The UnReal Times was initiated on 14 April 2011,[2] when the founders CS Krishna and Karthik Laxman wrote an article titled "Government mulls direct cash transfers by dropping money bags from the sky" jibing the government's direct cash transfer schemes.

[4] Through social media websites, Facebook and Twitter, the website began to gain traction and grew in popularity, aided from time to time by viral articles such as "Manmohan Singham",[5] "BCG hires McKinsey to advise it on how to become number 1",[6] "Journalist mistakenly interviews Bollywood actor Imran Khan instead of Pakistani cricket legend",[7] and "Stunning Revelation: West Indies' Cricket captain, Darren Sammy, is a Tamil Brahmin!".

[9] In 2017, URT columnist Ashwin Kumar launched a weekly satire series titled Unreal Missions that ran for ten episodes.

[11] Other popular columnists are Ajayendar Reddy, whose article on Dr. Raghuram Rajan was referenced in mainstream media,[12][13][14] Anand Walunjkar, Divya Srikanth, Lokesh Bahety, Pankaj Vaidya, Pritam Chatterjee, and Srini Chandra.

The book traces key political events in the year leading to General Elections 2014 with imaginative and fictitious accounts of backroom machinations, eventually resulting in an unexpected climax towards the end.