Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

 Samuel Beckett(1906-89)

Playwright, poet,novelist and 1969 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Samuel Beckett was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 to prosperous Irish -Protestant parents. That he was born on a Good Friday seemed singularly appropriate for a man who subsequently became obsessed with crucifixion and the sheer bad luck of human experience.

 Samuel was the younger of the two sons of a well-to-do bourgeois family. His father , William Beckett, was a successful businessman and an active sportsman an, interest that his younger son inherited. Samuel's mother, May, was a fiercely independent woman whose main passions were animals and gardening . According to him, "I had a happy childhood .. although I had little talent for happiness. My parents did everything to make a child happy . But I was often lonely."

Two men ,Vladimir and Estragon,meet near a tree. They converse on various topics and reveal that  they are waiting there for a man named Godot. While they wait, two other men enter. Pozzo is on his way to the market to sell his slave,Lucky. He pauses for a while to converse with  Vladimir and Estragon. Lucky entertains them by dancing and thinking, and Pozzo and Lucky leave.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave. a boy enters and tells Vladimir that he is a messenger from Godot He tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming tonight. but that he will surely come tomorrow. Vladimir asks him some questions about Godot and the boy departs. After his departure Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave but they do not move as the curtain falls . 

The next night Vladimir and Estragon again meet near the tree to wait for Godot . Lucky and Pozzo  enter again, but this time Pozzo enter again , but this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky and Pozzo enter again, but this time Pozzo is blind and. Lucky is dumb . Pozzo does not remember meeting the two men the night before. They leave and Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait.

Shortly after, the boy enters and once again tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming .He insists that he did not speak to Vladimir yesterday . After he leaves, Estragon and Vladimir decide to leave ,but again they do not move as the curtain falls,ending the Play.

The way Of the world by English playwright William Congreve

 The way of the world comedy of manners in five acts by William Congreve, performed and published in 1700. The play , which is considered Congreve's masterpiece, ridicules the assumptions that governed the society of his time ,especially those concerning love and marriage. The plot concerns the efforts of the lovers Millamant and Mirabell to obtain the permission of Millamant's aunt for their marriage.

The way of the world is a restoration comedy written by William Congreve . It begins with Mirabell and Fainall about his love for Millamant.

Further,Mirabell learns that on Lady Wishfort's marriage , Millamant will lose the fortune she is to inherit from her aunt.Thus , they can get the money only if lady Wishfort agrees to their marriage.

In the second act of the way of the world , Mrs Fainall and Mrs Marwood talk about their abhorrence for men . Suddenly , Fainall arrives to accuse Mrs Marwood  of being in love with Mirabell.

In the interim, Mrs Fainall expresses her hatred for her husband to Mirabell. Thus, they begin plotting to trick Lady Wishfort into agreeing to the marriage. Next , we see Foible encouraging Lady Wishfort to marry Sir Rowland.

Thus, the main plan is to trap her in marriage which won't go ahead as it will be bigamy and also a social disgrace because of the class differences. Thus, Mirabell will lend her a helping hand to sort it out if she agrees to the marriage.

As Mrs Fainfall discusses this plan with Foible, Mrs Marwood overhears the conversation . She reveals the plan to Fainall who has decided to take Mrs Fainalls money and elope with Mrs Marwood.

Mirabell proposes to Millamant and she accepts happily. As Mirabell leaves , Lady Wishfort enters and tells Millamant, she wants her to marry her nephew sir wilfull.

After that, Lady Wishfort receives a letter that reveals the Sir Rowland plot. He then accuses Mirabell of harming their wedding .Thus, Whitewel is arrested by Fainall. Lady Wishfort is grateful to Mrs Marwood for revealing the plot.

Fainall using the information of Mrs fainalls former affair with Mirabell plus Millamant's contract of blackmailing Lady Wishfort. He tells her to not remarry and transfer her fortune to him.

Mirabell comes to the rescue to save her fortune and honour. Thus all the blackmailing stops and everything is gets back in place. Finally, Millamant gets her inheritance and blessings to marry Mirabell.

The way of the world summary revolves around marriage, infidelity as well as inheritance. It explores the human mind and willingness to get what they want through whatever means.

