If I Could Steal Someone Else’s Life for Seven Days

If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?

If I Could Steal Someone Else’s Life for Seven Days

If you offered me a week in someone else’s shoes — not just any someone, but a fictional someone — who would I pick?

My first instinct is to go big. Sherlock Holmes has the flat in Baker Street. Tony Stark has the suits. Jay Gatsby has the parties. But living someone else’s life for a week isn’t about borrowing their gadgets or their guest list. It’s about borrowing their way of seeing the world.

So I’d choose **Atticus Finch from *To Kill a Mockingbird***.

Not the most glamorous choice, I know. No superpowers, no Hogwarts letter, no lightsaber. Just a small-town lawyer in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama, with a quiet house, two children, and a very difficult year ahead of him.

And that’s precisely why.

Why Atticus?

In a world that rewards noise, Atticus rewards stillness. He is the rare fictional character who never needs to raise his voice to hold a room. His power isn’t in what he can do, but in what he refuses to do — refuse to hate, refuse to rush to judgement, refuse to compromise on a principle even when the whole town thinks he’s a fool for it.

For one week, I want to know what that kind of moral clarity feels like. Not as an idea, but as a daily practice.

I want to wake up and walk to the courthouse knowing everyone is staring. I want to sit on the porch in the evening and answer Scout’s endless questions with patience rather than distraction. I want to read a case file not to win, but to make sure the right thing is done, even when I know I will lose.

We live in an age of instant reaction. Atticus lives in an age of considered response. I think my nervous system could use a week of that.

What a Week in Maycomb Would Teach Me

1. Courage without performance. Atticus tells Scout that courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway.” In my life, and perhaps in yours, courage is often confused with confidence. We post about it. We announced it. Atticus just gets up and does it. I’d like to practise that quieter kind.

2. Parenting by example, not lecture. He never tells Jem and Scout what to think. He shows them how to think. He lets them make up their own minds about Boo Radley, about Mrs Dubois, about the trial itself. For seven days, I’d love to learn how to parent, mentor, and lead that way.

3. The luxury of a slower lens. No notifications. No breaking news cycle. Just front-porch conversations, handwritten notes, and long afternoons. I suspect I’d notice how much of my own anxiety is not from problems, but from the speed at which I try to solve them.

Of course, it wouldn’t be comfortable. It would be hot, it would be unjust, and it would be heartbreaking. Switching lives with Atticus means switching into the hardest week of his professional life — defending Tom Robinson when he knows the verdict is already written.

But that is the point. An easy fictional life would be a holiday. Atticus’s life would be an education.

After a week, I would gladly come back to my own. Hopefully with a little less tendency to judge quickly, a little more ability to sit still when things are difficult, and a better answer the next time a child — or an adult — asks me a hard question.

If you had seven days to be someone else, who would you choose? Not who has the life you envy, but who has the character you want to borrow?

Let me know in the comments — I have a feeling the answers will be far more revealing than our CVs.

In Defence of Darkness – Why I Fell For The Villain Who Was Never Meant To Be Loved

Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

In Defence of Darkness – Why I Fell For The Villain Who Was Never Meant To Be Loved

Have you ever liked a villain more than a hero?

I have. And I still remember the unease of that confession in a single-screen theatre, surrounded by whistles for the hero, while my own sympathies were quietly, traitorously, leaning toward the other side of the moral fence.

I liked Shah Rukh Khan when Sunny Deol was the Hero .It was Darr (1993) – Yash Chopra’s haunting symphony of love turned into obsession.

And if that is the film, then dear reader, you are not alone. An entire generation felt the same delightful guilt.
The Hero We Were Supposed to Cheer

On paper, Sunny Deol as Sunil Malhotra was impeccable. He was duty, honour, protection. The archetypal hero – upright as a lighthouse in a storm, steadfast, muscular in both ethic and physique. He loved with the calm certainty of daylight. He was the man our parents wanted us to become.

He was, perhaps, too perfect to be interesting.

Heroes like Sunil reassure us. They do not disturb us. And that, paradoxically, is their narrative failing. Virtue without vulnerability becomes marble – admirable, but cold to touch.

