Perils of Writing

Book Review

Every person has a story to tell: his/her own. Life is a tale full of sound and fury, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth realised to his sad dismay. How the tale is told makes the difference. Roma Gupta Sinha narrates the story of her life in Destiny’s Favourite Child, whose subtitle ‘An Autobiography of a Rebel’ is what actually drew me to the book. The book is published by The Blogchatter (a community of bloggers) as part of its E-book Carnival. It became obligatory for me to review this book by virtue of the terms and conditions for the authors who participate in the Carnival.

   Roma has, no doubt, an engaging story to tell. There is a childhood that struggled with a profusion of cousins in a joint family in which the author’s parents were absent. There was the disquieting stand-offishness between the parents. There is the eventual loss of mother and alienation from father. And so on.

   Trauma makes autobiographies fascinating stories but only when certain depths are gauged. While reading Sinha’s book, T. S. Eliot’s women kept coming into my psyche and going out “talking of Michelangelo” and leaving me with the feeling that “I can connect / Nothing with nothing” until the challenge rose within my consciousness: “Do I dare?”

   Sinha’s autobiography leaves much to be desired. The least she could do was to get a good editor and avoid the errors that stare in every page ruthlessly. Writing is more an art than expeditious communication of one’s feelings and emotions. Sinha fails to take care of both: diction and depth.

The book is available here.