, which was placed behind the bathroom door.

With regular power cuts, you suddenly felt bereft if the generator wasn’t running and the offices went silent, like your heart had stopped beating. The office floor was quiet, in fact, despite being very small and intimate (one would say cramped), and full of people.

But this wasn’t just any floor.

This was the floor where some of Indian publishing’s greats worked during that time. David Davidar (Penguin India’s first publisher and CEO, and now founder-publisher at Aleph Book Company), Ravi Singh (now founder-publisher at Speaking Tiger Books), Karthika VK (now publisher at Westland Books), Udayan Mitra (now executive publisher at HarperCollins India) and Hemali Sodhi (now founder at A Suitable Agency), and a few other editors were to be found hunched...

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