Skip to main content

My Stories as Ebook


I have collected 33 short stories of mine into an ebook which will be published next week.  Most of these stories were written in the last two years and published in my blog.  Just to give a taste of what the stories are like, let me give the links to three stories selected at random:

Ahalya – the first story in the volume
And quiet flowed the Beas – the tenth story
The Nomad Learns Morality – the title story

The volume is dedicated to “Radha Soami Satsang Beas especially Dr Pranita Gopal.”  RSSB is a religious organisation which took over a school in Delhi where I was teaching for quite a while.  In about two years the organisation bulldozed the school to smithereens.  The bulldozer became my guru and muse.  However, the stories are in no way related to the school or RSSB.  Not at all to the bulldozer.  Not even to Dr Pranita Gopal.  All these happened to be my best inspirers.  I’m obliged to them eternally.  Were it not for them, the potential for fiction writing would have died quietly within me.  As Lord Rama’s touch brought life to Ahalya, RSSB brought a different life to the writer in me.  Dr Gopal is one of the many faces of RSSB that I came close to.  My admiration for her grows day by day.

I’m now working on a novel which is totally inspired by the RSSB.  The novel is tentatively titled Black Hole.  Following is an extract from it:

In the beginning was a black hole.  The black hole was with God, and the black hole was God.  All things existed in the black hole.  Nothing could escape the tenacity with which the black hole held everything within it.  The bonds of that tenacity grew strong and stronger until the black hole could not bear the bondage anymore.  And it exploded.  Boom.  Big Bang.  And the black hole became flesh.

Ishan Salman Panicker was writing his gospel.   

The picture in this post is not the actual cover of the book.  I designed it for fun.  I now live a few metres away from the road in the picture.  It is a picturesque village in Kerala whose landscapes suffuse beauty and vigour into my soul through an osmotic process which could not have taken place elsewhere.  I’m grateful to RSSB and its people for giving me this gift without even their knowledge.

That’s how life works.  We become agents of transmutation in other people’s lives.  We can be Desdemonas or Iagos.  Othello may fail to recognise the genuine face.  Othellos, Desdemonas and Iagos create art for us.  My stories are humble attempts to catch some of those aesthetic moments of life.  Some of those glimpses which may add some beauty to a life that is otherwise bulldozed over.


Comments

  1. Congratulations! I hope to get my hands on the print copy

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hearty Congratulations and Best wishes sir...!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Awaiting eagerly. Thanks. I want to relive the remnants of my past. Want to learn what I might not have learnt.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Awaiting eagerly. Thanks. I want to relive the remnants of my past. Want to learn what I might not have learnt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Grateful for your zeal. The stories may not carry that sort of lessons but I do hope they will remind you of a lot of things.

      Delete
  6. Wonderful. Congratulations. Wish you all the best :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Congrts sir, good to see u again sir on blogspot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had no choice, sir. Since I can't be a swami i have to be a writer. Thanks for welcoming me to where I rightfully belong.

      Delete
  8. Congrts sir, good to see u again sir on blogspot.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wow.. The much awaited writer has arrived finally. I am happy and deeply inspired. Congratulations :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Roohi. You once asked me why I get caught in the cycle repeatedly (not in the same words). I have seen Rahu and Ketu playing their incessant shadow game. ..:)

      Delete
  10. Congratulations sir... Wish you all the best for the success... I will read your short stories soon...

    ReplyDelete
  11. Life is for those, who dare most.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You will meet in my stories great persons like Lord Rama and Alexander the great who faltered... I understand what you mean...

      Delete
  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. Thanks for sharing. There were ways to save ourselves from that big fraud ... We defeated ourselves. We let ourselves be ruined by an entity that perceived itself as Browning's Duke of Ferrara who put an end to all smiles altogether in order to uphold the 900 year old family morality!

      Delete
  13. Sir can you send me a link to the book so I can buy.
    Looking forward to the series.
    Is there a way I can get in touch with you? Your old number I have does not seem functional.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As soon as the book is released I'll let you know. Please don't call me. I'm under self-imposed imprisonment.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived