We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shiva Kumar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Shiva, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned in school and why that lesson is important to you?
A life lesson can only be learned if one is open to it. What I mean is, life is constantly teaching us lessons every waking moment but when we are ready to receive the message, it lands like a lightning bolt. Often powerful bits of wisdom emerge from the most unlikely sources. The question is, are we ready to listen or are we either oblivious or turned off by the messenger?
Here is a moment when a lightning bolt struck me. I was 20 years old and in university in North Carolina. We were studying local Appalachian authors and our class had been invited to visit one of the local authors who lived deep in the woods, James Still had written beautiful and poignant stories about the environmental, economic, and cultural issues surrounding Appalachian coal miners and textile workers. James Still was about 80 at that time. He lived by himself in a log cabin he had built many miles from any town. He had made a wonderful dinner for 10 of us and after a while, as we sat by the fire we got into a deep discussion. He mentioned how he had written a few books in the 1950s and 60s that he thought writers were supposed to write. He told me he now found them to be pretentious drivel. Once his wife died in the late 60’s, he lost his moorings, retreated to the woods, and built his cabin. He became a hermit, a recluse, going into town once a month for some supplies. He said the solitude slowly stripped him of all the ways he had built his character and personality based on the opinion of others and over time with no other stimuli, he learned to rebuild himself from the inside out. He had recovered the real James Still and the books he wrote after that came from the authentic person he had learned to become.
His words hit me like a thunderbolt because I was wide open to receive his message. I don’t know if James Still knew how important his message was to me or if it even mattered to him. What mattered was I received it. It was a gift I cherish to this very day, and it lights my path when I’m in doubt. He taught me to listen to my inner voice. I learned to look at myself in the mirror devoid of all the masks we wear in front of others and embrace that person because that is my authentic self. Others will love and praise you today and curse and hate you tomorrow but above all else to thine own self be true.
Shiva, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Back in 2015, I was diagnosed with cancer. I was 54 years old. I suddenly had to grapple with the idea of mortality. I realized I didn’t have as much time as I thought. I had been a Television producer and director for 3 decades and produced countless TV shows, documentaries, corporate films, commercials, and educational programs. It was a wonderful, exciting life with lots of creativity, travel, new experiences, deadlines, and pressure. I loved it but I was also chafing a bit. I wanted to work on my own creative projects but the needs of raising a family, getting kids to college, etc. made that a bit of a pipedream.
As a boy, I loved reading world mythologies, fantastic stories, epics from Indian mythology, and science fiction, and l used to entertain my siblings and cousins with scary stories that I would act out with character voices, and sound effects.
As I went through chemo and radiation treatments, I started writing, mainly to distract myself from the obvious. I decided to write a mythology-based sci-fi fantasy based on an ancient Indian epic, The Ramayana. I imagined the hero of the myth as an older man coming to terms with his own illness and wanting to rectify the mistakes of his youth. It was when I realized how much joy I received from writing this story that I switched over to writing full-time. I wrote for a year and in the end I had a trilogy. It took a decade to get the three novels finished and published but they are out in the world now.
The trilogy is called ‘The Lanka Chronicles’. Book 1, An Awakening, book 2, A New Reality, and book 3 – Path of Destiny. The trilogy follows Dharma, the Prime Minister of the New India Federation of Planets in the year 2294. 30 years earlier, Dharma fought a Great Battle on the cloaked planet Lanka, where he lost his wife, Arya under mysterious circumstances. He receives a secret message from Lanka, which might be from his long-lost wife, and so sets out on a mission in hopes of reuniting with Arya and atoning for his past. The story is told from the point of view of Maya 1, the first sentient starship on her own voyage of discovery. Through Dharma’s dreams, Maya 1 uncovers his traumatic history, realizing her search for meaning is linked to his quest. The Lanka Chronicles is as much a spiritual odyssey as an exciting space opera. I have also written a screenplay called Journey to Babylon and an Indian mythology-based horror fantasy called Ratri the Cursed.
I also decided to try my hand at another old love of mine, acting. I polished my resume, got some headshots, and found an agent. While I am not being inundated with offers from Spielberg and Scorsese I have appeared as a guest star on several TV shows such as Law and Order, SVU, FBI Most Wanted, Quantico, Madam Secretary, Billions, and several others. I am also hired as a spokesperson and voice-over narrator for several corporate events and meetings and have acted in several commercials and educational projects.
