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Excursions in Past and Present is a collection of twenty short stories and essays which the author wrote over a period of the last two decades. The stories and essays cover a widely diverse range of topics such as problems of practising faith and religious ceremonies, general village life as the author saw before as a child and sees now as a senior person, human relationship and solidarity, teachers as authorities for the author in his later life, author’s yearning for food items of his childhood, and nuances noticed by the author in the languages he came across.
We live in a world where we follow ideological, social, religious or philosophical concepts of life. They determine our attitude or behaviour towards others. This is what this collection of short stories and essays is about. In the collection the author has tried to present his version of events and observations which he heard from his elders or which he himself witnessed, remembered and imagined during his life. Characters and events in these short stories and essays span over a period starting from the twentieth century up to the present. Each story is a narration of strong and weak sides of human behaviour.
Keshra Sangwal
KESHRA SANGWAL was born in Amarpura, a village 12 km south of Abohar (Punjab) in 1945. He completed his secondary school education (1962) and BSc (1965) in Abohar, and received MSc (1968) and PhD degrees (1972) in Solid State Physics from Sardar Patel University (Gujarat). After shifting to Poland in 1980, he obtained his habilitation degree in Experimental Physics from University of Łódź (1986) and the national title of Professor of Physical Sciences (1993) from the President of Poland.
With his teaching career starting as a science master in Government High School, Maujgarh (Punjab) for a brief period (1965-1966) before his MSc and PhD studies, Keshra Sangwal has taught physics at college and university levels as assistant professor, associate professor and professor. He retired from active academic services as senior professor of physics in 2015 and is an emeritus professor in the Lublin University of Technology (Poland). He has worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Crystallography, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow (Russia), a visitor at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie VI, Paris (France), a UNDP specialist at the Crystal Growth Centre, Anna University, Madras (now Chennai), a visiting scientist in the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, and a visiting professor in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona and the Hiroshima University.
Keshra Sangwal is an initiator and a co-founder of the Polish Society for Crystal Growth, and was its president (1998-2001). He enjoys studying ancient literature on religion and philosophy, listening classical western and oriental music, and reading romantic poetry. For over five decades Keshra Sangwal has been concentrated in scientific research on a wide range of topics related to crystalline and noncrystalline solids and has published profoundly as original research articles in various international journals and specialized books by different international publishers such as Elsevier, Trans Tech and Wiley. One of his books on the dissolution of crystals was translated into Russian by Mir Publisher (Moscow). According to a ranking, carried out by Stanford University and Elsevier in 2020, of 8 million scientists working in different scientific fields across the World, he occupies a position in the list of top 1% scientists.
The collection of short stories and essays entitled “Excursions in Past and Present” is his first nonscientific work.
