Ghostwriter · Biography Writer · Legacy Strategist · Film · Narrative
India's foremost ghostwriter and biography writer for founders, cultural figures, industrialists, and the Indian diaspora — serving clients globally since 2004.
The Philosophy
Most people do not have a writing problem. They have a proximity problem.
You are too close to your own story to see its structure. You know every detail — which means you cannot feel what a reader feels, cannot sense where the tension lives, cannot find the single question at the centre of your narrative that will hold someone's attention and refuse to let go.
That is where I come in. Not as a ghostwriter who fills pages. Not as a content agency that processes briefs. As a sparring partner — someone who sits across from you, asks the uncomfortable questions, finds the wound beneath the achievement and the doubt beneath the confidence, and helps you say what you actually mean.
Every serious builder, at some point in their life, needs one person like this. In different worlds, they have been called a consigliere, a scribe who understood the king, a war advisor. Someone with the rare combination of craft, intellectual independence, and genuine courage to challenge you.
I do not write for you. I think with you, until the story becomes impossible to tell badly.
The Person
I have been writing — without a brief, without a client, without an algorithm — since 2004. Every week for 22 years. Over 2,076 published pieces. Over 1.3 million words. Not because I was building a portfolio, but because I cannot stop thinking and thinking requires writing.
I hold an MBA from MDI Gurgaon — one of India's top three management institutions. After graduating, I did not join a bank or a consulting firm. I became a three-time startup founder. I know what it costs to build something from nothing. I know the specific loneliness of being the person who cannot leave. I know the difference between what a company says publicly and what its founders carry privately. That is not something a journalist learns. It is something only a builder knows.
I founded and have run C4E — a communications collective — for eighteen years. Among our clients: Mahindra, Godrej, ICICI Bank, JCB, Honeywell, Maruti Suzuki. I have seen how India's largest industrial houses communicate — the gap between the public narrative and the private reality, the careful architecture of what gets said and what doesn't. I have worked inside that world professionally. I do not observe Indian business from the outside.
I have co-produced short films with the likes Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Devashish Makhija, and others. I study the Mahabharata and apply it to modern storytelling.
When you work with me, you are working with someone who has built a company, survived three startups, and spent twenty-two years writing about what it means to be human. That combination is rare. It may be exactly what your story needs.
What I Do
Service 01
A life told well is not a timeline. It is a dramatic question with a human answer — the wound beneath the achievement, the belief that held when everything else failed.
Most authorised biographies fail because they are written to flatter, not to illuminate. The ones that endure — Caro on Johnson, Guha on Gandhi, Isaacson on Jobs — work because they find the contradiction at the centre of the person. The visionary who was also impossible to live with. The builder who was also afraid. The public figure whose private doubt was the source of everything they achieved. I do not write hagiographies. I write the truth, told with care and with respect for the person whose story it is.
I have written the authorised biography of one of the most celebrated businessmen in the technology and IT services space. That project required going far beyond the public record: extended interviews, documentary research, conversations with contemporaries, and the patient work of finding the dramatic architecture inside a life that the subject himself could no longer see from the inside. The book became a bestseller. I have also ghostwritten three bestselling books — business non-fiction and popular fiction — available for discussion on request.
I hold an MBA from MDI Gurgaon and spent eighteen years as a startup founder and communications consultant working with India's largest industrial houses. I understand what it costs to build something. That understanding is the foundation of every biographical project I take on.
Begin the conversation →Founders approaching a milestone or exit who want the real story told, not the press release version. Industrialists and business families who built something the world does not yet fully understand. Cultural figures — directors, actors, musicians, athletes — whose story deserves more than a Wikipedia page. Indian diaspora founders and executives in the USA, UK, UAE, Singapore, and Canada with stories that span two worlds and need a writer who understands both.
Most biography ghostwriters assign your project to a writer who has never met you and will never understand the cultural and emotional texture of what you lived. I work with just one biography client at any time. Period. Your story gets my full attention, my twenty-two years of writing craft, my trained business mind, and my personal commitment to the work — not a freelancer hired to fill a word count on your behalf. There are no account managers. There is no team. There is only me, fully present, for your story.
Service 02
Stories told on screen operate under laws that prose does not. Visual grammar. Scene construction. The precise architecture of what you show, what you withhold, and when the revelation lands.