Every day since my diagnosis in 2015 is a gift. I cherish each moment and weigh what one might consider a difficult moment or a rough period in one’s life with the idea of not being alive and that puts things in perspective. You can choose to see the glass as half empty or half full. You have no control over external elements, natural disasters, the stock market, or getting laid off but you do have control over how you react to it. Whether this life is all there is or if we come back to live again, what we know is this life and we have to try and live it to its fullest.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Years ago, when I was newly married and had 2 young kids, I was working as a producer of corporate videos. It was steady work, paid reasonably well and was predictable. It was not glamorous Hollywood, and I was not making edgy feature films, but we were making a living. One of my colleagues who was working with me ended up with a broken marriage and decided to leave NY and try his hand in the film industry in LA. A few years later I started seeing his name as a director on several major TV series and films and felt quite envious and sad that maybe I’d missed my opportunity. In the meantime, we had bought a house and the kids were now in middle school and the idea of just leaving it all to try my luck in LA seemed a bit risky.
As the years went by and the woman I fell in love with and I are celebrating our 40th anniversary, our kids are responsible adults and my son has his own baby boy, I think back to my envy of that friend who ‘made it’ in Hollywood. I know nothing about his life there. I don’t know if he’s happy or sad, if he has had other broken marriages, or if making those big studio films makes him happy. It doesn’t matter. You can’t just pick and choose the best moments of another’s life to envy. It’s a total package. It comes with the good times and the bad times. I sincerely hope he is happy in his world. Now that I have lived 40 years past that moment, I would not trade my life for another. There is so much I am blessed with and cherish, and this is the life I have been given and I love it.
There were several moments earlier in my life where I thought the actions I took were risky but in retrospect, I don’t think they really were. The big moments of my life, asking my wife to marry me, the birth of our children, buying our first home, and starting my production company, all seemed to follow as logical steps. I believe every time we are at a crossroad, we are forced to decide, which leads to other decisions, which leads to yet more decisions, etc. So, I don’t believe we all have a specific destiny which we have to discover, rather we uncover our potential by choosing the path that seems right for our journey. It once again comes back to listening to your inner self, meditating on what path seems right for you, given the decisions you made earlier. Sometimes we choose a path that turns out to be wrong for us, but it is just one branch of our life journey. At the next crossroad, you can always choose a branch that moves you closer to your goal.
I say this as a preface to what I might have considered my riskiest decision to date, and that is to begin a whole new career as a writer and actor in my sixties. But now that I have been at it for a while, I see it as a natural extension of where I was going all along. I realize I am privileged in that I have the wherewithal to make such a decision, which I couldn’t do without the support and consent of my wife who is willing to hold the fort down while I embark on this new journey. Our partnership and mutual desire to see each of us achieve our dreams allows me this freedom.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
My goal is to reimagine epics and stories from India in a modern vernacular. I came to America when I was 14 yrs. old. I devoured comics, pulp fiction, and fantastic stories. I saw a natural progression from those old epics of India to the Lord of the Rings, Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars, Conan the Cimmerian, Elric of Melnibone, and countless other fantasy stories I absorbed in my teenage years. Thor and Wonder Woman are popular comic characters that originated in Norse and Greek mythology. I plan to tread similar ground with my Lanka Chronicles trilogy. To me, science fiction and fantasy are ideal vehicles to explore the human condition.
Many of the ancient legends across all our many cultures are filled with great (almost exclusively male) heroes who go on fantastic quests, face incredible odds, and perform superhuman feats but the collateral damage they leave behind is often staggering. Countless thousands die on the battlefield, pining wives wait in vain, daughters are sacrificed to the gods, unearthly demi goddesses are bedded, and so on. I wondered, if those heroes lived to become older men, would not the guilt of what they did haunt them? Would they not want to atone for their many misdeeds? I wanted to tell the story of The Ramayana from the point of view of the hero as an older man who wants to find redemption.
I have great love and reverence for the original text of The Ramayana and its many variations. I wanted to pay homage to this seminal epic while approaching it from a 21st-century perspective. Archetypal mythologies continue to resonate because each time they’re told, the politics, economics, culture, and spirituality at the time of their dissemination, inform the re-telling. I hope those who are familiar with the original text will recognize all the major beats of the story that I have kept intact but approached it from a modern psychological perspective. I have attempted to find the place where science and spirituality meet, and quantum physics can be interpreted from both a scientific and a spiritual perspective.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://shivakumarauthor.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shivak28/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiva-kumar-04730228
