Honest Opinions

The status and safety of practitioners of black magic is something that still isn’t at a universal constant throughout, and could never be, given how the implication of this term and the practices associated with it vary with the differences in culture and the religious standing of people across the many continents. Despite the fact that black magic, witches and warlocks aren’t a concern anymore for us, witch-hunts aren’t something unheard of in the news. Even in the twenty-first century has our country witnessed a series of harrowing incidents entailing poor women who’ve been tortured by the powerful in villages, almost always doing these under the guise of ‘punishing a witch’. This isn’t however the case here alone, as the African and Asian continents hasn’t yet done away with the evils of witch-lynching. Saudi Arabia and Cameroon still treat this practice as a criminal offence, while on the other hand we’re in perpetual fear of a nuclear war. Most important of all is the question w...

An illustration of the introductory scene to Great Expectations, where Pip the orphan first meets the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch in a churchyard. Realism emerged as a literary movement around the middle of nineteenth century marked by Stendhal’s work in France after the 1848 revolution. It is notably a part of the artistic movement which went by the same name, at times also referred to by Naturalism, especially in case of paintings. The need for realism arose after the creative minds found the need to express reality the way it was, without romanticizing it or adding any implausible, exotic or supernatural elements. While art found the existence of realism over ages, and at times from earlier times as a test of skill, its presence in the literary sphere was marked by the need to present a truer image of the world around us, not to, however, cater to the relatable factor. The prime motive however, was to open our eyes to the way the things were in, contrary to what the roman...