Jongleur: A Storyteller

The Ridiculous Dream of a Fantastic Man             Dear reader, the title of this series seems to be fashioned after Dostoevsky's short story, but it isn't Dostoevskian. Rather, it is absolutely Rabelaisian and grotesquely realistic. The term ‘fantastic’ in the title also cannot be associated with the themes of magic or fantasy. It is ‘absolutely’ realistic by nature. In the present age, it is hard to find a single man who has the ability to think. That is why I call him a fantastic man. The dreamer in this narrative is indeed a fantastic man, in my conjecture. All his struggles and combats are for his one qualifying criterion: a fantastic thinker. He is the man who thinks; therefore, he is. However, time, place, people, and things in this series are all fictional. It is like Vetrimaaran taking advantage of transferring the crude real into fiction by the one disclaimer at the onset of the film, ‘fictional.’ The trailer of his upc...

  Chase Him for Phrases  Till now, I don't know with what confidence English Literature was opted for as a UG degree. It all started from scratch with the dream of reaching the zenith - speaking English fluently. At that time, call centers in Chennai were fishing out candidates with “fantastic English.” The prospect of earning twelve or fifteen thousand per month was a great promise for UG literature graduates. Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Centre can be read from this context. I haven't read the novel; I saw my seniors reading it on the local train. Working in call centers was a promise only for city-based girls and boys who spoke English at the tip of their tongues. If it is contemplated from the present, such jobs were ephemeral by nature, like mushrooms meant for living a short period of time. BA English graduates were hunted for it. Our super seniors were the last generation of victims to those dreadful bloodsucking monsters. Yet, that was the covetous promise fo...