Chandigarh writer’s debut book Lurking Demons: ‘We can’t choose our birth, but we can control our death’
- IE Chandigarh Wed,11 May 2016
Summary: Writer Jaskaran Chauhan in Chandigarh on Saturday. (Express photo by-Jaipal Singh)
Writer Jaskaran Chauhan in Chandigarh on Saturday. (Express photo by-Jaipal Singh)
MORE THAN the love stories based out of IITs, it is the absurd, the unresolved, the questionable that appeals to the writer in Jaskaran Chauhan. “For most of the times, the reasons stem from one’s own fears and is hardly anywhere near the truth. We cannot choose our birth, but we can control our death.
So, when she quit her job as an architect and returned to her beloved world of art and musings in 2014, she chose a rather dark and conflicted subject as the premise for her debut short fiction book. Published by Pune-based APK Publishers, Lurking Demons watches a man take his life and chronicles the reasons people in his life try to give and console themselves with for this ‘ungodly’ act. Cowardice, personal sorrow, terminal illness — while there can be multiple reasons for suicide, for Chauhan, it was an essay by philosopher Albert Camus that pointed her in the direction of a reasoning so absurd that it made her sit up and explore it. Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, struggles with the question whether “the realisation of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide”. “To some level, he justifies suicide, as an act of free will.
Source: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/chandigarh-writers-debut-book-lurking-demons-we-cant-choose-our-birth-but-we-can-control-our-death-2794531/