The Villain We Were Never Meant to Understand

Then entered Rahul Mehra. Shah Rukh Khan, all of 27 then, with a stammer that could curdle your blood and eyes that held both a child’s yearning and a madman’s abyss.

Rahul was not evil for the sake of evil. That is what made him unforgettable. His was not the villainy of greed or conquest, but the villainy of a love so absolute, so untempered by reason, that it consumed itself. In literature, we would call him Byronic – tortured, obsessive, eloquent in his madness. He was Heathcliff on the moors of Mumbai, whispering “K-k-k-kiran” into a silence that answered him with fear.

Chopra did something audacious. He gave the villain a monologue of the soul. We saw his loneliness. His motherless childhood. His letters never sent. His world where love was not a feeling but a religion, and where rejection was not disappointment but sacrilege.

How could we not feel for him?

Sunny Deol fought for Kiran. Rahul suffered for her. And human hearts, fickle and literary as they are, are always more moved by suffering than by strength.

There is a line in Paradise Lost where Milton makes Satan so tragically magnificent that readers have, for centuries, secretly rooted for him. Darr did the same. It reminded us that villains are often just heroes of a story told from the other side.

Why We Love the Monster

We like villains more than heroes sometimes because heroes reflect who we aspire to be, while villains reflect who we are – flawed, insecure, obsessive, terrified of being unloved.

Sunil had the world on his side. Family, law, society. Rahul had only his delusion, and he clung to it with the desperate poetry of a drowning man clinging to a raft.

In that imbalance, there was a profound, unsettling humanity. We did not condone his stalking. We did not endorse his violence. But we understood his ache. And understanding, as any lover of literature knows, is a hair’s breadth away from forgiveness.

That is the genius of Shah Rukh Khan in Darr. He did not play a villain. He played a lover who never learned how to stop loving. And in doing so, he made villainy vulnerable.

So yes, I have liked a villain more than a hero. His name was Rahul. And he taught me that sometimes the most memorable shadows are cast by the most brilliant, broken light.

Have you felt that same strange sympathy? That moment when the audience cheers for the hero, and you find yourself mourning the villain?

If so, perhaps it is not that we have poor morals. Perhaps it is that we have good imaginations.

What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?

The Longest Book I Ever Read — And the Journey Between Its Pages

Some books are measured in pages. Others are measured in the distance they travel with us.

Whenever someone asks me, “What is the longest book you have ever read?” I am tempted to answer with a number—seven hundred pages, perhaps a thousand, or even more. But the truth is that the longest book I have ever read was not necessarily the one with the greatest number of pages. It was the one that seemed to accompany me long after I had closed it.

I have always believed that reading is not merely an act of turning pages. A good book gradually becomes a second landscape of the mind. Its characters acquire familiar faces, its streets become places we have visited, and its questions follow us into our ordinary lives.

Among the enormous books I have encountered, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains one of the most formidable literary journeys. Its sheer scale can intimidate a reader before the first page has even been turned. It contains war, politics, love, family, ambition, loss, philosophy and the restless movement of history. Yet its true magnitude lies not in its length but in the astonishing breadth of human life it attempts to contain.

At first, a book of such proportions can feel like a mountain. One wonders whether the summit will ever appear. But eventually something changes. The pages cease to be an obstacle. The reader stops counting them.

That, I think, is when reading becomes an adventure.

A long book demands something that modern life increasingly discourages: patience. We live surrounded by instant messages, brief videos, abbreviated opinions and information designed to be consumed in seconds. A thousand-page novel asks us to do the opposite. It asks us to remain.

To remain with a character when he is confused.

To remain with a family when it is falling apart.

To remain with an idea until it becomes uncomfortable.

To remain with a question even when there is no immediate answer.

Perhaps this is why long books can be so transformative. They do not merely tell us a story; they alter our sense of time.

There is also a peculiar intimacy in reading a very long book. You begin to recognise its rhythms. You know when a particular character is likely to enter a scene. You become accustomed to the author’s vocabulary and cadence. Gradually, the book develops a private geography inside your mind.

And then, inevitably, comes the final page.

There is something strangely melancholy about finishing a monumental book. We celebrate reaching the end, yet a small part of us wishes the journey had continued. The characters who occupied our thoughts for weeks or months suddenly disappear. The bookmark becomes unnecessary. The book is complete, but the conversation it began within us is not.

