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.