Mills and Boon's India head pens new novel 'Breach' dealing with cyber-crime

New Delhi: A new book by Amrita Chowdhury, country head of Mills and Boon subsidiary Harlequin India, is a blend of cyber crime, medical ethics and IP laws. Set in Mumbai, Washington and Guangzhou against the race to patent a new cancer drug, Breach is about ambition and revenge, hacking and ethics, youth and crime, love and heartbreak. Chowdhury had initially started writing the story of Madhu, a young girl who is facing cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying. “This is a very real issue and I was hoping to craft a darker youth novel. But as I started researching, I realised that that cyber crime was quite endemic in India. Youth today think nothing of hacking into games or movies. It begins as fun and games. India sees a lot of cybercrime that originates outside its borders, affecting consumers, companies and government. I wanted to be able to capture all that,” she says. “So Madhu and her friends remained at the kernel of the story as youth engaging with the online world and its perils. But their story got layered and collided with the trajectory of Vir who finds his company’s data centre hacked into and protected data for a new cancer drug stolen, amounting to a loss of a hundred million dollars.” According to the author, the pharma industry crept into her narrative mainly of two reasons. [caption id=“attachment_2070255” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Screenshot of the novel’s cover.[/caption] “One reason was personal. My mother passed away from cancer last year, but in the preceding years I came to know a lot of this. At the core of the novel is this new imaginary drug that combines the benefits of stem cells and immunology. I wanted to make the data theft larger than life, and the fictitious drug Colare allowed me to do so,” Chowdhury told PTI The second reason, she says, also came inadvertently. “I sat in a class on Cipla being taught by HBS Prof Rohit Deshpande. It gave me a viewpoint into the grey areas around patent laws - something that comes up frequently in our country. I wanted to be able to capture that dilemma,” she says. Though a work of fiction, Chowdhury says her book, published by Hachette India, is very real. “During the course of my research, I met with several Indian cyber security and IT experts and ethical hackers. Through these conversations, combined with a lot of research and reading, I found many stories of cyber crime as it is happening in India. While the main plot of ‘Breach’ is fiction, many of these stories have inspired elements of the plot and many snippets have found their way in my writing through conversations between characters. In that sense, ‘Breach’ is very real,” she says. Cyber bullying, according to her, is absolutely endemic in India. “We live a very digital life today. We shop online, we transact and communicate online, we spill our secrets online and we even store our personal data on the cloud. All these are very real… We need to be very alarmed. But we aren’t sensitised enough,” says Chowdhury, who has earlier written an art crime novel Faking It. On plans to write a Mills and Boon novel, she says “A romance novel is like a water colour painting. With the lightest brush strokes, it needs to evoke the mood, sense and mystery of the first blush of romance along with its accompanying confusions, misunderstandings and pain. It needs to combine intensity and humour. That is not my natural style of writing though. So perhaps one day I shall attempt to write a romance.” PTI