Best Intentions

For everyone, myself included, it’s a struggle to be pragmatic versus idealistic. However, I feel we should find a middle point so that both balance each other. And in “Best Intentions,” “Simran Dhir” brings an enticing contemporary story of living life in “A grey area.”

We are often scared to live in a grey and let black and white script dictate our lives and not truly experience the life. Black and white are the values set by society that make us puppets of their game. However, when we live in grey, we decide our values and rules and lead life confidently regardless of others’ opinions and judgment.

Like the protagonist of the story, Gayatri, a 32 years old strong, confident, and single girl who has a law degree, yet she chooses a career that feels her alive and helps her shape her thoughts and actions rationally. Though Gayatri had her sets of beliefs and independence to make her decisions, she was on the continuous radar of Societal judgment being single. When she rejected a boy, his father quoted to her,

“You are thirty-two years old, he said sternly. ‘It is 11 p.m. for you now. If you are getting a bus, climb on. There is no line of boys waiting for you, so better to stop thinking you are above everyone else.”

Apart from this, many other characters portray the different facets, like, unfiltered politics, family drama, dirty games to achieve high ambitions, romance, and terror for real journalism.

Simran has crafted each character with a realistic lens; each character has flaws and conflicts, from a worried mother, an arrogant husband-wife in a turbulent relationship, an opportunist, and an over-ambitious politician to dealing with a bitter past.

The plot-driven fiction often makes a tricky genre, as it tricks you and makes you fully invested in the story. And Simran weaved a fantastic story of love, deceptions, social stigmas, and how situations test individual decisions and relations. I highly recommend this contemporary fiction to all readers.