By MANOJ KUMAR
In his world the demarcation between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, dreams and consciousness disappear. Everyday characters and incidents look magical and magical spell look very real. His world is far form reality and yet nobody has probably depicted the reality as faithfully as he has. Welcome to the very world of GarcÃÂa Márquez. The celebrated Latin American writer and winner of the Nobel Prize who was shot to fame with his magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Born on March 6, 1928, in Aracata, Colombia, a small town with exotic locations. He was the first of sixteen children born to Gabriel Eligio GarcÃÂa, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Soon after his birth, the family left Aracata, leaving him at the care of his maternal grandparents. So it was in his ancestral town where he spent most of his childhood.
The rural setting of his village and influence of his maternal grandparents germinated the first seeds of creativity in his mind. His village provided the setting of the most of his novels and his grandparents introduced to him the raw material of his characters and themes that later shaped his novels. His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, told him the stories of ghosts and supernatural elements as if they were real. It was the same technique and style that he employed in his novels thirty years later. And his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Iguarán, told the boy equally fantastic stories based on his participation in the Colombian civil. Most of the experiences and character narrated by his grandfather find their place in his works specially in his novel No One Writes to the Colonel. Later GarcÃÂa Márquez would write: "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences...