Featured Interview With KUNAL NARAYN UNIYAL
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Master mariner by profession and poet by passion, I am born and brought up in Dehradun, a beautiful valley in India. Joined shipping at the age of 18 as trainee navigational officer and since then have taken expedition round the globe, n number of times. 12 years down the line, I still enjoy sailing as this was what I always wanted to do. But I used to write since my school days, be it poetry or story, I always used to find a place in my school magazine for same. Once I joined shipping, I never gave up writing. In fact people and new places always inspired me to write. My topic for poems were little different as I have been practicing spirituality since my childhood, I always used to write on that, death being my favorite topic.
I spend my part time on land and part on ship, while most of the time on ship is spent on writing and on land for publishing.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I always has fascination for books even as a child, all thanks to my father who used to make me read lots of books be it spirituality or adventure. When i was four years old, i remember my father making me sit with him for meditation and writing. I used to scribble something or other in my small diary, short stories or poetry. But the major transformation came in my life when i was thirteen years old and i wrote a story about a man who had last eight minutes of his life left. It was basically a journey of a man from life to death and that was the time i realized i was meant to write and write something different. The description of the man was so realistic that whoever read it thought that i had actually experienced it.
Then during same time i started dreaming about various writers who used to talk to me and share their experiences with me including Lewis carol and Charles dickens. This is how i got into serious writing.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love spiritual writings, ancient scriptures, religious scriptures from where i can draw meaning to our petty lives and find direction to the lost kingdom of bliss.
Sri Aurobindo ghosh, Khalil Gibran, Shelley,Keats are among those famous poets i love reading and P.G.Woodhouse among the fiction writers.
But my greatest inspiration comes from people around me, each and every face carrying a story of their own. Some is happy, some is sad, some in love,some in pain, all filled with stories and poetry. All one need is to extract them out of their lives and give them word form.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Unanswered, I know it is quite an unusual kind of title for a book of poems barring a few articles. Before I say anything more about my book, I would like to say something about myself and my thought process. Born and brought up in Dehradun, I have always shared a close affinity with nature. I used to love, I still do, watching nature and ponder how it can be loving and cruel at the same time. I grew up with my thoughts and took to sailing, a job were I fit in perfectly. My roving mind now had more to ponder about. Often have I stood alone on the deck of my ship, feeling the vibrations of a surging ocean underneath and watching the sky change its colours and mood without any indication. At times I have been frightened…. bewildered… mesmerized…all at once. I respect nature in all its aspects…its benevolence… its fury…its colours… its stillness…its suddenness…its unpredictability…everything!
Then I look at us…I mean we humans…we are the most superior…the most intelligent…the most progressive of all living creatures and yet the most miserable of all living creatures so long as we are shrouded in false ego and ignorance. Nature has its laws fixed and does not discriminate. It is we who draw what we call bad luck. I quote Cassius from Julius Ceaser” fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings…”All that is required is an insight into ourselves and faith in divine providence. Here lies the crux of my book ‘unanswered’.
Unanswered is all about finding the answers which lay deeply hidden in the core of our hearts but we fail to discover it as we are covered with fog of ego and desires. Unanswered is all about revealing those answers.
Non fiction cum poetic novel are based on life as question and answers. Each poem is supported by an article explaining the poem and reason behind writing same.
So much of questions in me which in turn coming from this mortal world led me to find answers for same and giving solace in this painful world.Why is there pain and sufferings, why do we die,what is morality,how can we become immortals are among those many questions which one will find answers to in my book in a very very simplified form. If my writing can bring peace into someone’s life that would solve the purpose for which book was written.
“From where it came,there shall it go”
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