7 Seconds: A Typical Guy, Atypical Life

Set in the religiously important city of Mathura, the novel starts in future year 2025 with a mysterious female narrator named Satyaa describing the protagonist Akshant Sharma’s twin kids playfully teasing each other. The narrator then goes almost 35 years back to start again the protagonist’s story in a flashback to cover the protagonist’s birth, childhood, teenage and adulthood in first person as he told her about himself. She tells about his life at each of its stages while initially focusing on his teenage just as he had told her in their many email conversations and also as she remembers of him.


As the author of this story I seek to share a part of what I have experienced as a teenager almost till the middle of the story from which I hope to convey the lessons which I have learnt to my teenaged readers. It later becomes a romance-filled young-adult-fiction as it matures and is aimed at the 16-24 age group of readers to finally end like a thriller involving the protagonist fighting off the terrorist hijackers at one stage and later him being the target of a retaliatory attack. In my fresh writing, the budding author in me puts forward a common man’s view towards the system of the nation and the need to move forwards with time and reconsider the present viability of the social facet in India.

I convincingly try to exploit my lyrical prowess in the 5 Hindi poems (few of which are songs on YouTube), and I have also composed poetic pieces both in Hindi and English languages that touch both mind & heart. I also share my views about various malpractices that teenagers today follow as a fashion. I have also attempted travel guiding, describing Delhi’s Old Fort via the protagonist acting as a travel guide for a German-French tourist party at the Delhi and later the Taj Mahal at Agra for the protagonist’s fiancée.

Other than English, the novel includes small decorative inputs in Hindi, French and German languages apart from minor inputs in the South Indian language Kannada, the North Indian language Punjabi and North Indian dialect Haryanvi with translations following in the brackets to each of the sentences in some other language. The script remains uniformly Roman all throughout.