Perhaps that is the real meaning of a long book.

It is not long because it contains many pages.

It is long because it creates many lives within one life.

A short book can entertain us for an afternoon. A great long book can accompany us through an entire season of our existence. We may begin reading it as one person and finish it as someone slightly altered by everything we have encountered between the covers.

So, if I were asked again about the longest book I have ever read, I might hesitate before giving a title.

I would probably say:

“The longest book is the one whose last page does not feel like the end.”

Because the finest books eventually leave the bookshelf and take up residence somewhere far more enduring—the human imagination.

And there, unlike books on shelves, they have no final page.

When the Search for God Becomes a Search for OurselvesA Review of Show Me God…

When the Search for God Becomes a Search for Ourselves

A Review of Show Me God…

Available in digital and Paperback edition all over the World on all the Amazon Platforms

About the Book

Show Me God… is an introspective and thought-provoking literary novel about one man’s lifelong search for an answer to humanity’s oldest and most elusive question: Does God exist, and if so, where can He be found?

At its heart is Arun, a husband, father and lifelong seeker who refuses to accept inherited beliefs merely because they have been passed down through generations. His quest takes him and his family across places of worship and spiritual traditions, where they encounter the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Quran, the Guru Granth Sahib and the wisdom of other religious and philosophical traditions.
Yet the more Arun searches, the less satisfied he becomes.
His pilgrimage gradually moves beyond sacred buildings and holy books and into the difficult terrain of ordinary human existence—illness, financial loss, family tensions, doubt, ageing, grief, forgiveness and the fragile relationships between parents and children.

The novel’s most compelling insight is that the search for God cannot remain an intellectual exercise. Arun eventually has to confront a more demanding question: What kind of human being should I become while I am still searching?

That question gives the novel its emotional and philosophical centre.
Through encounters with strangers, children, family members and people facing hardship, Arun gradually discovers that compassion cannot depend upon certainty. One does not need to possess the ultimate answer before choosing to help another person.

The novel therefore refuses the convenience of a conventional spiritual conclusion. Arun does not receive a miraculous revelation or a definitive proof of God’s existence.

Instead, he reaches a quieter and more profound understanding: uncertainty need not prevent goodness, and faith need not require intellectual dishonesty.

About the Author

Prashant Kumar Lal brings to the novel a lifetime of experience in education, human relationships and the observation of people and society.

A veteran educator and former school principal, he has spent several decades working with students, teachers, parents and educational institutions. His professional life has given him an unusually broad view of human behaviour—ambition and disappointment, success and failure, discipline and rebellion, anxiety and hope.

He is also an author of numerous books across education, physics, personal reflection and literary writing.

In Show Me God…, these experiences are transformed into a deeply human narrative in which intellectual curiosity meets emotional experience. Rather than preaching a particular doctrine, the author allows his characters to question, disagree, doubt and grow.
That restraint is one of the novel’s strengths.

The USP of the Book

The greatest strength of Show Me God… is its interfaith and humanistic approach to spirituality.

This is not a novel written to prove that one religion possesses the final truth. Nor is it an argument against religion.

Instead, it explores what happens when a sincere seeker places different traditions beside one another and asks what they ultimately demand from human beings.

The novel brings together faith and doubt, science and spirituality, family and individual freedom, suffering and compassion, belief and reason.

Its central proposition is both simple and demanding:

If our search for God does not make us better human beings, what exactly are we searching for?
The book’s second distinctive quality is its treatment of doubt. Arun is not punished for questioning. His doubts become part of his intellectual and moral maturation. The novel recognises that certainty can sometimes produce arrogance, while honest doubt can produce humility.

Most importantly, the book turns spirituality into conduct.

Prayer becomes responsibility.

Faith becomes humility.

Forgiveness becomes an action.

Love becomes the willingness to let others choose their own path.

And compassion becomes meaningful precisely because it does not require certainty about the universe.

What Makes the Novel Memorable

The novel’s strongest passages occur when philosophy is brought down into human situations.

A frightened child does not need an explanation of suffering; he needs someone to stay.

A grieving parent does not need a theological argument; he needs someone willing to listen.
A strained family does not necessarily need another sermon; it needs honesty.

