The Nature of Stories

The thing about stories are that they give you a world of your dreams in which you can live and do the impossible things that you wish you could do. They give you a freedom and your imagination a free reign. You take to your heart your favorite characters, and slowly and secretly you live their lives as if their life was inseparable from yours, as if they were but one. You feel their anguish and their happiness, you cry with them and you laugh with them. Their emotions are your emotions, their success yours, their failures your failures. That is why we love them, we embrace them and we crave them.  That is we are hurt when they are hurt and that is why we flood our eyes when their heart is laden.

Have we not all begged in agony when we knew that our hero was walking into a trap, have we not consoled our hero when he blamed himself for the sad demise of his trusted companion, have we not sneered and cursed the villain who tortured our hero’s beloved. Is it the hero that makes him so amiable to us, is the story that drags us towards it and them submerges us in its intoxicating world or is it ultimately us the reader who has taken upon his heart the courage to lose himself and decide to adore and love the story and its hero. Somehow the story, the hero and the author are immaterial to the reader.

The reader weaves his own story every time, he makes his own castles and give his heroes the face of his creation. He crafts the enchanted forest and despicable moors.  The story of any story is the creativity and imagination of the reader not the creativity and the imagination of the author. It’s the reader who weaves the story and who gives it a life force that is capable of animating the whole world and it’s ultimately the reader who breathes life into the story and makes it come alive. It is the reader who fathers the story, the author is but a guide who lightly guides him through the altogether unfamiliar world the reader has conjured up. That is why a truly great story is one that is open for interpretation in as many ways as there are fertile minds there in the world.

Book Review : Redemption by Karen Kingsbury

“The perfect travel companion, blissfully light and engaging”.

Redemption by Karen Kingsbury is the first in the Redemption series, A trilogy revolving around the Baxter family, a highly religious and orthodox family living in Bloomington, Indiana. Redemption, the first book in the series redemption revolves around Kari Baxter. When Kari Baxter finds out that her husband, Tim Jacobs a college professor who is having an illicit affair with his understudy, her whole world falls apart. She is further devastated when he asks for a divorce. The much distraught Kari takes to religion and its echelons to save her and her marriage from this crisis.

Redemption is the story of betrayal and as the name of the book gives away 'redemption', Karen reiterates that the troubles of Kari are not enough reason to throw away a otherwise perfect marriage away and that marriage like all relationships require care and effort. Redemption is by far Karen's effort to convince the reader that even perceivably devastating betrayals in marriage can also be forgiven and a that a stronger marriage can at times be redeemed from these ashes.

Karen builds up a fairly elaborate family, each member with their own problem and in midst of her narrative she occasionally takes a detour to ramp the reader up on the background stories of the rest of the Baxter. Even then she forgets many main characters and fails to build them up, unfortunately they just remains as names and references. The most unforgivable of those is the story of Angela, Tim's lover. Even though she is central to the story she is conveniently forgotten. The story and its over reliance on religion and not on reason and the fact that the very story that is central to the book, the story of how the reconstructs their broken marriage is ill developed and leaves gapping holes and enormous in-continuity in the narration.

Otherwise the 360 odd page page-turner is a fairly light read, its one book that could keep you company during a short journey and would provide you with reasonable amount of entertainment. It however doesn't reach up-to the authors reputation of being an inspirational masterpiece.

Available at : Amazon.in

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The Abyss

This is difficult to write about, the words that once gave my ideas and I life are no longer there, they have deserted me. They have deserted me in this abominable hell. How I can ever get myself to tell aloud how I feel is beyond me. There is a gaping hole at the way center of my existence, a mammoth all consuming nagging hole. It fills me with anguish to tell that I myself do not understand it very well, not from the lack of trying though. I have had driven myself insane just to find what and why of it. But the ominous feeling of its presence just fill me, it suffocates and strangles me. The dark black abyss that fills me.

It seems to me that I must have ran into a midlife crisis at the age of twenty something that’s the only conclusion I can come up with. The fact of the matter is that I feel stagnation all around me, a lurking feeling that takes over in times of quiet contemplation. The reason for the stagnation itself is a lien to me my logical mind has verified debated and crossed off most of the things that I thought would be the reason. Somewhere deep down I know that reason but it eludes me like a ghastly shadow. 

Who can I turn to in times of such peril? No one will understand me; no one will care to listen. None can get themselves to the placed in my shoes and none can stand where I stand and stare into the blinding darkness of that the abyss that I state into. No one can hold my hand and no one can stand silently by my side as I unravel the secret of this deep disturbance of my inner equilibrium. I have many good friends but none of them posses neither the deep wisdom nor the complexity of thought to save my soul. They are normal material human beings of this plastic world, neither religious visionaries nor spiritual leaders whose vision spans the while of this cosmos. Maybe that is what I see, a spiritual awakening, a spiritual guidance. I do not know yet but the puzzle must most certainly be solved.

Or maybe it's just nothing, maybe it's something or maybe I’m just bored with it all. Mind you that also does haunt me. I promise myself many a things and many of them are still in pending maybe all I need is a nice, quiet vacation and put some distance between me and my existence, just magically transported to another world, to an escape from my monotonous reality. May be that's all I need.

The Bad Touch by Payal Shah Karwa

Child sexual abuse as a serious topic is seldom talked about in the coffee tables of present day society. Lately there has been a conscious effort to bring about a change in this very aspect of society. To bring to these tables of open discussion the topics and taboos that have been destroying many a lives in silence so far. The book The Bad Touch by Payal Shah Karwa is yet another significant stride in bringing about this much awaited and much delayed change in our society. The author attempts to being this topic to the public eyes as subtly as possible.

Filled with staggering and astonishing facts and numbers that question your very understanding of the world around you, fails miserably in keeping it subtle, irrespective of the authors best intentions and her best efforts towards that very goal. The books ends up spewing the facts about this venomous misfortunes that fall on more than half the country's juvenile population. Payal Shah Karwa through several examples and life stories of several influential people and the many astonishing survivors of child sexual abuse and there struggle attempts to bust the myths surrounding this evil. 

Understandably the greatest danger to the children of this great nation is the crimes committed against then when they are incapable of understanding it or are too weak to resist such advances. The stories are gruesome, as vulgar and repulsive as the society instills it is yet they happen every day every hour. The books goes on to help people prevent it and lists steps to ensure that the the child is provided with an environment conducive to detect such avails at it's infancy and mediate it effectively. Her stories through its characters strive in inculcate the ability to survive the tragedy and aims to provide a conducive atmosphere to do so.

I recommend this book as an essential read to any parents thinking of bringing an unsuspecting child into this vile world. The book facilitates easy understanding and that is key to mitigate such happenings and it's effective countering. Then again this book is not for the faint of heart who would prefer to live through this world by turning a blind eye towards its stark realities.

Buy at Amazon.in : The Bad Touch: The True story of Harish Iyer

Author Connects @ Pages off Life

In association with Payal Shah Karwa. 

The Mark of Democracy

Just voted for a new government in India. I hope this time its a charm.

They could have put the ink more beautifully, but its not how it looks but what it means that matter.