A strong screenplay is not beautiful prose with scene headings. It is a machine for creating emotion — built from character desire, escalating obstacle, and the exact timing of revelation. Most people who want their story made into a film approach it as a writing problem. It is not. It is a structural problem first. What is the central dramatic question? Where does the story begin — not where the life began, but where the story begins? What transformation does the protagonist undergo, and is that transformation earned? These are the questions I diagnose before a single scene is written.
I am not a film theorist. I have co-produced four films. My debut novel is in active screenplay development. My script Aakansha, co-written with Rachna Sukuru, was selected in the top 64 at SWA Pitchfest 2024. I took sessions from Anjum Rajabali, Satyanshu Singh, and Boman Irani.
Begin the conversation →The biopic is the hardest form in Indian cinema to get right. Most fail because they confuse a life with a story. A life has no third act. A story does. A life has a thousand interesting events. A story has one question. Finding that question — and ruthlessly building everything else around it — is what I do in biopic development. I start every biopic project with a single constraint: if this film had to be told in a single sentence that contained the entire dramatic arc, what would that sentence be? Until we can answer that, we do not write a scene.
Filmmakers and producers developing original stories who need a structural collaborator, not just a writer. Public figures whose lives are film-worthy and who need someone to find the story inside the life. Authors with novels they believe should become films. Families and institutions who want their story told on screen — documentary or fiction. Indian diaspora storytellers whose stories bridge two cultures and need a writer who understands both registers simultaneously.
Service 03
The best podcasts are not conversations. They are stories told in the architecture of conversation — with episode arcs, season-long dramatic questions, and the deliberate arrangement of revelation across time. The difference between a show people finish and one they abandon is almost always structural, not technical.
I co-founded The Podium, a podcasting network built around conversations with startup founders and C-suite executives. I published a deep investigative piece on IVM and India's podcasting industry in The Ken. I understand audio storytelling not as a hobbyist but as someone who has built in this space and studied its architecture from the inside — what makes a guest say something they have never said publicly, what makes a listener return for the next episode, and what separates a show that builds a community from one that disappears after six episodes.
Most founder podcasts fail for one reason: they are conversations mistaken for narratives. Two smart people talking is not a show. It becomes a show only when there is a central question the audience is trying to answer, an arc across episodes, and a sense that the host is on a genuine journey of discovery rather than performing knowledge they already have.
Begin the conversation →A podcast series is not a collection of episodes. It is a season with an arc. Each episode must do two things simultaneously: stand alone as a complete experience for someone who stumbles on it randomly, and advance a larger question that keeps a regular listener coming back. Building both at once is a craft problem, not a technology problem. It requires the same thinking that goes into a novel's chapter structure — each chapter closes a loop while opening a new one. I bring that thinking to audio.
Founders and executives who want to build a podcast around their expertise or story and want it to be structurally excellent, not just professionally produced. Public figures with a narrative worth serialising across a season. Institutions that want to document their history in an accessible audio format. Indian diaspora leaders building a narrative presence in their community abroad — a podcast that speaks to the Indian experience in a new country while remaining legible to readers back home.
Service 04
Your public narrative shapes how the world sees you before you speak, before you write, before you walk into the room. Most serious builders underinvest in this — and pay for it in ways they cannot always trace: the investor who didn't call back, the partnership that went to someone less qualified but more visible, the keynote invitation that went to the person who publishes, not the person who thinks.
I have taught writing and communication to students at India's leading business schools. I have spent eighteen years as a brand strategy consultant for companies including Mahindra, Godrej, ICICI Bank, JCB, Honeywell, and Maruti Suzuki. I have also built three companies of my own. I understand the strategic dimension of public narrative — not just the craft of putting words together, but the architecture of what you say, when you say it, and what it positions you to do next.
Personal branding is not about being loud. The most influential people in any industry are rarely the loudest — they are the ones whose thinking is most clearly understood. That clarity is built, not born. It is the product of deliberate narrative work: knowing your single most important idea, building everything else around it, and placing it consistently in the spaces your audience actually inhabits.
Begin the conversation →Most executive LinkedIn content fails for a single reason: it is written to perform expertise rather than to share genuine thinking. The posts that build real authority are the ones that feel like the person is working something out in public — sharing an observation they cannot stop thinking about, a failure that taught them something unexpected, a conviction they hold that most people in their industry politely avoid. That quality — raw, specific, genuinely yours — cannot be faked and cannot be templated. I find it in you and build from there.
