In Conversation With Shantanu Naidu On His New Book ‘Thinking Of Winter,’ The Dog Who Changed Everything

Do you ever look into your pet’s eyes and realise that this small, wordless creature has changed you in ways you didn’t even notice while it was happening? Pets don’t arrive in our lives announcing the ways they will transform us. That, perhaps, is why Thinking of Winter (Penguin Random House), Shantanu Naidu’s second book, feels less like a memoir and more like a meditation.

When I logged on to Zoom to speak with Naidu again — years after attending his first book signing — the familiarity felt gentle, softened by time. My first question surfaced almost instinctively: what did it feel like to step into the author’s shoes once more?

He smiles lightly at the idea. “I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer,” he admits. Writing, for him, was never a professional pursuit or a carefully charted ambition. “It was never part of a plan. I didn’t chase it. It just happened.” That absence of pressure, he believes, is what allows honesty to surface. “When you’re not trying to build a trajectory or meet expectations, the work becomes truer,” he says. Thinking of Winter wasn’t something he set out to write. “Some moments,” he explains, “just ask to be preserved.”

“It’s not a book you rush through,” he adds. “It’s one you sit with.” A book that understands stillness, patience, and the quiet emotional contracts we form with the beings who walk beside us. There are stories, he feels, that aren’t written to be explained—but to be immortalised. “Once something is put down on paper, once it becomes a book, it exists endlessly,” he says. “In a way, the subject lives forever.” Winter, unmistakably, was one such subject.

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Though the book moves between snowy Cornell evenings and the relentless hum of Mumbai, its real journey is inward. “It’s about loneliness, and learning how to love expansively,” he reflects. When Naidu moved cities — and countries — Winter didn’t arrive as a coping mechanism. “He was just there,” Naidu says. “A quiet companion who didn’t need anything explained.”

The realisation that this story needed to exist didn’t come immediately. It arrived later, after he returned to Bombay. “With time,” he says, “Winter’s traits revealed themselves more clearly.” This wasn’t just affection or loyalty. “It felt… central. Defining.”

He had known many dogs. He loved many animals. “And every pet is innocent in its own way,” he says. “But Winter was different.” What initially seemed like quirks slowly revealed themselves as core qualities, so pronounced they could no longer be brushed aside. “He wasn’t just special to me because he is my partner in life,” Naidu says simply. “He was different. And that difference deserved to be shared.”

At the heart of Thinking of Winter lies a question that quietly unsettles our understanding of love: we talk endlessly about the unconditional love of dogs, but who really deserves it? “I don’t think love changes its nature based on who receives it,” the author says. “Love is the most powerful energy in the world. It doesn’t come with categories.”

What Winter taught him, he explains, was radical in its simplicity. “You can’t claim to love someone while only loving a curated version of them,” he says. “To love is to accept the hundreds of versions that will inevitably emerge.”

This isn’t an endorsement of harm or toxicity, but it is a rejection of modern love’s obsession with checklists. “We’ve started believing love must make us feel specific ways,” he reflects. “Meet certain emotional benchmarks. Behave within narrow expectations. Anything outside that becomes disqualifying.” Winter dismantled that logic entirely. “He doesn’t care about return on investment,” Naidu adds. “He doesn’t measure affection. He doesn’t evaluate worthiness.” Winter moves through the world assuming everyone is good, everyone is deserving of love, regardless of how long he’s known them or what they carry.

Being loved that way reshaped his understanding of love in every form. “Flaws stopped feeling like deal-breakers,” he says. “Shortcomings didn’t cancel commitment. Love became something you stood by, not something you negotiated.” 

In the book, Naidu describes Winter as a wallflower and almost like a monk—a gentleman from another time. This, he insists, isn’t poetic exaggeration. “It was observation.” The signs were there early. Or rather, they weren’t. “There was no real puppyhood,” he recalls. “No destruction. No chaos.” Even during university life, Winter adapted with remarkable ease. “I structured his days carefully — exercise, routine — but what stood out was his tolerance,” the author says. “He absorbed the intensity of my life without demanding attention. Without acting out.” But what truly set him apart was empathy.

“He cared about other creatures,” the author says. “Often dogs don’t even register.” At Cornell, and later in Bombay, Winter responded to animals with a sensitivity that bordered on humans. “It wasn’t a one-off,” he adds. “It became a pattern, which later made me realise this dog has an immense connection with other creatures around him.”

Conflict unsettles him. Raised voices send him out of the room. “Aggression, even mild, repels him,” the author says. On walks, while other dogs gravitated toward each other, Winter consistently approached humans instead. “He was very curious and observant. He never wanted dominance.”

He never chased. Never fought. “Even when attacked,” Naidu says quietly, “he would stand still. Calm to the point of danger.” Once, at a dog camp, while seven golden retrievers chased a dog in heat, Winter sat in the water with his ball, entirely uninterested.

