It's Like Flying A Kite

It's Thursday!

Today's featured guest is:

Raksha Shukla

Balancing writing/ creating with real life is like flying a kite. My writing is the life-cord between the imagination flying high in the sky, exploring the vast expanse of the unlimited space and the concrete reality limited to its one fourth share of land on earth, the remaining three fourths having gone to the sea.

When the confines of reality become unbearably suffocating, I cross its boundaries and release myself to soar high in the realm of unlimited imagination. The change of reality into imagination is like the change of mass into energy; following the equation of E= Mc sq. This energy leads me to another plane which is subtle, ethereal, and vapory. While the body remains on the solid earth with its hands on the keyboard, the mind reaches out to find its soul in a different territory; connected by writing: the string that joins as well as separates the two worlds we are destined to inhabit. It is a coordination between the gravitation of the earth and the attraction of the adventure to go beyond and explore the unknown; experience the inexperienced and reach for the sky. It is only a short break. I come back to enjoy the real world with renewed vigour.

  When writing, I am not only a writer: I am the reader as well. Besides that, I am an actor, being ecstatic of the applause and being wary of hooting while enacting the roles of all the characters; at the same time sitting in front as audience: not to mention the role of the editor, the director, the proof reader and so on. The whole exercise is a pack of paradoxes, bound in the string of alphabets, words and sentences lined with punctuation marks and stuffed tightly in the boxes of books in attractive jackets embellished by the design artists.

   Writing for me is the freedom to be the way I want to be. I enjoy the freedom to go back and forth in time with a device like “Time Machine’, made accessible through writing; and this ‘Time Machine’ is combined with the ‘Space Machine” where the distances vanish with the freedom to move in each and every direction.

The records of the memories of visuals, voices, sounds, smells and so on, played and replayed become clear, vivid and sharp, facilitated with reproducing and experiencing them at will. Writing makes the reality more interesting by adding drama in the drab humdrum of everyday life by presenting it with the most subtle, sophisticated and multifaceted device called Language.

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Raksha Shukla         

 An  Introduction -------

A free lance creative writer ---    Born in Ajmer, Rajasthan, on the 15^th of august before 1947, when the day: 15^th August, came to be known as Independence Day; grew up in Agra, the city of “The Taj Mahal”, in Uttar Pradesh, India, Mother Tongue - Hindi, completed masters in philosophy from Agra University, indulged in writing as a hobby without any effort to get published, initially, decided to get published much later.

List of published works---

1.      Poetry --- Two collections, “Yey Shati” (this century) and “Parat Dar Parat” (layer under layer), in Hindi; a third one is under publication.

2.      Short Stories ---Two Books --- “Ajanabiyon ke Beech” (among the strangers) and “Maulshree” (Name of a flower with sweet fragrance), In Hindi

3.      Novels ---“Chir Aparineeta” (forever unwedded), in Hindi and “The Nose Pin”( it’s English version)

4.      Translations –3 Penguin Books – (from English to Hindi) “Yadav” an autobiographical novel about a love story of a woman inflicted with wanderlust, “Sarak Chhaap” (street children) and “Yadein Jee Utheen”( Memories resurrected) Autobiography of the famous playback singer: Manna Dey.

5.      Samjhauta Express”, (a book from Pakistan, translated from English to Hindi, Hindi translation published in India.)