Sharda, Vitasta and Haerath

This book has come about serendipitously. A heart surgeon suddenly decides to write after his transformative experiences during Covid Pandemic. This is a collection of 56 essays, reflecting 2500 years of Kashmir's cultural and philosophical legacy, seen through the perspective of one life, which was shaped by its ideas, inheritances and reality. It is a personal meditation on the heritage of Kashmir that binds it in a civilizational arc with the rest of India. 'The author's love for Kashmir, its land, rivers and mountains, its geography, culture, history, and its religious and philosophical thought, shines through the entirety of this book. 'This is a book that will stay with you long after the last page is turned. It will ask you to think harder, remember deeper, and perhaps undertake your own pilgrimage - not just to the Valley on a map, but to that inner Kashmir that endures wherever memory is not surrendered. 'May Sharda, Vitasta and Haerath find its rightful place among the works that do not merely catalogue pain but alchemize it into meaning - so that someday, when the river remembers us back, we might return with something of our soul still intact'. Sushil Fotedar