It has been an awful two-year gap since I last posted an update here. No, I didn’t resign from reading and writing and to put some humour into this gap… “I took a two-year long vacation.”
Watching
TV on a rainy-drenched weekend, I took an accidental look just below the TV.
The thing was a book which I was made to buy some months ago. I paid the
forgotten books’ price a month later. Such is the care for reading these days.
I, included.
With
children hooked on play and phones and wife busy banging her loom with loud
thuds every minute or two, I reclined on my bed aka three-seater sofa, began
reading HOW MUCH MONEY IS RICH? -THINLEY WANGCHUK.
A 136
paged story as the author claims is a work of fiction and to the Bhutanese in
me, I found a very thin line between Fiction and Realistic Fiction. The Author
also claims to have used the real name of his son in the Note.
The story
revolves around Kuenkhen (Protagonist) life. His toils, trails and
tribulations outweigh his jubilations, elations, and ecstasies. By now you must
have guessed it that this book is about what the author has rightly put it as, “His
self-contentment in life is living what he experienced.”
A typical
Bhutanese movie in mind resembles the plot of the story and as I mentioned, Kuenkhens
toils, trails and tribulations revolves around the simple fact that the money
you make is the symbol of the value you create. Or to put it simpler, you will
be loved, admired, and liked if there is money with you. How true of this
universal truth. Family, friends, acquaintances, kith/kin, and every soul begin
to take a back seat when one is in trouble.
The
author shares the only reason why divorces are a common problem among young
married couples or the newlyweds through this book and I at the reading end of
the story couldn’t agree to disagree. Despite the upheavals, which is too loose
a word to describe the protagonists’ life, his son is the only reason that
keeps him going. As I post this update, the protagonist’s son must be studying
in Grade III in one of the Thimphu schools. I wish the young lad to listen to
his father. Mother, although living with her son had no time to breastfeed the
poor infant in his cooing years. This happening in a typical family set up is
unthinkable for a man like me thinking which mother would deny milk for her own
flesh and blood?
The
protagonist also ventures into the Aussie dream of ‘minting dollars’ and
turning up wealthy only be bulldozed into desperation by his wife.
Page 69
sums up the feud in the story and I hereby quote, “Losing a battle behind the
enemy line can be considering, but losing your ground at your doorstep is
devastating.”
To take a
sensible break from the daily hum-drum of this mundane life in a hustle, I
highly recommend this book. Do grap a copy because I grudgingly believe this
story isn’t a fiction and you and I may be helping him out pay off his debts…
We all
have debts and this debt shouldn’t be monetary in all sense of the word.
Closing the update with an excerpt from page 131…
“No man
should be prejudiced to make judgement on others, the clothes, the hair, and
the way they talk does not make them the person someone makes him or her off.
Nobody actually has the right to judge anyone because they don’t know the
story of what someone has been through.”
Happy
reading folks!
