Burning Sapphires - Softcover

Story about one woman who, despite all the odds in life, takes on the responsibility and leads the entire community toward a progressive solution and revives the injured spirits and minds of Kashmiris. A seven-year-old girl, Ghulab Sahib, living in Machail, is unaware of life and its complications. The Machail village, 9,500 feet above sea level, in Kashmir, India, is surrounded by high mountains, thick deodar forests, and attractive meadows that are fully covered with thick snow for most of the year, except in the summer months. Living her childhood in this most spectacular village, she doesn't know that destiny is going to disrupt her peaceful life and propel her through a maze of grueling fateful events. But these fateful events do not destroy her-instead, a woman of great knowledge, substance, experience, and unparalleled strength emerges in the being of Shahzadi Ghulab Sahib, who takes charge of millions of Kashmiri Muslims trapped in the terror-stricken Valley of Kashmir along with 500,000 internally displaced Kashmiri pandits living as refugees in their own country and bails them out, leading them toward a life of contentment, dignity, and pride.

During my longstanding career as a professional chief executive officer / managing director of many multinationals in Africa and Middle east I had this passionate urge to write. Especially write about my experience and about the social causes that have manifested in the lives of millions of fellow human beings. But it took me to cross 60 years of my life to listen to myself and I left everything to take up creative writing. I wrote couple of scripts and in 2011 I made my first film transforming one of the scripts, "Ziyarat" to a feature length award winning docudrama. I continued to write a few stories but concentrated on writing this book, "Burning Sapphires" and completed recently. Being born in Kashmir, a terror ridden paradise on earth, each person is a story by himself and in my mind I am ambitious enough to pen down as many stories as I can and take them to the world audience. In continuation of the above thought process, I made another documentary, a short one, 21 minutes film about handicapped achievers called, "My Heroes" which was screened in film festivals and won the most popular award in Mumbai recently. My family includes my wife Savita, children Misha and Hrishant and my grand son are all wonderful people who give me their full support in whatever I wish to pursue. In order to continue my writing, we relocated to a new Hill station in India called Lavasa just last year. Lavasa is a beautiful place to live as the environment is clean and there is ample time to concentrate on creative writing. Apart from writing I spend some time helping my wife in gardening and cooking. Far away from the crowded and polluted cities in India, Long walks along the beautiful man made lake and the green water front add to the peaceful living in Lavasa