Ex-naval officer Suresh Goswami wins acclaim in film-making & authoring books

During his nearly 40 years of career, Suresh Goswami had donned several hats—naval officer, fleet manager and corporate CEO. So the obvious choice for a second career after retirement would be to offer consultancy services, as most head honchos are wont to doing. Instead, Pune-based Goswami found his calling in the arts.

Today, he is a successful filmmaker and author. In some ways his life has come full circle. “I used to write and direct plays during my college days at Doda, Kashmir,” shares the 63-year-old. He wrote around 30 plays, but admits that he “seriously considered getting into it on a full-time basis only after retirement”.

Indeed, after completing his mechanical engineering from Kashmir University in 1972, he joined the Merchant Navy. “However, I decided to continue my education and enrolled for a distance education master’s degree in business administration from the University of Mexico. Eventually, over a period of 10 years, I was promoted to the post of a chief engineer,” he says. In 1982, he decided to quit and move on.

“I thought my growth would be restricted if I continued with my job. So I switched to the private sector,” he adds. Goswami got a job as a fleet officer at the Independent Maritime and Management Limited, London. Two years later, he shifted to Nigeria after accepting a job offer from the Nigerian Port Authority to revamp the dockyard, and lived there for the next 22 years.

In April 1994, he became the MD at Adamac Group of Companies, where he worked for the next 10 years. In 2005, Goswami shifted to the Middle East after he got an offer to head a steel company, Sohar Steel PLC in Oman. It was smooth sailing till the recession.

“In 2008, my company had to downsize the workforce due to recessionary pressures and I lost my job. I tried to freelance for some time, but in 2010, I returned to India,” he says, adding, “Since I was around 60 years of age, I wanted to stop globe-trotting and enjoy a relaxed life.”

Goswami purchased his retirement home in Pune and currently lives there with his wife. Money wasn’t a consideration for him since he had made smart investments throughout his career.

“My investments were generating an income of about Rs 20 lakh annually, but when boredom set in, I decided to get into something I always wanted to do—writing,” he shares. Goswami’s first story was close to his heart.

“The Kashmiris have gone through a tough time and have a lot of stories that need to be told. So I wrote on Kashmiri Pandits, who were forced to flee their homes and are living in slums in cities like Mumbai. I gave it the title Ziyarat, which means pilgrimage,” he adds. The story turned out so well that Goswami decided to turn it into a short film. “I funded the filming and shot it myself, completing it in just eight days,” he says.

He chose various locations in Kashmir and held an audition in Jammu, where he chose 10 actors, whom he paid Rs 2,000-3,000 per day. He also hired a few local camerapersons and technicians to help shoot the film. It took Goswami an additional three months to complete the postproduction work.

After the movie was ready, he researched on the Net to send his movies to various film festivals. The film got rave reviews at most film festivals, be it in New York, Los Angeles, Iran, Dhaka or Pakistan, and the award money he received helped him recover the cost of making the film. In 2011, he made another short film, My Heroes, a documentary on the extraordinary achievements of mentally and physically challenged children.

This movie, too, has received a lot of awards. In the same year, Goswami started working on a book, Burning Sapphire. This is a story about a girl living at a place called Padar in Kashmir, which is known for its mining of precious stones like rubies and sapphires. “Penguin Books has decided to publish the book soon and it should be out in a couple of months,” he says.

Goswami is happy with the money he receives in the form of awards, and soon, in the form of royalty from the book. The sexagenarian is now dividing his time between two projects. One is a film on the missing Kashmiri children, and the other is a work of fiction called the Seventh Dimension, which he claims will be completed by the end of this year. His aim is to bag a National Award in the near future. Says Goswami: “I am still in the learning stage, but I hope to achieve it soon.”