Life and Spirituality

My last blog post was about motivations for writing the novel, Nude besides the Lake. Much before that, I had tried my hand at a smaller work of fiction that was published as – Mystic and the Blossoms. I began writing, Mystic and the Blossoms, in 1984 while still a very busy professional teaching engineering at IIT Delhi and busy with scientific publications. As a result, the book did not get beyond the first draft then. It remained buried in my files for years. It was in summer of 1991, I suddenly found time on my hands, free from professional work so I pulled it out and got it printed from a small printer in the city of Jaipur as a hardcover under imprint QUESST Publications. It is a small work and better described as a novella rather than a novel. The idea then was not to make any profit from it but share thoughts expressed through medium of fiction with those interested and those who matter. The book had thoughts on how to improve lives of some of the most backward par...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1463529392 I am not a professional novelist; rather I have been a professor of engineering. In my spare time I wrote a couple of novels to communicate thoughts and ideas that could not be conveyed through professional publications but were best conveyed through fiction. Not being a novelist the novels are different, far from perfect but nevertheless they have delighted those who read them. A few things about my novel –Nude besides the lake – confounded many. First was the choice of word ‘besides’ instead of ‘beside’ that seemed more appropriate. Guess a lot of persons expect someone nude sitting beside a lake, LOL. However the word used in the title phrase describes the content better. The story is about nudity as found in some spiritual sects in India and it is the story of a town that came up around a lake. The second thing that surprised some was the choice of the subject matter, nude. My other publications are on more serious s...