None of this was trained. “I never taught him restraint or gentleness,” he adds. “If anything, it worried me at first.” Why wasn’t his dog behaving the way dogs were “supposed” to? “The answer,” he realised, “was that Winter wasn’t trying to perform what we think about doghood. He was just being himself.” Living with Winter recalibrated Naidu's pace of life. “He anchored me in the present,” he says. Winter’s joy didn’t come from anticipation or nostalgia — it came from now. Standing still. Watching the sea at Nariman Point. Noticing light and movement around us.

“I realised how rarely humans allow themselves that,” the author reflects. “We fill the silence with the media.” He stopped using his phone on walks. Started following Winter’s gaze instead. “It didn’t make me immune to distraction,” he admits. “But it reminded me. It gave me a way back.”

There were moments when the author felt undeserving of Winter’s affection. “Life gets loud,” he says. “Priorities shift. You will catch your tone getting sharper without intention.” Winter never mirrored that inconsistency. “His love stayed steady even when I might have made him upset.”

That constancy, Naidu says, was humbling. “It demanded accountability. It made me want to become someone worthy of the love I was receiving so freely.” Which leads to a harder truth: humans often expect animals to fix their loneliness without offering the same devotion in return. “Dogs don’t need grand gestures,” he says. “Their radar for love is astonishingly simple. Time. Presence. Attention. In their short lives,” he adds, “that’s everything.”

Treats and adventures don’t register the way humans think they do. “What matters is showing up,” he says. “Physically. Emotionally. Without distraction.” Dogs give us all of their time. “The least we can do is meet them halfway.”

As urban India sees a rise in pet ownership, he is clear-eyed about the dangers of treating dogs as accessories and props for social media virality. “Language itself is a problem,” he says. “Ownership implies control. Guardianship implies responsibility.” A dog, he insists, is not an object or a phase in your life. “They’re individuals,” he says. “Main characters in our lives.” Abandonment, he believes, doesn’t happen because circumstances change. “It happens because empathy was missing from the beginning.” People adopt with the intention of owning, not loving. “Moving countries becomes an excuse. Inconvenience becomes justification.” Winter moved countries with him. “Not because it was easy,” he says. “But because it was non-negotiable.” “If it was your child,” he adds, “you wouldn’t even be having this discussion.”

Thinking of Winter exists, in many ways, to insist on that shift — to remind readers that love without expectation isn’t naïve. “It’s necessary,” he says. The book’s illustrations, by Somaly Datta, deepen this emotional register. “Her work doesn’t decorate the text,” he says. “It translates very warmly.” Their collaboration was intuitive, shaped by shared feeling rather than rigid direction. “We kept working on each piece until it felt right,” he explains. “Until it carried the weight the story demanded.”

When asked, Sumouli Dutta shares, “I generally love illustrating warm, watercolour-textured artworks that feel fuzzy and comforting. From the story and the photos, Winter came across as warm, kind, and full of huggable happiness. I kept his features simple,” she explains, “and focused on his little quirks to shape his character design.”

That simplicity becomes the book’s visual language. Winter’s gentleness isn’t overstated; it’s suggested. Much like the writing itself, the illustrations trust the reader to feel rather than be told. The book moves fluidly between Ithacan trails and Mumbai monsoons, but not every setting was easy to render. One moment, in particular, stayed with Dutta.

“There’s an illustration in Chapter 4 where Winter and Naidu are standing in the snow, seen from behind,” she recalls. “Snow usually feels happy and magical, and Winter always looks cheerful and cute. But this was a sad moment.” With no facial expressions to rely on, emotion had to be communicated differently. “Conveying sadness only through posture and atmosphere was quite challenging,” she says. The result is an image that feels hushed, almost suspended, grief suggested rather than spelled out.

In a genre where dog stories often lean into exaggeration or whimsy, Thinking of Winter chooses stillness instead. That decision was intentional. “I must admit, I initially leaned towards a whimsical style,” Dutta says. “But Shantanu had a very clear vision.” Through trial and conversation, they found their rhythm. “Winter’s illustrations became very simple, with simpler features. And maybe that simplicity made it easier for emotions, happiness, sadness, curiosity, to show through when needed.”

Illustration, after all, has its own narrative grammar. And Dutta was clear about what she wanted the drawings to hold. “The writing already helped me visualise every moment exactly as you see it in the book,” she says. “But I wanted the illustrations, even without the text, to let people feel the warmth and bond.” What she hoped to capture was something quieter, something cumulative. “I wanted them to show how two souls grew together and supported each other,” she says. “Creating a quiet example of love, kindness, and life.”

And perhaps that is why, when asked what Winter might say about humans if he could speak, Naidu answers without hesitation: “They’re all my best friends.”

Maybe that’s the lesson these quiet teachers have been offering us all along.

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