Writing, how my story began....
Write I must, or, as a wit said, burst. Writing comes naturally to me, as natural as breathing. I am a Bombay-based writer. Bombay is the tiny tear shaped dot in the sea off the west coast of India. I write short stories, poems, novel (one so far), essays and reviews. The writing of my novel "The Love Song of Luke Varkey" is a project I had begun in 1992 and has gone through many loving editing and rewriting. I wanted to portray through its pages a true picture of India, which would encompass the wide spectrum of cultures, languages, and attitudes that go to make India what it is.

On the novel's pages you will find a true reflection of India — warts and all — where people are constantly being threatened by poverty, communalism, joblessness, dispossession and the other ills of a developing nation. Through its pages I, as a writer, wish to bring to the reader a modern India — not exactly one of snake charmers and rope-trick performers — but one of journalists, executives, stock brokers, sub-editors, and migrant workers in the Persian Gulf countries. The novel is one of the first to portray the life of Indian immigrants in the Persian Gulf.

I write with a view to reflect the true realities of India as opposed to the existing realities of India of an exotic destination where poverty and wealth co-exist. My concern centers around how the poor and the traumatized survive in a big city like Bombay — one of the major cities of the world with a population of 19 million — half of which live in putrescent slums and hutment colonies.

I am deliberately simple in my writing style, as I want the novel to be read and appreciated both in India as well as around the world.

Writer's insights
I also make penetrating insights into the huge constructions project undertaken by multinational companies in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Such contracts had led to the Gulf War and the origin of Gulf terrorism. Perhaps insightfully, I deal with the very womb of such discontent in the form of the construction project of the multinational Trans-World Constructions in the fictitious Persian Gulf kingdom of Registhan.

 Though I have been influenced by Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, I consider my style and presentation unique and an authentic reflection of modern India san any attempts to white wash crude realities that exist as an overwhelming truth of life. VS Naipaul had mentioned that RK Narayan's novels didn't prepare him for India. 

Writer's honest oeuvre
"The Love Song of Luke Varkey" is my humble writing effort, which intends to offer the younger generation a point of reference, a curtain raiser I might say to the problems of urbanization and cross-cultural migration that will become a part of their lives at some point of time. At the same time, it also, rather ambitiously, lays claim to representing the reality of India to the world.

Here at last, as the cliché goes, is the searingly honest and darkly comical Indian novel you always wanted to read! 

Synopsis of "The Love Song of Luke Varkey"