Founders between Series A and IPO who want to build authority before their company's story is fully written. Executives transitioning from operator to public thinker. Indian diaspora leaders building credibility across two markets simultaneously — India and the country they now live in. Cultural and creative figures whose public presence has not yet caught up with the depth of their actual thinking. Anyone who writes regularly and wants their output to be consistently excellent rather than inconsistently brilliant.
Service 05
Some things are not written for today's audience — but for one that does not yet exist. Your children. Your grandchildren. Your institution fifty years from now. The generation that will carry your name without having known you.
Legacy management is the most underserved service in the writing industry. Every major agency offers PR and personal branding. Almost no one offers the deep, patient, archival work of building a body of narrative that permanently shapes how a person, family, or institution is understood — not just during their lifetime, but permanently.
I work with families, founders in their later years, and institutions that want to ensure their story does not get told by someone else after they are gone — or told badly, or incompletely, or with the wrong emphasis. The work is unhurried, rigorous, and built to last. It requires a different relationship than a book project: more intimate, longer in duration, and predicated on a level of trust that is earned slowly and honoured absolutely.
Begin the conversation →Legacy work is almost always started too late. The instinct is to wait — for retirement, for the right moment, for the full story to be written. But the people whose stories survive are the ones who started while the primary sources were still alive, the memories still vivid, the documents still findable, and the emotions about the early years still unguarded. Once the primary sources are gone, the story can only be constructed from the outside. It can never again be told from the inside. The best time for this work is now — not because of urgency, but because of access.
The Indian diaspora carries stories of extraordinary complexity: the migration decision, the first years in a new country, the building, the tension between cultures, the children who grew up between worlds. These stories are disappearing. The first generation ages, the details blur, the context that makes the sacrifice legible fades. I specialise in capturing these stories before they are lost — in a form that a grandchild born in New York or London can read and feel the weight of what their family chose to do and why.
Service 06
Every serious thinker eventually needs one person
who will not let them get away with it.
Not a coach who validates. Not a consultant who delivers. Not a therapist who reflects. Someone with enough genuine intellectual independence, enough craft, and enough courage to look at what you've written — or what you're thinking — and say: this is not as good as it needs to be, and here is why.
I have been called many things in this role: a sounding board, a devil's advocate, a thinking partner, a writing coach. None of these quite captures it. The closest analogy I have found is the sparring partner in boxing — someone whose entire function is to make you better by being genuinely difficult.
A sparring partner in intellectual work does not want you to win every exchange. They want you to be forced to think more precisely, to discard the comfortable approximations, to find the argument you actually believe rather than the argument that sounds good. The goal is not agreement. The goal is clarity.
This is the rarest kind of working relationship, and I take it seriously. I have worked with founders, executives, writers, and public thinkers in this capacity — people who have access to intelligent advisors and smart colleagues, but who have not found someone willing to push back with genuine rigor rather than professional courtesy. I am not professionally courteous. I am professionally honest. The distinction matters enormously.
Enquire about the Sparring Partner Retainer →Everything you publish, reviewed before it goes out. Not for grammar. For thinking. Is the central argument actually true, or just plausible? Is the evidence you've chosen the strongest available, or the most convenient? Have you addressed the strongest objection — or only the weakest ones? Are you saying what you actually believe, or what you think you're supposed to believe? I read with these questions. The feedback is direct. Sometimes uncomfortable. Always in service of making the work better.
Working sessions — in person or remote — where we take a problem, a decision, or a piece of writing and think through it together. I bring a generalist's mind trained across twenty-two years of writing, an MBA-trained analytical framework, and the genuine intellectual curiosity of someone who reads obsessively across disciplines. The sessions are structured around questions, not answers. I ask until we find the thing you haven't yet examined. That is usually where the interesting work begins.
Pieces written quickly, in your voice, when you need something that cannot wait. Op-eds that respond to the news cycle. LinkedIn posts that capture something you are thinking about right now. Letters that need to land precisely. Speeches drafted at short notice. I write these as you — not in a generic executive voice, but in the specific cadence, vocabulary, and register that is unmistakably yours. Because after months of sparring, I know how you think. That knowledge becomes the foundation for writing that sounds more like you than what you would write yourself under pressure.