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

 A thirteen - year old girl in Netherlands is given a diary for her birthday. Two days later she starts writing in it. It would have been the typical diary of a typical teenage girl, only it was the June of 1942. Adolf Hitler had launched his aggressive campaign against the Jews of continental Europe, his armies had taken over much of the continent already Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland falling one after the other like matchsticks- and when the Germans entered Netherlands, the little girl also a Jew went in to hiding with her father Otto Frank, her mother Edith, sister Margot, and another family of three in a sealed - off room concealed behind a wooden bookcase in the upper annex of the building her father worked in , in Amsterdam. There she would remain in hiding with the others for two years until they would all be betrayed and then whisked away by soldiers of the occupying German forces to a concentration camp where she would ultimately die of typhus, a mere two weeks before she would have been liberated along with the others by British troops had she managed to pull herself through the illness. Anne Frank was fifteen years old when she died in that Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the early days of March 1945,her short young life snuffed out tragically by the workings of a twisted manic ideology.

Born in June 1929, Anne Frank would have probably led a life  of obscurity had her diary not been published by her father in 1947. She would have remained a number , a faceless statistics lost in a government file supposedly documenting the human side of the Second World War. But it was not to be so . Though she had started writing in her diary in the summer of 1942, it had never been with the intention of creating a record of her experiences as a Jew in hiding. Anne's diary was , for her , a space to express herself in the most honest and candid of terms. She shied away from writing nothing,revealing  all and baring her very soul on the pages of the diary. However, in March 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast by a member of the Dutch people's experiences of oppression under the German regime. He asked the people to save all their letters, their diaries, journals , and photographs for they would all prove invaluable to his project. Inspired Anne began editing her journal with the intention of submitting it for publication once the war was over. She worked her way through two years of writing , always  staying true to what she had seen and been through to what she had written.

Today, Anne Frank's diary is one of the most important documents to have survived  Hitlers madness. Official records and political discourses aside, it is through the victim and the survivors voices alone that a human story can be woven out of historical tragedies and Anne's diary does just this. She was thirteen years old when she started writing . She had nothing to prove, No hidden agendas  to achieve,no propaganda to spread, she wrote simply because she wanted to.She wrote with the great innocence and sincerity that only children can possess, but what she wrote was not as innocent as she herself was. Amidst all the controversies and debates that have surrounded the Holocaust, Anne's diary,one of the most meticulously maintained and revealing of documents to come from the victims side , has become a symbolic text of the Holocaust. Children read abridged versions of the diary as a part of their academic curriculum to acquaint themselves of what a girl their age faced during a particularly terrible time in the 1940s.

Anne's voice has reached out across continents and generations. Her diary has kept the victims of Holocaust from slipping into an otherwise inevitable anonymity . She has given others like her a face and a life .she has made it real for all those who lived through it and for those who came after her,like us . It is said that the wound the pshyche of a people suffers cannot be healed by its closing up. It is only in keeping the memory of the wound alive, in remembering and in sharing, that the people find their true catharsis. The Diary of a Yong girl in as many times as it inspires dialogue and historical debates will bring this catharsis closer.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

 Virginia Woolf

Adelina Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born January 25,1882, London, England died March 28, 1941,near Rodmell, Sussex.

                     A Room of One's Own ,essay by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929. The work was based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College,the first two colleges for women at Cambridge.Woolf addressed the status of women,and women artists in particular,in this famous essay, which asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.

The dramatic setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. 

The narrator begins her investigation at Oxbridge College , where she reflects on the different educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, all of which has written in anger. Turning to history,she finds so little data about the every day lives of women that she decides to reconstruct their existence imaginatively. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of this background,she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows, conducted through a reading the first novel of one ot the narrator's contemporaries.Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the tradition that has been so hardly brequeathed to them,and to increase the endowment for their own daughters.

The Windhover by G.MHopkins

The poem was composed st st. Beuno's on May 30,1877. In 1879, Hopkins described it as the best thing I ever wrote.' The Windhover  or Kestrel appears to Hopkins as the symbol of Christ Himself.

The Windhover is the Kestrel, a small European hawk, somewhat resembling the American sparrow-hawk. In the poem under review we have the literal image of a falcon in flight. The poem has received both approval and disapproval of critics.

