Poetry
The Oasis Hunter
In an enthusiastically absurd world, why not be a peace laureate, a poet? Walking on a solitary trail, away from propagandist overtones, luminously imaginative, enjoying the regaling vocal varieties of bird songs, hewing his own convictions, reverentially visionary about the religion of love, flowing with the meticulous splurge of emotions.
A poet is a poorly clad rich man laden with inner wealth. A golden lamp in a thatched hut.
There was a time when even the brightest flicker of optimism inside him ruled out the possibility of redemption. The waves of fate spared no pains to land him at a lonely, wretched shore. It’d take loads of pain to arrive at the littlest gain. It felt like he’d just followed a futile circle—returned to his idiotic basics. A nihilistic romanticism. A shipwrecked piece at the freewill of chance, tossed by salaciously flowing freeways of stormy waves.
The storms churning in his soul make him a poet. Mystically enriched. Richly resonant with the hymns of love and peace. In tune with regaling restfulness. From his basket of agonies now he draws out ecstasies. Crossing the desert he now arrives at his oasis. He has taken long-long routes to sandy failure. Success and failure lose their meaning. The golden sands—that’s his oasis. It’s pure karma. He gets in splendid unison with the constructive spirit.
The Shape of My Love
The Shape of My Love invites readers on an introspective journey through the myriad emotions that define the human experience. Spanning themes of love, loss, and the eternal rhythms of nature, these verses by Sandeep Dahiya (Sufi) resonate with profound depth and lyrical grace.
From the tender exploration of love's many facets to the poignant reflections on heartache and resilience, each poem in this collection offers a glimpse into the complexities of human relationships. Nature serves as both backdrop and metaphor, from the solitude and pain of ‘Lonely Trees’ to the majestic presence of ‘Mountain Eagle,’ mirroring the joys and sorrows inherent in life's journey.
Through verses that contemplate existence itself—its fleeting moments and enduring truths—the poet captures the essence of being human. Themes such as renewal in ‘Spring’ and the melancholy beauty of ‘Dying Leaf’ evoke universal emotions that resonate deeply with readers.
The book is a testament to the power of poetry to illuminate the soul, offering solace, insight, and a profound connection to the shared experiences that bind us all. With exquisite imagery and emotional resonance, Sandeep Dahiya (Sufi) crafts a collection that speaks directly to the heart, inviting readers to pause, reflect, and find beauty in life's most profound moments.
The Lust of Life
Plato: “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” And as love caresses you, you are supposed to turn a poet. And your life a poem. A life lived poetically nourishes your soul. The prose approach to life is simply to earn the conveniences to support you materially. The brushstrokes of poetry softly touch the soul without disrupting its restful muse and bring out the nuggets of love, compassion, harmony and peace. If you are poetic in nature, you have the potential to be anything because all these elaborate extensions of your life, your dreams, your professional and personal goals, your milestones, the world around you, all these and more are nothing but a reflection of that poetic pure seed.
The Kashmiri Girl
Chimp, Champ and Chops
Holy Harlots
Holy Harlots is a rippling bouquet of emotions and heart-felt songs which have been the poet's companions during the toughest phase in his life. Most of these have been written in the charming countryside of the poet's native place at a small village in northern India. The poems try to capture the softest nuances of perceptible and imperceptible naturalities against the background of human trials and tribulations. The verses chime with an enamouring softness of the heart which sound Godsent against the present times viciously self-obsessed noise. The poems are exceptionally laced with silent spiritual reflections over the comforting quietude and teasing tranquility of the countryside. These simple swathes of aesthetics take the reader to a slow-paced world...far, far away from the 'maddening crowd'!
Lovebites
Without the seed of poetry there won't be any prose. Just like without the tiny seed there won’t be a tree. The canopy, the full foliage of the tree, is just an extension of the dream lying with its realistic potential inside the small seed. The elaborate network of trunks, branches, twigs, flowers, fruits and leaves is nothing but a commentary on the small poetic seed. So all ye wannabe writers of a good life story, nurture the poet in you, who understands the value of pause in life, who moves slowly to watch everything, sight and smell everything. Whose senses are open to the inclusive interplay of wonderful harmonies of the supreme song, the universe, the one song.
Fiction
Mists on the Moon
Beyond and Beneath
Beyond and Beneath is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. The work has very sharp political connotations. But I would like to clarify that while espousing the cause of clean politics, I have taken very dagger-sharp cuts at certain political forces whose brand of politics results in reversing the basic meanings of religion and nationalism. Also, it is for sure that all such literary efforts from my side are just a battle cry against bad politics, rather than going against any particular political stream. By having creative cuts at the razor-sharp edges of most of the political blocks in India, I have tried to carve out a straight-faced deity whom people have in mind when they envision their interests in the safe hands of the state.
