The Creator and her Magical Creation
My sketch - a dedication to a friend at Reading on her birthday
'What would you like to be when you grow up?'
'I want to be JK Rowling, mum,' my eight-year old replied back with pride-soaked eyes.
What author won't be elated to be an eponym? The way we "Google" instead of search, my son wanted to be JK Rowling, not an author.
Such is the power of this widely acclaimed writer and today the creator celebrates her birthday along with her creation, Harry Potter. Born fifteen years apart on 31st July, I wonder who between them is a greater celebrity. As for me it's Harry Potter, since years before I laid my hands on the books, I had seen him several times, flying round a stadium astride a broomstick in swirling black cloak or accosting a giant spider (Aragog) in the tiny square screens behind the antimacaassars of passengers sitting around me inside compact fuselage of international flights.
Those snatches hardly had any remarkable impact on me. But I was certainly destined to know him, and in turn his creator, beyond those blurry screens. A decade after the first book was published, my son was born; it was the same year that the concluding book of the series was unveiled. And yet another decade passed before my son was ready to pick up the books and start mastering wizardry vicariously, practising intensely, waving a wand this way and swishing it that way muttering unintelligible curses, spells, and charms to accio his juice bottle or petrificus-totalus a bully at school. I realized I shouldn't miss the fun! Along with him, I started turning the pages of the canon.
But I didn't just read, I inculcated it in me so much so that if I cut, I'd bleed Harry Potter.
Emancipation can mean different things to different people; it could be that impossible cyr wheel dance move mastered, a bold stroke of oil paint finally splashed unrestrained, a formidable height eventually claimed in hiking or the desired timbre nailed in a song. Emancipation for me is breaking free the fetters of inexpressiveness. Emancipation for me is synonymous to Harry Potter. Through the books, Rowling virtually armed me with the vocabulary, literary techniques, and tools to express my thoughts, unreserved. And this is a shoutout for both the creator and her creation on this special day!
I can't be more thankful for her precious gift - stoking the love for reading in young and aged alike. The intriguing storyline allures readers to the thick of the story while setting a new bar of building an expansive vocabulary with each book. The language is graded thoughtfully. She starts with tawny, chortle, haggle, hoover, straggle, stutter, sulk, skulk, sullen, sidle, sliver, scudding, slober, dollop, lollop, drawl, bawl, brawl, ladle in the earlier volumes to lend richness and variety to the read. Gradually she progresses to Fleur's patronising look at Harry cleaning his wand with his cloak, Bode's sepulchral voice, Buckbeak's pacing imperiously in the hideout with Sirius, Dumbledore's flighty temptress adventure, Ron's stabbing of kipper with unwonted venom, Xenophilius Lovegood's querulous voice, Igor Karkaroff's unctuous tone, and so much more! She sprinkles blood-curdling, ear-splitting, unassailable, vouchsafe, dudgeon, deign, condescend, wheedle, juddering, satsuma, bedraggled, transpire, taciturn, collude, glean, gloat, rhapsodising, codswallop, supplication, spread-eagled, mollycoddling, ministrations, sycophantically, incarceration, contraband throughout her texts and that certainly doesn't go unnoticed by young learners.
Needless to mention, I remember almost every context she has used these words in and to cite an example I can say confidently, 'Turn to page 319/320 of Deathly Hallows to check the use of condescend/ deign'. If not the page number, I can at the least track down a context back to a particular section of the tale to refer a word, an expression or a phrase. Lately, during the lockdown, my spouse did me a favour - he trimmed my hair. I was horrified to see my reflection - my hair quite too short for my taste. All I did was, picked up Deathly Hallows, flipped to page 40 and read out: He felt like asking them (the decoys) to show a little more respect for his privacy as they all began stripping off with impunity, clearly much more at ease with displaying his body than they would have been with their own.
'You too pared off my hair with impunity, didn't you?' I glowered but laughed our socks off at Potter-craziness in the end!
Like an all-pervading petrichor, Harry Potter, the eponymous hero, the boy who lived, the little wizard who was billeted in a cupboard under the stairs at his aunt's house 🏠, and the protagonist who vanquished his arch-enemy in the Battle of Hogwarts, has infused in our life the phenomenal charm of magical word in an intoxicating manner. We play the movie's theme music on piano, glean Harry Potter merch, create Harry Potter Corner at home, bake cakes and cookies after Harry Potter, watch the movies umpteen times until we don't need to wait for the actors to utter their scripted lines, and discuss at length the convolutions and explanations of the unfurling of remarkable moments and events. Widely celebrated wizard Harry Potter along with his cohort and professors has in true sense brought magic to those who've read the canon, watched the movies, taken pride in their knowledge of the wizrarding world. They perhaps cannot imagine what life would be without the creator and her magical creation!
Our little Harry Potter Corner, complete with enchanted quills ready to scribble away on their own at the wave of a wand we are awaiting delivery of from the Ollivanders
Here's a link to another tribute - one on England's🇬🇧Rose, Lady Diana who would've celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary had she been alive: A Teary Tribute to Taffeta
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