by Hamsini
There are so many books in the market right now that are filled with stories; stories that mean nothing. They’re filled with stories about BITS boys falling for IIT girls, engineering colleges, women who can’t make up their minds; bad English and slaughtered grammar. Most of these authors wish to pen down the best days of their lives: their college days.
But the people who need to write their stories, they don’t. The people who have faced suffering, loss, grief and pain—real emotions—they don’t or can’t write. But their stories are the ones that need to be told; they are the ones that people need to hear about and learn from.
I heard this quote recently: Those who forget history are condemned to relive it. Instead of amalgamating a style similar to that of the west, we need to talk about the essence that is India. We need to bring out the real stories that people live in everyday. We need to tell everyone these stories because that’s the only way we will not repeat our mistakes. The good books, the good stories; they live through and through, and people don’t need to know the alphabets to know of them.
This is not to say that books about urban chick-lit timelines are not good. Essentially all stories are the same and they all serve the same purpose. That makes sense, yes. But are some stories more important than the others? How do we rank their importance? How can we prioritize them and say that one is better than the other? Who has the right to say that one is better than the other?
We all grow up with our own, unique frames of reference; essentially, we’re all screwed up and we have our own baggage. And we hear and assimilate stories that we relate to, that somehow touch us for reasons unbeknown. But only when we go beyond our own frames of reference and move on to other issues—new territories of which we know nothing about—we grow as people.
So the next time you pick up a book, pause and look around to see if you want something new. You don’t know what you might be missing out on.