A person in difficulty may need help more urgently than an explanation of why the difficulty exists.
These encounters gradually transform Arun.

His final transformation is therefore not simply spiritual—it is ethical and emotional.

He learns to listen instead of immediately advising, to help instead of merely analysing, to accept his children’s independence, to recognise his wife’s unspoken burdens and to live without demanding that every mystery be resolved before he can find meaning.

That makes his journey convincing.

Target Readers

Show Me God… will particularly appeal to readers who enjoy:

– Literary and philosophical fiction
– Spiritual and inspirational novels
– Stories about faith, doubt and belief
– Interfaith and multicultural literature
– Family-centred narratives
– Books exploring the meaning of life
– Stories of personal transformation
– Fiction combining philosophy with everyday human experience
– Readers interested in Hindu, Christian, Islamic and Sikh traditions from a comparative perspective
– Readers who enjoy reflective novels that leave questions rather than providing convenient answers

It may also appeal to mature readers who have themselves experienced the transitions of family life, parenthood, illness, retirement, loss, financial uncertainty and ageing.

– Younger readers, particularly those questioning inherited beliefs, may also find Arun’s intellectual journey relevant.

Final Verdict

Show Me God… is ultimately not a novel about finding God in a particular place.

It is about discovering what happens to a human being when the search itself changes him.
– Arun begins by asking for evidence.
– He ends by accepting responsibility.
– He begins by wanting certainty.
– He ends by finding the courage to live honestly without it.

And somewhere between those two points, the novel quietly proposes one of its most compelling ideas: perhaps the deepest spiritual question is not “Where is God?”, but “What am I becoming while I search?”
That makes Show Me God… more than a religious novel.

It is a literary exploration of faith, doubt, family, conscience and the difficult art of being human.

Rating: ★★★★★
A reflective, humane and intellectually engaging novel for anyone who has ever looked towards the heavens and asked a question to which no easy answer came.

The Slow Road Is the Fast Road: What I Wish I’d Known at 25

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

The Slow Road Is the Fast Road: What I Wish I’d Known at 25

If you are reading this in your twenties or thirties, you probably think you are late. Late to a career, late to a house, late to figuring it all out. You are not. You are right on time.

I have lived long enough to get a few things spectacularly wrong and a few things quietly right. If I could sit you down over a proper cuppa, this is what I would tell you.

1. Stop trying to win the week. Win the decade.

When you are young, everything feels urgent. That promotion, that argument on the internet, that five-year plan you must have perfected by next Tuesday. None of it is as urgent as it feels.

Life does not reward the person who sprints the fastest for a month. It rewards the person who can show up consistently for ten years. Learn the skill. Save the money. Be the reliable friend. Compound interest works on careers and character, not just cash.

2. Your health is not a background task.

In your twenties, your body forgives you. In your fifties, it sends you the invoice.

You do not need six-pack abs or a marathon medal. You need three boring, non-negotiable habits: sleep seven to eight hours, walk every single day, and eat food that your grandmother would recognise. Lift something heavy twice a week. Your future knees, heart and mind will thank you more eloquently than any boss ever will.

3. Choose people, not just opportunities.

You will be tempted to chase the fanciest job title, the trendiest city, the highest salary. Ask a better question: Who will I become around these people?

Ambition is important, but your colleagues, your partner, your close friends – they are your real environment. A brilliant opportunity with cynical, unkind people will cost you far more than it pays. A decent opportunity with generous, curious people will make you richer in every way that counts.

Learn to be good company. Turn up on time. Remember names. Listen properly. Apologise quickly and mean it. Those are not soft skills. They are the whole game.

4. Learn to be bored again.

Your generation has a superpower and a curse: you never have to be bored. The moment stillness arrives, there is a feed to scroll.

Protect your boredom. That is where ideas are born, where grief is processed, where you finally hear what you actually want rather than what the algorithm wants you to want.

Leave your phone in another room for an hour each evening. Take a walk without a podcast. Sit on a park bench and do nothing. It feels unproductive at first. It is actually maintenance for your soul.

5. Money is simple. Behaviour is hard.

You do not need a complex investment strategy. You need to spend less than you earn, avoid stupid debt, automate your savings, and let time do the heavy lifting.

