Book Review: Slow by Digonta Bordoloi: Not a Book Not a Story But A Journey of Life

Slow by Digonta Bordoloi is a book of two ends of life. If one end is life, the other end is death. It is a story of slow and fast and the sync between the two. It tells the rhythms of slow and chaos of fast. It is a story of me and you. It is in fact a story of every human being, every life, every person. It is a story of journey and destination. It is the story of reality of a journey not being a journey and a journey itself becoming a destination. It is a story of friends and family. It is a story of aspirations of life... and beyond. It is a story of hills and plains. It is a story of relations of heart and relations of skin. It is a story of innocence. It is a story of one drop of life that if you are not able to fetch during your lifetime, the life becomes useless and worthless.

Slow by Digonta Bordoloi is a fiction published by Become Shakespeare. This is the second book I have read from Become Shakespeare and have started admiring their quality of writers and writings. Excellent stuff, I must admit. Earlier book that I read was a cupful of Aha by anandaa. Well, back to Slow. Digonta has put lot of philosophy and real life experience in it in a very rich and uniquely flavored manner. The book, though being fiction, seems more real than life, gives lot of inspiration and insights. It forces you to introspect and builds checkpoints to redefine life we are living. It draws a full life size canvas putting reader at the center point. And then it makes you travel on this canvas from one corner to another, from one end to another, where each end becomes a new beginning and each beginning becomes an end. The whole journey and picture on canvas - both are crystal clear - provided you travel and read it correctly. 

Digonta Bordoloi's Slow is the story of Baba who is born in a joint family. His father Mukul and mother Ambika shower the same amount of love on him as on his sibling Riku. It is one of the remote north east location in Assam where Baba is born but soon, based on the nature of job of his father Mukul, he keeps moving from places to places, plains to hills, and then back to plains; depending of the posting of his father. At time book becomes slow but just at the verge of reader losing interest in the story, Digonta, magically twists it and brings the train back on track quite swiftly. Story is more like the heartbeat graph on a screen where it goes up and it goes low, but the heart continues to beat and heartbeat never drops. 

Overall an excellent book to read - Slow by Digonta Bordoloi can be divided into two distinct portions, one can be termed life, and another death. The death part is as interesting and engrossing as the life part. Baba is quite slow as compared to others in the family. When others are running he is walking, when others are walking, he is standing and lost in nature. When the teacher is teaching in class, Baba is somewhere outside, out of the prison of classroom.

A must read for everyone.