Sena Desai Gopal

Often, I hear people say they are writers because they love to write. And since I am a writer, I wonder, "But will people want to read what I write?" And that is, perhaps, the biggest challenge to becoming a successful writer. Will people want to read my story?

We all have a story to tell by virtue of the lives we live, the experiences we have, the lessons we learn and the people we become as a result. Experiences become unique when the perspective changes and that is exactly what prompted me to write my novel, The Temple.

The book reflects my experiences as the only child of a landowning family in southern India. My life was unremarkable until I moved to England and then the United States to pursue further studies. I went to graduate school in both countries but my real education came about outside of the classroom.

For the first time I truly appreciated how easy my life had been in India. For the first time I also truly understood how wretched and heartless poverty in India is. It wasn’t that I was unaware of how the poor of the world lived - I had worked for a development news channel in India writing about issues of poor and marginalized communities and also been involved in various human rights activities. But neither in England nor the United States did I encounter a person who didn’t own a pair of shoes. Nor did I meet a desperate father trying to sell his teenage daughter for less than $20 so he could feed his entire family for a month.

The idea for a book was borne from a sudden insight I had - that extreme poverty and wealth coexisted in India in apparent harmony as neither was questioned. I had inhabited one world and witnessed the other and a story, I thought, about the meeting of the two would be fascinating. I didn’t begin writing right away – I was distracted because I met my future husband, got married, and had two beautiful children. Once that was sorted I sat down to write my book and here are the first few pages. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

More of my work is available on this website. I am trained as a science and medical journalist and written extensively about everything that falls broadly in that category – medicine, physics, sociology, and psychology. I also write about food and travel since my two greatest passions, besides my husband and our kids, are cooking and traveling. My work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Nature Network Boston, Heritage India magazine, children’s magazines, and newsletters of various universities including Harvard and Yale.

In my spare time I write a blog about the struggles, some real and some perceived, of being an Indian-American mom.

Comments are welcome at sena_desai@​yahoo.com