About The Book ?
No man is an island is written by Ruskin Bond and it has all the collections of life moments in some part of India. The book says itself that the tales of friendship and bonding.
What's Inside The Book ?
In a sense, every man and woman is an island. We communicate with each other, sometimes we share each other’s lives, but our inner selves remain inviolate, our very own. There are some things, some thoughts, we do not share. But life can be very lonely on our individual islands. We need to reach out, touch each other, feel the warmth of another personality, enjoy another’s company, recognize a kindred spirit—find a friend! And then, you are no longer an island.
Friendship had been a theme in many of my stories. It was there in one of my earliest stories, ‘Untouchable,’ which was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1952, the year after I left school. Over the next seven or eight years, the Weekly’s editor, an amiable Irishman named C.R. Mandy, published at least twenty- five of my short stories, and many of them—‘The Thief’, ‘The Crooked Tree’ ‘Madhu,’ ‘The Woman on Platform No. 8’—were about friendships, bonding, developing out of shared experience, or sometimes two people just being thrown together at random. I think of my father as a friend, because he gave me so much companionship, so much of his time, even when he was desperately ill. When I lost him, I retreated to my island, living in my own head most of the time. Slowly, I began to respond to overtures of friendship from other boys. You can read about some of them in ‘The Pool,’ ‘Friends of my Youth’ and ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’. As I grew older, I realized how important it was for me to befriend those who were lonely or without support. Much of my writing is autobiographical, and that is especially true of the stories in this collection. There really was a Calypso Christmas, a pool in the forest, a kind manager of a cinema, a khilasi who befriended a leopard; and Omar and Madhu and Miss Mackenzie were real people. Some of them are still around. What I have done is to try to make them live again on the written page. People who have led humble but meaningful lives deserve to be remembered as much as the rich and the famous. Their lives run deep. In writing about them I pay tribute to the human soul. Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part of mankind. Life only begins to make sense when we admit, with John Donne, that ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’
For PDF click below :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-cSNjfphvs7eanoFrrgglW8MnDa4OKn2/view?usp=drivesdk
What's Inside The Book ?
In a sense, every man and woman is an island. We communicate with each other, sometimes we share each other’s lives, but our inner selves remain inviolate, our very own. There are some things, some thoughts, we do not share. But life can be very lonely on our individual islands. We need to reach out, touch each other, feel the warmth of another personality, enjoy another’s company, recognize a kindred spirit—find a friend! And then, you are no longer an island.
Friendship had been a theme in many of my stories. It was there in one of my earliest stories, ‘Untouchable,’ which was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1952, the year after I left school. Over the next seven or eight years, the Weekly’s editor, an amiable Irishman named C.R. Mandy, published at least twenty- five of my short stories, and many of them—‘The Thief’, ‘The Crooked Tree’ ‘Madhu,’ ‘The Woman on Platform No. 8’—were about friendships, bonding, developing out of shared experience, or sometimes two people just being thrown together at random. I think of my father as a friend, because he gave me so much companionship, so much of his time, even when he was desperately ill. When I lost him, I retreated to my island, living in my own head most of the time. Slowly, I began to respond to overtures of friendship from other boys. You can read about some of them in ‘The Pool,’ ‘Friends of my Youth’ and ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’. As I grew older, I realized how important it was for me to befriend those who were lonely or without support. Much of my writing is autobiographical, and that is especially true of the stories in this collection. There really was a Calypso Christmas, a pool in the forest, a kind manager of a cinema, a khilasi who befriended a leopard; and Omar and Madhu and Miss Mackenzie were real people. Some of them are still around. What I have done is to try to make them live again on the written page. People who have led humble but meaningful lives deserve to be remembered as much as the rich and the famous. Their lives run deep. In writing about them I pay tribute to the human soul. Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part of mankind. Life only begins to make sense when we admit, with John Donne, that ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’
For PDF click below :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-cSNjfphvs7eanoFrrgglW8MnDa4OKn2/view?usp=drivesdk
