Wonderful work by Author Vijay Kumar Soni (VK). The book is based on the concept of Time Traveling and Time Machine. The story is an amusing one and takes you through the life of VK. To the comparatively younger readers, it may come out as a ludicrous world of high spirit from the bygone eras in the life of Indians. This story is not less than a mix of wit, whimsy and comic banter.
In the 1960s – the era in which this journey begins – Indian lifestyle was quite simple. So, it starts with the commuting by tongas, includes luxuries of air travel in th 1980s and merry misadventures of everyday life in the 1990s, through the tech innovations that altered life till the 2000s, up to Indians finding their global presence in 2020.
Author VK has properly talked of the Time Machine in terms of flight path and passengers. The machine takes breaks while moving from one destination to the other. He has put his destinations in the form of his past 10 residences in life. He has described his memories related to each residence in the form of short and crisp, sub-titled paragraphs.
Written in a reader-friendly language with utter simplicity, the story comes across as a relatable memoir for most Indian readers.
What makes it different from the usual writings these days, is that it could have been written in a serious tone but isn’t. Nostalgia is generally supposed to make people emotional. Rarely does a nostalgic text, or any such object for that matter, makes people smile. But here we have VK’s time travel that does.
The idea of going down the memeory lane struck the author’s mind during a lockdown period in year 2020. Given the waves of pandemic all around and forced to stay indoors, he decided to sit and watch a movie called Project Papa. In this movie, the daughter worries that her Papa is getting Alzheimer’s and may progressively soon forget everything including her. VK felt the same concern about himself. And in order to avoid falling prey to the issue, he opened the lid of his own time machine and attempted to go back through almost 70 years of his life till then. It wasn’t as simple of him, as it may appear. Disjointed and unrelated thoughts flooded his heart and head. As he describes, to him it felt as if someone stores files randomly without a proper structured filing system and then tries to locate an old file. This is how memories work. Often incorporating new items of the present moment, and old memories get re-stored with all these changes, but without a file recording
these changes. This is why we all have some false but mostly true memories.