Pradeep Kumar Kankipati

Pradeep Kumar Kankipati is an Indian author whose debut novel, BARG — The Beginning of the End of Civilization as We Knew It, explores the collision of surveillance technology, geopolitics, and human consequence in the modern world.

Drawing on a deep fascination with international affairs, statecraft, and the invisible architecture of power, Pradeep writes fiction that sits at the intersection of the plausible and the unsettling. His work asks a question that grows more urgent by the day: what happens when the tools built to protect a society become the very instruments of its undoing?

BARG was born from that question. Set across Afghanistan, Geneva, and the Gulf, it centres on a zero-click surveillance system — sold by an Israeli firm, brokered through Dubai, and deployed by a government with too much to hide and too little to lose. The novel unfolds with the terse precision of a classified file, drawing readers into a world where every phone is a potential confession and every silence is suspect.

Pradeep believes that the best geopolitical fiction does not simply entertain — it illuminates. In the tradition of writers like John le Carré, he is interested in the grey spaces: the compromised officials, the reluctant operatives, the ordinary people caught inside systems they never chose and cannot escape.

BARG is his first novel. He is currently working on his next.