DESCRIPTION:
THE Author's personal experiences during this long service career, varied from the fulfilling to traumatic, from the happy-go-lucky to the extreme of despondency, and the vicissitudes of a life he has richly lived - with all its hope and joy, all its pain and suffering, all its exuberance and dejection, all its expectation and disappointment, form the basis of this book. It is as refreshing as it is overwhelming, but always real. The experience he narrates in this book spans not only his service life but also his childhood and his student days.
"The Unending Trail - Journey of a Commoner", the autobiographical fiction novel by Bikash Paul Choudhury, a retired technocrat, is an account of his experience with life. It is narrated in the present tense as the recent happening as a somewhat fictional account, as well it is a collection of his various articles and past events in life explained in past tense simultaneously. His life's story is a moving, no-holds-barred dissection of his self on the surgical table of life that ebbs and flows in its richness, enveloping all our rationality and irrationality, emotions and frustrations, longing and despair. We sometimes rejoice at our triumphs and achievements, and at times curse ourselves at the follies and blunders we commit willy-nilly. It is an honest account of the remarkable journey of an ordinary man who could have been any of us. Hope the readers will like reading his recounts.
Do you feel nostalgic about childhood? Bikash also had a golden childhood which was simple but remarkable. There happened to be a touch of nostalgic feel in the narrations involving his formative days which many of his contemporaries may identify themselves within the novel, be it the middle-class joint family culture and ethos or the lifestyles that existed five decades back being devoid of complexity as we encounter now. The simple pranks in the childhood days we came across, the romances and nuances a youth had those days take us to nostalgia when we recapitulate. These things occupy a better part of the first half of the novel.
"The Unending Trail - Journey of A Commoner" is an attempt at a literary response to the devastation of the individual by the primitive human urge for the warmth and security of another person, or others, in other words by a socialized life. The existence of another resolves the problem of loneliness and dependence but brings with it anxieties for the individual, for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some form of power struggle. This is the existential dilemma confronting the individual, in a relationship with others. Human history abounds with cases of the individual being induced by force or another persuasion to submit to the power of the collective; the surrender of the self to the collective eventually becomes a habit, norm, convention, and tradition, and this phenomenon is not unique to any particular culture. Unless intent on challenging those authorities and facing the consequences, nonconformists had the possibility of living the life of the recluse or taking temporary or long-term refuge in Buddhist monasteries, although institutionalized orders too constitute collectives.
Though a late starter in writing, Bikash is also a budding poet and has a passion for pencil sketching. This book carried the impressions of all aspects of his versatile personality but basically is a tale told with courage and honesty.