From Byline to Bestseller, story of Romila Chitturi

Thirty years ago, a teenager sat down to write a piece for a local newspaper. The article was called "Food for Thought." She had no way of knowing it then, but that small byline would turn out to be the first sentence of a much longer story - one that would eventually include twenty-seven published books, a literary magazine with thousands of readers, a doctorate, and a career spent quietly making other people's dreams come true.

That teenager was Romila Chitturi, and looking back, she says writing was never something she consciously chose. "I had no idea writing was my forte," she recalls of that first piece. "It just happened, the way most important things in life tend to."

Romila's early years gave little indication of the scale her writing life would eventually reach, though the signs, in hindsight, were everywhere. As a student, she was selected editor of the Hindi section of her school magazine, a role that put her at the center of her school's literary culture years before she understood what that culture would mean to her. Around the same time, she began representing her school at ICSE-level literary events, and winning, she says, "had become a norm." What started as a single newspaper clipping had, by her teenage years, become a habit of showing up and coming out on top.

That habit did not stay confined to school corridors. Romila went on to become a national-level essayist, a quiz winner, and a debater of note, building a reputation for the kind of command over language and argument that few her age possessed. But perhaps the most unexpected turn in this chapter of her life was pedagogical rather than literary: she began teaching civil service aspirants, guiding students toward a dream she herself had once chased but never achieved. "I would not achieve it myself," she says of her own civil services ambition, "but seeing my students succeed was no less than my own success, for me."

Romila comes from a family of intellectuals and bureaucrats, a background where higher education was less an aspiration than an expectation. In a family accustomed to academic distinction, Romila's own record stands out: two undergraduate degrees, two postgraduate degrees, an MBA, and a doctorate - an academic trajectory few attempt and fewer still complete. Alongside this, she maintained a consistent record as a topper, not just in academics, but across sports, literary pursuits, dramatics, social service, and art, a breadth of achievement that speaks to a restlessness for excellence rather than a narrow specialization.

Long before "content creator" was a career path and "blogger" a household word, Romila was already writing online. In 2004, when blogging in India was in its infancy, she began publishing on platforms like Sify and Rediff, then among the only spaces where Indian writers could reach a public audience directly. It was a corner of the internet few people paid attention to at the time, and fewer still remember today. "I'm sure no one knew about it back then," she says, with the particular wryness of someone who was present for something before it mattered to anyone else. Today, within India's blogging community, she is regarded, half-affectionately and half-reverently, as a veteran - a "senior citizen of blogging," as she puts it, laughing at the title even as she owns it.

If her academic and blogging journeys were marked by deliberate ambition, Romila describes her career as a published author almost as an accident. "I call myself an accidental author," she says. "I never thought a simple idea could turn into a book." What she does not describe as accidental is the reading habit that preceded it: Romila has been an avid reader since the age of three, a lifelong relationship with books that eventually, inevitably, turned into one with writing them.

She debuted as a published author in 2016. A decade later, her body of work includes 27 titles and seven awards for her writing, a body of recognition that has done more than decorate a shelf. It has, she says, built her confidence to the point where she now mentors aspiring authors, guiding them through their manuscripts the same way she once guided civil service aspirants through their exams - not as a distant expert, but as someone who remembers exactly what it felt like to not yet know if the work was any good.

Success, in Romila's account, has never come without its share of rejection. Some of her own work failed to find a place in international literary journals, a familiar disappointment for even accomplished writers. But where many might have let that rejection close a door, Romila opened one of her own. She founded Unicorn, a literary magazine built on a simple, almost defiant premise: no terms and conditions. Age doesn't matter. Race doesn't matter. Location doesn't matter. What matters are the words.

Six years on, Unicorn has grown into something closer to a movement than a magazine. It counts 3,500 organic followers/readers and more than 400 writers who consider themselves part of its extended family. The magazine has published 21 editions and five anthologies, alongside other projects, all of it run largely single-handedly by Romila, with the occasional help of interns twice a year. It is, in many ways, the fullest expression of everything her story has been building toward: a space where the same door that once closed on her is held open for anyone willing to write.

Today, Romila serves as Content Director and Chief Editor at a corporate company, a role she describes without hesitation as a dream come true. But true to form, her satisfaction is inseparable from the satisfaction of others. "I feel happy to see that I have made many dreams of others a reality," she says of her current work. This year, that work earned her the company's Best Employee recognition, an accolade she hopes to carry into the years ahead.

From a teenager's newspaper column three decades ago to a literary magazine with thousands of supporters, Romila Chitturi's story reads less like a single achievement and more like a long, ongoing act of paying it forward: every award, every degree, every published title eventually becoming a door she holds open for someone standing where she once stood.

Recognition for that body of work has followed in its own right. In 2020, Romila was named among India's 100 Under 40, a distinction that placed her among the country's most accomplished young professionals across fields. Around the same time, she stepped into a role that added yet another dimension to her already layered career: Professor of Practice. Teaching, she has always loved, but teaching postgraduate students, she admits, was a different kind of challenge altogether, one she came to enjoy precisely because it pushed her.

Even now, with decades of achievement behind her, Romila shows no signs of considering her education complete. She is currently advancing her knowledge through Harvard University's Literature program, a pursuit she frames simply: studying, she believes, has no age bar.

Away from the classroom, the mentoring, and the manuscripts, Romila is, by her own admission, someone who loves to doodle, who unwinds with a good thriller, and who finds quiet fascination in theology - a reminder that behind the awards and the accolades is simply someone who has never stopped being curious.