Authors don't retire - 2

Sharad Bailur remembers his exciting journey to authorhood

Continued from the post above

And then Mayank Chhaya happened to me. He had been a journalist working in Bombay at the time I was heading Public Relations for the State Bank of India and we were vaguely familiar with each other's names. We rediscovered each other on Facebook after almost three decades. He apparently liked what I wrote on Facebook and asked if I had done any serious writing. I sent him the manuscripts of both my novels. He liked them both. And then he suggested that I self-publish them on Amazon.

Since I knew nothing about self-publishing, he offered to help. He then designed the cover for "TheTelomere Problem", my attempt at science fiction, and we gingerly launched it sometime in the middle of 2018, expecting some highly involved scientific criticism refuting the idea. None came. That was a first step. I did not expect it to do too well. It did not. It continues to tick along because it is specially written for a niche market that understands science more than fiction. And that market is microscopic, even by world standards.

So, I decided on a new novel. It was titled "The House on Pali Hill". This time it would be a straight murder mystery. It began with a conventional story of a murder being committed and then the perpetrator found out. I was dissatisfied. The murderer should not commit the murder. He should only conspire.  He should subcontract it to someone who know how to do such "jobs". Still not good enough. The murderer should be murdered!

After all even Hitchcock had tried that in "Dial M For Murder". And it had worked. Then again, there is an undercurrent of incest in Indian social life. I call it the Bhai-Behen phenomenon. I decided to add a soupçon of that to spice up the story. Like the earlier novel this one took on a life of its own and went into territory I knew little about. I had to invent as I wrote. This was new to me. But I have noticed this happening to most of whatever fiction I have written. It turned out to be too short - just about 17,000 words. So, I decided to add a second story to the first. That came a cropper because it was on an altogether different theme. And yet it was closely related to "The House on Pali Hill". So, I decided to break them up into two separate novels and to call the second, "Darkness at Midnight".

But I have made it clear that "Darkness at Midnight" takes off where "The House on Pali Hill" left off. In fact, that house features prominently in "Darkness at Midnight", as well. I have also ensured that a large number of my invented characters are a common feature in the entire series of six. This should encourage the reading of the other novels in the series. "Darkness at Midnight" has just been launched. In it, I venture, with trepidation, into the issue of National Security.

In essence, I have, sort of, blundered into the writing of novels, because my articles did not get much purchase, and I love to write. Also writing novels does not restrict the writing when you are in full flow and the inspiration comes out in a gush. There is no upper limit to the size of novels.

To this day I insist that the money my novel writing makes is not of much importance. It is a mere added bonus, if that. What is of importance is that it keeps my mind active searching, always searching, for new avenues for writing and subjects on which to write my novels. And for the first time I have never been happier with my life.

For all of this, I must place on record my gratitude to Mayank Chhaya who takes care of the publishing end. I have been insisting that he deserves at least fifty percent of the earnings. He is adamant that he wants not a penny. There are very few friends like Mayank Chhaya. And, incidentally, I am not trained is Science, or Security or any of the other subjects I deal with. I read them up before I write.

My next offering involves the poisoning of the entire populations of Delhi and Agra including the top political and Armed Forces leadership of the country. It will be titled, "Not a Drop To Drink". I then turn my attention to the "Swami-Baba-Sant" phenomenon that bedevils the minds of the people. I have titled that "Agehananda". After that comes an attempt to sabotage our uranium mines and the smuggling of arms using the Lakshadweep as base. It is titled, "My Name is Kutty, Baby Kutty." And then will come the last one titled, "Irongate- Athena" based on a fictional attempt to sabotage our nuclear centrifuges. If it is possible, I will finish off this long effort by getting my first novel, "Safe Custody" published last.

What is my next subject or field? I find Space Travel boring. Most of it is limited to Newtonian Physics and involves humans. It is difficult to write on Time-travel because it involves concepts like Entropy which flummoxes even highly intelligent and trained minds. Aviation, perhaps. Or Shipping and the Navy. And there is always that old staple – science fiction in a non-space setting.

Do I have a "writing style"? I don't really know what writing style all is about. Some write contrived stuff based on the styles of older well-known writers. My father wrote in the style of HG Wells. I write as I think and have come to regard "style" merely as a sort of mental shortcut to words, and sentence construction, that one resorts to most often. Style as I understand it, is a form of mental laziness. I try to avoid it. Unsuccessfully, so I am told.

The Telomere Problem

Guest post by Sharad Bailur

Sharad Bailur

Is Fate a deciding factor in human life? This book actually asks this question, never openly or straightaway. But it is the subtext, the premise, on which the novel is built.

Much of its basic philosophy is based on my reading of the philosophy of History from Plato to Hegel to Marx and Toynbee on the one hand, and, Thomas Kuhn, and then mavericks like Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend, on the other.

While the first four seem to think that events occur as a stream that flows in which mankind wallows helplessly and has no control over, Feyerabend and even Karl Popper have a different and more interesting take on the subject. Popper’s argument is that this “historicism is a myth”. Both believe that chance events make for history. There is no such thing as a discernible pattern that can help us decipher the future.

The Telomere Problem is fiction, science fiction at that, but it has deep philosophical roots. It begins with the inevitability of a love affair gone wrong,  leads to the inevitability of the ‘repair of the situation’, in an entirely novel, if inadequate, manner. It ends with the chance factor of an unexpected death.

This novel doesn’t involve spectacular fantasized subjects like space travel, or monsters from Mars; nor car chases and dancing around trees; and not even court cases and arguments. It is not about crime. It is not a conventional love story.

So, the only way this tale could be told was to make it plausible. Making it plausible involved educating myself in an entirely new subject –molecular embryology. A lot of what was written as long ago as 2007 has come true in the last eleven years. A lot of what is written is expected to come true in the lives of the present generation. That includes major scientific and social, and economic revolutions that will change the face of this earth.

Is that Hegelian? Are these paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn would suggest? Or is it just a string of educated guesses, that could go completely off-track based on chance factors? I don’t know.

On the face of it The Telomere Problem is just a novel. It starts on a simple core premise – the cloning of Madhubala, the film actress, and how it is possible 29 years after her death. Were it to remain at that level it would have merely been an entertaining, if implausible, story. But then it acquired a life of its own, refusing to close when it should have and went on to deal with the dangers involved with cloning.

From there to the use of nanotechnology in medical treatment. From there it turns to the 

new methods being used to arrest ageing and to the emerging possibilities of living forever, and its consequences in fields as far removed as Society, Economics and even world power balance.

You may buy Sharad Bailur’s debut novel here: The Telomere Problem

Sharad Bailur is that rare specimen, who are becoming rarer in our troubled times - an unbiased intellectual, who is willing to change his opinion in the face of new facts. A veteran media relations professional, Bailur has experienced the seamier side of the media at close quarters, and yet maintained a rare gravitas in his dealings with media professionals. I've had the privilege of knowing him for 31 years.