Suljhey Huey Logon Ki Uljhi Hui Kahaniyan (Binte Syed)- Book Review by Shahbaz Ali Naqvi (Shoby)
Prolific American writer Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Books are love and to me, reading & writing is a blessing in its own way. In this digital age of globalisation, we have lost a class of writers which ultimately resulted in the loss of charm of reading and not many of us dare to write complete books. I personally feel that writing a book is not an easy cup of tea, especially for the new entrants. There is a very little or practically no reception in terms of books sale and while writing a book, you are basically taking a risk, if you are not an established writer.
This is why, I always admire those who become a ray of hope by writing something and then take a challenge to convert their writings into books. In this book drought, here we have Ms. Bint e Syed, who has become a ray of hope for people like me. Hope of belief that some people still exist, who want to make a difference. Now let us explore her book and see, what she has in it for the reader.
SHLKUHK is an interesting title and it clearly indicates the overall theme of the book, which is further elaborated by the writer in her preface. She says, Yeh kahaniyan hain suljhey huey logon ki, jo ulajh gaey mubabbat ke bandham mein... This book is a collection of 14 short stories with diverse shades of our society.
According to English novelist/ philosopher Aldous Huxley “To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.” The same simple practice is followed by the writers and the result is this book in your hands. As a true artist, she seems to be inspired from the actual proceedings of our society and this is what her writing has taught me about her.
The characters used in various stories belong to our very own society and we can easily relate or locate them within us. Although, it is a work of fiction but while reading the book, you never feel, if you reading some fictitious stuff. Reason being the use of real common language & dialect, which everybody can relate with. I feel, you must have met with some of these characters with different names, at different places in some part of your life in our very own living planet.
We human beings are perhaps the most complex creation of ALLAH PAK, courtesy our complex nature. We are emotional and we have something that differentiates us from other creations, power to express our feelings through verbal & non-verbal communication tools. Language & words play an integral part in our life and we don't hesitate in giving us our opinion in various issues. This opinion can be in any form and at times, we really don't care, how the other one will feel or react to our thoughts.
Bint e Syed has highlighted the same phenomenon in her different stories and the best thing about her writing is, she never tried to be judgemental. rather, she left it all to her readers to decide whether the action of her protagonists were right or wrong. This is the best quality of a writer to write without being biased and let your readers decide the goodness or badness of an act.
One good thing about the writer is her simplicity in presentation. She never tried to exaggerate the things, which would have made the story look superficial. In fact, she kept the things plain enough to give her readers and opportunity to read, understand, monitor and decide. Her dialogues are plain and easy to understand, however, at times, they look like cliched. So I personally feel she should focus more on her dialogue structure building. At places I have found few grammatical & linguistic mistakes, which should be avoided in future to enhance the impact of writing.
I have a major complaint for new comers, they don't take the writing serious. It is quite evident from the fact that they simply ignore the very basics of writing. One should know the basics of the domain in which he or she is working. Poetry has its own sets of rules which I call the Science of Art of Poetry and similarly prose has also some set pattern to follow. If you don't follow the SOPs, you will not live for long in the field of literature.
This is for everyone, who is in writing field, please focus on what you are writing. While writing a short story, fiction (afsana), novel or novelette, you should bifurcate the narrative part with the dialogues. Do not make a mess of it by joining everything at one place. This will do no good for you. As a matter of fact, it distracts, rather bores the reader. If you want your writings to look efficient & effective, clearly give spaces, use valid punctuation marks, where they are needed, classify between the narrative part with the dialogues. This is the way to make your read look clean and easy to understand.
As I always say and mention in my reviews, in order to write good, you have to read well and in order to write well, you must read the best. The more you will read, the better you can write. An artist especially a writer has to be a keen observer of society as well as an avid reader. This is the only way to think out of the box and to bring the uniqueness out of yourself. Unfortunately, new comers don't learn a lot from the experiences and they carry on committing the same mistakes. Either they try to reinvent the wheel or they are happy with what they are doing. I always focus on one thing, son't stop learning.
If you ask me, which was my favourite story from this collection, I would probably unable to answer you with a single title. I guess, all of these stories have the same flavour, which primarily tells us about different shades of love , friendship, romance and other human relations. However, I feel, Zaat Ka Safar is indeed the best story of the book. It was authentic to the core and conveyed the message amazingly. Khudkushi was another daring attempt to showcase something new.
Being monotonous with her subject picking, up to some extent made me bored at times, as considering her abilities, I was expecting her to discover some more unique genres. But as she is new in the field, I believe she will make the best use of her writing skills in future. I believe, she will definitely take her writing to the next level in her upcoming works. She will surely write unorthodox and will bravely explore the unexplored.
I would leave you guys with one request. When someone writes something, give him or her the due share of respect by providing your honest feedback. In this case, I would urge you to purchase Binte Syed's book and do give your valuable (honest) feedback to her read her, so that she get some more motivation and works more hard in future.
