“It is the best of times. It is the worst of times”
A rainy evening in Palakkad with the sun setting L iving in Palakkad, quite strangely I am reminded of Charles Dickens, the immortal writer. Last week, as I took my son to the small farm behind our house, as a project of the “save earth” campaign to free the space of plastic wastes, I told him of Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby and about a character Wackford Squeers, a cruel school teacher who used to take advantage of the orphaned boys by giving them all menial jobs. Secondly, as Dickens described, I thought that we in Palakkad are living in the “best of times as also in the worst of times.”(Charles Dickens began his book, “A Tale of Two Cities,” with the following words: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of hope. It was the season of despair.”) What made me think as above was the things happening around. Palakkad was reporting...