Pervin, Anil and Akshat, bringing their varied writerly backgrounds and facilitation styles, formed a generous team and helped create a friendly dynamic. Adishakti also provided an ideal setting to connect socially with the other participants as well as space and serenity to delve into our creative worlds.

The mentors are cheerful people, fine writers and worthy mentors. Thankfully they aren’t all kindness in their critiques of your stories! Best of all, the peer group, friends and mentors earned in the workshop stay with you for life.

The most important thing I gained from having attended this workshop was to know the response that readers had to my stories. Having your stories critiqued by more than a dozen people really helps you put things in perspective.

This workshop has altered the way I read a novel, write and rewrite a story, and play with words, form, and structure. Anil, Pervin, and Akshat have been very influential and supportive in their unique ways and continue to do so. The best 14 days I’ve spent cooking up stories.

Anil, Akshat, and Pervin are not only extremely kind mentors, but are also very generous critics, as they share their insight and experience with the workshop participants with sheer positivity.

I considered myself an under-confident writer before the workshop. But at the workshop I learnt that the first thing I had to lose was my pessimism. The exercises conducted were so liberating and such good practice that I could feel the creative juices trickling through the sulci of my brain.

The workshop was a turning point in my writing skills in more ways than one. Firstly, the environment, the mentors, and the fellow writers provided for the much needed inspiration. Critical reviews from all of them provided over 20 different perspectives on one particular piece.

Anil, Pervin and Akshat are very professional, honest and on the money with their critique. Not only do they steer you in right direction, but also lend a helping hand along the way with their workshop exercises and carefully chosen reading excerpts.

I walked into the workshop sceptical of what just 2 weeks can do to my writing – I walked out feeling like it was the best experience of my life.

The workshop is a wonderful space to engage with invested mentors, get exposed to strategies to work your way around a writer’s block, to spark new ideas, and above all, to meet a bunch of people who love, crave and breathe literature.

Anil, Pervin and Akshat go out of the way to educate, advise and support participants, and I would strongly recommend it to every aspiring writer.

I am indebted to this workshop, first of all, for the sense of camaraderie and deep friendship it instilled in me for fellow writers and the instructors, with whom it was possible to share anything about writing and literature.

This is an intensive workshop with very sincere mentors who become your friends and hand-hold you long after the workshop. If you get a chance, don’t miss it!

All the mentors bought different tools and perspectives to writing. We unlayered gravitas, context and subtext in undeniable ways. I remember rasam rice days, Auroville’s freshly baked cake, crying after Arundhathi Subramaniam’s session and not knowing why. All of this is a memory that won’t fade

I recommend this to everyone — if you get selected through the discerning scrutiny of the trainers — as the workshop is sure to open new perspective to your writing universe.

I can, without a doubt, say that the two weeks of this workshop has completely transformed the way I approach writing.

Staying at Adishakti for two weeks and getting to attend classes from Anil and Pervin was the highlight of my year 2017.

This workshop seemed unique even before the program began. For some weeks prior to the program we were sent one short story a day to read and comment upon. The stories were very diverse and eased us into the frame of mind and quality required for the program.

The Workshop was a creatively fulfilling experience where you get to hang out with other writers like yourself in a natural setting. With great mentors who give you new outlooks on writing and even yourself, I came back raring to go and write more.

I attended this workshop a year into my foray into writing, and it was the best thing I have done. Pervin and Anil helped me understand techniques to tell stories, form characters, plot plots (not a typo, that) and manage to tell stories in a way that is uniquely mine.

The workshop is one of the best writing workshops I have ever been to. I loved the venue – Adishakti is a writer’s paradise. The instructors Pervin, Anil, Akshat are the kind of mentors who could change your writing life.

This workshop is a nurturing, engendering space for writers who want to crack through daily monotony and instead, look within for answers to their writerly preoccupations and questions. The workshop is intensive, and easily the best writing workshop out there for people who want to take their writing seriously.

The workshop turned my half-baked abilities and aspirations into skills and a way of thinking, to create sustainably with. The teachers here are true Gurus and taught me to trust and value my style and to appreciate others through the round of critiques that inculcated self-evaluation and reliance.

The workshop is a place where you are allowed to ‘fail spectacularly’ and what else does an artist want from the world: sheer acceptance of their art with open arms and warm suggestions.

The workshop allowed me to go further than reading between the lines, and start reading behind them. I left the workshop with a richer understanding of fiction’s mechanics. It is an all-access pass behind the great stage of writing; the sights are most surely worth seeing.

The workshop — like most important things in life — happened as an unexpected adventure. Away from urban chaos, the workshop was a catharsis where reading, writing and talking about words seemed to become a liberating process. It laid routes to get to a most wonderful place in my own mind.

Being a writer is not a condition. It is an act. Writing is not about mists of inspiration oozing from your fingers as stories, poems and novels. Writing is about setting down words, removing words, reading again, writing again. This is what I learnt at the workshop.

Immersion in word-play and the craft of writing created a momentum that thankfully has not reduced so far. The fantastic friends I made and the amazing mentors I gained were the icing on the cake.

At the end of two intense weeks in the quaintly verdurous Adhishakti, even as it dawned on me that one must write to write, the experience of unlearning and learning was deliciously piquant, thanks to the mentors- the gently persuasive Pervin, the insightful Anil and the fun Akshat.

This is one of the most comprehensive writing workshops there is in India. The workshop helped me immensely with the technical aspects of writing fiction. We were exposed to so many different perspectives on the art of fiction and literature. The mentors are incredibly patient and continue to guide us in our journey.