As Karthik wakes up and goes around through his daily routine, he narrates what goes around within his mind. His day covers the morning hours of getting ready to office, a small glitch while traveling to his office, his observations at the office, another discrepancy that he needs to attend to back at home, his travel back home and his late evening hours with his mom at home. Pretty much, an ordinary day, as it sounds!
One can imagine the story line to be a mundane journal of one person. But, I would rather look at this work a step beyond a journal writing. Randomly ordered isn't about what happened on that one day in Karthik's life. It is more about how Karthik perceived the situations that every big and small turns of that one day had brought with it. It is about a process that happens within you, me and everyone in this world. It is about the thousands of unspoken words that go hidden behind a handful of words which we would use if we were to describe a day's routine. As you wait for lifts, adjacent to each other, have you ever had a bet with yourself on which would open first? As you notice a girl speaking on the phone while smiling all the while, have you ever imagined she is speaking to her boyfriend? As you hear a familiar tune, have you ever dug your brain to think which familiar song it closely resembles to? Does your memory sometime wander to the events that led you to buy the book which you are about to read? All of us must have! How many times, but, do we speak about such trivial thought processes? Do we care to pay attention to the rapidly changing and evolving sequences of thoughts within us? How would it be, if we did? That's Randomly Ordered!A few interesting observations of Karthik's flow of thoughts from the book:"That's the thing about dreams. Sometimes, you don't remember what the dream is about. You will just be left with a feeling of it.""I felt that the downward arrows on the elevator panel symbolically refers to my life. Not that I live a bad one. But, the strange thought popped in my head."A light and a quick read, Randomly Ordered can leave us thinking about the nuances in our everyday conversations with ourselves. The impression of us we project to the outside world, or in fact even the way we assume ourselves to be, could be different from the original thoughts and beliefs of us that underlies beneath. In situations like when Karthik meets an unexpected stranger on the road asking for a donation of Rs.300, he thinks, "Why would I spend Rs. 300 for charity?" As he sits down with his mom to watch a Big Boss show, he thinks, "How we all love peeping into the lives of others?" Such little observations of ourselves are the true witnesses of what makes-up our deepest layers. Randomly Ordered is a simple, straight forward book which you can complete in a few minutes, may be, during a short bus travel. It can, perhaps, motivate you to try doing what Karthik does in the book - connect with your thoughts!Kindle subscribers can download the book here.
