Chiki Sarkar who has been named the Publisher of Penguin Random House India in March 2014 is indeed a wonder girl. I have seen few women in India rise the way she has risen and I write this only because I have had the chance to interact with her as an author of Penguin India. Why did she rise the way she did? I will try to analyze the reasons. The chief reason for the meteoric rise is her efficiency. Whenever I sent her an email I received her reply within a few hours if not minutes. Her replies were always positive. They always made the other feel good and wanted. She has that personal touch in her dealing without which people seem officious and standoffish.

She has real caliber. An editor who brought some of the best known Indian and Pakistani books into publication and that with a leading publisher in India, books of authors no less than Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, and Amit Chaudhuri, and then picked up new talent of the class of Mohammed Hanif, Basharat Peer and Daniyal Mueenuddin, is rare indeed.

The most successful publisher/editor is one who has the ability to recognize talent and that within good time, before another has picked that author up. Sarkar has that quality which will one day make her a much bigger name than publishers/editors in the Western world. One could never have dreamed that someone in India will emerge so quickly as such a towering genius in the publishing world. There has been a crop of wonderful editors in India, the kind of people one did not come across easily about two decades ago. David Davidhar and Ravi Singh were already very fine editors but recently we have a new brand that works, works and works. Some of these are Milee Ashwarya, Meru Gokhale and some really young ones who are working wonders within the very first three or four years of their careers. It is so wonderful to see this younger lot do so well. Without them we would hardly get authors such as Anees Salim and Jerry Pinto. This is all very heartening for those who would like to see India advance at the cultural front effectively.