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| Sunday, May 16, 2004 |
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| Sunday, May 16, 2004 |
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Kleptomania
A creative writer lives in a world of ideas that provide food for thought. While it is difficult to have a steady inflow of ideas, explaining how exactly these come about is even harder. In her book comprising ten stories, most of which have already been published elsewhere, Padmanabhan goes on to inform how the stories were strung into words to make a meaningful whole. While some of the stories have been drawn on real-life experiences and concerns — not necessarily her own — the others like Gandhi-toxin, 2009, and Sharing Air were a result of flights of fancy. She says she gets ideas "by looking around and sifting through the flood-plain of reality that contains you, me and the universe." She has used non-fictional elements to give depth to even the fictional stories. The stories are contrasting. Some offer hope, some are macabre and others bleak, especially 2009 where a journalist, signed up for a perma-sleep programme wakes up after 82 years only to find machines ruling the world following the detonation of atomic bombs. The profile of his India is now unrecognisable. The story ends with him wanting to go back to the perma-sleep centre and gaining consciousness at the end of the next century which, he feels, might hold some hope. An Upbeat Story is high on emotions. It tells the story of a cripple and a man suffering from Down’s Syndrome who find love. The tale brings alive a world where people understand the importance of love. In Gandhi-toxin DNA is cloned from Gandhi’s ash and mass-produced to "disarm aggression vectors" in humans. The chaos that results makes an interesting read. Stories like Beads, Betrayal, and The Body in the Backyard are average. Padmanabhan is an accomplished writer-cum-artist. Her play Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre. Besides comic strips, she has also done illustrations for children’s books. |
KLEPTOMANIA is brilliant in parts. Each story in
this anthology makes the travel to new levels of imagination possible
even as they tease rational thought.