About the novel - Nude besides the Lake

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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 subjects. I left India for higher education in my youth and worked abroad for many years. In my interactions with persons of host countries, there were criticisms about many things in India, its poverty, cultural customs such as arranged marriages, naked religious persons etc. In my first year or so of stay abroad, these criticisms offended me and I tried to defend them. However, soon I realized that defending leads to more adverse comments. Therefore I dropped that and laughed it off. Humor often works best to change dynamics of a situation from disparaging to pleasant. 

In recent years I have written about various matters that arose in the criticisms in blogs and when it came to nudity that is found in some religious sects of India since ancient times, a novel explaining the reasons behind it from a spiritual perspective. It was a difficult topic to write on because while nudity may have been common in some ancient societies and the roots of western civilization as in Athens or its religion in the garden of Eden, it no longer remains so. However instead of making the content mostly academic, humor was incorporated at places. Overall the story is about good humans and human goodness.



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