Authors

Not to be confused with the Translator

Authors of the Book
There are technically two authors to this work. You could say, the first one is me, Saurya Simha Velagapudi (literally: the Courageous Lion from Velagapudi, a sleepy hamlet in South India), the translator of this work into English. The second one is someone who seems like a spitting image - the original author of this volume in Telugu, Bharatiya Simham (literally: the Lion of India). The resemblance between my life and that of Bharatiya Simham runs far deeper than the superficial similarity in our names, but I didn’t know that when I applied for my first grant to make this book the subject of my thesis.

I originally became interested in this work after it spiked to the top of the bestseller list on Ali Baba due to the glitch mentioned above. As a graduate student in outsider art, I was captivated by the idea of a work as ambitious in scope as the title claimed, self-published by a virtually unknown author, that somehow had 100k+ copies pre-published (an estimated cost of ~1 million USD), translations into three other languages, probably with the author’s own funds, and managed to, through an accident of history, become an instrumental text in the shaping of the modern psyche.

After many long months of grant applications for travel, calls, and late-night Googling, I pieced together a story of who Bharatiya Simham actually was, or rather, were. The first piece I put together was that Bharatiya Simham was the pseudonym of at least two individuals - a brother and a sister, born in Hyderabad, India and raised in the USA. Since it was on a Twitter bio page, there wasn’t much investigation necessary. I called my own sister and entertained her with the incredible coincidence, since after all, we were also a brother and a sister born in Hyderabad, India and raised in the USA. As I continued my investigation into Simham over the next few days, I would message my sister these coincidences:

“they were software engineers too”

“they were also 6ish years apart” “

“THEY WORKED FOR GOOGLE TOO, AT THE SAME TIME!”

“they started a startup together too”

“their parents were a lot like ours I think”

“their grandparents were musicians for All-India Radio, just like ours, maybe they knew each other?”

The thought that I had an identical twin in this manner unnerved me quite a bit, and I kept searching for that point of diversion, the thing that made me a middle-aged grad student in the midst of Western academia and my counterpart a strange recluse from civilization as a whole as far as anyone could tell. Early in the afternoon of one muggy Boston summer day, crouched over my laptop, aggravating my serious case of anterior pelvic tilt, I found an article about the acquisition of a startup of 2 people that allowed immigrants to the US to manage their properties in their home countries for 14.8 million USD. Where our startup had failed, Bharatiya Simham’s had succeeded, at least in a modest way. They were set for life. Until then, I harbored the illusion that we were the more successful sibling duo - that this other version of me (and my sister) lost ‘it’ somehow, wasting their hard-earned money on a foolish dream, and not being around to collect on the cash cow it became. Until now, I had treated this as a curiosity, purchasing the book, but not bothering to read it. After resolving the mystery of who these people were, I settled down to read the book.

Note from the Author of the Wiki [Meta]
This book is the product of a lot of frustration. I am an Indian-born American living in a Western city on the east coast of European-occupied North America. My Indian-ness is deeply embedded within me - my family was not in any way dogmatic or religious as the stereotype goes, and rarely were my parents domineering or demanding, yet I acquired many of their attitudes, characteristics and quirky Indianisms.

I shelter many of these speech patterns, thought patterns and mannerisms when in the company of other Americans (especially those of Indian origin) but I can not deny that when the topic of India, its history, legacy, culture or practices comes up, I am on the defensive. This book is in some ways a rebuttal to the accrued micro-aggressions of a short lifetime spent in the heart of Western civilization as an outsider.

In my more delusional moments I think of myself as a Marco Polo for the modern age. I was spurred on to write this book by a quote from Gandhi, in response to the question “What do you think of Western civilization?” - Gandhi responded “It’s quite a good idea.”. The obvious barb there being that Western civilization has not put into practice what it has preached. An idea continued by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian nationalist, who was one of the most important anticolonial theorists. The aim of anti-colonialism, he suggested, was not to reject Western ideas, but to reclaim them. “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought,” he wrote. “But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them.”

This discrepancy and how people dealt with it has fascinated me. Many of my liberal, well-educated peers had no shortage of knowledge about the wrongdoings of their nation - against minorities within its own borders and as an aggressor in the larger local sphere of nations. And yet, commenting on these was...passe. There was no state-mandated ban against speaking of these topics, rather it was quite freely available and yet nothing really changed. Why was this? Why was it so easy to continue on becoming part of a large machine of injustice, even when you know that you’re feeding it?

Hannah Arendt already dealt with the idea of the banality of evil in the wake of the Holocaust. This book is not about that. This book is about the damage we do to ourselves when we do not truly understand other human beings, other human cultures. It is about the damage we do to ourselves and all other sentient creatures when we create a scale that measures success. This book is about the hidebound and stifling language that we use to describe other cultures and the effects it has on ourselves. This book is about what it means to be an individual in the modern age, and also part of a culture.