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 over manuscripts or marketing plans.But mostly over the rickety fax machine as letters from authors, customer orders, manuscripts and press releases were sent and received.And then there was Chopra. Editor and later publisher, non-fiction at Penguin Books, then publisher non-Fiction and Harper Business at HarperCollins India (2006-2021), then Publisher at Bloomsbury India (2021-2024), and then back at HarperCollins India, until last week.For me, coming to work in publishing straight from a bookstore, and then into faraway Delhi from the cocoon that was Chennai, was not as daunting as working with this group of people, all of whom were in the various stages of becoming legends.Hi! Chopra had said. That was all.He spoke very little and would often come around to the sales desks to drop off a cover or an “advance information sheet” and would say, “This book should sell a lot.” Tall, lanky, a chiselled, aquiline face, one you could call stern and maybe even unfriendly, until he got to know you better, and that million-dollar grin came on.Then you heard tales about his Daryaganj upbringing, fearless journalism at the Times of India, and publishing.Since I had a job that meant I was travelling a lot, in the beginning, there was very little interaction between Chopra and me. The others had become friends by then.One of my earliest and most surprising work encounters with Chopra happened over a business book. We had already moved from the matchbox that was the Nehru Place office to much nicer digs in South Delhi, spacious offices sandwiched between a village, Shahpur Jat, and the upscale N Block Panchsheel Park that came with a parking lot full of trees and birds.These new offices also meant all of us had individual work cubicles, and in my case, an entire room. We were on the second floor, while marketing, editorial, and the senior leadership were on the first. So, I was surprised when Chopra climbed upstairs and came to my desk. He knew I had an interest in the business and management genre and came over with a manuscript.Here, I have to pause and tell you something about Chopra. He was tall, I had mentioned, and we often quipped that his head was in the stratosphere. Because he always seemed preoccupied. Our building had four floors, a terrace, and a basement. So, if you bumped into Chopra in the stairwell while you were going down, invariably he would say “Hi” back when he was just about to enter his floor and you were well on your way into the basement. One could still hear him because of the acoustics in the small stairwell.“Will you read this and let me know what you think?” he asked.Chopra used to like working with a printed manuscript, however long the book, and so he dropped off a printed copy. At that moment, I wasn’t sure he was serious – did he really want a sales manager to comment on a yet-to-be published book? That wasn’t how publishing worked then. No other editor had done that in any case.I read the manuscript on a working Saturday, and the precocious part of me gave extensive feedback. Including deletions because they weren’t working for the book. He wasn’t around, so I went to his floor and dropped the manuscript on his desk, so that he would see it on Monday.At this point, I had no idea what stage the book was at, if he had indeed worked on it already, and, more importantly, whether things like author feedback mattered. Still, I was very pleased with the work I had done.Chopra came to my desk on Tuesday. A man of few words, he said, “You’ve read the book well,” and turned to leave. Just before he exited fully, he said, “It is always good to get another opinion”.I saw the book when it was published, and he had taken on board most of my suggestions.Krishan Chopra’s favourite publishing project, and its authorThe year 1997 was a landmark one for publishing. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Tuesdays with Morrie. Memoirs of A Geisha. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And then came Arundhati Roy and took the world by storm with A God of Small Things, eventually winning the Booker Prize.It was also a momentous year for Chopra.As he recounted (in an earlier piece in Scroll), “It is worthwhile to go back to 1997, when I got the idea for a book that pinned down the fuzzy notion of a developed India and went to meet APJ Abdul Kalam, a meeting whose outcome was India 2020. The Indian economy was progressing at a reasonable pace, the streets were bright, shop shelves had their share of attractive imported goods alongside the homespun fare, the cars were better with just that little edge for some that were roomier and more powerful, such as the Contessa, which had been around for several years, and the more recent Cielo.”APJ Abdul Kalam was the scientific advisor to India’s defence minister at the time. He had a hectic schedule, travelling across the country to research labs. The book came chapter by chapter, and it was a race against time to get it published.In the last leg, Chopra, along with two other editors, sat in a flat in Chanakyapuri to proofread the manuscript just before it went to print. “There were three of us – sprinting through the text at eye-popping pace to correct as much as we could,” Chopra told me. “The taxi had been kept waiting, and the last set of pages was sent to the typesetter near midnight.”Krishan Chopra and APJ Abdul Kalam.For those of you in publishing, media or books, here is an interesting example of a detailed note Chopra sent as feedback. This one went to one of the former governors of the Reserve Bank of India, and concerned his memoir.