“There is no glass ceiling; we create it with the way we think,”

says Maya Bathija, Author of Paiso

Born in Salem, Tamil Nadu, to a Sindhi money lending family who were considered the backbone of local industry, Maya Bathija had an easy childhood as the daughter of “a big man in a small town”. Being the second of three children, she also had a need to be “seen and heard”, which later led her to journalism.

An incorrigible reader since her boarding-school days in Yercaud, and later as a college student in Salem – both one-horse towns without bookstores at that time – Maya got her monthly dose of quality reading through mail-order subscriptions, or through her father who would bring back bestsellers for her whenever he travelled.

Married at 20, Maya moved to Mumbai and, just three months after having a baby boy, went to work at a nearby bookstore. The exposure to Mumbai’s intelligentsia opened the young Maya’s eyes to a new world.

Her husband encouraged her to start something of her own. And so, in 1998, Maya’s Dial-a-Book service was born. Within a year, she made it a success byher amazing knowledge of books and ability to source even the rarest ones within 2 days.

Then her husband suggested they set up a magazine together, The Sindhian, covering the Sindhi community across the world. With Maya as head of content, the magazine soon took off, and Maya ended up travelling the world, meeting new people and writing about new experiences.

She was diagnosed with Cancer and her life slowed down for a year. Despite losing her hair to radiation treatments, Maya began to live life with a vengeance, developing new dreams and goals.

In 2015, Penguin came calling with an offer to write a book on five billionaire Sindhi families. The book, Paiso, was released in November 2017, and the experience triggered Maya to focus more on her writing, especially biographies and her own personal memoirs.

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