The biggest financial mistakes are rarely mathematical. They are emotional: trying to impress people you do not even like, buying things when you are sad, quitting too early because comparison made you impatient.

Build an emergency fund, insure what you cannot afford to lose, and remember that freedom is not having more. It is needing less.

6. Failure is data, not identity.

You will fail. You will get rejected, make a fool of yourself, choose the wrong person, invest in the wrong thing. Please do not make a story out of it that says you are a failure.

I wish someone had told me earlier: failure is just information. It tells you what does not work, who is not for you, where you need to grow. Write it down, learn the lesson, and move on. Shame keeps you stuck. Curiosity moves you forward.

7. Kindness is not weakness.

It is fashionable to be clever and cynical. Do not fall for it.

The world is already sharp enough. Be the person who sends the thank-you note, who checks in on a friend, who gives way in traffic, who tips well and speaks well of people when they are not in the room.

In the end, no one will remember your performance reviews. They will remember how you made them feel when they were having a terrible day. That is your real legacy.

What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?

The One Change That Could Make a City Breathe Again

If I could improve my city instantly by changing just one thing, I would not build another shopping mall, widen another flyover, or erect another glittering tower of glass and concrete.

I would give the city clean, safe, uninterrupted public spaces.

It sounds almost too simple. Yet sometimes the most consequential changes are not the grandest ones. A city is not merely a collection of roads, buildings, offices and traffic signals. It is a place where human beings are supposed to live. And people need somewhere to pause.

Imagine a city where every neighbourhood has a well-maintained park, a shaded walking path, benches beneath trees, clean public toilets, drinking-water points and spaces where children can play without dodging vehicles. Imagine streets where pedestrians are not treated as obstacles and elderly people can walk without fear. Imagine an evening when families can step outside their homes and simply sit together beneath a tree.

That would be a different kind of development.

We have become remarkably skilled at constructing things and strangely careless about preserving places. We measure progress in kilometres of roads, numbers of vehicles, square feet of construction and the height of buildings. But perhaps another question deserves to be asked:

How pleasant is it to be alive here?

A city should not exhaust its citizens merely by requiring them to cross it.

Public spaces have a quiet democratic power. The millionaire and the street vendor, the schoolchild and the retired teacher, the jogger and the grandmother with her walking stick can occupy the same patch of ground. For a brief while, social distinctions become less important. A park does not ask for your income before allowing you to sit beneath a tree.

There is another advantage: mental space.

Modern urban life is noisy in ways that are not always audible. Deadlines, traffic, notifications, bills, competition and uncertainty follow us everywhere. We carry invisible burdens through crowded streets. A little greenery, a quiet bench and a ten-minute walk cannot solve every problem, but they can give the mind enough breathing room to confront those problems with greater composure.

Children need this space too. Childhood should contain scraped knees, muddy shoes, bicycles, footballs, arguments over whose turn it is, and the temporary heartbreak of losing a game. If every vacant patch of land becomes a construction site, children gradually exchange outdoor adventure for screens.

And cities need trees not merely for beauty. They offer shade, reduce heat, soften concrete landscapes and make neighbourhoods more humane. A tree planted today is, in a sense, a gift to strangers we shall never meet.

But there is an important condition: public spaces must be maintained, not merely inaugurated.

We are fond of ceremonies. We unveil parks, plant saplings, install benches and put up plaques. Then enthusiasm fades. Grass grows wild, lights stop working, litter accumulates and the beautiful new space slowly becomes another neglected corner.

A truly improved city would therefore treat cleanliness and maintenance as civic duties rather than occasional campaigns.

Perhaps the greatest improvement would be psychological. When people see that their surroundings are cared for, they begin to care for them too. A clean pavement discourages litter. A functioning park encourages families to use it. A safe footpath encourages walking. A pleasant public square encourages conversation.

Cities teach us how to behave.

If we build only for speed, we become impatient. If we build only for vehicles, we forget pedestrians. If we build only for commerce, we forget community. But if we build places where people can walk, sit, talk, play and breathe, we remind ourselves that a city exists for human beings, not merely for economic activity.

So, if I were handed the impossible privilege of improving my city overnight, I would not ask for a spectacular monument.

