Despite Stolen Dreams – Review

Seeds of Terrorism have split all over the land of the heaven on Earth. Kashmir is buzzing high with terrorism. It’s a burning issue everywhere and all the 365 days of a calendar year. Jihad and human bombs and young minds led astray are common in each and every household there (the general view says so). That heavenly part of India is occupied by Satans and devils turning it into a hell. The plight of that state is really heartrending.

Anita Krishan, the author of the book, has brought to life one such story of a Kashmiri family. This family tries to escape a house arrest by a group of terrorists. They succeed to earn their freedom and leap to Delhi to start afresh. Meanwhile, the servant of the family who was involved in holding them hostage falls victim to an encounter with Indian Army. The author in her tale has tried skillfully to bring out all the emotional upheavals to connect to the people who are really suffering at the hands of this terrorism.

The novel Despite Stolen Dreams is a lengthy enough fiction compared to the modern-day jargon mostly written by youths of the day who just know how to narrate the love stories and fuse it with some erotica to keep the youth readers indulged. Anita Krishan, on the other hand, is an author who is persisting with her class in every novel she writes. She has written the current one as a succession to her previous novel Tears of Jhelum. The story of Wali and his family continues in this one and it moves to Delhi and there, everything falls in line for Wali gradually and eventually, he sets himself up with the length and breadth of the Delhi wonderland. His emotional excursion with Kashmira Singh lands him in some of the memorable moments of life and he understands that human beings are human beings and they all bleed red.

Terrorism is subdued in the novel and you will read some of the most emotional episodes in it… Anita knows the art of fiction and her plot and theme and imagery (in the language) are wonderful! Despite Stolen Dreams excels the contemporary novels and offers much more than what you usually get these days.

As the writer herself terms Kashmir as fool’s paradise, she carefully brings out the term through incidents. I myself can connect to the story at a personal level because I had a classmate who joined the class in mid-session as her house in her hometown Srinagar was burnt to ashes. I had seen her family struggle with every little thing. Such brilliant minds succumb to loss of homeland and other pressure and stress. Hope people realise before it turns into a PARADISE LOST.

You can read the novel yourself and understand it. You can have a copy of it by visiting the Amazon India link below:

Anita Krishan’s Despite Stolen Dreams on Amazon

review by Nidhi Sharma