CHENNAI: It was around 9 pm on July 8. Gayathri ‘Potter’ Gopalakrishnan, as her Facebook name reads, was sitting bored in a park near her house when she got a message from her friend about the 1,500 word update by J K Rowling on the Pottermore website. “I didn’t believe it at first but something told me to check online anyway. When I realised it wasn’t a rumour, I ran to my apartment, jabbed the elevator button, zipped to the computer, turned a deaf ear to my grandma and parents, and started reading,” says Gayathri, a copywriter at a firm here.
A few minutes later, she updated her Facebook status. It read — ‘Witches, wizards, house-elves and goblins... our prayers have been answered!! *crieswithjoy* JK Rowling has written a Daily Prophet article in Pottermore about the on-going Quidditch World Cup (by the horrid ol’ Skeeter woman, but still)!! Aaaaaa! Harry Potter lives on!’
Rowling’s article has been written as a report in Reeta Skeeter’s voice, the infamous snooty journalist in the seven-book series. It has Harry and his friends — Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley — as 34-year-olds coming together to attend the Quidditch tournament — the famous game played in the magical world. For some, hearing about Harry again (the last they heard was on July 21, 2007, when the seventh book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released) gave birth to new hopes that Rowling might come up with a new book, for others it brought back the same excitement which they had felt right before each Potter book was released in the past.
“The new story by Rowling, to me, was like a Patronus driving away all the hogwash of the muggle world! It just proved that Harry Potter will live on for centuries. It also got my hopes up for many more Harry Potter books. (But I might need some Liquid Luck for that!) And don’t forget — He’ll never be gone, not as long as those who remain are loyal to him,” says Gayathri.
Like Gayathri, Aurelia ‘Weasley’ remains hopeful of a new series. “It (the article) rekindled the excitement I felt before each book released and brought hopes that Queen Rowling may actually consider giving us another book to add to the series,” she says.
However, there was a shade of disappointment among a few fans for whom the gossip article just did not deliver enough. “As I sat at the computer eagerly reading the article, I was disappointed because Rowling had already mentioned most of it during various interviews over the years,” adds Aurelia.
Sharing similar sentiments, another potterhead Nayanika Bharadwaj, a student, says, “I was kind of disappointed because I thought it would be a story of them on another adventure, but it just turned out to be a report by Rita Skeeter and almost all the ‘extra’ information in the article had already been mentioned before by J K Rowling in other interviews,” she says.
But that is clearly not a dampener, as many now look forward to more updates from the world of wizards. “I would love to have Rowling write more. Harry always will be the blue-eyed boy for me and I will keep reading about him even wen im 34!” says Sona Ramani, a freelance brand consultant.