The Unity Behind Them

By Siddhartha Shukla, *The pilgrim's progress* - Express India - India
Friday, October 2, 2009

For the common man, it's still a distant land full of mysticism and a different kind of spiritualism. Sufism is yet to be decoded by the layman, but in the meantime, Kamla K Kapur has taken an initiative and simplified it a bit.

Poet, writer and playwright, Kamla has come up with her new book on Sufi tales of Rumi, the 13th century Persian Sufi mystic, poet and writer.

The book titled 'Pilgrimage to Paradise - Sufi Tales from Rumi' is a simplified account pertaining to the spiritual essence of Sufism. The short stories in the book have been taken from Rumi's work Masnavi, a six-volume work originally written in Persian.

In town to promote her book, Kamla says, “Rumi was known more as a poet and less as a writer. He dealt with all the aspects of life, not just the ascetic aspect. His manner of story-telling was in the old-style. I have simplified it to make it more accessible to the modern reader.”

These days, Rumi is getting increasingly popular in the Western countries as well, and Kamla feels that “books such as these are reminders that we all operate from a central ego system which makes us view the world in our very own way.”

When asked about how much her own experience in life had contributed in her writing, she smiles, "There are many strands in a story like the strand of our spiritual journey, our career strand and biographical strand. In my case, the career strand took precedence over the biographical strand.”

Her last book was *Ganesha Goes to Lunch*, a vivid collection of stories from the Hindu epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. She plans to complete her trilogy of books on the spiritual aspect of different religions by writing her next book on the Sikh Sakhis.

“I wanted to write books on different religions to show the unity behind them,” says Kamla adding that Gurbani was an inspiration for the book on Rumi’s Sufi tales. On the wide appeal of Sufism among the people she feels, “sufism resonates with the heart. It is a bridge between the Islamic and the non-Islamic world.”

Kapur, who also has eleven English plays to her credit, says that she was motivated by her father to take up writing at a young age. It was only in 2006 that she decided to be a ‘full-time’ writer.

On her immediate future plans, she said that she would be taking a break, not from writing, but from publishing.

[Visit the Author's website http://www.kamlakkapur.com/]