Dear Reader,

At 2pm on a Tuesday, as MBA students slump post-lunch, guest speaker and Bollywood scriptwriter Atika Chohan does the unexpected—she questions her own presence.

‘Why invite a feminist writer like me,’ she challenges, ‘when you could have the Stree (horror film) screenwriter?’

The room snaps to attention. This is classic Atika: part provocateur, part psychologist, wholly persuasive.

With films like Margarita With a Straw, featuring a young woman with cerebral palsy and Guilty, which deals with a college rape, she’s mastered the art of wrapping urgent social commentary in compelling narratives. Today, as she talks to the MBA students on persuasive storytelling, she shares how childhood trauma, her secret reads of James Hadley Chase novels, and a daring bathroom break at Yash Raj Studios came together to forge her activist approach to storytelling.

The students and I hang onto every word. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

The Foundations of a Storyteller

Tell us about your childhood reading influences.

I grew up in Old Delhi, bound to a house filled with books on Literature and Marxism. These books were my sole inheritance from my dead grandparents, both of whom were academics. They became the primary staple of my childhood reading. I don’t think I could fully grasp half of the stuff I was reading but I do know that a copy of Maxim Gorky’s Mother filled my nine year old brain with a furious love for words. Later came the more age-appropriate stuff like the Enid Blytons and Champak magazines. By then I was already surreptitiously drawn to the James Hadley Chase hidden in the lower shelves and preferred those over the school’s prescribed morally upright reading list. I read morally upright and ethically ambiguous writers with equal appetite and relished both.

Your storytelling style is so fiery. Were you always rebellious?

I grew up in a very dysfunctional setup. My father had schizophrenia and he was an alcoholic, and my mother was like the master caretaker, and then I was the sub caretaker- so I knew that the little time that I have, I have to max it. That was my rebellion - to do everything, to create that juice in the small moments that you have, you know you have limited time to yourself because you have bigger duties to deal with.

The Art of Reading People

When you walked into this class, you........

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