Kosen Rufu is a writer’s space, created by writer-director Anuraadha Tewari. While she derives the name from her Buddhist practice, she says that the space has given birth to many successful writers working in the industry today.
“The year was 2017. I was done with writing for television and done with working solo. I did briefly contemplate changing professions as well since I was dabbling with psychology already. However, a deep introspection revealed to me the fact that I wasn’t done being creative, I was simply bored of the way I had been working for the last 13-14 years. It was monotonous and creatively lonely. That is when the idea of Kosen Rufu was born. Incidentally, it is a phrase from my Buddhist chanting practice. when people ask what it means, I get to spread the message,” she says.
She adds, “It was a simple idea. To create an umbrella where I gather small teams of writers and do live jam sessions over stories. A lot like musicians jam on songs. It was still very early days of the web business in India and writers’ rooms were still not fashionable yet. But I had sprung them already, out of simply my own need! And as manifestations go, just as I left TV a lot of web show bibles started coming our way. That is how it became our focal point and specialization.”
Talking about the process of how things worked out in her company, she says, “By 2018, I concretised the idea and actively found many young and fresh minds who I trained via live projects. It became a sound model and each year I found a new ‘batch’ of fresh minds. I am so proud to see a whole lot of them turned independent writers or absorbed into platforms now! It was a bit like a writers’ room cum writing workshop rolled into one. We worked out of a co-working space in Araamnagar and created some mammoth ideas. I also trained myself on how to run a writers’ woom under Ilene Chaiken, the Writer of ‘The L Word’. This has been how I have been working ever since. Over the last 2 years, I have cut down on the number of projects we do since it got a little exhausting. Currently, the show on air is Raisinghani vs Raisinghani which went through a writers’ room in its first month of episodes. We also have ‘Dil, Dosti, Dilemma’, produced by Ten Years Younger, which stands as the latest Kosen Rufu endeavor out there.”
