Exploitation of adolescents, their Endurance and the Formation of their Character in Paro Anand’s The Other: Stories of Difference

Abstract

Paro Anand‘s "The Other: Stories of Difference" (2018) underscores the contemporary difficulty and challenges that strike the lives of Indian teenagers, an issue that's approached cautiously by the author for the advantage of her young adult readers. The narratives, however, ar daring within the sense that they focus sharply on the hidden or suppressed, and under-represented, crises faced by youngsters, underlining the urgency of addressing these problems during a society that's still mostly ignorant or apathetic. Yet, the literary illustration of social uneasiness, psychological trauma, emotional misery, and physical harm in texts intended primarily for young readers is never an easy task as there is a risk of such texts becoming overtly didactic in their desire to inform and educate. whether or not Anand steers afar from this entice – for the stories got to work as stories – is one amongst the considerations of this essay. Another task of the author is to depict teenagers as not entirely freelance of adults and nonetheless additionally as not deprived of agency. The essay examines the stories within the assortment in relevance the identity formation of the young adult characters, who have to grasp as well as grapple with the complexities – along the axes of gender, class, caste, and disability – of what it means to be growing up in India.