A new book by Amrita Chowdhury, country head of Mills and Boon subsidiary Harlequin India, is a blend of cyber crime, medical ethics and IP laws.
Set in Mumbai, Washington and Guangzhou against the race to patent a new cancer drug, "Breach" is about ambition and revenge, hacking and ethics, youth and crime, love and heartbreak.
Chowdhury had initially started writing the story of Madhu, a young girl who is facing cyber stalking and cyber bullying.
"This is a very real issue and I was hoping to craft a darker youth novel. But as I started researching, I realised that that cyber crime was quite endemic in India. Youth today think nothing of hacking into games or movies. It begins as fun and games. India sees a lot of cybercrime that originates outside its borders, affecting consumers, companies and government. I wanted to be able to capture all that," she says.
"So Madhu and her friends remained at the kernel of the story as youth engaging with the online world and its perils. But their story got layered and collided with the trajectory of Vir who finds his company's data centre hacked into and protected data for a new cancer drug stolen, amounting to a loss of a hundred million dollars."
According to the author, the pharma industry crept into her narrative mainly of two reasons.
"One reason was personal. My mother passed away from cancer last year, but in the preceding years I came to know a lot of this. At the core of the novel is this new imaginary drug that combines the benefits of stem cells and immunology. I wanted to make the data theft larger than life, and the fictitious drug Colare allowed me to do so," Chowdhury told PTI.
