Why the World needs Fiction!

As being an avid reader myself and at times a writer too, I feel the need our world has, since the beginning of its days, for fiction. Here in this blog I attempt to concise it to an extent and proclaim the vitality of ‘story telling’ to the real world. The world as we see it is a sphere of reality, too much of it, contained fully with the daily lives of its occupants.  

We are surrounded by the circumstances we can’t change – we wish our lives are better and happier; we wish our jobs are more interesting and high paying; we wish the people around us are more lovable and loyal. It appears that our life is full of I-wish-this and I-wish-that moments. This feeling of a constant lack of something that we deeply desire for makes us vulnerable and in turn, we grow afraid and distressed. It even makes us we feel unblessed for having a life, an unhappy one at that. 

We all have gone through the situations when we were very dull and out of mood and having no heart to do anything, especially when we faced a bad failure in life or when learned an inevitable truth. At such downhearted times our heart cries for support, for happiness, and above all, for a ray of hope that tells us to try again. We live in a world - where material possessions in life are highly valued than the life itself, where you’re really not free to do anything that you love to without the permission of others, where you face pretty bad situations when you set out to find your true love. Like this, by living the reality too much we become only merely alive than be blissful and merry.

 

This fate of mankind had made it go in search of a new world where everything is possible, EVERYTHING. That pursuit opened the doors and the new world behind it is Fiction!

Imagination, they say, is God’s greatest gift to Mankind, and that imagination is the corner stone on which the fiction laid its very foundation. A story has the ability to change everything and anything. A story that you love is nothing but a reflection of an unsatisfied desire that you carry in your heart, even if you didn’t know it at the moment. A kid sitting in the classroom listening to a math lecture might have alternately put his heart and mind in saving his kingdom and its citizens to whom he is the Emperor, like Ulysses from the ‘Trojan War’ book that the kid had read recently. He continues to live that way imagining himself as a ruler, as a leader only to become a real King one day and take up the responsibility of people as the President of a nation and change the world. Math didn’t teach the kid to become a President but a story did. This is just a glimpse of the real power a story can give you. 

Fiction tells you about people who did the very same things that you always wanted to do but didn’t do thinking that they’re impossible. Fiction tells you a very vital thing that nothing is impossible if you have a keen mind to perceive and a strong heart to achieve.  The loved fictional characters we encounter in our favorite movies are a reflection of ourselves in an ideal life; we want to be like them living our dreams by being fearless and passionate. 

Fiction gives you a chance to live as somebody else – a young man with nobody to care for might relate himself as a happy guy from a film whom everybody loves as their best company; an active science student in the classroom can aspire himself to be a Rocket Scientist from an Issac Asimov novel or a computer programmer and the protagonist Neo from ‘The Matrix’ film. Even the intelligent investigation agencies around the world that bring out the hidden facts of a mishap can be said to have, somehow, been inspired from Sherlock Holmes character. Who can ignore his deductive and reasoning skills!

Not just that, fiction does not just show you how it feels to be somebody else but it also proves to you what you truly are, a lovely family drama film or a novel about friendship might make you realize how you spent your young good days with your family members and friends in college life. It might take you back to memories and further make you  plan a long vacation to home or a fun trip with your lovely buddies. Fiction has the ability to wake up the forgotten part of your 

own self.

Fiction has stood as a prime motivating factor to lot of people in shaping up the world into a better place. In fact, the present day technology that we’re living with - the computers, the web, the touch screen, the virtual reality, surveillance, space travel and a lot more has all been conceived from many science fiction novels written in the history. To give you an example, the recent hi-tech product from Google called the Google Glass is a replica of a cool gadget from the James Bond films. 

Fiction has taught people and most importantly the younger generation to be righteous and loyal, to be true friends, above all, to be good people. Fiction has lot more to tell us about reality, where reality means happiness, it means fulfilling your heart’s wishes, it means living the life being true to yourself. That is the reality we should all live in. If you’re an admirer of fiction, if a story ever made you feel happy and inspired you to live that way forever, then it means you’re living a real life, the happy life, or at least you’re wanting to live that way. 

That is why the world needs fiction, to make us want to live more happily.

 Written By: Krishna Kanth