Isolocation. 9th August, 2020.

45 poems, 9 poets, released on 9th day of the month.

Took us just 130 days to be in this position. Our first book is now out on Amazon. We (Ishmeet & I) never thought 2020 will be the year we wanted to do books. All we ever wanted was to do zines (Rogue: The Zine) throughout 2020 in a subscription-based model starting April 2020. But as we say, life never goes as per the plan, right?

You never know what's going to hit you and what's not. COVID-19 hit us as indie publishers, hit all of us around the world and it's still hitting us every day. But when chips are down, we make the best of what we can and rise from the shadows.

The day when India went under a lockdown, a moment of brilliance arises, I pushed the idea of #NaPoWriMo to Ishmeet and a smart input from Manisha Lakhe to do #AtoZChallenge led us to forming the group Aurea Writing Circle. To bring together the poets and writers and readers around us for everyone to showcase their talent across and write and read some beautiful work of poetry that was supposed to hit us.

The theme that was selected was "The Times We Live In", which included 26 prompts like Quarantine, Xerox, We, Patience, Empathy and Distancing to name a few. We started giving out the prompts every day from April 1st with letter A and concluded with Z on 30th April. The writers had one more week to assimilate all their work and send it to us within 7 days.

Our timely execution and the enormous response saw 150+ poems being written by 25 odd poets in the whole month of April. Ishmeet and I looked at each and every poem, argued, agreed to disagree and slept over certain things that we finally had our first draft by 28th May 2020.

Revisions, re-iterations, collecting blurbs and early reviews from our advisory board, fellow reputed poets in the country, the poets in this anthology, friends and family gave us the confidence to go and get out first ever book in print.

The support from government authorities to get us the ISBN, Manisha writing one of the most beautiful introduction for the book I have ever read, Isolocation as a word that came from Meeta Sengupta, the support of Ritesh Kala on execution of the book, Diveyani Sarkar's brilliant cover design, Ameet Datta on his crucial and timely inputs on IP and getting our legal works out of the way, which led to finally seeing everything come together at the right time.

After almost two months of sleepless nights and hand-holding process by folks at Manipal Technologies Ltd. in Manipal, our book, our first baby went into print. Due to COVID-19, the process was longer than expected and our patience started to fizzle out.

But, finally after 14 days, books turned up at home! Oh boy, the joy, the joy of seeing your name in paper, seeing everyone who has worked hard to bring it together, their names in print. I didn't sleep that night when I held the first copy in my hand.

I have so much to say about my parents! They have been the solid rock in every step of my way in starting this publishing house. If they did not stop to tell me to do better, I would have lost all my hope in everything.

Ishmeet, the crazy other half of this book, this publishing house, the woman who I owe a lot outside my entrepreneurial stint. If that day you didn't hang out with me in Lower Parel, I would've never known you. You gem of a person, handling all my whims and fancies. This publishing house would be nothing if you didn't say yes to my drunk call at 3pm in scorching heat of Chennai where I said, 'Let’s start a publishing house together!!'.

Lastly, thank you to everyone who have been a part of my journey, online and offline, people who've known me for a decade of being on social media, people who've supported and criticized and made me even better, I owe you all my deepest gratitude.

The book of our dreams, the book of pandemic poetry which talks on numerous socio-political issues, the anxiety, the love and care and everything a human being experienced is out now in the world of books. Please do buy and read and gift and help a small bootstrapped independent publishing house based our of Bombay grow so we can bring more books out in the world.

Text by Nirav Mehta (Founder & Publisher of Ratio Auream Publishers LLP)