The real hallmark of an author’s greatness is his or her ability to etch out characters so that they are not mere figments of imagination but grow on you almost like people you know. Such characters then don’t remain enclosed within the pages of books but have magical impact on the readers.
For me it will always be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. So much so that the clay pipe smoking detective working out of 221 B Baker Street rooms had to have a museum created for the fictitious character at the same address on popular demand.
And for me, my first visit to London way back in the early 90s would have been incomplete without paying homage to the world’s most suave and intellectual detective. I even bought a camera then and there to capture the moment!
It was a journey that began way back in school and endured well into my adult life. All the summer holidays were spent in Baker Street (metaphorically) and I read and reread every word written, acquired the collected works and saw myself as a detective of sorts and in some ways still do. As a cub journalist when investigative journalism was not even an accepted nomenclature I saw myself as some kind of an investigator out to find the real story.
In personal life it taught me how to observe keenly and deduce reality from the unsaid. So much so that even today I can “deduce” much about a person’s character thanks to the tips by the great detective.
Alka Raghuvanshi is an artist