On a Drive with Life! By Ankit Kumar | Book Reviews

“On a Deive with Life!” is a collection of thirteen short stories written by Ankit Kumar.

Ankit Kumar is from the new generation of writers that keep their passion for writing alive while working as a professional IT engineer. As he states, his adventures in writing were started as means of shedding his shakiness with English.

Book Title	:	On a Drive with Life!
Author	:	Ankit Kumar
Purchase Links	:	Purchase @ Amazon.Com Purchase @ Amazon.In

He has come a long way since as he has been appreciated for his literary efforts, an example of which is the release of this book by Padmshree Dr D.Y.Patil. Apart from reading and playing cricket, he likes wandering alone and this has started him thinking on stories that have a definite bend toward supernatural.

The collection starts with “The Sweetest Gift Ever”, wherein the budding love of youngsters meet a brutal and abrupt ending when faced with ugly realities of the society around them.

“A Trip on the Train”, “The Haunted Village”, “Flat No. 13” and “The Curse” are chilling and blood-curdling stories that will remind you of movies from Ramsay brothers. However, “The Spicy Bet” is quite an entertaining piece revolving around the all too familiar plot of innocent people falling prey in the name of extraordinary spiritual powers.

“The Verdict”, “I was a Failure”, “An Orphan’s Desire”, “The True Love”, “The Three Stabs” and “I was Selfish” talk about the most fundamental bonding or lack thereof that every human being craves, i.e. a family and filial love.

“The Handicapped Sacrifice” will remind you of some of the war classics that questioned the psyche of soldiers fighting the war and how often they are not just the fighting machines brimming with patriotism that we take them for.

The stories are intense and are different from most of the popular literature in that they are not the “Happily Ever After” stories. These stories come from real India where life is full of difficulties, crime of passions, poverty and inherent belief in powers beyond the limits of human understanding. They talk about thwarted ambitions, failures, longing for love and tormenting break-ups and mercilessness of day-to-day life. Ankit Kumar aims at stirring strong emotions in readers as he gets through the narrative and tries to give each story a surprising and twisting end.

There are instances when these stories give you a feeling of reading something that is translated from a vernacular language as the narrative becomes patchy at times and expressions appear out of context. However, the tales are endearingly local and will remind you of the stories you read in magazines while growing up or watched on TV. As the introduction in the book says, Ankit Kumar started writing in order to get over his limitations with English, and there is still some way left for him to go before he achieves a flowing narrative.

Nevertheless, the stories make an easy read and might appeal to our young readers for their unpretentious content and quirk.

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