Sawaal’, an innocuous word meaning a query, is perhaps the most apparent to all conscious beings, and yet the most terrifying to some who once enthroned, wish to never let the power go and stick to it by hook or by crook. Lokesh Malti Prakash weaves a beautiful tale of a child discovering an unanswered question lying in her bag and sharing it with her peer, which are the multiple and diverse entities in Nature that only a child can fully perceive. With illustrations of high quality building a parallel fantasia like resonance, the tale flows smoothly in a poetic ecstasy. Reading Baste Mein Sawaal, one is reminded of the images in the timeless poetry of Shamsher Bahadur Singh, the laureate who asked in his own aesthetic style the same questions that this tale of a forlorn Sawaal ends up gathering near its end–questions on the self-destructive path chosen by mankind, questions on bigotry and hate, the difference being that this time it is all on the tongue of a child.
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