Today, 23rd April is celebrated a world book day. As an author, I want to take this opportunity to write something about the importance of literature. 23rd April is selected as a date by UNESCO to celebrate all things reading, from books themselves, to authors, to illustrators and bookstores. Today, I would like to share with you my journey of becoming an author. I hope that this journey might inspire many to write and make contributions to literature. It is through writing books that one can offer a solution, inspire others, Teach others, help others, etc.

To be very honest, I have been a creative person since my early childhood but never articulated my thoughts on paper. My first big writing assignment was my Master’s thesis at Texas Tech University. It was not that I was writing something for first time but this assignment involved putting on paper everything that I had researched in my thesis work. Thankfully, I had a great thesis adviser like Dr. Richard Gale and he really helped get my thesis in a good shape. It gave me a sense of achievement as it involved a lot of hard work. Hence, I was excited to see the hard copy of my thesis. My thesis in the Bachelor of Electronics Engineering at University of Mumbai was not as original as my Master’s research. Besides, Masters thesis was also a sole contribution as compared to Bachelors thesis, which involved two other team members.

Until 2008, I have mostly been a reader of academic books and related material. I read novels on and off but never finished any novel that I started with in first place. Subjects like Politics, Socio-economics, etc. were hardly my interests but I was always interested in reading stuff about semiconductor industry and progress of Moore’s law. It was this passion for semiconductors that inspired me to pursue a Masters degree from Texas Tech University. In year 2008, I was working at Texas Instruments Inc. when stock markets of US and across the world started to fall beginning October 2008. It was an interesting time when my co-workers at Texas Instruments Inc. starting speaking about failure of Capitalism,etc. I started to take some interest in economics and tried to read about Capitalism.

In early February 2009, I came across Dr. Ravi Batra, a well-known economist, who I really did not know at all before February 2009. There was a talk by Dr. Batra and I was surprised to know that he had forecasted the present stock market crash in 2006 and also wrote it in a book. There was hardbound book that I purchased at this event entitled “THE DOWNFALL OF CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM. CAN CAPITALISM BE SAVED?” It was the first non-fiction book of over 400 pages that I picked up to read. As I started reading the book, I started enjoying the book. The book was essentially about patterns of history. I have to confess that history used to be my most hated subject in secondary school ( It could have been because of the style of teaching at secondary school ). However, After reading Professor Batra’s book, I started appreciating patterns of history. I could start understanding the logic based on which Dr. Batra made his uncanny economic forecasts.

After enjoying this book, I started reading more and more books. I became an avid reader. How this transformation happened in my life is truly a miracle. Till date, I should have read more than 250 -300 books after 2008 which are not academic books. Now, I just love reading and I have become one of those readers who like to spend their free time reading books. Just one book can change your life and you too can become an avid reader like me if you pick up just one great book. There are so many great books to read and it is up to you to grab a book and start enjoying the book. My interest in books, because of my reading, also increased my interest to become an author of a book one day.

“Writing a book should be a daunting task”. This is precisely what I thought and the very thought about writing a book used to scare me. However, I started writing short articles and my ideas as well as my unique style of writing did gain a lot of appreciation. Thanks to the social media, I got good reviews from many and it encouraged me to write more. However, Once I had authored so many articles, I thought that I have a lot of ideas and I need to think about a way to bring these different ideas together to write a book. Of course, I was not sure what the end product could turn out to be. I also was not sure how the response to my book would be. I knew that I was writing a book but unless I have something unique to say in my book, how would it interest a prospective reader?

My book was daunting as I wanted to challenge the established norms of the way of doing business as I found them to be defective. I could envision a much better world for all and much better use of technology to solve innumerable problems of humanity. Coming from a technological background, I could foresee what could happen to an economy if technological progress and scientific progress are not used for greater human good but are just used to increase profits for a few individuals but create a misery for many. In fact, I could foresee a backlash against the Tech sector due to present unsustainable progress of technology resulting in an unbalanced economy. With all these ideas in mind, I gave 6 months of my time to author a wonderful book which has been appreciated by so many in this world today. It has reached prime ministers and finance ministers of countries, economists and policy makers in several countries who are looking for an alternative to present unsustainable economic progress, given me a recognition as an economist without going through a school of economics, made me an author of books on technology and economics.

It has given me a sense of achievement and had I not taken the first step of reading and writing, I would not have made it here. If someone like me, who never read much in past could transform to become an avid reader and a prolific writer, it could also happen to many others in this world. The title of my first book is “MASS CAPITALISM: A BLUEPRINT FOR ECONOMIC REVIVAL“. The most interesting thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment is that intellectuals from right as well as left side of political spectrum agree that I have offered a perfect solution to technological progress and resulting economic progress. They have appreciated how I have concluded my book and I would like to restate my book’s conclusion below as I end this blog –

Economic democracy with economic decentralization should please the classical and neoclassical economists and the entire business community because of its small government. The neo-Keynesians would be happy because of low unemployment and inherent stability in the US economy. Because wages would catch up with productivity, there would be less inequality in the economy. Even the CEOs of the US microelectronics industry would like this business model because it would ensure a steady growth in corporate profits and, hence, a steady rise in share prices of their corporations. By bringing about an end to the control of businesses by the financial world, such a system would put an end to the ballyhoo and hoopla of speculative bubbles, which has been always been followed by a crash of US stock markets. In this way, there is not a single economic ill that cannot be solved by mass capitalism as the United States deals with the rise of the industrial power of China.

I wish you all a very Happy World Book day 2017. I hope that you will also think about reading what I have written. Perhaps, You will be inspired to write or read more books after you have read my book. I would be glad to be a part of your journey.

About the Author

Apek Mulay is a Business and Technology Consultant at Mulay’s Consultancy Services. He has authored a trilogy in three consecutive years viz. Mass Capitalism: A Blueprint for Economic Revival (2014), Sustaining Moore’s Law: Uncertainty Leading to a Certainty of IoT Revolution (2015) and How the Information Revolution remade Business, and the Economy: A Roadmap for Progress of the Semiconductor Industry with More than Moore and Beyond Moore (2016). His monograph on technology is entitled Improving Reliability of Tungsten Plug Via on an Integrated Circuitry: Process Flow in BiCMOS and CMOS technology with Failure Analysis, Design of Experiments, Statistical Analysis & Wafer Maps (2016). Mulay is author of patent Surface Imaging with Materials Identified by Colors. USCIS honored him with US permanent residency under the category of foreign nationals with extraordinary abilities in science and technologies. He engineer, economist, author, blogger and social entrepreneur in an e-commerce business http://Calcuttahandicraft.in .www.ApekMulay.com