Dis-ease called Life: A Dostoveskian Reading of Akhtar Mohiuddin
What makes us and sustains us as humans is our need and capacity to dream, to tell stories and live in mythic space and time. One needs certain level of culture literacy to qualify as a human and, in our troubled times, it is poets/writers, especially of short story and novel that have been vouchsafed the task of keeping the most important question of any living culture – the question of the Being/Sacred – alive. What makes us and sustains us as humans is our need and capacity to dream, to tell stories and live in mythic space and time. As we find in Dostovesky: “But how could you live and have no story to tell?” And what is the key archetypal story – story of stories – that we find in all cultures? It is of Adam and Eve’s exile from and return to paradise, of frantic human effort to be, to mean, to escape the hell that life ordinarily is and be born again through love/gnosis. Dostovesky’s answer to the question “What is hell?” is that it is “the sufferin...