A Debt of Gratitude

To whom do I owe a debt of gratitude for inspiring me to write and publish my ideas? Well, I would say many! So many that it would take me days to find out all their names.
There are many people (not only authors, but many other ordinary individuals) who are my creditors on this account. Therefore I shall mention those who have inspired me to write.

Where shall I start? Well let me start with Shashi Tharoor, who had started his literary career by writing interesting short stories in the now inactive Junior Statesman , to the great nineteenth century authors like Dickens (who wrote about the trials and tribulations of the Victorian era), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (for his psychological and spiritual works like Crime & Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov) Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry for their short stories with such twisted climaxes.

But I also owe a great deal to the innumerable number of Indian authors, whose names are either known or unknown yet who have shown that Indians are very great with words and are not just great speakers, starting with Ved Vyasa, who compiled and composed the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata (consisting of 24,000 verses, which itself was a challenging task of epic proportions) Valmiki, the author of another great yet misinterpreted and misused epic, the Ramayana (which also consists of around 20,000 verses), Bhasa & Kalidas the great Indian playwrights who match Shakespeare in content their great works being Urubhangam,Abhishekanatakam,Pratimanatakam (by Bhasa, which were considered to be parallel literature in those ancient days because they looked at the epics from a different perspective)Abhignyanashakuntalam, Meghadootam,Raghuvansham,Kumarasambahvam(by the world reknowned poet Kalidas, who wrote with such an imagination, that to think he was originally a simple cowherd would be considered to be an insult for Sanskrit scholars).Then the prose writer Banabhatta, known in the much forgotten NCERT textbooks as the author Harshacharita (the autobiography of Emperor Harsha,not Bhogale, a great playwright himself).

Then our famous Mughal Emperors like Babur, Humayun and Akbar( although he was illiterate but just wait) who produced their wonderful autobiograghies Baburnamma,Humayaunnamma and Ain-i-Akbari (officially ghost-written by Abdul Fazl whom the history textbooks, not the history student, have gladly remembered). Then the Parrot of India Amir Khusrau (search in the Class X History textbook published before and after the NDA government by the NCERT) and Mirza Ghalib, whom the common man believes that he had an autobiography about his drunken escapades.

Then our renaissance writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Premchand who showed that we are not " oriental mystics" who only concentrated on the metaphysical world but as realists who, like other European authors such as Dickens, Maupassant and Dostoyevsky, drew inspiration from the real world for their content.And finally to our post-colonial figures like the much mired Salman Rushdie, the already mentioned yet the last surviving anti-Congress Congresswallah Shashi Tharoor, the rising star Amitav Ghosh, the satirical Chetan Bhagat (I think he is), the great columnist and newly published and mytho fanatic Debadutta Patnaik( please forgive me for fanatic, as I am short on adjectives) and phew, last but I believe he is not the least, Vikram Seth (and many many many others but that's it for Indian authors who are very talented.

My creditors also include academicians, especially my uncle Prof. Arjendu Pattanayak who has his own excellent Internet journal (blogs are a misnomer, which I shall explain why sooner or later), and my teachers at Law School who maintain such excellent blogs that students must read and comment on them, otherwise their intellect will lack basic nutrition ( forgive the last phrase as I am addicted to adornment like many of our Indian authors).Then they also include famous newspaper columnists like Paul Krugman, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times (who have become published authors themselves), the various columnsits of the Hindu like Bhadrakumar, Sainath and Hassan Suroor, and the Economic Times acerbic editor Swami Anklesar Aiyar.

So, we have ended the article, but not the list. There are many, many authors of the Christmas past, present and future, but I cannot mention them (especially those of the future) as I lack the time, space and word limit for writing them. So, let me try to fulfill my debts by writing my ideas and opinions on this journal( which might take a lifetime, but it will be exciting for me, and hopefully, my readers).