In 2019 I wrote that I had taken the first of a hundred steps. This is the rest of them.
In the Garuda Purana there is a hell kept for the man who leaves his work unfinished. They boil him in oil.
I do not have that level of tolerance.
So I finished the job.
The first step
I wrote Unfailing in 2019. I put it on Kindle, botched the paperback, and it was never launched properly.
The wish to tell stories is older than the book. In college I worked in an internet café for fifty rupees a day. Four computers, one Reliance phone, and every evening a room full of strangers arguing about politics and the stock market. Sometimes I told them stories. Mythology, the World Wars, films, and a few of my own making. That was where it started.
When the first draft was done, I wrote this here, on this site:
There are 100 steps to the destination
My first step completed!
Just 99 more to go.
…
I may fall behind.
But, I will not give up…
I fell behind. Seven years behind.
The Start of Unfailing, the piece I wrote in 2019
Seven years
Much changed in my life.
I survived the death zone. Thirteen thousand kilometres on a bicycle, alone.
And somewhere in all of that it occurred to me. A journey with nothing but my own name on it is pointless.
I have no interest in giving motivational lectures about what I have achieved. The whole point of the work is to become a nobody.
The school
January 2026. I went to Tanzania with my friend Anurag to climb Kilimanjaro, and to spend a few days volunteering at a school I had heard about. Bright English Medium School, in Loliondo.
The moment I stepped in the school, Kili vanished. I never went up. Bright School became the expedition.
We drilled a borehole there, a hundred and fifty metres down, with Anurag's Project Breathe Foundation and a hundred and eighteen people who gave. The water is out of the ground.
That is only forty percent of it. Water out of the ground is not yet water in a child's hand.
The rest is this. Five hundred and thirty children still eat off broken plastic, some of it old paint tins, three times a day. Doors that do not close. Windows without glass. Plumbing that does not run. And the pump works only when the power does, which in Loliondo is not often.
Climbing was never the harder thing.
The book
This expedition is not finished. So this is my attempt, with Unfailing.
Unfailing is a novel. It begins with a man in a corporate job in Hyderabad, living a life that looks settled, until one night it is not. It ends in the high Himalaya. What happens between the two I will not tell you. The book is built so that nothing arrives before its time, and I would rather you met it the way he does.
It is fiction, but not all of it is invented. Some of its moments are lifted from my own life, hour by hour.
This second edition is the book I should have published the first time. Every line has been edited again, word by word. There is a new writer's note, and a glossary for the mountain words.
The number
Every rupee of royalty this book earns goes to that school.
A plan that depends on somebody else saying yes is not a plan.
10,000 copies: the plates and the plumbing. 750 sets of 304-grade steel plates and tumblers, built to outlast every child in the school today. Doors, windows, and the plumbing in both hostels.
20,000 copies: solar power to run the pump, and filtration so the water is safe to drink.
34,500 copies: the elevated water tank, and a water system that runs on its own. At that point the school stops needing us.
I have worked every one of these numbers on the lowest royalty Amazon pays, as if every copy were sold in India. Every copy bought outside India carries more.
Where the money goes, what it costs and what is finished are all published on the Bright English Medium School project page. When a stage is paid for, the account goes up there, with photographs.
How to get it
Unfailing, second edition, is on Kindle from [RELEASE DATE].
Ninety-nine rupees in India. Two dollars ninety-nine everywhere else.
In 2019 I had ninety-nine steps to go. I did not plan the price to match. I am keeping it.
The distance
Every journey I have done, I have measured in distance.
Now the distance is the number. And the first number is ten thousand.
निर्ममो निरहङ्कारः
nirmamo nirahaṅkāraḥ
No "mine." No "I."
Only then, peace.
Bhagavad Gita 2.71