How It Works
We begin with a single conversation. I ask questions that most people have never been asked about their own lives. This is diagnostic, not transactional. I want to understand what is actually there — not what you think the story is.
I identify the dramatic question at the centre of the work. The wound that became the gift. The transformation arc. The single thing that makes your story different from every other story of success and struggle.
For biographical work, I go beyond what you tell me. Interviews with people who know you differently. Documents, records, contemporaries. The details you have forgotten. The things others remember that you do not.
I never begin writing before the structure is solved. The outline, the chapter architecture, the revelation sequence — these are built and agreed before a single word of the manuscript is written.
The final work sounds unmistakably like you. Through extended interviews, I absorb your rhythm, your vocabulary, your cadence. The reader should feel they are in the room with you — not with a writer.
Manuscripts are delivered in stages. Every draft includes a revision cycle. The work is not done until you feel the story is exactly right — not merely finished.
Who I Work With
I take on two to three clients at any given time. The work demands full attention, and full attention cannot be subdivided. These are the people I serve best.
You have built something significant. The real story — the doubt, the near-failures, the choices no one saw — has never been told in full. That story is worth telling, and it deserves more than a LinkedIn post.
You have lived inside India's creative industry for decades. The film, the failure, the relationship that shaped everything. Your story has layers that a publicist cannot reach. I can.
Three generations of building. A company that is also a family history. You want something that the next generation can hold — not just a balance sheet but a story of why it all happened.
The public record is one version of you. The human version — the convictions, the compromises, the things you would do differently — is more interesting. That is the version worth writing.
You are mid-career and want to establish yourself as a thinker, not just an operator. Personal brand strategy, thought leadership content, and the strategic construction of your public narrative.
You have a story that wants to be a film. A life that wants to be a documentary. A podcast that wants to be a series. I bring narrative structure to projects that have ideas but not yet architecture.
I am based in Mumbai, but I write for — and am deeply read by — Indians in the United States, United Kingdom, UAE, Singapore, Canada, and Australia. The Indian diaspora carries stories of extraordinary complexity: the migration, the building, the tension between where you came from and where you arrived, and what you want to leave behind for a generation that may not remember the beginning. I understand the cultural register of those stories — the references, the silences, the things that need no explanation for an Indian reader but require careful context for a global one. If your story lives in both worlds, I am uniquely positioned to tell it in both.
Work — Selected Projects
Most of my significant work is protected by NDA. What is public, I share below. What is not — the three bestselling ghostwritten books, the ongoing retainer clients — remains confidential, as promised.
I worked with one of the doyens of Indian IT industry and told the story of how a man, a team and an association took India's software industry from a footnote to a $250 billion engine of the global economy. Writing the biography required going far beyond the public record.
The challenge: The story had written itself over the years but had never told. I had to scour through records going back almost 40 years and understand the personal cost of building an institution that would outlast the leaders. That story lived in his memory, in old documents, in conversations with contemporaries — none of it organised, none of it structured for a reader.
My work was to interview extensively, research deeply, find the dramatic question at the centre of the life — and build a manuscript that was both historically accurate and impossible to put down. The book became a bestseller.
My debut novel — a crime thriller set in contemporary Bollywood, inspired by the PanchaDosha framework. 90,000 words. A Bollywood actress begins receiving death threats from unknown assailants. The investigation that follows pulls back the curtain on fame, power, and the machinery of the film industry.
Either you drop it within the first 20 words, or you cannot put it down. The Hindi edition was published in 2020. The novel is currently in active development as a feature film screenplay.
It is available to read. If you want to know how I write — this is the most honest answer I can give you.
Four short films co-produced, numerous awards including at MAMI, FilmFare and more.
Published in The Ken — a deep investigative piece on IVM and India's podcasting industry. Written to the standards of India's most rigorous subscriber-only business publication. Available on request.
Hero's Journey project — published applied analysis of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth across Indian cinema, including a detailed structural breakdown of Munna Bhai MBBS. A demonstration of how I think about narrative. Read at saurabhgarg.com.
For Families & Dynasties
A CEO memoir is a story of one person's decisions. A family biography is something else — the story of what one generation builds and what the next inherits. The silences between generations. The things that are never said at the dinner table but shape every major decision the family ever makes.
