Paul Thind

I was born in a small village, Mohie, in Punjab, India. At the age of 11, in November 1965, I arrived in Ealing, London accompanied by my mother and brothers. Our father had arrived in 1963. I was brought up as a Sikh, but in time as I learnt English and studied science and went on to university I shed not only my religion but also many aspects of my culture. What was I to do after being exposed to Darwin, Newton etc. and European culture?

I started keeping a diary at the age of sixteen.

My first job was at 3M, in cold Minnesota, after I obtain my Ph.D in 1979. After four years I moved to Connecticut before moving back to London in 1985. It was while in Minnesota that I started to write my first book, Women in White, which remains unpublished. From 1985 to 2017 I worked and lived London, Zurich, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Vienna with spells in India and Canada. Pretty much my whole life has been spent in the financial services sector.

In 1998 I started to write Dispalced after my father died. He was a unique man. He was religious. He was a soldier. He fought agains the Germans and the Japanes. I wanted to preserve a little of his life story. However, as the story I began to tell, took on its own life and the work ended up, largely, as fiction - for in fiction one can explore reality far better than what happens in the life of one person.

In 2016 while I was in Sydney I started to keep notes on the unfolding of Brexit. Only in 2019 these notes became formulated, as the climax of divisions took hold in Great Britain. I was interested in the causes of Brexit. Talking to working class white people in the Midlands made me realise that the imagined world in which the English live in, was not real. It was if they hadn't moved on from the Empire and WW2 victory. They were still glorifying their place, when the United Kingdom was stagnant or in relative decline. Brexit was not only sad, but a rude awakening of the conscious of a nation.

After retirement I put to type the very many poems I had written in the course of my life. These are in Rebirth.

I am married and am a father of 3 grown children, 2 boys and a girl.

I am retired and live in London, Zurich and Delhi.

I have still several books to complete that are stored on One Drive. These half completed works are clogging up the space in my head and preventing me from doing something new.

13/10/2020