Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon on Maya, Creative Evolution, and the Bond That Fuels Their Vision

TALKING ABOUT THEIR NEWEST venture, MAYA, filmmaker Anand Gandhi and game designer Zain Memon complete each other’s sentences. Like two minds locked in orbit, the filmmaker and the game designer close philosophical loops and leaping across cinema, politics, metaphysics and biology like it’s a game of hopscotch.

And it all started with a DVD.

A self-described ludologist who’d dropped out of school in the 12th grade, Memon was a natural misfit. Before producing games, films, VR projects and speculative multiverses as part of Memesys Culture Lab, the company he and Gandhi co-founded in 2015 he was just an intern on a small errand. “I was asked to drop off a DVD,” Memon recalls. “It was supposed to be a quick delivery to someone who was going to colour the film.”

Dangsa, a character from MAYA. The universe stretches across novels, films, graphic novels, digital and tabletop games, speculative architecture and more

That someone turned out to be Gandhi, then in the throes of releasing his debut, Ship of Theseus, in 2013. The drop took a detour. The two started talking: about AI theorist Ray Kurzweil, about the Mechanical chess-playing Turk, about an idea Gandhi was developing, called Rasgulla. “We spent three to four hours talking,” Memon says, “until the person I was reporting to called me, like—where are you? Why does a DVD drop take so long?”

By his own admission, Memon didn’t even know Gandhi was a filmmaker. He was just someone who had time for a conversation about fables, future civilisations and moral philosophy. Soon after, Memon started working for Gandhi. “I was interning with Anand shortly after. I went there on loan from my previous gig, and that loan hasn’t ended yet,” Memon laughs.

That meeting would evolve into one of the most dynamic creative relationships on India’s indie scene. A few years in, they co-founded Memesys, a media R&D studio that went on to launch India’s first virtual reality journalism platform, ElseVR; pioneer non-fiction storytelling in VR (Cost of Coal, Dhaakad).

In 2019, the duo launched SHASN, a political strategy board game that lets players roleplay as politicians navigating power, ideology and public opinion. It was a smash hit, picking up the Social Impact Award at IndieCade Europe in 2021. And after its success, SHASN proved a theory: that politics can be play. In the process, Memon built a new syntax for storytelling—rules and grammar that now form the foundation for their next, even more ambitious world-building experiments.

And that experiment is MAYA.

The MAYA Narrative Universe is a sprawling, cross-media science-fiction epic that aims to become a living mythology for the 21st century. This “neo-mythology” has been conceived by their new venture, Department of Lore, that aims to pioneer interconnected, multi-format, large-scale universes. MAYA is designed to live across novels, films, games, graphic novels, toys and immersive experiences.

The first trailer of MAYA arrived recently as something closer to an invocation. Over abstract, otherworldly visuals— shifting dreamscapes, root networks like neural maps, cities sprouting from forest canopies—Hugo Weaving’s unmistakable baritone rumbles through on fate, control and rebellion. Their first novel, MAYA: Seed Takes Root, was published in late August.

MAYA began with a provocation: What would Vyasa write if he were alive today? What verses would Kabir be singing? Just as their works once offered moral compasses to navigate life, it seeks to do the same—creating a mythos for the defining challenges of our age: climate crisis, pandemics, existential risk, inequity, artificial intelligence.

They gathered evolutionary biologists, economists, speculative architects—and started building from scratch. “We got everyone we could to build this universe in its highest possi - ble fidelity,” Memon says.

But this isn’t just about sprawling ambition. It’s about rebalancing the monologue that has historically been dominated by the West.

“There has been a monologue from the West to the East for centuries,” Gandhi says. “And that monologue has been wonderful and inspiring. As much as we know the difference between poetry readings in Bushwick and speakeasies in Harlem, our peers in the West don’t know the difference between Bareilly and Banaras.” The MAYA Universe, then, is not just a sci-fi playground—it’s a reclamation.

Sometimes, their projects get labelled as didactic—too talky, too prescriptive, too full of thesis. They don’t deny it. “You do not walk out of Tumbbad (2018) and wonder what the moral is,” says Gandhi. “You do not walk out of An Insignificant Man (2016) and wonder what the political inclination of the filmmaker is.”

Clarity is the point. “Our desire is impact,” Gandhi says. “We’re offering solutions for the first time, so we can’t afford to be subtle. Our characters mouth philosophical frameworks. That’s intentional."

Their shared refusal to tiptoe is, among other things, what has kept their bond strong. In an industry where creative egos routinely combust, theirs is a partnership built to last— room for argument, but enough clarity to build worlds. “Anand never stopped investing in my journey,” Memon says, while Gandhi is just as candid. “In the first two hours, it was clear we were going to work the rest of our lives together.” And so far, they have.

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