Boy "Alice" goes into the Wonderland of "Pilgrim's Progress"

Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth" merges the surprise journey of Alice through the rabbit hole into strange places with the characters & places named after themselves like in Bunyan's immortal allegory.

A bored boy Milo gets a surprise package which is a miniature Tollbooth. He gets into his toy car & drives through it like Alice plunging into the rabbit hole. He enters a strange world of "Doldrums", a region without cheer & thought. He meets a "Watch" dog called "Tock", which carries a watch in its body. 

Like in the "Wizard of Oz", there is a good witch called "Which." There is a place called "Conclusions" to which one doesn't travel, but jump into it!

The land of Letters has a capital called "Dictionopolis" & the land of numbers' capital is "Digitopolis." The competing claims of the two cannot be reconciled until two princesses, "Rhyme"& "Reason" are rescued from "The Castle in the Air."

Milo, Tock & the appropriately named "Humbug" travel in the car on their noble mission.

After successfully completing it, Milo returns home. But after a night's sleep, he finds the Phantom Tollbooth has vanished, leaving a note that it has accomplished its task, i.e., ridding Milo of his boredom & finding his everyday life interesting & worthwhile.

The book, illustrated by the author's neighbour, Jules Feiffer, gets more interesting, as the age of the reader progresses! Also better the command over English of the reader, more his/her enjoyment. Otherwise the numerous puns & jokes will go right over their head!

Great Literature inspired by Pandemics

The first great work is probably Boccaccio's "Decameron". He created 100 stories narrated by a group of 10 young men & women, over a period of 10 days, who withdraw to the countryside when the Great Plague was ravaging Europe.

Two famous authors wrote about the Plague in London. Samuel Pepys, the great diarist, was an eye-witness & gave an account in his diary. But a more gripping, absorbing account was written by a man, who was a child & was probably removed out of London for safety when the Plague was raging. He was Daniel Defoe & the book "The Journal of the Plague year." With meticulous research among the documents extant, he created a day to day account, that is unique among the books of this genre, & gives London the city a stellar role in the narrative.

A later outbreak in France provided the material for Albert Camus's "The Plague." It is also an existential classic, which symbolically depicts the epidemic-like war clouds hovering over Europe at that time. An outsider, inadvertently trapped in a plague infested town, trying to get away is the protagonist.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the time of Cholera" also deals with the events during an epidemic.

Though strictly speaking, tuberculosis cannot be classed as an epidemic, it is contagious & Thomas Mann in his "The Magic Mountain", creates an insular world in a Swiss town. Hans Castorp, visiting a sick cousin there, contracts the consumption himself & stays there for seven years, meeting an unforgettable gallery of characters. Mann, like Camus, uses illness as a metaphor for the anti-Semitic carnage which followed.

Inaccessibility as an index of "Importance"

Even though the United Nations think that democracy is a universal requirement & most countries follow it in letter, if not in spirit, the mindset of ages of colonial or feudal rule cannot be erased rapidly.

One such regrettable attitude is that the time, which is nothing but a function of life itself, of people occupying positions of importance, is somehow more valuable than those of the unfortunates, who have to meet them. Hence the ubiquitous queues before the offices of any petty official. Instead of feeling ashamed that because their offices are run so badly that people have to meet them to redress their grievances, our petty tyrants feel a sense of misplaced pride that they are so important that "lesser" mortals have to waste their time in queuing up before them.

This arbitrary allocation of "subaltern" status to the ruled as opposed to the "rulers" (which itself is an anachronism in a presumed democracy), apart from violating human dignity enshrined in the Constitution, is causing loss of millions of manhours of productive labour of people waiting in queues for goods & services which are after all, their birthright.

Even after waiting till eternity, there is no guarantee that the applicants work will be done. Two examples, one from films & one from real life may drive home the point. In the Kannada film "Tabbaliyu neenade magane", the village schoolmaster wants to meet the tahsildar, but is refused by the ubiquitous flunkey on the stool outside the door. But when he meets his friend the rich landlord, he takes him inside pronto!

The other example is the real life experience of the famous "serial" entrepreneur Capt. Gopinath. When he went to Delhi for some clearance, the official looked at his watch after a few minutes & said he had a meeting. This repeated many times, until the good Captain brought pressure from another lobby to expedite the matter!

Rather than a high GDP, the eradication of such mindsets, will tend to make our country a developed one.