TURN SETBACKS INTO COMEBACKS

Shiv Khera is an Indian author of self-help books and activist. While working in the United States, he was inspired by a lecture delivered by Norman Vincent Peale and followed his motivational teachings. Khera has written several books including You Can Win. He launched a movement against caste-based reservation in India, and has founded an organization called Country First Foundation whose mission is “to ensure freedom through education and justice.” He also joined a political party as National President in India and intended to contest the upcoming elections in Delhi.

Shiv Khera was born in a business family who used to have coal mines in Dhanbad, India. Soon after the nationalisation of coal mines by the Indian government, he had to search for his own living. In his early years he worked as a car washer, a life insurance agent, and a franchise operator before he became a motivational speaker.

Shiv Khera’s first book You Can Win (Jeet Aapki in Hindi) was published in 1998. The focus of the book was on achieving success through personal growth and positive attitude. Khera has written three more books, Living With Honor about living honorably and respectably in a fractured world, Freedom Is Not Free about the need for action to reform the Indian society and You can Sell (2010).

When Freedom Is Not Free came out, Amrit Lal, a retired Indian civil servant, accused Khera of plagiarism, alleging that content from that book directly comes from his own book India Enough Is Enough, published 8 years before. Additionally, he found that numerous anecdotes, jokes and quotes in Khera’s other books were also used without acknowledging proper sources. Khera countered that he takes notes and inspirations from numerous sources, and he is unable to keep track of all of them. Lal finally settled out-of-court for a certain sum of money which he donated to the Missionaries of Charity.