The Blessed Curse
The book, The
Blessed Curse , is the fulfilment of my long cherished desire to
take, through memory lanes, young learned readers,
back to Fifties and early Sixties
when India just began to breath fresh
air of freedom after centuries of slavery, so that they , who now have
smart phones in their hands and laptops
on their laps, can see for themselves, what may look to them utterly primitive, their great
grandparents holding black slates in
their hands solving arithmetical questions with white chalk and
learning to write with mud-ink (white
kharia) on a wooden sheet (Takhti).
They need to know
it because the present generation, with their wildest imagination, cannot visualize
the impact of massive tragedy of partition and the plight of families who lived with most wretched living
conditions prevailing then? They need
to know about their great grandparent’s day to day struggles for survival on
the face of ignoble scarcity; their pain and agony in the absence of basic
amenities like light and water and the roof over their heads.
The young
generation needs to be transformed into living with them holding their hands to
realise that they have the best of the world today because their fore-parents struggled
to ensure smooth sail towards future for the coming generations. And they should
know all this , not as a dry stuff of history, but through their
active involvement in talks punctuated
with interesting tales and anecdotes
which would only be
possible when a person, who lived during that period,
becomes a natural bridge connecting the two distant ends of time.
And this responsibility I took upon myself by
virtue of being the one who lived that period as a child, a toddler and
then as teenager, born as I was on the eve of independence. Now, I have
good fortune to enjoy the company of my grand-children. Having sojourned
in two different worlds, I have attempted to do
through the pages of this book precisely what I had witnessed then, watching
with observant eyes the phenomenon of changing India gradually in preceding seven decades.
The plot of the book has been woven with an Indian middle class
household holding together three
generations in generous harmony with all those ifs and buts about the
generational gaps. It is the story of Jagdamba Prasad, the grand old
man, and his wife, Pushpa Devi living
with their son, daughter- in- law and grandchildren in one of the colonies of
East Delhi. While the readers, through this book are taken through good, bad
and ugly about each generation, it does not come as a bout of episodes but as
“cosy chats” between the members of the family, the son, the grandchildren and
Jagan Babu himself. The conversations that happen at the family’s Dining Table,
at the Birthday Cake Cutting function, during family Train Journey or drive through Delhi roads
keep the spectrum of readers happily engaged in the family chats. And, at the
same time, the flash back pages,
interwoven in the book, have been used to
turn the focus on moments of emotions.
The books is available at Amazon.in and Flipkart alongwith
my other books.
