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.

Photographing The President

The President being photographed is not any president but a 3500 year old one. The President tree is the giant sequoia located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in the United States, California. It is not the tallest giant sequoia tree in the world (75 m), but it is the third largest tree in the world.  

The tree until now had never been photographed completely. A team of photographers from National Geographic and scientists from the Sequoia National Park to be the first to accomplish that feat. if you look carefully you can see the tiny scientists among the branches and leafs of the giant tree. I myself could find four of them, you are welcome to find more if you can.

Courtesy : National Geographic Society

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

From The Life of William Grimes to the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, slavery in fiction and reality is not something thats easily digestible to the modern man, it makes him flinch with disgust and the details churns his stomach in ways detestable. 12 Years a slave is the autobiography of a freeman, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery and redeemed 12 years later. Solomon Northrup lived in a time of great turmoil (which eventually culminated in the American Civil War) when the american consciousness was torn between freedom and slavery, with the southern states supporting strongly the institution of slavery and the northern states strongly condemning the devilish practice. What happened of it is a matter of history and of little importance to the book.

Solomon Northup was born to a freeman and spent his childhood working in his fathers farm, later he went on to move to Minerva after his marriage. The rest of the particulars of his life again is academic in nature now. He was a carpenter by profession, an educated, trained and unsuspecting man, who was lured by two strangers with the promise of a more rewarding job and then sold into slavery in the slave pens of New Orleans. The one thing that differentiated this man from the rest of the slaves around him was the fact that he knew what freedom meant, a fact that he had to conceal cleverly due to the fear of punishment and torture.

Solomon's narrative of his on experience as a slave is mostly objective but it brims with a feeling of distance towards the whole of life. His need or desire to be as much away from the most torturous 12 years of his life is easily reflected in his writing. Its neither flowery nor flaunting oratory of any nature, just an observation of what he had to endure and how he did so. His account of life he saw happen around hims and what it meant to him. The most wonderful thing about Solomon's narrative is that he didn't demonize the villains in his story, they were definitely villains but he reserved crude judgements to a very appreciable degree. 

The book '12 years a slave' by Solomon Northup is a good old slave narrative that objectively illustrates the life of a slave and his livelihood through the eyes of a freeman that he was. The book offers a clear perspective into the working of the institution of slavery and explains why the masters behaved as they did and for what end. Solomon explains that not all his masters were cruel and each had his own on way getting what they wanted form his slaves, from treated them a little as men and others terrified them. some gave them little comforts and rewards others gave them nothing and kept them that way.

Buy your copy at Amazon.in 

In association with 'Pirates' A Publishing House.