One year of being an author

My first book, God and Destiny: The Supreme Knowledge, was published by Rupa & Co. on first April, 2009, so yesterday I completed an year of being an author, and this year has passed very quickly—I can’t stop myself from saying, “Time flies,” even if it is a cliché. I am smiling when I write that it was an interesting, eventful, proud, busy, not very successful but mostly happy year.

Many of you may still not be knowing that my book has been published and is available in both physical and online bookstores, because I wanted to announce its publication in style—by inviting you to the book launch function or passing you on a link of an article or news about it in a reputable medium—but I could not do so, because I could not timely organize a book launch function, which I had planned to be grand and huge to an unforeseen scale, and the articles published about the book in the print media were not good enough to be shown to you. So the main purpose of this post is to let all of my friends and acquaintances who are not yet aware of the publication of my book know about it being out there.

In the first year of its publication, the sale of God and Destiny was not anywhere close to my expectations, I could not execute the majority of plans I had made for its promotion, and the main thing on which I spent my time for its publicity failed. But my efforts are on, and there were some positives too: I noticed a positive comment of a reader about the book on the Web; some sellers listed the book on Amazon.com, making it available at very reasonable price for US residents, and people are actually purchasing it from there too; the book got a place in the library of the Indian parliament; and this is what a reader from Mumbai (Hormasd Sumariwalla) had to say about the book in an email he sent to me on January 01, 2010:

“I convey my deep gratitude to you for your book God & Destiny which I consider a treasure, and which is one-in-a-million that one can find in the mountain of "so-called" spiritual books.”

His was the first email I read this year, and I thought, “Oh my God, what a wonderful way to begin an year!”

More information about the book is on its website, http://www.godanddestiny.com/. Thanks again to all of you for your love and support.

Regards,
Vivake Pathak

next time

This is an excerpt of a news I read in Hindustan Times:

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New Delhi, January 23, 2010: A 32-year-old man was beaten to death by two young men after he protested against their urinating on his wall in west Delhi, police said. According Delhi Police data, the Capital saw some bizarre murder cases in 2009 as far as motives are concerned. Among these, figure cases like a man murdering his neighbour because the latter had kicked his dog at Ranhola village in Outer Delhi. In another case, a man was killed for breaking the queue at a public toilet in Civil Lines. In New Friends Colony in South Delhi, a man was killed for refusing to let another person make a call from his cell phone.
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Considering the above, I would say that next time be careful if you decide to stop someone from urinating on your property, to kick your neighbor's dog, to break the queue at a public toilet, or to refuse to let a stranger make a call from your cell phone. But above all, next time, if somebody stops you from urinating on their property, your neighbor or anyone kicks your dog, someone breaks the queue at a public toilet, or a stranger refuses to let you make a call from their cell phone, then you definitely know what you have to do.

holes

Every person is unique and irreplaceable.

Bruce Lee

And when the opportunity arises, it is not me who strikes: the opportunity itself strikes. --Bruce Lee

love and life

Both love and life give more pain than pleasure, more woe than happiness, more tears than smiles.

drought

I have never seen such a severe drought in my life. I feel as if this is the only drought I have witnessed. Here in Delhi, till now, the rainfall has been just ten percent what it used to be.

four questions

The first two of these questions have been troubling me from a long time now, and the last two came up recently as a result of a news:

1. By any means, by any chance, can there be any trace of reality outside the Internet also?

2. There is a big wall clock four feet above the monitor of my computer. If I move the mouse cursor to the tip of the minute arm of the clock and press the left button of the mouse, will time stop?

3. In their mission of implementation of the teachings of the ancient, holy Quran, Shariya, and Hadith and of accelerating the Islamisation of the world, Talibans, in the holy land of Pakistan, are now recruiting small kids to turn them into terrorists and to use them as suicide bombers. Don't they know that child labor and child abuse are prohibited these days?

4. How did you feel when you killed a human being for the first time?