The Mahindra story spans partition, independence, the Emergency, liberalisation, and globalisation. The Tata story, the Birla story, the Godrej story — these are not business histories. They are India's story, told through the prism of one family's choices under pressure. That requires a writer who understands both the business and the country, both the public record and the private psychology.
I have worked with India's largest industrial houses as a communications consultant for eighteen years. I understand how they think about their public narrative. I also understand, as a writer and as someone who has built and survived three startups, what the private reality of building looks like. I can hold both.
A family considering a biography is not primarily asking: can this person write? They are asking: can I trust this person with the things that never become public? The stories that live only in family memory. The failures that were survived. The relationships that shaped everything but have no place in a press release.
My answer: I have never disclosed a client's private material — not a detail, not an anecdote, not a name — without explicit written consent. The most significant work I have done is not on this page. That discretion is the foundation of the work, not a feature of it.
These are not the same obligation, and I do not pretend they are. My editorial philosophy for family and dynastic biography is simple: everything that is true goes through a filter of necessity. Does the reader need this to understand the story? Does its inclusion serve the narrative, or does it merely expose?
The family reviews every section before finalisation. There are no surprises. The work is collaborative by design — because the story belongs to the family, and I am merely the person with the craft to find its shape.
The Credentials
I graduated from MDI Gurgaon — one of India's leading business schools — in 2006. Then I did not join a bank. I became a three-time startup founder. I built C4E from nothing over the last twenty years. I have made payroll under pressure, lost sleep over a company I couldn't leave, and made decisions that shaped other people's livelihoods. I understand the founder's interior world because I have lived it — not observed it.
On top of that business practice: 22 unbroken years of writing, a bestselling authorised biography, a published novel in active screenplay development, and four film co-productions with directors whose work appears at MAMI, Filmfare, and on international streaming platforms.
Most biographers are either writers who don't understand business or executives who can't write. I am both, which is why the work I produce is different from both.
Comparable Titles
The shelf my biography work sits on. Where a commissioning editor would find the market for what I produce.
The Craft
A formula produces content. A framework produces understanding. These are the diagnostic tools I bring to every engagement — ways of seeing where a story is, where it wants to go, and what is currently standing in the way.
The Difference
Investment
Significant work requires significant investment — in time, in access, in the depth of engagement that produces something that lasts. These are starting points. Larger engagements are scoped after a first conversation.
These projects are scoped privately after an initial conversation. Investment reflects the depth of the work — not hours or word count. Enquire to begin.
Fixed-scope work with clear deliverables. All require an NDA at commencement. Full copyright ownership transfers to you on completion.
All engagements begin with a confidential conversation and a clear scope before any payment. An NDA is signed at project commencement. Full intellectual and copyright ownership transfers to you on completion.
Common Questions
Yes. An NDA is signed before any work begins and before any story is shared. I have never disclosed a client relationship without explicit consent, and I never will. Several of my most significant projects are not on this page for precisely that reason.
You do — entirely. All copyright transfers to you upon final payment. My name appears nowhere unless you choose to credit me. The work is yours, the voice is yours, and the story is yours.
A full memoir or biography typically takes between four and twelve months, depending on complexity and your availability for interview sessions. I do not rush work that is meant to last.
Yes. I regularly work with Indian founders and families based in the USA, UK, UAE, Singapore, and Canada. All meetings are conducted remotely. The work travels — the depth does not diminish with distance.
I am a writer, not a literary agent. I can advise on the publishing landscape and make introductions where appropriate, but I do not represent manuscripts or promise publication outcomes. My commitment is to the quality of the work, not its commercial placement.
One conversation tells both of us. I am looking for stories that genuinely matter — people with real depth, not just interesting credentials. If after our first call I do not believe I can serve the work well, I will say so honestly and we will part with mutual respect.
It is not a sales call. I will ask you about the story — not the project brief, not the desired word count, not the target audience. The story. What happened, what it cost you, what it gave you, and why it matters that someone else eventually reads it.
Two to three, at most. This is not a marketing position — it is a structural reality. The work requires full attention. I will not divide that attention across more projects than I can carry with complete presence.
Begin the Conversation
Tell me what you are carrying — the story that exists but has not been told yet. The project that keeps getting deferred. The thing you want to leave behind. I will respond within 48 hours.
All enquiries are held in strict confidence. No unsolicited sharing of your information. Ever.