Prasanna Raghavan

 2022 an Opportunity I consider 2022 is an opportunity. The new year is always an opportunity--an era or a season ends for a new one. To choose and shuffle and enchanted by the expectations. The dawn of 2022 is remarkable, marking a transformation in the Covid time.  It's an era of celebration of progress--science has stood the challenges to effect with noteworthy progress. With a lot of hesitation and resistance, we as humans also progressed. We learned to cover our faces.   Now, hardly see any person without wearing a mask. The face is an integral part of one's personality. We style delicately to present before others to get the first impression about us, to make a statement before others--straightforward or convoluted. Now all that we see is a cover in that place. The sacrifice is a revolutionary habit change to accept we value life and that of others.     How do we plan this windfallen opportunity is an important question. Everybody is busy making plans. Whether we follow t

  How have I become a fiction author? The first spark of creative imagination connected the dots in my brain at 7. I remember sitting at the cosy corner of an open shed behind our home, scribbling in my school book using a blunt lead pencil. Our guard dog misbehaved with a homegrown hen, pounced upon her, a neighbour intervened in time saved her a previous day's incident was my theme.  What inspired me?  The previous day, I read a book from my father's library--nothing fancy, an arrangement of books and his medical references on a shelf in a small room. Vischinnakankanam--broken bangles--I found among the books, read in a single sitting, no author's memory. It planted the seed of a story in me. Storytelling wasn't alien to the culture we grew. For everything, there was a story in the form of an anecdote to pass on a moral lesson--a nasty action begets nasty reaction.   My father was a practitioner in the indigenous branch of medicine--Ayurveda. He was the only medical m