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Fool’s Paradise —
A Collection of Musings and Amusings
This is her fourth book. There is a common strain running through all her writings — bypassing the negative and her effort to grasp just the positivity around her. So much so that in her earlier published novel she’d even given a second chance to the romantic characters fitted in her novel, with this rather apt title Once More!. Before moving ahead, let me also muse along the strain. I just about wish that our policy makers and cops do work along the same strain of giving a second chance to lawbreakers. Then, perhaps, things would be better in in our over-crowded jails and the numbers of undertrials would also go down. Cops ought to think along the ‘second chance’ philosophy/formula. Back to Roswitha’s philosophy that she seems rather adamantly adhering to during these long years that she has spent in India . "During my long sojourn in India, I have come to realise that Socrates’ statement: "I know that I don’t know", is not only an oft ignored pearl of wisdom, but also the brightest jewel in a fool’s cap. There is not one way to trot, there are many, and some of these might lead to paradise, even if it is a paradise of one’s own making." With this in the foreground or background, she writes in this volume about the various anecdotes, travels, interactions, dialogues disruptions, and, of course, those creatures — human and otherwise — with whom she has been interacting with here all these years. Mincing no words, baring out that she is way beyond a migrant writer and one of those who cannot be fitted into a definite slot, she says, "Writers like me, who write in a country which is not their native country and in a language which is not their mother tongue, are labelled migrant writers. They are writers whose perspectives are foreign and indigenous at the same time, and, thus, they blur the line of distinction between the two. I am now an insider-outsider, a foreigner-native. Not an "either this or that" but a "this as well as that". In other words I am an Indo-German as well as a global human being in word and spirit." It is with this broad perception that she sees situations and judges human beings trapped in those situations a little differently. Perhaps you and I would have seen them a bit differently. But her forte seems to add that special frill — a frill laced with some degree of humour. She has this to offload in the epilogue — "To live in India and write in English has made me on the one hand vulnerable to mistakes and misinterpretations and on the other hand offered me plenty of opportunities to be amazed, shocked and shaken. And to laugh. For I realised that it is possible to dig deep into a matter and then step back and, from a distance see the humour in the situation. Humour also provided me with a shield, behind which I could hide, at least a bit." And with that she takes you along to the various locales of the country, confronts you with some of the peculiar situations and lets you have a close look at the strangest of notions and myths.
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If
you are feeling down and out due to what all is going on around you,
then there’s this antidote. Try to read these short and long musings
by this German writer living in our midst. Marriage to an Indian
economist-turned-businessman brought Roswitha Joshi all the way from
Hamburg to India and thus began her rather "optimistic
journey" here. For the past four decades she has lived in India
travelling, mingling, interacting and writing.