One of the characters is a beautiful girl named Phulva, the girl. Through the trials and tribulations of her beautiful path through the society of the settlers, I have tried to depict how these almost stateless, religionless people come into friction with the sedentary society to create sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes tragic episodes. She smiles like a lotus in the perilous waters of a muddy pond. Also accompanied is the pleasantly sweet-sour path of the now-vanishing nomadic culture that once caressed the settled society with the suddenness of a fresh and fragrant gust of wind. When the pitch up their campsite on the fringe of settled—and the so-called civilized society—always there are showers and sparkles as the merging fronts of two different entities rub past each other.
The main protagonist is a lame Hindu religioner. Well so much for his Villainy! But there are reasons for badness. After detailing the circumstantial forces, which put him on the path of selfishness—and ultimately his brand of utilitarian Hinduism—I have tried to depict him under the light of multifaceted sun of faith. Through the testing admixture of religion, spirituality, blind faith and superstition, I have tried to churn out substantive meanings, which have eluded the mankind puzzled by conflicting dilemmas of faith, superstition, ritualism, or the religiondom overall. At the other end is his guru, the man with the real, selfless, utility-less mission of spiritual awakening. Through this contrasting set of religious personalities, I have made a humble effort to point out a little arc along the infinitely drawn out compassionate folds and contours of Hinduism.
Heartily mixed up in the silent pace of the tale is the old Muslim fisherman. The silently brooding—and expertly following the principals of humanism—frail man plays a far-far weightier role in the tale with his effortless maneuvers instigated by a heart lit by the unsung lore of true humanity. The man from Bengal, a direct victim of the partition-time butcheries, carries along the seemingly insignificant path with firm, humanistic strides.
Then there are smaller players: the disciples, good and bad dogs, stoically suffering animals like donkeys in the caravans, and plainly villainous bunch of thugs who can always put their foul smell in any fragrant orchard—all jutted against the exciting admixture of fate and human deeds.
It is a highly literary work. The target audience is all those who love real humanism devoid of all misinterpretations and miscalculations.
Faceless Gods (Volume 1, Second Edition)
Faceless Gods (Vol. 2, Second Edition)
Faceless Gods (First Edition)
There is no separate story. Stories weave into each other like a well-spun fabric. Stories are like rivers, ever flowing, existing yet not existing, shifting still static, different and similar at the same time.
The pieces. The patchwork. Stories within The Story. Yours and mine.
Be the princess of your story. The seed in you carries the potential to be the tallest, luxuriant-most tree. The powerful force of creation propels the potential for maximization. Nature doesn’t want it to be a world of half-smiles, half-growths, half-blossoms and half-potential. There is a tendency for fullness. It pulls the process of evolution for the maximum, for completion, for what we call greatness.
O my mind, my seat of potentiality, take my journey further,
Be the seat of my strength, not weakness,
Be the seat of kindness, not cruelty,
Be the source of light, not darkness.
You, me and all of us are born for the stories of greatness. Let’s share our stories to see through the journey. Please give me company while I tell a few stories!
All That Woman Is
Dreams of a Common Man
Dreams of a Common Man is a pickled, various flavoured, cross-genre pill of immediate taste. There are unforgivingly apolitical outpours of the helpless common man; there are magical realist traces of a pseudo-reality trying to portray a better, more convenient world; there are poetic outpours in prose through heart-touching little anecdotes; there are off-beat, unconventional attempts to lay bare a-bit-possible aspect of history; there are abstract thoughts that may capture any context as per the reader’s suitability; there are not-so-fictitious versions of the happenings that matter to the common man; there is flailing, browbeating tug of war among the religion, faith, belief and non-belief; there are large cynical pools, ordinary collectives of the common man’s helpless grudges against the larger forces...It is like T20 cricket, fast paced, expected, unexpected, unorthodox literary hits to the fence. It basks in convenient improvisations of style and substance. The creativity set free of the conventional genres and bound ideas. It captures the realities lying in dust at the mundane level, polishes the titbits of socio-historical facts with the crude, judgmental brush of a common man who is not bothered about the burden of his own name and identity.
It’s a beautiful world. If you are happy and joyful, this entire existence feels the same through you. If you exist on a plane of harmony and peace, you invite the entire cosmos to the same plane. When you smile, everything around you does the same. So be a joy-maker and see the beauty underlying everyone and everything around you.
Look out for beautiful souls around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It's not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by...’
Through my stories, I try to positively touch the lives of my dear readers. These stories deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life’s tale naturally follows from this point. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’
A Half House
A Half House is a pickled, various flavoured, cross-genre pill of immediate taste. There are unforgivingly apolitical outpours of the helpless common man; there are magical realist traces of a pseudo-reality trying to portray a better, more convenient world; there are poetic outpours in prose through heart-touching little anecdotes; there are off-beat, unconventional attempts to lay bare a-bit-possible aspect of history; there are abstract thoughts that may capture any context as per the reader’s suitability; there are not-so-fictitious versions of the happenings that matter to the common man; there is flailing, browbeating tug of war among the religion, faith, belief and non-belief; there are large cynical pools, ordinary collectives of the common man’s helpless grudges against the larger forces...It is like T20 cricket, fast paced, expected, unexpected, unorthodox literary hits to the fence. It basks in convenient improvisations of style and substance. The creativity set free of the conventional genres and bound ideas. It captures the realities lying in dust at the mundane level, polishes the titbits of socio-historical facts with the crude, judgmental brush of a common man who is not bothered about the burden of his own name and identity.
