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FULLER PORTRAITS
Roy's style, as usual, is flowing naturally. While giving his impressions of Subhas Chandra's great character, he does not follow any chronological order of events. He jumps from one incident to another and often comes back to the same unmindful of repetitions. He frequently digresses from the main narration. While talking of Subhas, he begins to speak of himself and again comes to the main point.
Roy's style, at times, appears to be very loose. In Chapter Twenty One of The Subhush I Knew, he talks of the capacity of prayer and adds the letter he had received from his guru on prayer, but it appears to be an utterly irrelevant chapter, for it throws no light on Subhas. In Netaji the Man: Reminiscences, Roy has included a play-'Fantasia'as Chapter Twenty Three with three charactersMr. Morality. Chief Justice and Miss Art, which perhaps has nothing to do with the subject of the biography. One might wonder why such a 'Morality piece is needed here. Perhaps Roy had some purpose in his mind. But he has not cared or has failed to reveal it. Be that as it may, the redundancy of the chapter looks 100 obvious to be disputed. It is clear that Roy lacks concentration in his method of writing. Perhaps he seems to have assumed that because he writes with remarkable fluidity, smoothness and sweetness, the reader would make allowance for his inability or even unwillingness always to be precise and to the point. One may say Roy is thinking aloud. He does not seem to be conscious that he is writing for the readers. In a way, it could be called a stream of consciousness. But it is the stream of conscious mind, flowing freely according to the level of the land. The author does not seem to be directing its flow very carefully. That is how it differs from the Surrealistic fiction of the stream of consciousness which is a free flow of the tendings of the unconscious mind, at the threshold of the conscious. That is why, it could more appropriately be called a romantic rambling at its worst.
It appears to the readers that Roy fails to be sufficiently frank at certain points. He reserves, all through the book, a few facts related to somebody referred to as "the Congress High Command." He never mentions the name of this person and the readers are likely to be baffled by such reservations.
Roy's tendency to find glory everywhere can be seen in the following description of heroes given in The Subhash I Knew :
"One thousand nine hundred and twenty-three (or was it 1922?) It happened at Subhash's house under the aegis of chief C. R. Das. I had been invited to sing before a galaxy of political leaders who deigned for once to be entertained. Here was God's plenty:there was the leonine Das, strong and massive, radiating strength and kindliness. There was Jawaharlal with his Hamlet smile. There was Sarat Chandra Bose a pillar of moral support to wherever morality rocked on its foundations. There were a
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