Bøger af Nirmal Kumar

'Bin Udgam Ke Srota' has been enthusiastically received by the Hindi world. The famous Hindi novelist Jainendra Kumar wrote: "The very first few pages had hit my heart with sweet pangs. By the time I reached the end, I was amazed and overtaken by the sincerity of emotions and the power of expression. This novel had appears to me nothing short of a miracle., the reader cannot miss the sensations coming from his deepest soul that he misses in the humdrum of life. I got all this from 'Bin Udgam Ke Srota'. If this novel has the grandeur of elevated thoughts, it has, in equal measures, the sweetness of genuine emotions. Nowadays, I find novels only full of thoughts and lacking in emotions. I'm told that it is inevitable in this age of science. However, if literature is of any use, it has to compensate for the abstraction that the thinkers gift. In any case, literature should not be heavy and devoid of sweetness and the juices of life. I found sweetness and light both integrated and balanced in this work of Nirmal. The fact that he is very young and his literature is full of the spirit of life fills me with great hope. What has touched me the most is the impregnation of speed, movement and joy in this novel. Like some cataract breaking loose from the very root of life, flowing gracefully with verve and enthusiasm, it has the power to suddenly turn into a light shower from heaven. Nirmal embraces all the bitter as well as sweet experiences of life without the slightest hesitation - indeed, Nirmal is a rare boon...... I believe Nirmal Kumar will have a unique place in Hindi literature and his contribution will carve a niche for itself." This novel is about love. The title itself suggests love, for the words in the title translated into English mean certain brooks whose origin is untraceable. The hero of the novel, Ravi Kant, is an adolescent, who loves two girls, both madly. One of them is Mini, his elder sister and the other, Savani, who is an adolescent, like him. What strikes the reader is a truth of human nature, that, in spite of being loves of equal intensity, love for the two differs right from the roots, like a rose and a jasmine, sprouting close in the same soil. The beauty of each comes out spontaneously, since there is no weight of morality on any of these two loves. There is no trace of any effort on part of the author to keep them separate and distinct from each other. They grow uninhibitedly, but nature flowers each differently, as if the difference is a part of nature, not a gift of moral education. Nowhere does the hero curb or intellectually restrain his spontaneous feeling of oneness with his sister. These are not ordinary feelings. These are fiery feelings, emblazing with passion, the feelings of a man who cannot imagine himself separated from her, yet the burning passion seems instinctively informed from within. His love for her knows no limit and yet knows its direction. Nirmal Kumar seems to have dug up the very roots of these two loves. He has revealed the truth of both, and it is heartening to see that love is not subject to ethics. If anything, its roots are deeper and its stem is higher than ethics. If analysis is permissible of lyrical characters, Mini and Savani show that woman's nature is fragile, not fickle, and her character is, comparatively, stronger than man's. 'Bin Udgam Ke Srota' is a classic that deserves to be placed among the best novels in all literature. When Hindi will become free of the sectarian warlords of literature, this novel is sure to get its place in world literature.

The Burning Sands of Sindh is the story of the beginning of India's decline, and enslavement of a thousand years, set in the eighth century. It contains a vast range of human experiences and emotions from the bizarre to the sublime. It is the story of every man and woman who chooses to walk in the faint but sure light of the atman. It is the story of those that do not want to live by the vagaries of chance or destiny. The modern rationalists have confined reason to a combination of sense-observations and logic. It is a neat method adopted by genuine seekers of knowledge, yet it lacks the joy that knowledge brings to the human heart. The expectation of the heart is not a whim, for nobody suffers more due to lack of this joy than those that lie in the Procrustean bed of empirical knowledge. Intellect of Indian philosophers was not only empirical. It evolved from Dhi (empirical) to Medha, i.e. the intellect aware of sources other than empirical, to Pragya, i.e. the intellect intimate with immortality, to Ritambhara, i.e. the intellect that integrates the other three and discovers nature of the material truth in the mundane world. Beyond these lie the transcendental truth that includes everything - the material and the transcendental - and satisfies the mind completely. Man needs to investigate the way to happiness. Nirmal Kumar has offered in this book a way to it, which may fit in the definition of rationality of a majority of the modern people. This story is set in the eighth century, when the Arabs invaded India and enforced Islam for the first time. It was not like the earlier invasions of the Iranians, the Greeks, the Shakas and the Huns. The Arab invasion aimed at wiping out India's spiritual culture, which did not use deceit, cunning and cruelty. The invaders aimed at changing the human personality from natural to artificial. They wanted humans to fit in the measurements of their newfound faith. They wiped out the most populated cities of Sind that resisted them. This gory event in India's history coincided with the brief life span of Shankaracharya, one of the world's great rationalists. He taught that when the intellect stops taking one further towards truth, a deeper faculty, Pragya intellect brings intimations of immortality to the mind. It grows only after the soul sacrifices itself to the Absolute. After Pragya, the Ritambhara intellect grows. It integrates the mortal body and the immortal soul. Self-sacrifice only introduces the soul to its immortality. It gave the people the secret of conquering fear and all negative emotions in those troubled times.