Malgudi Days | The OpenBook

MALGUDI DAYS – A SYNOPSIS.
‘Malgudi Days’ is a collection of short stories by R. K. Narayan published in 1943 by Indian Thought Publications.The book wasrepublished outside India in 1982 by Penguin Classics. The book includes 32 stories, all set in the fictional town of Malgudi, and located in South India.It has a series of chronicleswhich talks about the lives of people in the fictional town of Malgudi. The stories share the lives of everyone from entrepreneurs to beggars, all take place in and near this Indian (fictional) village. Thus the heart and the soul of that village are on display and we find it is a place where most people are haunted by illiteracy and unemployment. Despite the ubiquity of the poor, many of the stories come across with humorous good-natured episodes of their lives.
Indian villages which are often depicted as poverty-ridden, infested with epidemics, occupied by good for nothing illiterate fellows have another side to them. They have a charm which we cannot explain. This charm is depicted and presented in each of the stories in this book. Each story is so full of humanity and will invoke that part of you which you have forgotten in this deplorable rat chase called life.
Rather than revolving around a particular plot these stories wander off dreamily. Each of the stories describes the relationship between members in a family, the various social taboos prevalent in the mid-nineties. All the stories will seem faintly similar but they are vastly different from each other. The stories deal with the most ordinary men and women and that makes these stories extraordinary. Each story deals with simple people and simple issues they are faced with in real life. The stories instantly establish a connection between the reader and the characters. Some of the stories are humorous while other will shake your soul.
Among the stories the reader meets an astrologer, a gatekeeper, and a young man yearning to pass the examinations. There are also animals including a forlorn dog who befriends a blind man and a ferocious tiger (perhaps a hint of Narayan's short novel, - A Tiger for Malgudi.The tone of the stories belongs to the nineteenth century, to the world of Rudyard Kipling and O. Henry, to the days when stories were expected to have neat little plots, a touch of irony, and a surprise ending. R. K. Narayan has long ago mastered his form and techniques, but the result is a body of work that is not for everyone’s taste.
More often a character's dreams or expectations do not lead to the results he desires. This keeps the reader guessing as to what the next story will show in the lives of people who become endlessly fascinating, if only for the reason that you have met them before in your own town.
Sometimes the stories may not be strictly true. Occasionally, they are blatant tell-tales, with little pretense at veracity. The truth inherent in these tales, however, goes beyond the mere plausibility of the facts of the narrative. The tiger in “The Tiger’s Claw” may or may not have behaved as the author says, but it does not really matter. The author will never reveal what happened at the end and will leave it to your imagination. It will make you go mad thinking what would have happened. The author will tease you by leaving you wondering forever as those endings willnever be written as the author himself is dead.The reader does not know if the story is true, but it mightbe, especially if one is willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the tale on its own merits. #theopenbook #Education #Educationalvideos #Studyiq #learn #Cbse #icse #ssc #generalknowledge