This post has been updated on October 19, 2020. See the new version here.
September 1, 2019
Wrapping up two years of work on a novel — or is it a memoir? Or both? I am inclined to define it as "A Saga of Spiritual Adventure across Space and Time"... Simply put, this book is written as a novel, inspired by auto-biographical memories interwoven with fiction. It contains about 90,000 words, or 300 pages, and encompasses 40 chapters.
Here follows the blurb of "The Sun-Eyed Children":
" December 1970. It's about midnight at a bus stop in the deserted street of a Munich suburb. Lionel, a rebel archetype of the beatnik-hippie generation, shivers under freezing sleet in the gloomy yellow fluorescence of the street-lights. His long hair flowing from under a Norwegian woollen cap gathers icicles and he wonders. Should he burn all bridges behind and run away from looming prison time? When at last the bus, like a bright blue dragon, emerges from the mist and stops, Lionel shakes off all his doubts and hops in without hesitation. The door slides shut in a 'whoosh' and the bus moves on.
He doesn't know yet he is embarking on an adventure far more demanding than he has ever anticipated; an adventure that will take him half-way around the circumference of the globe, to distant India and the remote reaches of the Himalayas.
Forced into choices he never knew he would be capable of, as a half-naked spiritual mendicant — a sannyasi — he plunges head on, into a Quest that began centuries ago and may find its conclusion only in a far-off future.
What dangers, what joys, what mythical Shangri-La will he discover on the way, and where will his Quest take him? Which extraordinary Beings of Light will he meet, who shall guide him on the path? Will he survive the onslaught of these Forces whose only reason of being is to disrupt the flow of Evolution?
And in the end, could he possibly find the answers to his burning questions on another World?"
No one dare ask me onto which pre-existing shelve the "bold-publisher-to-be" shall place the book!
Addendum, April 20, 2020
Leadstart Publishing, Mumbai, took the plunge. The book is presently under final editing.
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