KOCHI: An author, an ex-journalist, painful rationalist, closet idealist, Middle-Ages junkie and a Proteas fan, Manoj Kewalramani is all rolled into one. After spending quality years in mainstream journalism, he found himself growing increasingly cynical and in desperate need of a change. "I had begun that process, but then everything came to a screeching halt owing to a freak accident. That sort of turned my life around in a not so good way. I was at my lowest in every sense," says Manoj.It was in that state that he turned to fairy tales for comfort. "The idea of good begetting good and happy endings neatly wrapped in a bow," he recalls. Well, what he didn’t realise then was that with age and experience, he was to discover something very different in those pages he had grown up with.While Manoj was experimenting with poetry and rhymes, the idea for 'Fairy Tales: Love, Hate and Hubris' found wings in a random conversation with a friend about messy relationships. She repeated that phrase about kissing a thousand frogs to find prince charming. "Something about that supposition that there is an ideal 'fairy-tale life' out there for everyone got me thinking," he explains.From the ocean of fairy tales, Manoj then picked 16 tales to explore the grey areas of stories with 'happy ever afters.' He chose all the popular ones - from Snow White to Thumbelina to Red Riding Hood to Sleeping Beauty. But it was not as simple as it seemed. "I think finding the voice of the character and interpreting the story from a different perspective was an effort at times. But, there were days when it all fell into place with absurd ease," he says.However, what he did find difficult was to tap into the negativity that had been ascribed to a particular character. "Often that meant confronting and accepting my own negative thoughts and primal emotions, such as hate, arrogance, failure, anger, lust, etc. Although, doing that is a liberating feeling," he quips.Ask him which story really got his creative juices flowing, and he is quick to point to the story of 'Bluebeard.'"In Bluebeard, each character is motivated by certain needs that are rather clear and not necessarily noble. Yet we see that there is little thought given to that. The focus is on the miserable appearance of Bluebeard and, of course his murderous past. That aside, however, if one looks at that tale from an allegorical perspective, it’s a beautiful story about anxieties that people experience in relationships and the destructive conflict between the need to protect one's own self and individuality and the desire to surrender to the one you love," he explains.And, it is this shade of the classic tale that Manoj has tried to capture in 'Ghosts in your closet' in 'Fairy Tales: Love, Hate and Hubris.' However, the author is quick to point out that an attempt at hearing the other side and bringing out the subtext within the story does not imply that he is offering a justification for the misdeeds of these characters in the tales. It is just being fair to them as individuals.Emphasizing on the timelessness of these fairy tales, Manoj urges grown-ups to take an opportunity to revisit these stories. "If you look at the subtexts, you will more often than not find them as commentaries on relationships, the nature of power, time and the impact its passage has on people, and so on," he says.After a non-fiction 'Voterfiles: A Political Travelogue' and a fantasy poetry collection 'Fairy Tales - Love, Hate and Hubris,' Manoj is now working on what will be his first novel.
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