Skip to main content

A2Z – A Prelude


The A2Z Challenge of The Blogchatter is an incentive to write systematically every day of the month. I have completed the challenge successfully three times and each exercise ended in the release of a book. All these books are available absolutely free. Let me give the links.

Humpty Dumpty’s 10 Hats – 2022 – a collection of ten short stories. ““You have a clever way of talking about the trivial yet burning issues of the day.” Sonia Dogra’s review said.

Life: 24 Essays – 2021 – “To read this book without any depth of attention would be to do it a disservice – but it also means that one must find oneself wanting to respond. There builds a desire to be in conversation with the writer.” Yamini MacLean

Great Books for Great Thoughts – 2020 – “I’m warning you that this book, Great Books for Great Thoughts, has the potential to change your life if read seriously.” Ravish Mani

All the above books [available only in electronic form] were well-received and I am grateful. That is precisely what encourages me to participate in the campaign this year too though something within me is trying to pull me back from it. And strongly too. I shall go ahead notwithstanding the strapping temptation to take this April easy. April is the only month of vacation.

I’m going to give it a try without any promise of taking it to the last letter Z for which my planned topic is ‘Z: the last letter.’ The last letter of life is what I want it to be. The long sleep from which none of us will wake up.

Death is a theme that has caught my fancy these days. Quite a few people, much younger than me, have been taken away rather unexpectedly by that sleep in the past couple of years. What amuses me is that these tragedies did not affect me too deeply. Rather, it left me thinking of death as a deliverance from the pain of life. I want to die while I am still teaching in a classroom. My essay on Z will be as personal as the others in A2Z series this time.

A is for Authenticity. B for ‘Behold the Beauty.’ And so on. Occasionally you’ll get topics like ‘Capitalism is fated to be sad’ too: not really personal, but never theoretical or scholarly anyway. I haven’t really planned for all the letters yet. But I do hope it’s going to be interesting for you too to take this journey with me from A to Z in April.

Comments

  1. I love the diversity and range of topics. I hope you reach Z because I'd love to read that personal essay. All the best!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are some programs planned for April. But I still hope to complete this campaign.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Bravo that man! You have taken courage to fill April once, more. I (a little reluctanctly) am taking this year off; there are several family and close friend matters to attend in the month and I just have to be sensible about the time involvement. But I shall be reading with great interest! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looking forward to reading. I would also like to participate but keeping deadlines is a dreadful project for me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Deadlines are the real fun in this.

      Glad you'll be around when it starts.

      Delete
  4. Wishing you the best ! Hope I can take up this challenge in the coming years.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You had my attention where you mentioned that you have begun to see death as a deliverance from the pain of life. Looking forward to read your perspective on life.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Replies
    1. Are you there this time? You are not blogging these days!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af