Vipul Shah

I ran away once — in 10th standard — for a beautiful, reckless infatuation. Not because my home was unloving, but because I was the kind of teenager who believed feelings were bigger than walls, rules, and consequences.

That one act didn't just change my life. It revealed my nature: intense, stubborn, all-in. Years later, that same intensity would reappear on the page as Pravash — because much of his storm, his hunger, and his falling-and-rising is stitched from my own real memories.

After that runaway chapter, I entered a new school… and met Amisha. She didn't “save” me in a cinematic way. She did something rarer: she made me believe I could become someone I respected. Her faith in me pushed me back toward education — and eventually I completed my Master of Science from BITS, Pilani.

Before that, when I was away in Bangalore for my bachelor's studies, life wasn't glamorous. I took a part-time job at Pizza Hut as a cashier — INR 20 an hour — not for pocket money, but to pay my bills for outstation calls to Amisha. If you've ever counted coins while waiting for a dial tone, you know what devotion looks like.

We married in 2009, after ten years of beautiful friendship and relationship. A year later, 2010 brought both hope and heartbreak — a first pregnancy that ended in loss, and health challenges that tested Amisha in ways we never expected.

In those years, my family became a quiet fortress around us. I have two siblings — Kanan (my sister, 6 years older) and Dipen (my brother, 4 years older). Dipen has always treated me like his first son — doing everything in his power to make sure I succeed.

And then there are my parents — Dinesh Shah and Mina Shah — the roots. My mother, deeply devoted to Jainism and its rituals, is also the one who sparked something fierce in me. She wrote articles against animal cruelty and killing — and without realizing it, she was handing me the emotional core of what I would later write: compassion that refuses to be convenient.

In 2012, our whole family went on a pilgrimage trip to Gujarat — to Ayodhyapuram and then Palitana. On that trip, my cousin Bharat Doshi spoke passionately about Jain cosmology and Jambudveep Architecture. I mocked him — not because I lacked respect, but because I was trained by modern life to laugh at what I didn't understand. And yet, his certainty stayed with me like a stubborn echo.

Back in Bangalore, I began researching — alongside my tech job. I met scholars and professors. I listened. I argued. I learned. Then YouTube sent me down strange rabbit holes: people in the West working on theories rooted in Christian cosmology that, to my surprise, aligned strongly with Jain frameworks.

I went deeper — through Vishnu Puran, Harivansh Puran, and Tattvartha Sutra — and kept finding recurring patterns pointing toward the same larger architecture. The word Jambudveep appears in so many Hindu shlokas… but when I asked friends who recited them, most couldn't tell me what it meant. That gap fascinated me. It still does.

During those years in Bangalore, I also supported an organization called Sath, which supported girl babies in an orphanage. I started teaching the kids there — and then pulled in friends to support them too — until we had every child in that orphanage cared for. Service changes the way you look at “good” and “evil”. It makes those words heavier — and more real.

In 2019, Amisha and I decided we would move forward with adoption. I was nearing my 40s, and we were tired of living in “maybe.” Then life surprised us again. We were blessed with a pregnancy — and on 1 January 2020, our son Soham was born.

Soon after, the world entered the COVID era. For us, it was a blessing in disguise. I got time I never would have had otherwise — time at home, time to watch my son grow, time for balance. And in that quieter rhythm, a thought returned with force: I always wanted to write a story about my own adventurous life — and fuse it with everything I had been researching about Jambudveep.

I'm not an avid reader. I've read only a few books. But when I read Amish Tripathi's Shiva Trilogy, something clicked — his voice, his conviction, the way he built a world you could feel. Alongside that, Jeffrey Archer shaped my sense of pacing and storytelling. And that is how this series was born: my lived reality braided into a cosmology-driven story-universe — a contemporary epic that asks: what if the world is bigger than we've been told, and the Matrix holding it together is beginning to crack?

Bharat Kshetra – The Hidden Matrix is my debut novel — Book 1 of the Jambudveep series. If you feel Pravash's choices are too intense, too impulsive, too human… that's because I've lived some version of that intensity myself. And if the cosmology feels like it's written with obsession… that's because it was.