Reflections on the autobiographical account of Javed Akhtar’s ‘Tarkash’ using life story approach

Pages: 948-951
Naina Kapoor and Tejinder Kaur (Department of Psychology, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, Rajasthan)

The aim of this paper is to explain and discuss the autobiographical account of Akhtar’s book ‘Tarkash’. The paper focuses on empirical exploration of narrator’s life using life story approach as a method of qualitative psychology. The approach takes as foundational the propositions that (1) people construct and internalize stories to make sense of their lives, (2) these autobiographical stories have enough psychological meaning and staying power to be told to others as narrative accounts, and (3) these narrative accounts, when told to psychological researchers, can be analyzed for content themes, structural properties, functional attributes, and other categories that speak to their psychological, social, and cultural meanings. The paper reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self understanding, personality structure and change, and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity. With this assertion, the present paper attempts to study translation of Akhtar’s volume of poems Tarkash titled as Quiver in English, translated by Mathews. It attempts to bring out the traces of Indian tradition as well as present day Indian urban life with problems of living in a street of Mumbai, lying beneath the universal themes like love, disillusionment and social injustice and a philosophy of life. One sentence that I can dedicate to this book is : Humne to jindagi batayi thi .. log kavitaye samajh ke padhne lage.