For The Love Of Fiction

We have all been to the movies in our lives, haven't we? Where the lights went off and we found ourselves in a world that is different from the one we know. And as we stepped out, something felt different. What is it? The same goes for when we finish reading a book. What changes?

Fiction has the beautiful power to pull us out of our heads and take us somewhere new, somewhere unthinkable. It makes us step out of our realities and let ourselves go in someone else's story. And in the process, we end up empathising with someone we barely know and probably doesn't even exist. Isn't it a beautiful coincidence that 'Fiction' and 'Empathy' are both seven-lettered words?

I have grown up watching and reading Harry Potter and it has changed me as a person. It taught me values and lessons which I wouldn't have learnt otherwise. Makes me wonder if my mother hid my acceptance letter. The author takes us through the life of a young boy named Harry, who stumbles into the world of magic and makes it his own. As I dug deeper into his story, I felt a certain attachment not just to him but also to everyone and everything else from the magical world; a sense of belongingness, if you will. Of course, our realities were different but the humanity of it all was the same. The emotions, the feelings and the relations portrayed are known to me if not the magical spells. His story helped me navigate my own and it continues to do so every time I peep into his world.

As Andrzej Sapkowski says, "There's a grain of truth in every fairytale." These stories are born out of human minds and that doesn't make them any less real. I feel it only makes them a little truer.