My notes this week are a tad self-serving. I have been super productive all year and I figured I’d update you on my writing progress.
Last week, I wrote about my novel, Jambudveepam: The Song of the Blue Birds. It took me six years from having just a kernel of a concept to having a finished, edited manuscript, which stands at 104,000 words and 438 pages. I quit my corporate career three years ago to write full-time and finish the novel. I’m so glad I did. It’s been a lot of fun writing it. It easily feels like the biggest accomplishment of my life (outside my personal arena). It feels bigger than my academic accomplishments or anything in my professional career, which have significant highlights in them. I hope to find a “good” publisher who will treat it kindly and give it a proper home so readers can find it. I’m working on my submissions to Indian publishers. More on this in the weeks to come.
Request: If you have any contacts in the Indian publishing world, I’d be grateful for an introduction. Thank you.
The novel blurb
What happens when a civilization forgets its soul?
Jambudveepam is an epic mythological fantasy set on a mythic island-continent frozen in time. A field of arrested reality leaves Jambudveepam vulnerable to an invasion by an advanced civilization from the West. Two unlikely heroes race to restore the balance: Kotravai, a Pandya princess from the South, and Aritra, a foundling bearing the mark of Lord Vishnu, with a wristband that counts down the exact number of sunsets he has left to live.
Unlike the retellings that prevail in Indian mythological fiction today, Jambudveepam is an entirely original world – new characters, new kingdoms, new cosmology – steeped in the rich mythological and philosophical traditions of ancient India, from the Puranas to the Tamil Sangam poetry. It weaves an intensely human drama against the backdrop of an epic clash of philosophies. At its heart, it is an ancient debate made flesh: What is primary? Spirit or Matter? What a civilization can measure and what it cannot touch.
Don’t Sell the Ferrari
I have also completed a short non-fiction book titled, Don’t Sell the Ferrari, a humorous What Ho! style introduction to Advaita Vedanta, which is the essential teaching of the Upanishads. I’ve tried to lighten the topic with humor and occasional reverence and yet grant the topic the weight it deserves. Advaita Vedanta may be the most important idea humans have conceived next to stuffing the pizza crust with cheese. This book is about 110 pages. It’s funny, insightful, and an easy read (I think). I’m almost done with editing it. I’ll likely self-publish this on the Amazon Kindle platform sometime later this year.
If you’re interested in reading the book ‘Don’t Sell the Ferrari’ when it comes out, please sign up by clicking the button below. I’ll be sure to contact you when the moment arrives. Thank you, yet again.
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In the pipeline
I have begun fleshing out the plot line for a sequel to Jambudveepam. I hope to have the bones of the novel ready to start writing by Christmas this year.
About 14 years ago, I wrote a partially finished novel called Past Imperfect, a paranormal thriller about a man with a psychological condition who discovers that trauma in a past life led to his condition. The story is a human drama covering the toll his condition takes on his marriage, his subsequent discovery of the cause, and the eventual resolution of the trauma. It remained partially finished for a long while, and I recently got around to finishing it. I’ll need to edit and polish it. I’m thinking I’ll self-publish it mid to late 2027.
That’s the writing update.
Switching Topics
The Swampland Conjecture
Imagine you’re asked to design a universe. You’re given shiny dials that let you set various things such as the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the speed of light, and the number of dimensions in your universe.
If you turn the dials around randomly, you’ll create all sorts of universes. And you’ll find that most of them won’t last for long. Either they will collapse immediately, or there won’t be any atoms.
So, to help you, let’s say I gave you String Theory. It is our best attempt to combine quantum physics – which describes interactions at the most fundamental level of what we call matter—and relativistic mechanics – which describes Gravity, the interactions between very large objects like planets and stars – into something called Quantum Gravity. Think of String Theory as a mathematical description of everything.
Note: String Theory is not to be confused with Sting Theory, which posits that Sting, the lead singer of the erstwhile band The Police, is actually a fundamental particle vibrating across eleven different dimensions simultaneously just to watch every breath you take, every move you make, and every bond you break.
Using String Theory, you’ll be able to design many universes. 10 to the power of 500 number of universes, in fact.
Physicists divide these “working” universes into two categories: The Landscape and the Swampland.
In the Landscape lie those universes that are possible. By “possible,” I mean the laws of quantum gravity are perfectly obeyed in these universes.
The Swampland is everything else. It’s the collection of impossible universes. The ones you tried to create by randomly turning the dials. The laws of quantum gravity are broken here. Unless a guy named Enzo shows up to fix them and sends you a massive bill, they’ll stay broken.
Here’s where the physics drama has been going on. A bunch of physicists used String Theory to come up with something called the Swampland Conjecture. A pretty bold move, like wearing white after Labor Day. They say that any universe with a stable and constant amount of dark energy is impossible. i.e., it lies in the Swampland.
What is dark energy, you ask? It’s the mysterious force that is stretching our universe and causing it to expand at an accelerating rate.
Here’s the issue: Our universe – the one we are in right now and reading the What Ho! report in – has a stable and constant amount of dark energy.
Per the Swampland police, our universe ought to be impossible. And yet we know it’s plainly there when we look out the window.
Something is wrong somewhere. The possibilities are:
- The String Theory is wrong. If so, we’re going to need a new playbook.
- The Swampland Conjecture is wrong. Maybe the math hasn’t been math-ed properly.
- We don’t understand Dark Energy well. Maybe it isn’t constant or stable. Maybe it is temporary or changing, what scientists call “the quintessence.”
You might be tempted to dismiss all of this as the babbling of geeks. It’s not. It’s humankind’s attempt to answer our most important question, the only one that matters ultimately: What is Real?
Have a wonderful weekend!
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