PATNA: The COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown might have caused mental strain to many school children forcing them for long home-stay but for a 16-year-old boy from Bihar’s Hajipur, the period was a good chance to write a novel.
Krrish Kunal, 16, the son of a noted woman social activist Sarita Rai and lawyer Ranjit Kumar Rai of Bihar’s tiny town Hajipur in Vaishali district.
Collecting all his observations on the plight of children and other people in the last few years and during the lockdown period, he put those observations, in a very lucid narrative, into his debut novel written in Hindi titled as 'Aadha Jivan-Pura Lockdown Me' (Half Life in Full lockdown).
It took more than 30 days in recalling the sequences of events, people’s plights and pangs caused by many social ill-practices in forms of child marriage and dowry system.
His mother Sarita Rai runs a social organisation that provides free educational support to the poor children of locality and tips to IAS aspirants in addition to carrying on other philanthropic activities.
Krrish Kunal, who has just passed class 10th examination with flying colours said: "The book includes whatever I observed through the nature-forced home stay during the Corona-lockdown and in last few years of my life since I started experiencing the pain and pleasure of human-beings. All that has been narrated through characters in the novel. It is one part of my novel and its sequel will also come in near future."
Aspiring to become an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer, Kunal said that expression through literary creation comes spontaneously only after one feels the empathy towards all and sundry.
"To put my observations of last few years and of lockdown periods in particular, I sacrificed my all entertainment pursuits for 30 days. I used to sit for hours with pen recalling the happenings, observations and writing them on the copy in the form of a novel," he said.
He added that the publisher, Express Publishing house of Tamil Nadu, after hearing the theme agreed upon to bring it in the form of a novel.
"And now, my novel has hit the readers’ heart across the country and is available online for sale, getting good response," he said.
"Novel carries life-descriptions of a girl turned victim with her early marriage, a woman subjected to dowry system in society and a bunch of other day to day plights of human-beings-who are hapless before unseen nature-nurtured occurrences or the man-made disastrous," he opined.