I ended up reading Preeti Shenoy's Life Is What You Make It. Yes, one look at the front cover of Preeti Shenoy’s novel ‘Life is What You Make It’ and I fell madly in love with her, she made me poetic and I read the book in 3 hours. It is a well crafted and synchronized novel, in which emotions are intensely described.
I had a feeling that perhaps I made too much sense out of an appealing front page and ‘Life is What You Make It’ is simply yet another novel about a middle class, ambitious girl sacrificing love for money, who fails to meet her own expectations and ends up at a clinic for some quick counselling.
But, Preeti Shenoy proved me totally wrong. After about 100 pages or so, I got the biggest shock of my life. Suddenly, the plot shifted gears and a routine love versus career story was transformed into a heart wrenching first hand account of a schizophrenic. Almost overnight, Ankita is transformed from a brilliant, vivacious girl into a dim witted, scared creature, who is unable to decipher a single written word. She loses her memory, her mind goes blank and she steadily slips into the dark dungeons of depression, even turning suicidal.
This book is not a love story but it is about how one should live their life like. Preeti has beautifully scripted the whole story to let the world know that the people going to mental hospital or coming back from it aren't crazy. That's a kind of sickness which can happen with anyone at any point of time. The time I realized that the book is about the main character itself and it has no love story involved, I took deep interest in reading it. At last, when the book ended, I clapped and wanted the book to be little more big. I didn't wanted it to finish.Believe me, I finished it at one sitting.
Kudos to Preeti Shenoy for her unusual storyline.
2 Spoke out:
It is a creed that has allowed him to follow his own passions, establish his own identity, and reap his own successes. In Life Is What You Make It, Buffett ...
I have been through the highs and lows of bipolar disorder today.
Well, not technically.
Preeti Shenoy's second book, a full length fiction called "Life is what you make it" is the story of Ankita Sharma, a young girl (my age in fact!) from a middle class Indian family. She's beautiful, she's talented and she knows it.
Then life takes a turn for he worse.
Yes, you've heard it before. The typical drama.
Except it is not. It is anything but.
It is a story about finding oneself and not having to force upon yourself the baggage of new age gung ho forced positivity. It speaks the truth.
Preeti has managed to show us through this story that life is not always butterflies and roses, even for the apparently "lucky" ones: and she has not made a pretense of an unreal out of the blue happy ending.
It's about the process of a girl next door faced with an extraordinary situation.
In many ways it answers back to the society that we are raised in. Ankita's multiple love interests, her inability to respond, her often dreaded "belittling" of love, her decisions to drop out of a prestigious college, her admission in a "mental health" facility and the ultimate phoenix like rise from the ashes to pursue what lies true to her heart speak out loud that a person can go through hell and in Ankita's words "proudly live to tell the tale."
They all tell us one thing: it is a person's own life and what they make it is in their hands. even when faced with a seemingly impossible situation; albeit with the right kind of help.
Preeti has dealt with a real issue in a very real manner. Mental health is real. It exists and making it a taboo only accentuates the problem. She tells us that pretty girls who have it all can have a disease of the mind as much as they can have a road accident. They can also deal with it if given the right kind of support.
I only have to say that a hundred bucks is nothing for a read like this. Generally books from young, new authors are considered light "metro" reads. While I will refrain from estimating it's literary value (which is a matter of personal choice anyway), I will go out on a limb and say that this is what new age classics are made of. A real issue, characters we can relate to, a very practical yet emotional approach.
Post a Comment