Life, Dreams and Reality -- Sohel's Blog

Nick Paumgarten's article in New Yorker is concise but does have thoughtful punch lines and musings. A few hours ago I heard about the death of three of my acquaintances in a tragic car accident, husband, wife and the mother died on the spot, while the father is in critical condition, and the four month old baby girl was not hurt. And then this New Yorker article caught my eyes. Like the author, and perhaps like many simple minded souls I also find these types of accidents and misfortunes sad and hard to explain by any philosophical or theological wordings. Is this the act of God? "When God acts, apparently, the rest of us do not. He is a little like the Balladeer". Hmmm... Here is another example from New Yorker article: Last month after a limb fell from an elm tree near the Central Park Zoo, critically injuring a woman and killing her infant daughter, citizens wondered, as citizens will, how such a thing could be allowed to happen. When trees kill, as trees will, ...

It seems like a tradition, from time to time, an article decrying the decline of literary world, the receding attention span of overall human populace, when snippets and twits started to rule over intricately woven fiction, and the theorists, linguists and the high brow scholars of literature ponder loud and clear about the possibility, or perhaps the certainty of irreversible diminishing of once lauded literary fictions, one must notice the cyclic occurrence of such musings and lamentations. Here is an extract from The Guardian: "For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, " fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers."  I don't agree with Sigel's comment. I am not sure where are his observations and data are coming from to declare such a sweeping pr...