It was in April 2021 when the second wave of Covid-19 struck India severely. My entire family, including me, were infected with Covid and each of us was isolated in separate rooms within my home.

During this time, I received phone calls from various relatives to ask about the well-being of my family. Apart from medicine that helped us get better from our infections, these phone calls and verbal support from our relatives helped like magic, especially since we all were isolated and were losing our morale due to isolation. During the isolation period, I watched a Hindi movie on YouTube which depicted family togetherness and the bond between various relatives. These two things made a deep impact on my mind.

After getting fully cured, the idea of writing a fiction book on various relationships in our life crossed my mind. Till then, I had been writing my blog regularly, but writing a complete book was totally a different ball game. With great inspiration, I started keying in the first story of my proposed book, but it was not meant to be that time.

My wife got transferred to a different town for her job at the same time and had to relocate with our son. I was left alone at our home and was also involved in various accounting and audit assignments and had actually lost the energy I had to write my book.

Fast forward to April 2022. The Covid pandemic had subsided to a great extent and Covid protocols were relaxed by the government. Educational institutions in India switched from online coaching to classroom coaching again and my son shifted back to our home so that he could attend his college. Since I had company at home now, the thought to complete my book was aroused in my mind again. However, my new schedule would not allow me to focus much on writing as I had to cook food for myself and my son. That was something that I had never done in my life before. I remembered a teaching from The Secret, a book I had been reading since 2017. It said to thank the Universe for whatever you have and also for whatever you desire. I am also a firm believer in Lord Shri Ganesh (the Hindu God). I used to pray to Him regularly and the Universe used to answer my prayer.

Soon enough, I got adjusted to my new schedule and also could find time to write my stories. From the beginning, I was clear on certain things. I wanted to write stories that underline the beauty of various relationships, such as parent/child, brother/sister, teacher/student, etc. I wanted purity and simplicity to be the hallmark of all the stories in my book. I wanted my book to act as a ‘feel good’ companion for its readers by creating emotional positivity. I wanted to show the readers that beneath the relationships that we have, there lies a strong bond of selfless love and belongingness that enriches our lives. I used to pray to Lord Ganesh daily and the Universe used to give me thoughts and ideas about how to proceed further.

While writing the book, the Universe gave me such great ideas that I was awestruck. More specifically, while writing the fourth story on the brother-sister relationship, such great ideas, and dialogues occurred to me that it became one of the most heart-touching stories in the book. I used to get emotionally so overwhelmed while writing that my eyes would get teary and I would need to take breaks to be normal again before I continue writing. The amazing part is that all this emotional overwhelming was being created from my own imagination because I do not have a real sister. How can I thank the Universe enough for this?

My book was completed by the end of October 2022. Having written a fiction book in English, I was keen to reach an international readership. Accordingly, I submitted the manuscript of my book to three international publishers, two from the United States and one from the United Kingdom.

The month of November 2022 was both exciting and frustrating for me. Exciting because all three international publishers approved my book to be published under their banners. However, this woke me up to today’s reality in the publishing world. You have to pay the publishers a fee to publish your book and the international publishers’ fees in USD and GBP was beyond my set budget. A point came when I felt that my dream of having my book published may never materialize. I felt sad, but I also prayed to Lord Ganesh and thanked the Universe for taking me to that stage and also for showing me a way out of this to have my book published.

On December 1st, a thought to consider an Indian publisher crossed my mind. I started searching online and contrary to my earlier impression, many of the Indian publishers have an international distribution system by which I could reach a worldwide readership. Considering various factors, I chose to go ahead with White Falcon Publishing Solutions in the first week of December 2022 as their fee was within my budget.

My experience with White Falcon has been fantastic and they carried out each and every step in publishing my book with excellent professionalism. In the third week of February 2023, my book titled ‘Beautiful Relationships’ was officially published, thus fulfilling my dream to have my own fiction book published. My book has been listed for sale on Amazon websites in most countries.

On receiving my copies of the book, I held one of them in hand. Looking at its quality, I felt proud of my decision to go with an Indian publisher. I thanked the Universe for guiding me in my selection of the publisher and getting my dream fulfilled.

My book is being received well by the readers. I am getting positive views, especially regarding all the stories in it being heart-touching and giving a positive feeling.

I sincerely thank Lord Ganesh for all of this. I also thank the Universe and I thank The Secret for all of this as well.

Just a few days ago, I was looking into old files on my laptop. I found an MS Word file created in June 2021 with the name ‘Beautiful Relationships’. It has only two or three paragraphs written in it. It is the story of a relationship between a landlord and a tenant that I started writing about at that time but never got completed. So, you will not find a story on landlord-tenant relationship in my book.