Lost in Red Mist
Self Help
Love
Love defines the countless pathways to the cause of creation as Lord Byron points out with poetic precision: that love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey. Do you think fear, anger, hate, envy, jealousy, ego, lust and greed have their own standing? No. Just like darkness is simply an absence of light, all these tortuous tools that lynch our self are nothing but phantoms doing painful rounds in the absence of love. Like a tiny lamp puts out darkness simply by casting light, without fighting the dark, a simple ray of love, a symbol of our true self, chucks out the flimsy appendages of the unreal self. There is definitely limit to everything in cosmos. But there is one exception: Love, prem as we say it in Hindi. One need not fight fear, fury, hatred, jealousy, distrust, ego, lust and greed at various fronts to defeat them. They have a common root: burial of your loving self, your essential nature, under the peripheral dust of illusions and ignorance, making you identify with what is essentially not your real self. Remove the grime, allow the light of love to emanate from your soul, enter your behavioral self, and all around you see peace, harmony and balance.
The Slow Lane and its Everyday Wonders
Love: The Ultimate Alchemy
A Notebook of Dancing Shadows
Step into the world of the introspective and poetic writer, where the mundane transforms into the profound, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In ‘A Notebook of Dancing Shadows,’ we are invited into the gentle embrace of a soulful observer, who effortlessly weaves together the threads of everyday life with the tapestry of the spiritual realm.
With each turn of the page, readers are drawn deeper into the writer’s inner sanctum, where thoughts flutter like leaves in the wind and emotions ebb and flow like the tide. From the whispering secrets of nature to the intricate dance of social processes, every observation is tinged with a sense of wonder and reverence for the world around us.
But beyond mere observation, this collection transcends the boundaries of the ordinary, delving into the writer’s spiritual quest for meaning and truth. Through moments of contemplation and introspection, he grapples with the mysteries of existence, seeking solace in the beauty of the unknown.
A nobody's Notebook
It’s the notebook of a small-time writer. No big efforts at super-heroism, no ironies of heart-breaks, no bombastic romance, no gooseflesh rippling drama, no thunder-stricken rigmarole of saving the planet from the aliens. It’s not about chafing thoughts, it’s all about the frolicking gaiety of common emotions in the life of common people.
Beyond the grinding millstone of bigger caprices, it’s about sublimated emotions. It creeps genteelly like a flowery vine. It’s just a fragile moment capturing the kernel of eternal truth in it like you see in a painting of beautiful hills, smatterings of snow on the slopes, chatty streams, green pastures and a sense of virginal peace to tow all these along. There are no chivalric, lionized doctrinaires delving into deep mysteries of human existence. It’s a gently flowing painting on a self-absorbed canvas. The human characters simply add to the soft shades of the softly evolving painting.
In this small world, I believe everyone is taking chiming steps to be a nice human being. Come, let’s all walk together for a greater collective good.
Notebook of a Self-unmade Man
Step into the enchanting world of the countryside with this captivating book that invites you to witness the magic that unfolds within the author's little garden. In this collection of poignant observations, heartfelt reflections and profound insights, Sandeep takes you on a journey through the seasons, offering a rich tapestry of life's intricate beauty.
Through the author's keen eye and introspective musings, you will discover a profound connection to the natural world, where delicate dance of flowers, rustling leaves and changing seasons become metaphors for life's deepest lessons. From the simplicity of a budding blossom to the grandeur of nature's cycles, you will be captivated by the wisdom found within these pages.
Beyond the boundaries of the author's countryside abode, the words transcend time and space, delving into the complexities of human condition and offering thought-provoking insights on broader societal issues. From bustling cities to the global stage, the author's opinions and perspectives will challenge and inspire you to contemplate the larger meanings of life and our place within it.
This book is a sanctuary for the soul, a healing journey that transforms solitude into a source of joy and peace. It's a balm for the bruised soul, a panacea for the losses endured. Delve into the author's world and allow his words to ignite your own sense of wonder, as you uncover the hidden truths nestled within the delicate embrace of nature's little happenings.
Lazy Ways to Truth
This is the journey of a common man during one of the most difficult phases in the modern history. Corona stole many a smile from us. There were individual pains swaddled in collective miseries. But then we have to walk through the fog to reach the sunny slopes. And we did. Many of us fell on the way. It’s in remembrance of those who couldn’t make it. It’s also for those who went on to make it to the end of the tunnel. These chronicles are in celebration of life and living amidst all the testing and teasing pulls of fate and circumstances.
