My rating: 3.5/5
The Protagonist is about to turn 40, belongs to a rich and affluent family, lives a luxurious life but feels discontented because he believes that the world is ruled by fake moral values and suffocating bondages. He leaves everything and migrates to Kolkata to live a creative and meaningful life. He goes through many funny experiences in Kolkata in his quest to know what the real meaning of life is. He meets Debolina, an upscale prostitute, who loves to listen to his poems while making love. She tells him about many truths of life and finally he has the panacea of his confusions and doubts.
Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone. And that’s when miracles happen. We need to challenge our fears and break the long established, conventional views of the society. And that’s exactly what the protagonist tries to do in this book “Poetic Penetrations”. At 40, when most of the people are all set with plans to savor the yields of their life-long endeavors, here is someone ready to leave all and everything behind to seek the true meaning of his life.
The book is an apt combination of humor, misery and realism without compromising with the story line. The protagonist, in his quest for the self, meets Debolina, an upscale prostitute, who introduces him to the untouched aspects of life. The flow of the story is mostly placid, except for a few places here and there and author’s writing style does all the justice to the story.
85 pages might seem to be a quick light read at first, but soon it turns out to be a lot deeper than most of the novels by Indian authors you come across these days and there is so much all through the book we all can relate to; the failure of the education system, publishing industry, not forgetting loneliness.
Author’s intuitive thoughts keep flowing all through, to keep you engaged for the entire 85 pages. His views, opinions and his perspective is well reflected in the protagonist from beginning till the end. But will the protagonist really be able to add a meaning to his life? Or will his quest for happiness turn out to be a yet another mockery in the catalogue of his failures.
In order to not reveal any spoilers, all I can say is that the novella has an honest ending, something credulous, but could have been made even better; the kind that demands a continuation and with an ending worth remembering.
All in all, a short, but revealing read and a must read for all those who think life is much more than just a pile of comfort and riches.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sanjay Chitranshi is an alumnus of IIT Roorkee. Sanjay has always believed that life should not be lived just for the sake of living. He loves to experiment with life and experience it in its different hues. In the process Poetic Penetrations happened and in it he has tried to explore the outer world as well as the inner one through an interesting journey interspersed with a variety of experiences.
