: About Me

I was born in a small town in Pakistan called Burewala of refugee parents who lost everything in India during and after the 1947 Partition. A few years after the migration to Pakistan, my father found work in the post-war immigration boom in England in 1955 and since he only earned laborer wages, he had to save enough to send for his family a few at a time. (Credit was a thing of the future ). As he left Pakistan, my mother took her five children to live with her parents in Karachi until we could join my father.

In 1956, when I was just four, my mother managed to save and borrow enough to take the trip with at least her two yougest children, my younger brother and me. My other brother and two sisters completed the family migration about a year later. I spent my childhood in Doncaster, England and grew up there until I left home for college in Southampton, England to learn how to be an aerospace designer. A high point during this time for me was to have been priviledged enough to witness the launch of Apollo 16 on my very first trip to the USA in April of 1972. That set me on the path of loving everything American and I resolved to live in this great country one day.

I spent a few years in the aerospace industry but though I was enamored with airplanes and flying, the industry didn't do that much for me. In 1979 I made a significant career move into a new field called Computer Aided Design and continued my headlong path to gear-headedness. A few more years later, I found I had something of an aptitude for marketing and later business strategy. The geek never left my soul however and I managed to become Chief Technology Officer of a company called Computervision Corporation in Massachusetts having migrated to the USA with my wife Rehana and three British sons in 1988. Three American daughters later, in 1998, I was on my way to another fascinating and nascent industry - digital maps for navigation at NAVTEQ in Chicago. Those are the ones used in map websites like Mapquest as well as most car and cell-phone navigation systems. I spent nine years at NAVTEQ becoming, you guessed it, Chief Technology Officer and then Senior VP for Global Marketing and Strategy.

After a nice stock market payout following NAVTEQ's IPO, I decided to pursue a dream or two. One dream was to design and produce a new line of high-end loudspeakers with my partner Gary (so we called our company SALAGAR and you can see my designs at www.salagar.com). Despite rave reviews for the products, we hit the great economic tsunami of 2008, so I've had, er, more time on my hands than I had planned.

Coincidentally over the last year I've been befriended by a devout elderly Christian, called John Callahan who at the age of 75 picked up a paint brush and started painting. I'm a Muslim, so we naturally found a lot to talk about, which is something of an inspiration for my writings in comparative terms on religion. Meanwhile, John approached me about marketing his paintings and before too long I also found myself launching a web site for him with both his paintings and various kinds of "tastefully designed" products featuring his artwork (try www.artcallahan.com) to see why I was taken by him and his work.

While surfing, I found Helium one day andI liked the look of not only the material but also the effort to preserve civility that is so often missing in online forums these days. This is where, I pitched my tent and have written about virtually anything I wanted ever since. Very liberating!

In December 2009, a thought struck me about a particularly interesting situation about which I was intrigued enough to imagine a story around it. With a few more days of tinkering with the idea, a novel was born. In a state of frenzied concentration lasting six weeks a nearly 600 page novel called SIKANDER did indeed emerge and now I''m happy to say was published in the summer 2010.

Early in 2011, I submitted the book for consideration at the Los Angeles Book Festival. Imagine my surprise and delight when at the end of February I learned that SIKANDER had not only won the category of General Fiction but also was the GRAND PRIZE winner across all fiction and non-fiction categories!

Check out the book's website at www.sikanderbook.com to read all about it.

My passion is ...

my wife and family

I know too much about ...

them

My parents always told me ...

not to be an artist. "You'll need to die to be famous" they'd say

My childhood ambition ...

To be an artist

My favorite memory ...

watching Apollo 16 leave the launch pad in April 1972

Why I write ...

to speak from the heart instead of the tongue

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

is "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortensen and CNN

My first job ...

was helping to build fighter jets (honest!)

My best moment ...

is too private to share

My inspiration ...

This amazing world we've been given

Politics, News & Issues > US News Controversy over building a Mosque at Ground Zero

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We enjoy celebrating the greatness of this country and its hard won freedoms. Indeed, such things are most worthy of celebration. And since its founding, the United States of America has always held that religious freedom is a cornerstone of this democracy as much as separation of church and state and the prevention of a tyranny of the majority. Yet, such an outlook has begun appearing almost foolishly naïve when set against the backdrop of the present so-called debate on places of worship. Most particularly these days, Muslim worship. Muslims were the first community in the world to ...

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