 

The major success of the poem lies in the opening account of the Bird itself.Here ,in contrast with "Harry Ploughman" , technique is the servant of vision, and once the grammatical structure of the lines is grasped, the distortion of natural speech order ceases to disturb. The poet conveys both the objective movements of the Bird , and his own joyous participation in its mastery of flight. But Hopkins is unable to let the Bird merely be, he seems to be unable to enjoy any intense sensuous experience without justifying it by moral reflection.There is certainly nothing wrong about this,but in Hopkins poetry the vividness of natural description has the effect of making the philosophical moralising appear crude and mechanical.Whereas in "spring and Fall" Hopkins enables the reader to share the emotional and intellectual drama which leads to the conclusion, in " The Windhover" the philosophical ending bears little relation to the opening of the sestet  is a plea or a plain statement ,it is clear that no attempt at the kind of reflection found in " Spring and Fall" is being made. The latter is written in the present tense it could almost be a piece of dialogue from a poetic drama ." The Windhover" is an attempt to endow with moral significance an experience which according to Hawkins description,had little of the moral in it at the time it took place

Obviously the poem is somewhat difficult to grasp and the charge of obscurity is quite tenable in this case. This 'obscurity'is the direct result of distortion in diction and rhythm.

Tennyson's Lotos Eaters

 This poem was first published in 1832. A revised edition was brought out in 1842. This poem is based upon a familiar story in the Odyssey of Homer. The first five stanzas describe how Ulysses along with his mariners arrives on the strange land of Lotos - eaters while he is sailing home to Ithaca from the Trojan war. In Homer's Odyssey,a description of Ulysses's arrival, is given in his wandering, at the land of the Lotos -Eaters (Lotophagoi):"On the tenth day we set off on the land of the Lotos - Eaters who feed on food of flowers, and there we set foot on shore and drew us water . When we had tasted our food and drink,l sent forward shipmates to go and ask what manner of men they might be who lived in the land. And they went their way forthwith and mixed with the Lotos-eaters ;so the Lotos -eaters plotted not harm to our shipmates , but there they wished to abide , feeding on the Lotos with the Lotos-eaters , and all forgetful of home"

This poem is a piece which can hardly be paralleled except in Spenser or in Thompson's 'Castle of Indolence'. It is a delicious poem even as it stands originally. It is the poem of sensuous indulgence and enjoyment. "Work is hateful" "dreamful ease" is the only object of desire. Nay, so deep, a drowsiness broods over the land that desire it self is a word too suggestive of action and effort to be appropriate.

In this poem Lotos-Eaters ,Tennyson gives dramatic expression to that mood of weary disgust in which doubts will force themselves on the mind whether life has any prize worth the toil and trouble of winning

The Lotos is an African plant known as the Cyrenean lotus .it is a low throrny shrub .Herodotus places the Lotos Eaters on the Lybian coast,seemingly in Tripoli.

In the introductory narrative Tennyson uses the stanzas which differ from one another in the number and Spenserian stanza.In the Choric Song ,completely irregular rhyming order and nature of the lines composing them have been used. In the first seven stanzas of the song iambic prevail, here and there varied by a trochaic line; in stanza 8the metre changes to trochaic rhythm, and the lines are prolonged to 13 or 14 syllables.

Many critics have agreed that Tennyson's best work depends mainly on the musical beauty re - created from a sensitive and dexterous management of words. At its best , this verbal music of this poem has an unquestionably individual accent. This chief excellence of this poem is that the rhymes are of a piece with the total onomatopoeic excellent of the passage. Tennyson has never had ambitious aims; it was only to evoke mainly by the sound of words , the simple feelings of the atteactiveness of sensuously idyllic life without effort and action;but within its limits the poetry is admirable . The rhyming words are used to great advantage in the evocation of dead dull atmosphere and any suggestion of vigorous movement would disturb the imagined peace .All the words are languorous, slow and soft, long vowel sounds and the consonants m, n I and s predominate with a high percentage double rhymes with a falling cadence. We shall probably agree that Coleridge would have enjoyed ' The Lotos Eaters' in the light of his dictum:the sense of musical delight with power of producing it,is a gift of the imagination

Ode to Evening by William Collin

 The 'Ode to Evening' is the best and finest lyric of the eighteenth century. It is Collins best poem. It shows his faith in Nature and his poetic faculty. It is written in rhymeless stanzas of four lines . Its twilight atmosphere, its Nature imagery and its lyrical quality make it one of the master pieces of English Nature poetry.

