For most people, Amit Dubey is one of India’s leading cybercrime investigators. For Rajkumar Hirani, he became something else, a storyteller whose real-life experiences opened the door to an entirely new world.
When Hirani was exploring the idea of making a story around cybercrime during the pandemic, he found himself speaking to Amit Dubey. Dubey shared a collection of his stories, drawn from years of investigating digital crime. They weren’t simply accounts of hacking or technology. They were stories about people, their fears, their mistakes, their resilience, and the strange ways in which the digital world had begun to shape everyday life. Those conversations and stories eventually inspired what audiences now know as Pritam and Pedro.
In many ways, it wasn’t an accident. Long before he became a cybersecurity expert, Amit Dubey was a writer. As a teenager in Jhansi, he wrote poetry and short fiction, fascinated by human behaviour and the emotions that drive people to make extraordinary choices. Even as his career took him into digital forensics, national investigations and cyber awareness, the storyteller in him never disappeared.
Perhaps that’s why his books including Hidden Files, Return of the Trojan Horse, Hidden Files: Unlock and Atharva feel different. They don’t attempt to impress readers with technical jargon. Instead, they invite them into real investigations through compelling characters, human dilemmas and narratives that are both educational and deeply engaging.
His credibility, of course, extends far beyond the written page. A Commonwealth Chevening Fellow trained at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom with postgraduate studies at Cranfield University, Dubey has trained hundreds of thousands of police personnel, investigators and government officials. He has advised national institutions on cyber policy and brought digital safety into millions of homes through his books, radio and television. Yet, despite these achievements, he continues to approach every case as a writer first—searching not just for evidence, but for the story hidden beneath it.
That rare combination of authenticity and imagination is what makes his work stand apart. Rajkumar Hirani didn’t simply find research material in Amit Dubey’s books. He found a way of looking at cybercrime that was warm, relatable and deeply human. It is this perspective that ultimately shaped Pritam and Pedro, a series that proves technology may drive the plot, but people always drive the story.
Today, as audiences celebrate Pritam and Pedro, they are also discovering the writer whose imagination quietly laid its foundation. And for Amit Dubey, perhaps that’s the most fitting recognition of all not just as a cybersecurity expert, but as a storyteller whose stories were always meant to travel beyond the page.
