One of my passions is reading. I love reading, especially adventure books, in Japanese it would be shounen. I do believe that my love for adventure books was instigated by my beloved dad. Every evening before going to bed I would beg him to tell me a story and he would enthrall me with various stories of kings, queens, princesses and of adventure. My father being a learned person that he was would tell me stories sometimes from biblical origins or else sometimes from oriental legends. He even passed on to me ‘Big Bang Theory’ and ‘Discovery of India’ in the form of a moving tale. It was only much later that I realized what a great story teller my father was as he could make even the driest subject into a fairy tale. When I learnt to comprehend the written word my favorite became comics, they included several famous characters like Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Tintin and various others. All the stories would have the same moral theme, good verses evil and how good always triumphs over evil. As years went by I moved on to Enid Blyton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Franklin W. Dixon. Slowly I became more matured and therefore interested in Agatha Christie, Jeffrey Archer etc.
One of the authors that caught on to me like a hook was J.K Rowling. Being 30 year old and still reading HP sometimes I feel shy to tell others that my all time favorite author is J.K. Rowling, but the fact is that it remains so. The reason was because I empathized with Harry. Like Harry I was a nobody, a shadow, a transparent person having very little worth as long as I was a student. Like Harry when he entered the new world he was revered, I too was put on a pedestal when I went for my religious studies. I felt that I was living a life similar to Harry Potter. When my Aunt died, in my condolence letter to my uncle, I didn’t quote from the bible but I quoted from ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’ and from ‘Order of the Sometimes I wonder is literature a reflection of society or is society shaped by literature? There are various examples throughout history. Two that comes to my mind right now are ‘Das Kapital’ by Karl Marx and ‘Anandamath’ by BC Chaterjee. Both of them shaped countries. The former led to the formation of USSR
I feel today’s world is being shaped in a very similar manner by HP, which has become to certain aspect a cult. It has led to various other similar fantasy literature and movies topping the charts from the top of my head I can recall ‘Twilight’, ‘Night World’, ‘Artemis Fowl’, ‘Eragon’. All these top bursting titles came about in the same genre as Harry Potter. The question I want to ask is why are these fantasy tales are so famous nowadays? I suppose it is because it brings to us a feeling of wonder, of awe, of astonishment that we seek as an escape from our ordinary daily routine of sitting in our 4x4 cubicles (for some the dimensions are little different). At the end of it all I feel all of us we want deep down in our hearts to be HP to fight the good fight and win despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances and that all of us wishes to spend a day with Harry Potter.