The poet invokes the spirit of Evening . He describes what generally happens in the evening and what he wants to do. He offers to compose a pastoral poem to sooth her ears as the murmuring brooks and gradually dying winds. When the sun is setting in the west , it looks like a tent whose borders are made of clouds. These clouds are hanging from the wave -like bed of the sun. There is silence everywhere. Only the screaming noise made by the dim -sighted bat and the faint angry sound produced by the beetle are heard. The beetle flies in the air. The poet prays to the quiet evening to teach him to sing a soft song.

The valley is becoming darker. The soft song suits to the quiet atmosphere. The song greets the return of the lovable evening. The evening star folds up the day and announces the arrival of the evening. It gives a signal that day has ended and the night is coming. When the evening appears the super natural beings like the fragrant hours,elves,nymphs etc., begin to awaken. Many of the fairies cover their fore heads with the plants which grow on the rive banks. From them drops of water fall down like dew The pleasure of evening get themselves ready to welcome the evening and they are preparing the shadowy car of the evening . The poet likes to roam over some widening grounds or visit some ruined buildings in a barren Heath whose grey walls will produce in him some awe in the dim light of the evening.

If the cold, violent wind or the tempestuous rain prevents the poet from going to such ruined places, he will spend the evening in a hut at the mountain side. From there he will watch the brown villages and the dimly seen towers of the church and hear the church bells ringing. From there he watches the gradual spreading of darkness over the earth. When spring comes along with showers of rain,it drenches the sweet smelling hair of the evening.

When summer comes it loves to play under the prolonged light of the evening. When autumn comes, the leaves turn pale and yellow .The autumn loves to fill the lap of the evening with heaps of dry leaves. When autumn comes, the leaves turn pale and yellow.The autumn loves to fill the lap of the evening with heaps dry leaves . When winter comes it shouts and howls through air and frightens the shrinking days and does a lot of damage .

As long as these seasons continue to perform their respective function in the evening the poets , believers in friendship,scientists and peaceful persons would acknowledge the greatest influence of the evening over them and would utter the dear name 'Evening'.

To A Skylark-P.B Shelley

 To a Skylark is one of the finest lyrics in English poetry. It embodies the best qualities of Shelley's lyrical genius. The poem is a supreme piece of art. It is remarkable for its exquisite melody, it's wealth of metaphor, its unusual imagery,its rapid scene and its lyrical fervour.

This poem was composed by Shelley in the summer of 1820 while staying in the Gisbornes house at Leghorn. Mrs. Shelley wrote: " In the spring we spent a week or two in Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer evening , while wandering among the lanes whose Myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies , that we heared the carrolling of the skylark which inspired one most beautiful of his poems." From this account of Mrs .Shelly it can be gathered that this poem was composed at a time when the song of the bird was actually heard by the poet. The poet had watched the flight of the bird and heard the musical notes with rapt attention . This lyric,therefore ,embodies the lyrical passion and emotion and is considered as a gem among Shelly's lyrics. This poem has been highly admired by millions of readers all over the world.

Shelley is enraptured by the song of the skylark. To him the bird appears to be a happy spirit, whose song is full of joy.The bird flies higher from the earth. It is like a cloud of fire. It sings as it soars higher and higher in the sky. It is like an embodied joy when it flies in the morning or evening.The music of the bird is as keen as the arrows or beams of the moon. The music fills all the earth and air. The poet is filled with joy when he hears the music of the skylark . He compares the bird to a poet hidden in the light of thought , to a high-born maiden in love soothing her soul with music, to a glow -worm glowing behind bushes and unseen by man, and finally to a rose concealed in the petals which have been opened and scattered by the warm winds. Then the poet feels that the song of the bird surpasses in its beauty and charm all that is joyous and fresh in the world. The praise of wine or love is nothing as compared to the praises showered on the music of the bird. The poet wonders as to how so much sweetness is found in the song of the bird. The bird is happy at heart. Human beings can never enjoy the happiness of the bird. They are not destined to experience that joy and happiness which the skylark feels in her heart. The lot of human beings is very sad. They look before and after and pine for what is not . But the sad pining is not to be found in the song of the bird. The bird's song is superior to teach him half her gladness so that like the happy skylark he may also pour out sweet music in his poetry and may impel the world to hear his song just as he is hearing the song of the skylark.

