Monopoly

Building fictional and fantastical worlds is something that I enjoy deeply. I also like to create superheroes for personal pleasure and even though I can't draw, I can use them in stories because there is no dearth of superhero literature in the West even if we keep aside comics and graphic novels. Superheroes empower kids and at present there is a dearth of indigenous superheroes. There have been indigenous superheroes in the past which still exist in this country though barely. I was travelling by train a few years ago and I saw a mom playing monopoly with his child, he might be eleven years of age. At that age I was reading comics bought from A.H. Wheelers and it kinds of sums up how this country is evolving, financially but not creatively. Kids do not read anymore, at least a majority of them which is evident by comics sales in this country. Most indigenous comics sales come from 90s kids trying to complete their comics collection rather than kids buying comics to read. Also, comics are incredibly expensive now, even Indian comics so they have gone beyond the reach of even the middle class and high class kids read Marvel, DC and imported Mangas and not indigenous comics. It was during a phase of terrible depression that I decided to create superheroes at a personal level to help me cope, these characters were made of my favourite traits and tailored to my needs, just like Lord Hanuman is for wrestlers. I like creating fictional and fantasy worlds, and I had thought about creating a space operas which got actively sabotaged during a low phase in my life. The point now is not about reading or creating fantasies or fantastical worlds, the point now is being capable of suspending the reality and actually being able to inhabit those fantasies or fantastical worlds. After the internet became from a tool of connecting people to a huge financial and propaganda machine, reality has been too on the face and the hyperreality and simulacra that had been built all through these years has, at least for those who are intelligent, collapsed. I have all the important fantasy series in my library from Tolkien's Lord of The Rings to Ursula K. Le Guins Earthsea novels and of course much loved Harry Potter series and even Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy books and yet I find myself incapable of escaping into those worlds like I could when I was a kid or even in my early youth. Only time I'm able to escape into fiction or fantasy now is when I am myself writing it which is not very often due to writer's block. I make my characters and superheroes, and I have lived with them in my childhood, Chacha Chaudhary by Pran, Fauladi Singh in Diamond Comics, the numerous superheroes of Raj Comics like Nagraj, Doga and so many others. I want to create and I hope to create something worthwhile, I'm not a monopoly kind of person and anyone who is knows that it's an unending game which ends up in murder. Superheroes don't murder, they save.