Dr. Gnanasekaran’s book A Divine Visit and the Human Touch deals with the intricacies of human interaction and the constant motif of emotions. The inspiration for the book stemmed from the idea of how books in general open up a world of fantasy, knowledge and creativity, weaving diversity into the fabric of people’s everyday lives. The author feels a short story collection or novel is often an overture to a symphony of transformation. It initiates a transmission of thoughts, feelings, ideas and experiences among a lattice of individuals. Through his unconditional presence he tries to seek an opportunity to journey to a greater depth of human understanding than was ever possible. Creative writing immensely gives opportunities that we need and opens up more and more vistas for us to behold and get bewildered. This serves as an inspiration to write more about life and look at human relations in all possible permutations and combinations. That’s why he likes to put life before art in his stories. According to the author, “every image that leaves an impression is the seed of a story. All these factors cumulatively inspired me to write this collection of short stories and will inspire further collections.”
Dr. Gnanasekaran has a habit of tuning his eyes, ears and inner self to what is happening around him. As a result, his stories form a mosaic of emotions and feelings. Some stories, despite their flashes of humour, impress one as infinitely sad, full as they are of frustration, disappointed hopes, and unfulfilled longings – all because we are aping others, not being true to ourselves. Some stories make one realize that society is a web of interconnected relationships and responsibilities where each individual has a duty to discharge. This is how important he considers emotional expressions in his book.
His stories bring in the contemporary and the local through suitable references from the past and the present in the context of humanism. One can evidently discover the universal and timeless quality like humanism in them because their emotional purport is universal and falls so easily into the milieu and context elsewhere and everywhere.
The circumstances of ordinariness are down-to-earth that makes it possible for us to locate ourselves effortlessly amidst the people in the stories, get identified with one or the other, and watch along with them certain acts of the complex human drama unfolding dramatically before our very eyes. The fifteen stories in this collection are marked by an intimate and urgent sense of passion and deal with the lives of people and what their real life interactions are like. These are stories where one can relate to the characters; laugh, cry and feel with them.
The first story in the collection “A Divine Visit”, narrated in a lighter vein involving the monkey-god, Lord Anjaneya and my mother, concentrates on the human-divine interaction. The rest of the stories revolve mainly on human interaction and try to portray human relationships and their inescapable complexities.
These stories deal mostly with certain universals, despite their immediate contexts and familiar characters bound by space and time for the moment; they can transcend space and time and are likely to appeal perennially. This book would bring a wave of change in the reader’s outlook on life in general and the changing patterns of life of late. A writer’s concerns are not expressed in a single work; they evolve and refract themselves over a period of time, through several works. Whenever he chance upon a different theme or motif, he gets insights for detailing and layering, and it results in the birth of a new short story. The author confesses that he has got more than he bargained for through his stories.
