I was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Having been raised outside
Boston, I attended Goddard College and the University of Vermont, graduating
with a BA in Comparative Religion and Literature. Vermont has
been my base ever since. Apart from my journeys to India, I have also
lived for extended periods in both Lisbon, Portugal and in the mountains
in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
I have traveled extensively by horse-drawn covered
wagon in Vermont as well as by foot on the dirt roads of India with
a brilliant elderly ex-Harvard professor turned wandering holy man.
I have had the good fortune of being taken close by an enigmatic Tibetan
lama, a practitioner of ‘crazy wisdom,’ whose legions of
followers consider him a living god but whose whispered confidences
assured me he was not. I have lived atop a high stone mountain in Greece
with a Greek Orthodox monk who had lived alone in his ancient monastery
for over forty years; I have also been the guest at the home of a millionaire
in the exclusive Breach Candy section of Bombay who believes he is the
incarnation of one of the three Wise Men of the Gospels. I have fled
a siege of the Himalayan town of Darjeeling and eluded the Mexican army
to help indigenous Mayan villagers secure a supply of water. I have
traveled with the man many from the Himalayas consider the Prince of
the Hidden Land of Immortality to the retreat of a Bhutanese lama—once
the official rainmaker for the King of Bhutan—who is seriously
working on a potion to render himself invisible. I have had dinner with
an American Buddhist who confessed he knows the feeling of a knife going
into human flesh.
And I’ve written about it all.
During the past seven years I have been mainly living
in the Himalayas collecting stories, photographing, and absorbing what
the highest mountains in the world and their inhabitants have to teach.
I have had the good fortune to encounter some truly remarkable people
here, some of whom I am presently writing about.
Having been based in Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling Hills
of India’s
eastern Himalayas, for some years, my partner Barbara Gerke and I have
recently moved to the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh in India's
western Himalayas. We are presently settling down and getting to our
respective writing and research work.
Writing for me is both a passion and a craft which
I have spent years patiently developing. Though the quality of my writing
I must leave for others to judge, my commitment to writing is total,
as is my love of stories that both entertain and spur the reader into
exploring his or her own depths.
Having been writing and photographing for many
years, my first full-length book, Windblown Clouds, was published
in the USA in October, 2003 by Escape Media Publishers of Morrison,
Colorado. In June, 2006, the book was also published by Pilgrims Publishing
of Varanasi, India and Kathmandu, Nepal for the Asian market. Pilgrims
Publishers are major players in English language publishing in South
Asia.
In June of 2006 I had a three-week solo exhibit
of my photographs at the Nicholas Roerich Memorial Trust Art Center and
Gallery in Nagar, in the Kullu Valley of Himachal Pradesh in India's
western Himalayas.
Presently, I am completing work and seeking a
publisher for my next book entitled A Crack in the
World, which tells the story of a Tibetan
lama who came to Sikkim in the early 1960s and led a large number of followers
into the high snow mountains in order to 'open the gate' to Beyul, the
Hidden Land of Immortality. For more on this book and excerpts,
click here
Please contact me at:
ShorThomasK@yahoo.com
Indian Mobile: (91) 98 16 77 84 02
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