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In 1935, Evelyn Waugh set out to search the pre-war Georgian era. Two years later in 1937, Graham Greene tried presenting till then this little known collection as a collage in a short lived literary magazine (Night and Day). This interesting collage is a mix of reports from Waugh’s immediate past, bits and pieces from his personal diary, and from newspapers of the age, ads, lines of poems and bits of social gossip. Greene confesses he does not know why Waugh chose the pieces that he did. Read almost a century later, the pieces exude a similar feeling of living through a surrealistic and unsettled reality, of unnamed dread and a certain black humour. He quotes Stephen Spender:

‘We, who live under the shadow of a war,

What can we do, that matters ?’

In an age where times are delivering surreal judgments, incarcerating social workers, allowing bank robbers to flee, hanging four men for rape, permitting another rapist to get away, giving bail to a rich media baron charged with killing, calling for public auction of assets of yet to be charged people to fulfill government’s losses in a riot .

Do these fables seem surreal?

We can see similar trivia in our media today.

We rage helplessly at our courts delivering surreal judgments, incarcerating complainants who dared report rapes while allowing the rapists to get away, on bail or with cases against them dismissed........

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