Mother Courage and Her Children

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) is the antiwar musical stage- play written by exiled German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Set in seventeenth century Europe,the play follows Anna Fierling , a woman who operates a rolling canteen business during the Thirty years War. Along with her three children, Anna travels across Europe in a covered wagon,selling goods to locals and alchohol to soldiers. While Anna vows to keep her children safe from the war, in the end she finds herself poor, childless , and alone.

Anna Fierling has been enduring for a long time, travelling with nothing except a supply wagon pulled along by her adult children: Eilif ,Swiss Cheese, and Kattrin. Throughout the play , though she does show concern for her children,she seems more interested in profit and financial security than the safety and well being of her offspring.

                       

She has a love /hate relationship with war.She loves war because of its potential economic benefits. She hates war because of its destructive ,unpredictable nature.

The play begins in 1624 Dalarna,Sweden. The Sergeant and Recruiting officer lament the lack of soldiers to join the Swedish effort in Poland. A canteen wagon pulls up with provisions to sell to the soldiers. Inside the wagon are Anna Fierling, aka Mother Courage, her dim witted daughter , Kattrin, and two sons, Zelig and Swiss Cheese. The Recruiting officer coaxes Eilif to join the army, but courage insists he leaves her children alone. Eilif claims he wants to join the army, but courage warns him that his bravery will kill him if he does so .The sergeant pretends to buy a belt from Courage, allowing the Recruiting officer time to enlist Eilif away from his mother.

When mother Courage get into marketing business and sells the commander a silver buckle she forgets her kids and her son Eliff is taken to the army.

In the second scene the plot is set in Poland from 1625 to 1626.The son of Mother courage Eilif is honored in the army because he managed to confiscate the cattle of the enemies.During the honoring mother and son meet again and while celebrating his glory they dance until dawn.

Mother courage and her children fall in to the hands of the enemies and get trapped with a prostitute Yvette politer.

Mother courage tries to run away with the help of the cook who is very fond of Yvette. She dresses as a chaplain and her daughter takes Yvettes clothes. Her son does not want to be a traitor so he tries to save the cash register but gets caught and sentenced to death

When Mother Courage find out about it she tries to buy him and bargains with the commander about the price while Yvette tries to seduce him and get him to do the same thing.

Despite all of the effort the son is executed and his execution is announced with a drum sound .His death body is shown to mother Courage and his sister but they pretend notto know him so they wouldn't get discovered.

The conformist philosophy of Mother Courage is best described in the fourth scene were Mother Courage meets a young soldier fighting injustice.

Mother Courage lost her children in the war ,both sons and Kattrin who was sentenced to this miserable life.

The war is ending and the cook who was courting to Mother Courage is back, Yvette is married to a commander and Eilif is caught and sentenced to death.

A new war starts and Mother Courage decides to go with the army again. The cook and her daughter go after her . After some time the cook wants to settle down because he gets tired of living out of a suitcase. His wish to marry Mother Courage but she turns him down because of her daughter Kattrin who is weak and psychically broken.Despite her condition Kattrin still pushes the cafeteria and travels with the army.

In front of the city Halle the army is prepared for a night attack. Kattrin climbs to the roof of a village building and decided to warn the villagers about the attack with a drum. The soldiers threaten her to quiet down but she does not stop with the drumming until they shoot her.

In the penultimate part Mother Courage cries for her daughter while singing her sad lullabies.She keeps on following the army.

In the last scene Mother Courage pushes the cafeteria on her own with her daughters dead body.

Pride And Prejudice

 Pride and Prejudice, a classic novel by Jane Austen, tells the story of a complicated love that develops between what was thought to be two very different personalities. The protagonist , Elizabeth Bennet, misjudges  a man upon rumor and appearance , but finds out she is extraordinarily wrong. The novel explains how difficult it is to fully understand some one after settling upon assumptions and being under the influence of the authorities around them. However this is the trial one must pass in order to find true love or friendship.