I would ask for one good park, one safe footpath and one peaceful corner in every neighbourhood—and then I would ask that someone care enough to keep them beautiful.

Because perhaps the finest measure of a city is not how high it can build.

It is how gently it allows its people to live.

What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?

The Longest Journey Was Never Measured in Miles

What is the longest trip I have ever taken?

At first, the question seems to demand a number. How many kilometres? How many days? How many cities, railway stations, airports, mountain roads and unfamiliar beds?

But the longer I think about it, the less certain I become that the longest journey of a life can be measured on a map.

I have travelled across considerable distances, sometimes with an itinerary carefully folded into a pocket, sometimes with little more than curiosity as my companion. I have crossed plains that seemed interminable, climbed into mountains where the air grew thinner and the horizon wider, travelled towards the sea, and returned from places that had seemed impossibly distant when I first set out.

Yet none of those journeys, however long, quite deserves the title.

The longest trip I have taken has been the journey from youth to age.

It began innocently enough.

In youth, the world appeared almost limitless. A few coins in the pocket seemed sufficient for adventure. A train journey could become an expedition; an unfamiliar town could become a story; a chance meeting could acquire the importance of destiny. We travelled not merely towards destinations but towards possibilities.

Then life happened.

Years began accumulating with the quiet efficiency of a railway timetable. Friends moved away. Some disappeared from our lives altogether. Responsibilities replaced spontaneity. Dreams acquired practical considerations. The exuberance of youth gradually made room for discernment, and sometimes for regret.

The strange thing about growing older is that one does not notice the journey while travelling through it.

There is no announcement saying, You have now entered middle age.

No conductor walks through the compartment and declares, Please prepare yourselves for the next station: old age.

One morning, you simply discover that yesterday’s adventures have become memories, yesterday’s heroes have become photographs, and some of the people with whom you once imagined growing old are no longer walking beside you.

That is when you realise how far you have travelled.

I have discovered that the longest journeys are not always the most exhausting ones. Sometimes the hardest distance lies between what we expected life to be and what it actually became.

There have been stretches of uncertainty, moments when the road ahead appeared obscured by mist. There have been decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but looked rather different when examined through the rear-view mirror. There have been successes that proved less satisfying than anticipated and disappointments that eventually revealed unexpected lessons.

And, thankfully, there have also been moments of extraordinary beauty.

A mountain at dawn.

The sound of rain against a window.

An old song suddenly transporting you decades backwards.

A conversation with a stranger that remains in your memory long after the stranger has disappeared.

The laughter of children.

A quiet morning when nothing spectacular happens, yet everything somehow feels right.

Perhaps this is what travel ultimately teaches us: the destination is important, but the experience of moving towards it changes us.

We leave one place as one person and arrive somewhere else slightly altered.

Sometimes the alteration is imperceptible. Sometimes it is profound.

A long journey also teaches humility. The world is too large for certainty and too complex for arrogance. Every unfamiliar landscape reminds us that our little corner of existence is only one fragment of a much larger mosaic.

And every journey eventually brings us home.

Home, however, is another curious word.

When we are young, home is a physical place. Later, it becomes a collection of people, memories, familiar sounds and emotional landmarks. Eventually, perhaps, home becomes an interior territory—a place within ourselves where we no longer need to prove anything.

That may be the final destination of the longest journey.

Not wealth.

Not recognition.

Not even achievement.

Peace.

The ability to look backwards without being imprisoned by regret, and forwards without being paralysed by fear.

If I were asked today how far I have travelled, I could give an impressive figure. But it would still be inadequate.

The longest trip I have ever taken has carried me through laughter and sorrow, ambition and disappointment, friendship and separation, certainty and doubt. It has taken me from the impatience of youth towards the patience of age.

And there is still some road left.

I do not know precisely where it leads.

Perhaps that is the beauty of it.

After travelling for so many years, I have finally learnt that a journey does not need to reveal its destination to be worthwhile.

Sometimes it is enough to keep walking.

To remain curious.

To notice the landscape.

To be grateful for the companions who stay.

And, when the road becomes unexpectedly beautiful, to slow down and look around.

Because perhaps the longest journey was never measured in miles at all.

It was measured in everything we became along the way.