Sharda, Vitasta and Haerath: A Personal Civilizational Journey

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

Author biography

Pankaj Kaul is a Consultant Cardiac Surgeon by profession, in the UK. He has performed over six thousand heart operations in his 39-year cardiac surgical career and continues to operate with the same intensity as before.

He has been published widely in peer reviewed cardiac surgical journals, addressing the entire spectrum of adult cardiac surgery.

He is on the Editorial Board of a large number of cardiothoracic journals and holds membership of many national and international cardiothoracic societies. He has a well-recognised teaching and training profile at undergraduate, post-graduate, regional and national levels and is a recipient of many clinical excellence awards. This is his first attempt at writing on anything beyond cardiac surgery. Not surprisingly, however, he has written two books together, a kind of twin adventure, a diptych, hinged together by a common post-covid effort. This book, Sharda, Vitasta and Haerath, is a diasporic reminiscence of Kashmir, a land that might have changed externally but that is caressed agelessly in the heart of every Kashmiri.

The second of the twins, Atom to Cell to Idea, has a wider canvass and deals with a variety of subjects touching philosophy, science, religion, culture and politics.