How does an architect, computer science major, and information technology expert start writing and illustrating children’s books? Deven Jatkar can thank his two young children for the career change, although they sometimes prefer Captain Underpants over Dad’s stories. The Bay Area author’s second children’s book, Holi Colors! discusses the concepts of color and inner beauty using the backdrop of Holi, the Indian Festival of Colors. Young Maya cannot contain her excitement for the upcoming celebration, but when she accidentally hits her head, she wakes up to find that the world is black and white while the people are all different colors. Jatkar adorns his book with vibrant illustrations and valuable lessons in friendship, love, and self-confidence. He spoke with us over Zoom from his home in California; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Each of your books has been self-published. What was that experience like?

I was in the IT and technology sector for about 15 years or so, until our first kid was born, and I wanted to try something in a more creative field. I quit my job around 2014, and for the first six months, I was just playing around as the kids grew up. Then slowly, I ventured into trying to see if I could write a picture book for them.

For me, I was trying to break a big barrier, because I was neither a trained author nor an illustrator, and English was a second language. It took me a couple of years to get to a point where I was confident, and I did a lot of research on how the book publishing industry works. For my temperament and the way that I work, I thought self-publishing would be easier than trying to convince big publishing houses to work with me—because, to be fair to them, I had no experience. Finally, I settled on Amazon because that gave you the most flexibility in terms of how you get things moving faster. I reached out to a few people and had my books reviewed, and I’m now at a point where I have about 10 books in the pipeline.

You also have your own design studio, Monkey Mantra. What was the inspiration for creating that?

It’s been a fun adventure, especially creating books and working with my editor as well as having my kids criticize my work. Hopefully [Monkey Mantra] becomes a sort of a design studio where I can help out other people like me, you know, who have the talent and who have that zest to do something but don’t always get the opportunity to do so. I’m trying to see if I can expand the studio by hiring more illustrators, designers, and authors over the next two or three years.

Not only does this book tell a beautiful story, it is also incredibly informative.

The whole idea behind Holi Colors! started when my kids and nephews and nieces began talking about their concept of color. It’s interesting when you listen to them discuss what you see in a book and the characters’ different skin tones, and it became difficult to talk to them about it. They know about Holi because their grandparents are in India, we go to India every year, and Holi is a festival of colors. And they love to play with colors, right? What if you played Holi without the colors?

What was your thought process behind creating the art for your book?

From an illustration perspective, I wanted to showcase India, where most of the major cities you go to are crowded, noisy, and fun. That was the setting I wanted to use, because once you’re there and you take color out of it, your whole perception of the city changes. I wanted to go from a heavily illustrated, fully colored page to suddenly just black-and-white outlines so that people who are reading it would also realize what that little girl, Maya, is going through at that point in time.

What do you hope young readers will take away from this book?

I wanted to make sure children understand where to really place the importance of color. At the end of the book, the key character understands the fact that the color of the people really didn’t matter, what mattered was that colors in nature were more important.That message itself is a bit overwhelming for those of a young age, because they are not exposed to anything that will tell them otherwise. You also don’t want to be too preachy with your picture books for kids, right? I mean, they just walk away. If you want to convey that message, how do you convey it in a way that it is fun, in a way where they interact with it properly? That was both the challenge and the inspiration for creating this book.

Francesca Vultaggio is an editorial intern.