Prashant's Solace

A friend once told me with disdain. ‘I think fiction books are stupid. Stories about love, hate and all the… stupidities. I only read non-fiction, the real deal.’ He announced why reading fiction is one of the guilty pleasures that humanity indulges in and we are better off never reading it. And he wasn’t the first one to tell me this. The Onslaught  Many of my students and parents come to me declaring the usefulness of certain works and subjects and the useless pursuits of story subjects, which I should rather neglect while teaching. Some are willing to concede a little ground. According to them, while these stories might be a good 'time-pass', they might not land their kids a good career, a good social standing or a good job. While it is good to patronise them, these storybooks do not mean anything in the real world. Maybe one can read them for a couple of hours in a week, if at all.  But no one is going to employ them or marry them for reading storybooks. Some are b...

There he was again. Amidst life on earth, a speck of dust, a blip, a grain of sand. The kulfiwallah walks into the street like he had countless times before. The same soft jingle, the same rectangular arch, hoisting the name of his moving establishment over a black pot draped with a red cloth. He looks the same. No. He looks the same! He keeps coming from an unknown place and disappearing down the street each evening only to reappear the next day. Day in, day out. Times, mutinies, 09/11, 26/11, economic meltdowns, World Cup victories, marriages, divorces, deaths, births, careers, pandemics, growths, developments, regressions, governments; nothing seems to affect him. 30 years on, he looks the same. The pace of his cart is the same and of course the taste of that perpetual kulfi is the same.  About 25 years ago, a game of lingorcha was being played on the same street. It was March, the middle of the exam season. But this boy couldn’t care less. He wasn’t the one to study till the ...