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Showing posts from June, 2015

Mulk Raj Anand's "The Lost Child": An Epiphany

Mulk Raj Anand is a weaver of tales. His stories have a social significance. He was a social reformer whose chief concern was to motivate a sequential change in thinking. Anand’s Coolie , Untouchables  have been landmark texts in this regard. Anand prods an alternative perception to age-old hackneyed social attitude towards subalternity. Whether or not this resulted in any concrete change in the conditions is an economical factor, but his writings have successfully triggered questions of immense relevance. Anand is that big great-grandfather whose art of story-telling draws every far one near and close. The Lost Child is one of Anand’s most successful and popular short stories. This is the story of a small boy travelling with his parents from the village to the fair in town. As he walks , he is enamoured by the wide range of distractions in the form of sweets, toys, garlands etc that are offered to him in the different shops on the way. The destitute, penniless, poverty stricken

Lazarus' last laugh: On reading "The Bell Jar"

Sylvia Plath has always been one of my favourite writers. Her life has intrigued me many a times. Somewhere because as a women of the 21 st century I have faced similar moments… of multitasking and balancing career, family , private and public issues and at the same time hunting for a suitable opportunity to hone my skills in.  I read her  Daddy many years back and loved it.  The familiar circumstances of Plath , Virginia Woolf , Anne sexton have always posed in my mind questions about intellectualism and its connection with women. The Bell Jar was published under a pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a few weeks after her suicide by burning her face in an oven. A more terrible death could not have been thought for such a beauty as Plath married to one of the greatest writers of the time ,Ted Hughes. It is said that Plath did not want the book to be published primarily because she thought it would hurt her mother. The narrative is semi-autobiographical and is based on Plath’s own r