It may not be a coincidence that Haulianlal Guite, an Indian Administrative Services officer of the Rajasthan cadre chose to write his first novel, Confessions of a Dying Mind, on the God question and atheism. Guite, after all, is a student of philosophy. But the young officer is clear that his book is anything but a dry, boring account of either religion of atheism.
“It addresses the question of whether God exists in a simple way, without over-simplying the concept,” says Guite, who began to write this book when he was preparing for the UPSC exams. The rough draft however underwent several rewrites over many years, before he finally came up with a book that takes a fresh look at the oldest and most profound anxiety of man — does God exist?
The book takes a non-fictional but novelised route to debate on the God question. Guite uses a protagonist, Albert Dyers, a journalist and an atheist who faces a near death experience and in his semi-unconscious state gets into a conversation with Walker, who claims to be an angel. What follows is a questioning of a set of basic questions like: Has the advancement of science made the concept of God irrelevant? Is the concept of atheism logical? “This is perhaps the first novelised philosophy book that has been written. Most of the books that attempt to answer philosophical questions do so in a very academic, boring way. However, I do believe that even a layman, who isn’t interested in philosophy as a subject, seeks an answer for the question, “Does God exist?” That is what prompted me to write this book in the way that I have,” shares Guite of his book that is published by Bloomsbury and is now available online.
{{/usCountry}}The book takes a non-fictional but novelised route to debate on the God question. Guite uses a protagonist, Albert Dyers, a journalist and an atheist who faces a near death experience and in his semi-unconscious state gets into a conversation with Walker, who claims to be an angel. What follows is a questioning of a set of basic questions like: Has the advancement of science made the concept of God irrelevant? Is the concept of atheism logical? “This is perhaps the first novelised philosophy book that has been written. Most of the books that attempt to answer philosophical questions do so in a very academic, boring way. However, I do believe that even a layman, who isn’t interested in philosophy as a subject, seeks an answer for the question, “Does God exist?” That is what prompted me to write this book in the way that I have,” shares Guite of his book that is published by Bloomsbury and is now available online.
{{/usCountry}}He hopes that the book will cut across all age groups and will specially appeal to youngsters. And in the meanwhile, he has already started penning his next book. “It will be a fictional novel and will be a take on my concept of Utopia,” he says.
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