Books and Beyond with Bound

If your family has ever felt like a soap opera you can't escape, this episode is for you. 
For the finale of Season 9, Tara sits down with Karan Mahajan to discuss The Complex, a sweeping family saga set in Delhi across the 1980s and 90s. Through the rise and fall of the Chopra family, they unpack the emotional realities of marriage, the loneliness of immigration, family expectations, male inadequacy, and the uncomfortable question of how personal disappointments can evolve into political resentments.
What happens when a marriage becomes the defining factor in a woman's future? And how do family loyalties survive affairs, betrayals, and decades of silence?
Karan also talks about playing with the line between fact and fiction from the very first page, opening the novel with a supposedly "found" 100,000-word manuscript by the mysterious Mohit Chopra. Together, they explore how fictional families can help us understand real historical moments, from immigration and the Emergency's aftermath to the rise of Hindu nationalism.
Karan takes us behind the scenes of a novel that took nearly a decade to reach readers: from a 500-page draft during the early months of COVID to separating himself from the characters before editing. Finally, he shares the advice he gives his students at Brown: write in conversation with your unconscious and never lose that sense of childish wonder that made you want to tell stories in the first place. 
Press play to tune out of your family drama and into the Chopra family's.
Books mentioned in this episode: 
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai
Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.
The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.
Cohort size: 50 seats
First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas
‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

A love story, across timelines as one woman tries to reach the other through the words she left behind.
In this episode, Tara sits down with Tarana Hussain Khan, writer and food historian, to talk about her novel The Courtesan, Her Lover and I, a book that moves between two women and their love stories separated by a century, bound together by letters that almost didn't survive.
The conversation explores how Tarana first discovered Daag’s letters to Hijab in archival material and why Hijab became such an enigma to her. Through Hijab's story, they get into the larger world of Tawaifs and the extraordinary dichotomy of women who were the most culturally significant of their time, yet whose writings were lost, romanticised, or dismissed. 
Through the parallel journeys of Hijab and Rukmini, a contemporary aspiring writer, they also unpack the realities of becoming a woman writer in India today, with Tarana reflecting her own insecurities of pursuing writing full-time and her relationships in Rukmini’s world and the ways women now have more agency and opportunities than the generations before them. Tarana also opens up about her process in fiction and non-fiction, and the emotional toll of delving into these stories.
They discuss Tarana’s bold structural choice of writing Hijab's entire narrative in second person to let Rukmini speak directly to Hijab across centuries, questioning the silences left by history.
Press play to be transported to a world of poetry, music and a love story of epic proportions. 
Books mentioned in this episode: 
Deg to Dastarkhan by Tarana Hussain
Last of the Earth by Deepa Annapara
Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.
The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.
Cohort size: 50 seats
First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas
‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

This episode contains discussions of sexual violence, human trafficking and child abuse. Please listen at your discretion.
Have you ever read a headline, felt the rage to make a difference, but didn’t know where to start?
But an 8-year-old girl acted on it and inspired millions to make a difference, no matter how small

In this episode, Tara sits down with Sunitha Krishnan, founder of Prajwala, Asia's largest institution combating sex trafficking, and Padma Shri recipient, to discuss her memoir I Am What I Am. Over three decades, Sunitha and her team have rescued more than 32,000 survivors and prevented 18,000 children from entering the sex trade. This is the story behind all of that. 
She traces her journey from a 17-year-old with no experience walking into red light areas to building one of the most sophisticated rescue and rehabilitation operations in the world. She talks about what a rescue actually looks like on the ground, speaks candidly about her own experience of gang rape at 15 and why she refused to let it become her entire identity. 
From being beaten up and accused of kidnapping the very children she was rescuing, and when she had to spend 23 days in jail, the stories of her fearlessness are endless.
Tara and Sunitha ji also get into the process of writing the book. She spent 13 days in a hotel room alone with her memories, writing for 14 hours every day. She spent two hours being violently ill as her body released what her mind had been holding for decades, but she didn't leave until every last memory was on the page. 
Courage can also be contagious. Press play and maybe you’ll be inspired to take that step you might’ve been putting off. 
Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.
The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.
Cohort size: 50 seats
First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas
‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

If you’ve ever wished for food to transport you to new places, this episode is for you!
In this episode, Tara sits down with Lavanya Lakshminarayan, international award-winning sci-fi author and game designer, to explore the world of Primus in Intergalactic Feast, a sequel to her Interstellar Megachef.
They dig into her two-book series, where food is not just sustenance, but culture, conflict, memory and resistance all at once. Lavanya talks about how it all started with a bowl of rasam made by her grandmother during a bout of dengue, and a question that wouldn't leave her alone: who decides which foods matter? 
Lavanya also dives into her elaborate process of building speculative worlds rooted in Indian food history, designing alien species and futuristic systems, and writing emotionally immersive sci-fi. From flowcharts that map out all the civilisations and systems to writing 120,000 words under an international deadline, she reveals her recipe for a bestseller that’s unmistakably Indian and universally loved. 
Press play and maybe sit with a bowl of your comfort food before you do, because you are in for a feast!
Books mentioned in this episode: 
Interstellar Megachef & Intergalactic Feast by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.
The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.
Cohort size: 50 seats
First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas
‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

Do you actually need a big personality online for your book to succeed? The answer might surprise you. 
In this episode, Tara sits down with Naiyya Singh, Assistant General Manager of Marketing at HarperCollins India, to pull back the curtain on what it actually takes to get a book into the right hands. 
They get into what a book marketing campaign really looks like and why fiction and nonfiction get treated completely differently. Naiyya tells us how plans have to adapt to news cycles and trends, and why an intimate launch of 20 people can be as significant as a packed auditorium. 

Naiyya also breaks down the question of virality every author asks, as well as the other elements that go into marketing a book.
From escape-room campaigns to intimate roundtable launches, they explore the creativity, unpredictability and occasional frustration of book marketing. They also dig into the resurgence of book clubs and why the best metric for a successful book has nothing to do with first-week sales. 
If you are an aspiring book marketer or an author nervous for their launch, you don’t want to skip this chapter! 
Press play to get the scoop on what really sells a book and why even the best ones take time. 

Books mentioned in this episode: 
The complex by Karan Mahajan
Politics, Policy and Predictions: Views from the Front Row of Parliament by Derek O’Brien
Dream Count - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan
The Only City: Bombay in Eighteen Stories by Anindita Ghose
Lightning in a Shot Glass by Deepanjana Pal
Dakini by K. Hari Kumar
The Enclave by Rohit Manchanda
August 17 by S. Hareesh, translated by Jayasree Kalathil 
The Complex by Karan Mahajan
Ghost Eye by Amitav Ghosh
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough 
Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.
The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.
Cohort size: 50 seats
First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas
‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.