Meet engineer-turned-writer, who quit Rs 10 lakh job for films, lived off wife’s money; then one show changed his life

A writer of the film plays an equally important role in the success of the film as much as the actors and the directors. Nowadays, when the content is king, a good story is what makes the film a success. One such writer, who has given several hit series, started his career with a flop. 

The writer we are talking about left his high-paying job to pursue his dreams. He lived off his wife's money and was unemployed for six months. Later, he became a star on OTT with his superhit series. He is none other than Puneet Krishna. 

In an interview with Dainik Bhaskar, Puneet Krishna studied engineering from IIT Bihu. After graduating from IIT, he worked in companies like Citi Corp and Coca Cola where he used to get Rs 10-11 lakh annually. He used to travel by flight, had secretaries, had a beautiful house and had all the luxuries. But the dream of becoming a director was such that all these things disappeared from his life.

After leaving his job to pursue his dream to make films, Puneet Krishna met Rajkumar Hirani through one of his friends and the filmmaker took his contact number and sent him back by assuring to meet soon. He was unemployed for 6 months. Gradually all his savings were wiped out. The situation was such that he used to read a newspaper 4-4 times a day to keep himself busy. There was no money even for an auto to ask for work. His wife used to travel by bus even during pregnancy to support the family financially. 

Puneet then got his first break and he wrote the story of the film Bangistan. After reading the story, director Ritesh Sidhwani agreed to make the film. However, the film flopped. He revealed in the same interview that the attitude of people towards him changed and they called him a flop writer. However, things changed when he wrote Mirzapur season 1. 

He said, "I was fighting this bad phase that one day a call came from Farhan Akhtar's production company Excel and they demanded a story. The dark phase of life was going on, so I wrote the story of Mirzapur with dark comedy. I wrote this story in three days. After my first meeting with the makers, I wrote 2 episodes till July 2016. When this story was narrated to Amazon, they also liked it very much and thus the series Mirzapur was made." 

After this, there was no looking back for him. He also wrote Amazon's first Indian orginal series Inside Edge which became hit. He also wrote Mirzapur 1 and 2 and became an OTT star writer. He recently wrote the story of the show CA Topper Tribhuvan Mishra for Netflix which recieved positive reviews from the audience. 

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