No cap: Amish Tripathi learnt to talk like Gen Z for his new book

Whether at the airport or on the local train, you can be sure you’ll find at least one stranger reading Immortals of Meluha, Amish Tripathi’s bestselling debut and the first installment in his now-iconic Shiva Trilogy. They’ll be holding the overhead handle with one hand, and resting their book on their bag that they’re wearing in front, like a massive belly. No amount of getting pushed and pulled by the crowd will make them take their nose out of the book. Isn’t that every author’s dream reader?

And now Tripathi hopes to engage a whole new generation of readers with a dive into Indian history. His latest book, Dhruv-Tara & The Great Indian History Quiz, follows two 11-year-old class toppers and fierce rivals who, forced to work as a team to represent their school at a history quiz competition, set out on a thrilling journey through the annals of our country’s past.

Dhruv-Tara is meant to be the first part of a whole universe that Tripathi is dreaming up for young readers from the ages of 8 to 11, and he sat down with Tweak to tell us more about it.

Amish Tripathi on how to get your middle-grader to love history books

Tweak: Why did you decide to write for children this time? And did it alter your research process drastically?

Amish Tripathi: I’ve always loved history as a subject, but I suspect most kids find it really boring. In fact, I’ve been doing some pre-launch school events, and whenever I ask students, “Tell me honestly, how many of you find history boring?”, practically everyone raises their hands. And it’s kind of sad because I think history is actually a very interesting and a very important subject.

But how do you make it fun for children? The last time I read children’s books would have been 45 years back. So I picked up some children’s books again, just to kind of get into that frame of mind. It connected me back to the kind of person I was when I was young.

T: Did 11-year-old Amish have anything in common with Dhruv or Tara?

AT: I certainly did. I was hyper competitive in school too—I hated coming second. And there was this time in second grade, a new girl had come into class called Nirmala, and she beat me. I was so angry, and I even remember my teacher saying, “Amish, what has happened to you?” But Nirmala and I became friends over time too.

T: You’ve used a lot of Gen Z slang in this book. How did you make sure you got it just right?

AT: It’s one of the benefits of having a Gen Z son. He is 17 years old. So I ran some stuff by him, and asked him for advice. I asked some of his friends too. And fortunately today, you can just look things up on the web too.

T: You talk about wanting to ditch the British-created India that kids read about in school for the India-centric story. What’s one fact that never made it to the textbooks?

AT: I think our history books have not been sufficiently decolonised. They don’t tell our own story from our own perspective. For example, what the history books at school told me, and my kids as well, was that Vasco da Gama discovered India and came to Kerala. But Vasco da Gama did not discover India. It was a Gujarati trader who met him in Africa and guided him to Kerala, along the standard route that Indian traders had been sailing along already.

T: Do you worry that children won’t want to read through an entire book and instead prefer AI or YouTube summaries?

AT: The only thing that we authors, or any artist, have to do, is try and make sure that our work is so interesting that they will give up the doom loop of surfing Instagram and chatting with AI.

I kept asking myself as I was working on chapter by chapter—how can I make this even more interesting? Can I have some jokes in the middle? Because if it becomes like gyan, a kid would think, “Mujhe textbook nahi chahiye (I don’t want a textbook)”. So that was the attempt, and it actually took more effort than the research itself.

T: How can parents motivate their kids to read more?

AT: I get asked this by a lot of parents and I tell them all the same thing: kids do not listen, they imitate. You want your kids to read? You have to be a good reader. You don’t want your kids on the phone all the time? You should not be on the phone all the time.