On the second day of the Jaipur Literary Festival, Hindi writer Uday Prakash, at his book reading, explained why there's need for pessimism in literature. On being asked by a listener why his stories often end in despair, he spoke of the "author" being an intersecting point of the sociological aspects of any society. The author is the most marginalised, the lowest of the lowest, or to borrow from Prakash, "a dalit". So the author, an adivasi of his own language, the most powerless of all creatures, inherits the pain from his sufferings and puts them to words. Truth is essential and it is always disturbing, the writer concedes, and so speaks his literature.
The world which Prakash might have been trying to convey through his writing, the world we exist in is closer in semblance to Dystopia...
