rahulkamble2023
Stories travel. They travel across genres, generations, lands, times, and media. They are also short reflections on how people relate with places and times and how these relations become part of individual and collective memories. So embedded they are with tales, messages, reminiscences, codes, and archetypes, that their decoding gives birth to exciting stories. They are literary, oral, mythic, folk, and popular. Shadows is a story of such stories. It is a story of dalit youths, their rural social milieu, their thirst for education, anxieties and woes of daily commutation, social camaraderie, struggle for keeping pace with the modernized world, struggle to learn and adopt the idiom of social progress, trapped in the vicious cycle of competitive examinations, sincere efforts to fulfill the parental desire for settled life, and failures and successes. It is also a story of their moral victory which will keep them immune from the social, political and cultural distractions and pressures. The reason for such victory however is not a miracle, revelation nor a charishma. It is about thought they gained through education. It is also a story of the elder generations' struggle to hold on to resources which they earned with hard labour, aspirations for children, and compromises with personal choices.