Characters such as Elizabeth and Jane are torn apart as they struggle against the pressure from their mother and other aristocrats that frown upon their relationships with Darcy and Bingley.

The novel primarily focuses on the personalities and actions of female characters as they strive to gain happiness. However, the women in this novel can be divided into two groups. The first includes characters such as Mrs . Bennet, Miss Bingley, Lydia, and Lady Catherine. These women have the tendency to manipulate the world around them in their favor. They display all the faults in women greed, over confidence, and stupidity to name a few.

The other half of women consists of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, and Georgiana Darcy. These characters can be thought of as the good hearted women. Although they have some realistic faults, their over all personality reflects the honest side of women.

Austen is able to create a miniature representation of women in English society just by a few characters in this story. She criticizes ignorant women with similar mindsets as the first group of women that she encountered from her experience.

Readers are able to conclude from this novel that most women in the 1800s desired only marriage that would lead to wealth, gaining social rank,and saw it as their sole responsibility to become wives. The author restores some dignity in women by adding characters such as Elizabeth who have the sensibility and modesty that allows them to reflect upon their mistakes , while others never admit to theirs.Austen suggests ideal women should be like Elizabeth and not what the characters of the book consider accomplished.

This novel teaches us not to misjudge a person without completely understanding them,which formulates the title, Pride and Prejudice.Not only is this story for those troubled in relationships, but the fact that it is a beautiful love story should not be dis regarded.

Pathumma's Goat

'Pathummayude Aadu by Vaikom Muhammed Basheer

Pathummayude Aadu is a novel written by one of the most influential Malayalam writers of all time, Vaikom Muhammed Basheer fondly known as 'sultan of Beypore'. This is a humorous novel and a cult example of realistic fiction. The characters of this book are Basheer's family members and he himself is the protagonist of the novel. And he narrates the story from his perspective. The goat is a metaphor for all consuming hunger of a family living in poverty and it is beautifully handled throughout the novel with Basheer's characteristic wry humour. The story takes place in his home in Thalayolaparambu,Kerala. The goat belongs to his sister Pathumma . The goat in the story is characterised by a voracious appetite. It eats anything and everything , it feels like eating. Once it eats Basheer's lunch along with the banana leaf on which the lunch is served. It even eats some of his novels and other books. And once it tries to eat his blanket!

There is an event in the book where Basheer's little nephew comes crying to him , because the goat has eaten his trouser's pocket along with a 25 paise coin inside it and also that his father will beat him if he comes to know of it. The kind hearted novelist gives him money from his savings, then catches and ties up the goat and patiently waits for it to defecate, so that he can get his 25 paise back. Even though Basheer uses his humour to describe these events, this clearly shows us the poverty of the family and the scarcity of the money. The use of black comedy is perfect and on-point. This book has a long foreword written by the author himself in which he tells us the circumstances under which the story has been written. This is the only major Basheer work that was published from the original manuscript.

Basheer wrote this book in 1954. Actually there is no great plot in this story. This novel is a mere collection of various events happening in his home . But he used this to express his views towards family,relations,the importance of money,poverty,philosophy and hooks the reader till the end just with his writing style and the description of events.

Basheer is one of the pioneers of Malayalam literature or we can say Indian literature. He and his contemporaries wrote realistic fiction even before modernism. Basheer was born in Thalayolaparambu, Kerala in 1954. He was a freedom fighter and participated in salt satyagraha. He spent many years in Chennai, Kottayam,Kollam, Travancore and Trivandrum prisons.He travelled all over India and lived in various places under various names and did many different jobs such as loom fitter, fortune teller,cook,news paper seller,painter,fruit seller,sports goods agent,accountant,watchman,shepherd,vessels cleaner etc.He lived in the banks of Ganga and valleys of Himalayas and also as a Sufi saint for many years. He travelled as a nomad throughout the African continent and also spent years in Arabia.

He then became a full time Malayalam fiction writer .He became insane twice during his life time and got treatment in a lunatic asylum. He got the plot idea for his stories from his real life incidents.He wrote many novels,Short stories,essays and won many awards.He is noted for his path breaking, disarmingly down-to-earth style of writing that made him popular among literary critics as well as the common man.He was a humanist.He passed away in 1994 at the age of 86.