As a college chemistry professor for almost four decades, I had accomplished a great deal. That included teaching students from high school to university, here in the United States and in the country where I was born, India. The strange fact is that I learned English alphabet as a freshman in high school. Before that I had learned two languages, state language Gujarati and national language Hindi.
In chemistry, I won a couple of scholarships and grants like Fulbright, Dow Chemical, ATIRA and the US Department of Education, National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society. I completed research projects in Chemistry and published a dozen technical papers before I devoted my career in teaching. I served as a reviewer for national and international scientific journals and for grant applications for the National Science Foundation.
But something was lacking in my life. I was a vivid reader of fiction and nonfiction books for many years. I decided to take a class in creative writing at the community college where I teach at present. Then I attended a writing workshop at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. These two events prepared the background for me to jump-start my writing career.
The first novel I published was ‘Chasing a terrorist among us’ and this started when a man, named Dhiraj Barot in the United Kingdom was arrested for terrorism charges. If you notice that man shared the same last name with me. The book described the chase by two FBI agents to arrest a nuclear scientist who had joined a terror cell for Islamic Jihad. The two FBI agents were not successful in their mission but they fell in love and got married. When they were on their honeymoon, they received the news of capture of the same terrorist by another FBI team. The book was published as an e-book on Amazon kindle.
After that first novel, I started writing with passion, spending my early morning hours. Most of the time, I wrote fiction novels about romance, murder, crime and other human emotional issues of loss and grief. I had written a couple of short stories and nonfiction books, too. The total is ninety five books in ninety five months.
As a reader, you may ask ‘is it monetary rewarding?’ My answer is no. But there is something that keeps me writing and it is hope. One day in the far distant future, some of these books may be see the light of the day, in movies or stories in textbooks. If nothing else, my grandchildren will know about the time, events, and places of my time through my characters. It is just a hope and that keeps me going.
