A Thousand Splendid Suns – Glittering amidst human darkness

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a novel written by the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini.

The novel is witfully crafted around two characters – Mariam and Laila. The way Hosseini characterized these two Afghan women brought him loads of accolades. While the Afghan war acts as the cornerstone of the novel, Mariam and Laila are the two pillars of the story building block. Story is divided into four parts. First part tells the story of Mariam, second tells the story of Laila, third tells the story of Mariam and Laila in alternate chapters and a final part dedicated to the both.

With the success of ‘The Kite Runner’, Hosseini proves once again that he is one of those rare storytellers who can make a rock to weep. Some might criticize the author for his way of handling human emotions and sentiments. But, it is the reality prevailed in Afghanistan from 1979 to till date.  Afghanistan has attained a metamorphic transformation in the past three decades and the author’s description brings the Afghan beauty, Afghan war, Afghan men and women, their mindsets right in front of our eyes.

The intended audience for this novel is the whole world which watched their neighbor Afghans to die everyday in heaps. Even the Unites States entered the war only after they got their own burns. Hosseini’s writing comes as a blow to every nation which is complacent in its foreign policy. The main point proven by this war epic is that ‘whatever happens to our neighbor may well happen to us one day’. In the end, the author wins in establishing his views to the audience.

Tragedy epics do have some air of emotions which will place them under literature masterpiece category. No wonder that Shakespeare wrote more tragedies than comedies. In short, Khaled Hosseini wins our heart with his master story telling and three-dimensional character projections. Even after you turn the last page, the beauty of this story will remain etched in our hearts forever.

A novel can make us to immerse within the plot which will make us to feel the story. Or a novel can penetrate our heart, which will make us to live the story whenever we think about it. ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ falls in the latter category.

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Express Avenue – A name meant for human life!

Express Avenue is the largest shopping mall in Chennai Metropolitan, built by the subsidiary of The Indian Express newspaper group. Though I went to EA for umpteen numbers of times, the last visit kindled my thoughts about shopping malls and hence this article incepted. Lets us analyze the association between the history of shopping malls and the history of human mindset.

Flow chart for the origination of shopping centers is given below:

Town Centres->Markets->Shopping arcades->Shopping Malls/Centers->Online Shopping

Transformations in the shopping centre structure do have some close associations with the transformations within the human mind. In the ancient Europe, every village or town will have a main building called ‘Town Centre’. This is where the people traded their produced goods.  After the initial days spent in caves and river banks, man found freedom in house-oriented civilization, which is the main reason behind the formation of town centres. But after the advent of modernization in trade, such trade buildings started to diminish. Next step in the transformation cycle led man to categorize or segmentize his environment based on his specific needs.  Hence the inception of markets began and it almost continued till the end of 20^th century. 

With the ingress of Information technology, human mind is blessed with a faster medium of communication which led to the next step in the transformation process. Researches show that the amount of information gained by an average person of 21^st century is much more than the total amount of information gained by an average man from the beginning of this world to 1920 A.D. This shows the rapid age at which we live. Due to such a pace of life, categorization of environment based on specific purposes is dissolved. Now, man wants everything at his touching distance.  Thus, the malls or shopping centers are invented.  A mall is nothing but a coagulated series of shops providing all sorts of A to Z products. The parade of shopping malls has started with the first mall being built in the City of Damascus in Syria.

One of the realities about men is that they will lose their precious things right in front of their eyes, then search for it everywhere, then embed an exact hoax of that precious thing, from which they will try to ‘extract’ satisfaction.  Man lost his real happiness within his own family, then searched for it everywhere else, then embedded it in his surrounding environment in the form of ‘entertainment factors’. Malls are also included in this search of enjoyment. Hence, the theatres and other sorts of entertainment factors are being bumped into shopping malls and destroyed the functional categorization of environment. In this continued transformation cycle, online shopping malls are readily waiting to replace the real shopping malls. There might arrive several good and bad results due to such civilization transformations. And the best way to understand such changes is by wait and watch.

All the definitions are defined by ‘time’.  In the past, the term ‘shopping’ is synonymous with ‘trading’. Man shopped for his needs; he did things with specificity as the core; he ate dishes he liked; he went to places for specific purpose.  In short he lived a unified life in which everything is a part. There, Society is defined by what the man stood for. So men made markets.

In the present, the terms ‘shopping’ and ‘trading’ became anonymous with each other. Shopping became the second nature of man’s social status; he is doing things with no specificity; he orders buffet, not sure what he likes and eats what his par people eats; he goes to places for collective purposes. In short, he is living a diversified life in which he is a part of everything. Here, Man is defined by what the society stands for. So malls are made for men.

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