Magic Square

After a long period of my "Reader's Block" I just wanted to break it and engage myself in reading some book, desperately wanting myself back into track as a reader. I was quite sure that if I selected something long to read, like a novel, for this ice breaking attempt, definitely I'm going to fail again. So I wanted something that is short and crisp but interesting. I started searching my Kindle Library keeping this in mind and I came across a novella written by Salini Vineeth titled "Magic Square". It was only 62 pages and could be barely a 1.5 hour read that made the "wanna come back reader" in me happy. Still I was doubting about the plot, "is it going to be an uninteresting story? What if it is some bullshit kind of literature?" etc etc. But without much thoughts I just plunged my mind into it and started reading it. As expected I was able to read it in a stretch and the writing totally engaged the reader in me. So I wanted to write about this novella, believe me it's not a review!

Amudha is the central character of this novella and it's all about her life. How her life was flowing, how the course of that flow just changed when she happened to face a real life puzzle and how the answer to the puzzle was a life changer for her. Then there is Dheeraj, who became the reason for Amudha to encounter this puzzle. The story was very interesting and it had thriller elements in it that can keep the reader's mind fully engaged. The frustrations through which some PhD scholars went through, situations like research becoming a vicious circle etc are well portrayed. At a point we can see a flashback story with references to some incidents in nation's political history.

I'm concluding my 'writing adventure' here, with an excerpt from this novella:

"life is an optimization problem. It has constraints and conditions. The important thing is to differentiate between the hard constraints and soft constraints. You cannot change who you are and how you were brought up. Those are like hard constraints. But, your fear of failure is just a soft constraint. It may be uncomfortable, but you can definitely control and manipulate it. Whenever you are stuck, you should always ask yourself; “Is it a hard constraint or a soft one?” the trick to solve life is differentiating between the two"