The Village by The Sea

What is the first thing that you will think of when you hear this words"The Village By The Sea"? A village by the sea ? No. The Village By The Sea is actually a title of a book. A quite interesting book, a book that I read for Literature. Here is what the story is talking about:

This story takes place in Thul, a village in India. It is about a dysfunctional family's ups and downs in life. This story is also about industrialisation in the village. Why is this family dysfunctional? This is because the mother of the family is sick and is getting weaker and weaker by the day. In this case, she was bedridden. the father of the family was a drunkard and only wastes money on toddy. He spends most his time sleeping at home. Thus the children are prematurely saddled with the responsibilities of running the house.

The only son has to take up the role as the father and earn money for the family. The eldest daughter has to do the chores for the family. The family also consist of two other daughters. They are Bela and Kamal. The duo would help Lila with some chores like gathering the ingredients needed for meals and they are still schooling.

As jobs in the village are not able to provide Hari with the much needed money to run the family, he has to find a job somewhere else. So he went to Bombay, which was a city where people made fortunes. He went there mostly for the job opportunities there. At Bombay, he worked at a restaurant and learnt how to mend watches. He accumulated some wealth before coming back to reunite with his family in the village.

With Hari gone, Lila had to take care of the family alone and thus had to bear a greater responsibility. With the help of a rich family from Bombay ,Lila was able to send her mother to a nearby hospital to receive treatment.

This story has a fairytale end as things changed for the better. Hari brought home money for the family. Mother recovered from her illness and father change his habit of drinking toddy.This story is really worth reading as there are many cultural things that you can learn from it.

There is also industrialisation happening in the village as a whole city of village is going to be built there. A sleepy fishing village is going to change into a busy and bustling factory area. The villagers there are not happy of course as the arrival of the factories also meant the arrival of polution. The factories are going to produce harmful gases and dispose waste into the sea. This in turn disturbs the villagers traditional way of living. The villagers did try to prtest but it failed. Thus most of them had to change their way of life.

One of things that I learnt includes adaptating to our enviroment. Changes always happen. Running away from them does not help at all. This only allows us to hide from the problem for a short while. The problem will resurface again. So we must learn to adapt. While adapting we are actually learning new things. This is because for every thing change that happens there is always a cause. In order to adapt, we must know what are the factors that contribute to the change and adapt according to the factor.