Vivek and I call ourselves “accidental authors”!
The journey started with Bollywood and Culture Groove, a company I co-founded in 2010 to spread the joy of Indian dance and culture in Chicagoland. But right from the get-go, our kids’ classes were unique. Instead of only teaching dances, our curriculum included learning about the people from different regions of India that the dances came from. This concept was a fantastic hit with parents, educators, and kids alike!
It was in 2016 when Vivek suggested that we make the cultural learning aspect accessible to everyone in the world irrespective of their physical location. And that’s when the concept of writing books came about.
This was before big publishers were publishing many books on Indian culture. So we decided to publish ourselves. We knew absolutely nothing about publishing except that our content was extremely engaging. After all, we had been teaching this content in our classes for kids ages 3 and up for years!
We published our first book – Let’s Celebrate 5 Days of Diwali – in the Fall of 2016 and watched in wonder as it became hugely popular. The next year, this book reached a rank of #387 out of all 8 million books on Amazon at that time. Encouraged by this amazing phenomenon, we published 12 more titles covering Indian festivals, cities, activity books, and even one on Indian weddings.
Today, our books are available in 54 countries with almost 80,000 books sold worldwide. But the biggest joy is receiving messages and letters from little readers from all around the world.
What started as a small dream to share the joy of Indian culture has now spread to a proportion that we couldn’t have ever imagined. And we owe it all to the amazing support we have received from parents, educators, library systems, and more.
