The Tragic Hope Trick

I read Erich Segal's 'Love Story' several years back, and am sure a lot of you would have read it too(if you haven't :O:O, do it ASAP or you're damned! :P). The book in my view deserves every bit of its popularity, because somethign about it is extremely touching and true. Yes, painful too, for some, on a first time read, but what makes it click according to me is the fact that it's short, pacy, realistic and very very direct to the heart. Without going into the story for the benefit of those(if any) who still have it on their To-Read list, it's obviously a love story as the name goes, with two peppy characters whose conversations esp in the first half wouldn't make you stop smiling, and it's rather easy to fall in love with the characters all at once. When I first read it, I loved the guy so much I read the book cover to cover once again immediately. It's a 45-minute read anyway!

A conversation today reminded me of the book again, and left me wondering if there's something about deaths and tragic ends that appeals to readers all over so as to establish a connect and hence a liking, or is it just me. I mean, (sorry for the give-away) the strongest binding point of this book is obviously the end, the death of Jennifer, and the way they both take it. A friend of mine loves to criticise about me that I have an acute fondness for death, because a lot of my stories have somebody or the else dying :P(but hey, my last two don't, though nobody has read them yet either:P). Further on, he says I always kill the guy and therefore am feminist=))

Ok, that's not too true, but somehow, I feel the punching effect of a story like that comes when the 'stronger' character, who can endure, despite grief, the death of the other survives. What I mean is the suffering of the loss is somehow better endured by the stronger, practical albeit emotional character, who'd cry and move on and therefore touch a chord with the reader. Somebody who grows hysterical at the loss and just loses it and kills herself/himself is somehow not-so-cool fictional material. And this is a trend I've seen at a lot of places! Infact it's more general. They say tragedies are easier to write, to be appreciated and to identify with, than say comedies or goody goody bits. That's because EVERYONE has their own tragedies, big or small, real or imaginary, and of course several times maginified in a personal frame of reference. I always claim humans are so ego-entric they remember only what happens to them, and everybody's own grief is probably the bigggest in the world. There is something enigmatic about tragedies thus, and that's why everyone from scriptwriters to novelists to TV serials harp on it. We just looovvveee to see the sugar heroine weep tonnes of salt water on TV screens, to see young 'true' lovers fight it out with parents and 'zaalim zamana' for an eternal union, to see or read heartbreaking tales of dying people, and so on and so forth.

Face it, tragedy sells. And maybe because subconsciously one feels lighter and emotionally vented out after seeing a tragedy, to see somebody else's grief bigger than my personal earthquakes. So always, the tragic hero, almsot as Aristotle theorised for Greek theatre centuries ago, is the strong character who endures the most, and even if he dies, it's never an ordinary death. Nobody would have liked DEEWAR if Amitabh Bachchan didn't face the 'circumstances' he did to take the 'wrong path'. Nobody would have read Hamlet and Ekta Kapoor wouldn't make crores through weeping tulsis and Prernas and whoever...

It's all a trick!! Game of hope and tears...(and TRPs and crores)

A drop of psychoanalysis: Think about it, have you ever imagined yourself as the super-sufferer, the all-enduring hero, the aggrieved-by-circumstance victim? Does it give you a momentary sense of superiority?