The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

WHAT DAN BROWN IS NOT?

After fifth Robert Langdon adventure, Origin, is out!

Though adept in detailing elements of his narrative, he fails in making them thrilling enough to keep the reader hooked to an extended period of time. His are not ‘read in one sitting’ books anymore. You can visit a particular segment on any given day and can revisit the next pages, probably after two days, without feeling a hangover of the story. Yes, a thrilling work must create its hangover in the psyche of its readers.

A direct fallout of that is the perception being built around length of his adventure tales – yes, they are basically the adventure tales but lack the charisma that makes adventure tales memorable experiences, be it The Lord of the Rings or Alice in Wonderland or even Harry Potter. A 500 pages Dan Brown book can essentially wind up in 100 pages and mind you, most people do like that, even his fans. Apart from few discernible readers, no one bothers to go for and in between the lines to know the semiotics of symbols or architectural details of buildings. If needed, Google and Wikipedia do much better job at this.

Dan Brown is not an avant-garde writer and Robert Langdon is not an avant-garde character. The concoction of religion, atheism and modernity that he presented in The Da Vinci Code in 2003 has seen a consistent downward slope. The Da Vinci Code presented a worn-out subject in a new, if not fresh, flavour and people accepted it, creating a fan base for Brown’s works. But since then, it has always been an ‘I thought so’ journey with his books. One can easily guess where the plot is going. And moreover, he is sounding repetitive and thus boring.  

©SantoshChaubey