The beginning

Every time I sit down to write something, my first feeling is that it won't happen. It will never be complete and nobody will get to see it. The 1000-page novel by Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, was even scarier. And there were two of us sharing that feeling — me and Smita Singh (my co-writer in Season 1). Our second co-writer, Vasant Nath, was more hopeful and pushed us to get down to work.

Our process began by discussing the broad themes and character arcs, which took six to eight weeks. Then, for the next few weeks, we started chipping away at the individual arcs for every character and the clouds started to part, but only a bit.