Sampoorna Kahaniyan : Akhilesh

Akhilesh has given the Hindi story a new dimension and, while fulfilling all the requirements of readability, has enabled it to observe reality with a more ruthless gaze. His narrator, to observe the reality of the world, places his telescope and microscope at a point from which the nakedness of our times is most acutely visible. Akhileshs irritation with the grandeur of wrong and his support for the helplessness of right play a selective role even in his descriptions, which, even before the story is complete, repeatedly warns us about choosing our side. He also takes care to ensure that we do not remain mere spectators of external details, and to this end, his narrator inadvertently delivers some abstract strokes of terror to the readers subconscious, which are even more painful when we move from the role of reader to return to being a citizen and a social being. His stories like Shaapgrast and Chithi shattered the formulaic nature of Hindi short stories at a time when, in the throes of ideological linearity, it was abandoning much of the complexities of reality around it. Akhilesh was almost the first to achieve the kind of vision and language needed to capture the maximum of a society desperate for rapid change. Akhilesh has given our minds, accustomed to constantly creating and nurturing various structures of power and authority, a new way of seeing with his deconstructive acuity. Akhileshs storytelling has not only succeeded in observing the current reality but has also been able to hint at its future trends. This collection not only testifies to Akhileshs development as a storyteller, but also to the transformation, growth, and formation and disintegration of Indian society as an institution over the past four decades.