How did the idea to start TnQ Books and Journals come to you?
I used to work for advertising agencies — HTA and O&M. After I left HTA, I started my agency with corporate advertising as the focus. We used to design corporate brochures, typeset and print annual reports. These brochures were printed at the Macmillan printing press in Bangalore. Once they showed me their scientific technical and medical unit where they were doing the same work for many publishers, including the world’s biggest, Elsevier. I thought it was a perfect business model for India because it requires scientific skills, IT skills and proficiency in English — we have the all three. At our company, we were already doing annual reports for the corporates. Therefore, I thought it would be a good business to start with. This was in 1998. Macmillan had been doing the same work for 15 years then. In fact, they are the first to start this business model. How did you get your first client? We browsed the Net and read about Dutch publishing company Elsevier. It is known as the world’s
