BY VISHNU MAKHIJANI
New Delhi– An attempted whistleblowing gone wrong saw Aman Singh Maharaj spend three months in the doghouse and resulted in a 1,200-word manuscript that took him 16 years to whittle down to 400 pages. The outcome is ‘A Dalliance with Destiny’, a novel that dissects the human condition with extraordinary attention, with the fourth generation South African of Indian descent lamenting that though universal suffrage was achieved in 1994, its remnants still exist in the country’s social structure.
“I have always been an avid reader, as I grew up in a small town, and the only choice of entertainment in the eighties was either sports or reading. I was not good at sports. I knew that there was a book for me; writing has always been a passion, but it doesn’t pay the bills. This has only happened now,” the Durban-based 49-year-old Maharaj, a civil engineer, MBA, PhD in development economics and a businessman, told IANS in an interview.
“In the year 2006 I became a whistleblower of some grave discrepancies at work. In the end, it blew up on my face, and I was charged with gross insubordination. I was suspended for three months and that was when I put pen to paper. I wrote some 1,200 pages in those three months, and thereafter it took 16 years to edit it down to about 400 pages.
“The rounds of self-editing were a painstaking process, and there were times during those 16 years that I really got tired of it. My publishers in the UK, Austin Macauley, liked what I...
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