Since childhood, as far back as my mind takes me, stories have been a constant in my life. When I was a kid, I needed a story to fall asleep every night. The narrator kept changing; most nights it was my mother, and some nights it was my grandmother. Slowly, as time went by, books and their protagonists became my narrators. But the stories remained an immovable, unshakeable part of life. I traversed different lands, met different people, walked in their shoes, loved them, hated them, and wanted to be them.
The human need to tell stories has always fascinated me. If you observe, you will realize that we are continuously and incessantly telling stories. The book you are reading is a story; the gossip shared between two friends is a story; the emails between two colleagues tell a story; even the lecture that your physics professor delivers on the discovery of gravity is a story. All around us, we keep telling each other things and passing on information. But that is not where we stop; we don't only tell stories; we also create stories.
Stories that aren't true, stories that are but figments of our imaginations. Why do you think we need these stories—these unreal tales of times untold? Why do we need a wizard to save the world, a hobbit to walk for miles, and a maddened lover to dig up the grave of his lost love? Why do we need to create these alternate realities? As someone who has always been drawn to fiction, the stories I read created magical worlds of unforeseen adventures and indomitable challenges. I haven't managed to escape the allure and charm of fiction, and I don't intend to.
I believe that humans are able to express themselves best through the lens of fiction. Without reality weighing down on our shoulders, we can write what we want, say the most outrageous things, live the most brilliant lives, do the most condemnable things, love, haunt, hurt, feel, and even kill. Fiction provides you with an escape from the mundane routine of life. We escape the horror of our mediocrity to revel in the brilliance of the characters. We find in fiction a sense of abandonment, some freedom that being tied to reality does not give us. The world of fiction allows the writer to be his truest self, preach the highest of morals, and fall to the lowest of depths. In Sparkling Redemption and harrHarrowinglGallows follow these characters 'fictional' stories. They fly and fall in their stories, and we fly and fall with them. The worlds built in these fictional stories are so much more fascinating and so much stronger than anything we read in the non-fictional realm.
I read somewhere that the ability to be affected by fiction is rooted in the inability to accept reality. When the actual world around us gets too bleak to breathe, fiction presents itself as a savior; it lets you breathe and helps you believe. This is not to say that fiction is always a comfort. I read somewhere that the purpose of art is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Many books, through their harrowing stories borrowed from the realities around us and the realities in our minds, disturb us when we need them the most. I believe that discomfort is an important emotion for humans. It is one of our greatest teachers. So, while most would like to believe that all fiction is about fairy lights and magical lands, that is far from the truth. And even in the magical lands that fiction takes us to, we learn things that cannot be learned elsewhere. This is why fiction and the need to create worlds not known to humans are so important. Storytellers and stories save us from the worst of ourselves, and while reality has the power to do so sometimes, fiction most definitely always delivers.
- Yugandhara Barve
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