Epigraph:

They ask thee concerning wine and the game of hazard. Say: ‘In both there is great sin and also some advantages for men; but their sin is greater than their advantage.’ (Al Quran 2:220)

There are 150 million people suffering from alcoholism in the world. Alcohol is also the entry drug or gateway for many to fall prey to other drug addictions.

From 2000 to 2014 nearly half a million people died from drug overdoses in USA. According to CDC  78 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.

As fiction is often exaggerated true story, the addicts or those who may fall prey to addiction, which would be all of us, may find much needed inspiration in the classic and a very popular novel by Thomas Hardy: Mayor of Casterbridge.

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of Character,’ Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.

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