“The first ten chapters give an interesting portrait of life as it used to be, throwing light on some things we take for granted but were hard to come by – down to toothbrushes, for example.However, all things considered, it would certainly help to reduce this section by 10-15% through judicious pruning of a paragraph or two where possible. Portions of chapter 10, pages 103–105, could be reduced as an instance.StyleIt would help if you could make the following changes.Single quote marks, except for quote within quote.It would help to have all spellings where ‘z’ is an option with ‘s’. For example, realise, organise, utilise, fertiliser. Consistency in spelling: Ananthapur/Anantpur, Sarla/Sarala, Vibuthi/Vibhuti/Vibhuthi, Nalgonda/Nalagonda and other names as marked.Our date style. 26 January 2016 instead of January 26, 2016 (no commas).Designations: It helps consistency to keep them all lower case, except where with the name: Hence, the prime minister but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.Spellings: We follow British style. Hence, colour, programme, and so on.Names: Full at first occurrence, surname on subsequent. However, some names could be given in full again in a subsequent chapter at their first occurrence.Abbreviations: Too many are avoidable, but for some common ones, such as the Reserve Bank, we will use Reserve Bank occasionally but RBI will do. Similarly, SBI and so on. Just government will do instead of the Government of India.Spacing: Better if we have 1.5.Don’t need numbering point-wise in the margins.Endnotes: Should be numbered chapter-wise and at the end of the book.”In the above instance, I had been copied in on the communication. Chopra and I had met the author together and there was a question about the very tight deadline we were working on and the author had insisted that I be “involved” in the process, which at that point was literally restricted to accompanying Chopra to the author’s residence and home office when summoned, also on short notice.Sachin Sharma, Chopra’s colleague and Publisher, Harper Business, said, “In my five years working closely with him, we not only launched Harper Business but made it the most successful business books imprint in the country. The credit goes to Chopra for pushing me the extra mile whenever I thought we had arrived. We were celebrating 50,000 copies of a bestseller and right after the cake cutting, he and I were sitting in his cabin, where he said we must create a new author/book in the same genre. Restless, main character energy – whenever I look back, I think he pushed me beyond limits because he saw a possibility. Yes, he yelled at times, but that was his style. Humbling for most of us but that’s the price you pay for accelerated learning.“He always led by example. If he felt a book hadn’t been properly edited, he would print it out, edit it himself, and send me his notes on WhatsApp, sometimes as late as 2 am. He used to compare editing to finding bugs, often saying, Eediting is about finding bugs…’”Authors and colleagues would tell you that for Chopra, it was equally, if not more important for those involved with the book to understand the nuances of editing, and not just click “accept all changes” and close the manuscript.Journalist Niharika Alva, who interned with Chopra a few years ago, sent me this exchange.Chopra published, among others, a long line of Reserve Bank governors – Bimal Jalan, YV Reddy, Raghuram Rajan, and Urjit Patel. He ardently chased the other governors, some of whom published their books elsewhere. I think I can say with authority that the idea for their books, or that nudge to put pen on paper had come from Chopra. He was obsessed with the state of the nation and the machinations of the Reserve Bank – its economic health in particular, and the way it treated its citizens.The publisher and his authorsIt should be a priority for govts to devise care systems that do not wipe out savings. Currently even insurance is not available, or with difficulty, to those above a certain age, and with a pre-existing illness, even a manageable one, even less so https://t.co/4bPeL7xB7q— krishan chopra (@krishnDG) December 24, 2025