I have been living in another world for the past two and a half days. I have been wondering about the reasons for this alternate world experience. And it appears that there could be more than one, as it often happens with confused me.
It all started with Radhanath Swami's TED Talk that I stumbled upon. That led me to read his book The Journey Home that I had bought a while back. Over the past three days I have been reading up the book. It is for the first time in many years that I got to read a book at a stretch.
And what a book it has been! In my limited engagement with the world of letters I have been moved only by two other books as much as I have been by this book.
The first time that I was moved by a book was when I read the story of Abhimanyu in Rajaji's Mahabharata. I was all of ten years and some months then. I sobbed inconsolably as the brave, young Abhimanyu, fought on and fell in the battlefield like a warrior worthy of his father, even though he knew that he did not know the technique to get out of the battle formation that he had broken through.
I was too young to know if it was the sheer tragedy of the way he was killed, or the cruelty of the injustice meted out to him or the courage that the sixteen year old displayed in battle that made me weep so much for Abhimanyu.
Or if it had anything to do my state of the mind at that time. Our family of four had just been uprooted from the secure comfort of a large joint family in Trivandrum to a nuclear setup in an utterly strange town Ernakulam thanks to the government of India's policy for transferring officials like my Dad. We had been moved to Ernakulam, a city that appeared to be in a permanent state of melancholy because of the always overcast skies and incessant rains. (My older brother stayed on with my grandparents.)
The next time I was cast into such a mournful state was after I completed reading Maugham's Razor's Edge. It was a monsoon weekend in Mumbai. It rained incessantly as I read right through the tragic end of Sophie after she had been tempted back into drinking and Larry took to driving a cab in New York after having been a fighter pilot in World War II.
I was much older by then, having started life as a banker in Bombay. If anything the experience said to me that there was a part of me that just had not grown up. Again I cannot say if it was the monsoon gloom in general or my specific state of forlorn in this huge and impersonal city of Mumbai as a nearly friendless paying guest or the sheer pathos of the story that got me into that state.
And the third time I shed silent tears while reading a book and could not bring myself to discuss it, after I had read it, without breaking down was over these last two days when I read The Journey Home. Here again I cannot say if I felt the way I did because of the rather enervating attack of dengue that I was suffering from, or whether it was because of a preoccupation with an individual that I had been missing lately or it was the Swami's story itself or some combination of all or some of these.
I am much older now, pushing 58. I am no longer a stranger to grief, of major or minor magnitude. Yet I realised that I had not grown out of being affected by the joys and sorrows of the dramatis personae in the books I read. I felt sad for the young Richard Slavin or Little Monk as he underwent enormous physical hardship, intellectual confusion and emotional turmoil in his quest for his destiny in life.
This is one book that I will take a while to come out of. And this is one book I hope to read at least once again before my faculties shut down for good.
While in the spirit of that book....Hare Krishna..Gopi Jana Vallabha...
It all started with Radhanath Swami's TED Talk that I stumbled upon. That led me to read his book The Journey Home that I had bought a while back. Over the past three days I have been reading up the book. It is for the first time in many years that I got to read a book at a stretch.
And what a book it has been! In my limited engagement with the world of letters I have been moved only by two other books as much as I have been by this book.
The first time that I was moved by a book was when I read the story of Abhimanyu in Rajaji's Mahabharata. I was all of ten years and some months then. I sobbed inconsolably as the brave, young Abhimanyu, fought on and fell in the battlefield like a warrior worthy of his father, even though he knew that he did not know the technique to get out of the battle formation that he had broken through.
I was too young to know if it was the sheer tragedy of the way he was killed, or the cruelty of the injustice meted out to him or the courage that the sixteen year old displayed in battle that made me weep so much for Abhimanyu.
Or if it had anything to do my state of the mind at that time. Our family of four had just been uprooted from the secure comfort of a large joint family in Trivandrum to a nuclear setup in an utterly strange town Ernakulam thanks to the government of India's policy for transferring officials like my Dad. We had been moved to Ernakulam, a city that appeared to be in a permanent state of melancholy because of the always overcast skies and incessant rains. (My older brother stayed on with my grandparents.)
The next time I was cast into such a mournful state was after I completed reading Maugham's Razor's Edge. It was a monsoon weekend in Mumbai. It rained incessantly as I read right through the tragic end of Sophie after she had been tempted back into drinking and Larry took to driving a cab in New York after having been a fighter pilot in World War II.
I was much older by then, having started life as a banker in Bombay. If anything the experience said to me that there was a part of me that just had not grown up. Again I cannot say if it was the monsoon gloom in general or my specific state of forlorn in this huge and impersonal city of Mumbai as a nearly friendless paying guest or the sheer pathos of the story that got me into that state.
And the third time I shed silent tears while reading a book and could not bring myself to discuss it, after I had read it, without breaking down was over these last two days when I read The Journey Home. Here again I cannot say if I felt the way I did because of the rather enervating attack of dengue that I was suffering from, or whether it was because of a preoccupation with an individual that I had been missing lately or it was the Swami's story itself or some combination of all or some of these.
I am much older now, pushing 58. I am no longer a stranger to grief, of major or minor magnitude. Yet I realised that I had not grown out of being affected by the joys and sorrows of the dramatis personae in the books I read. I felt sad for the young Richard Slavin or Little Monk as he underwent enormous physical hardship, intellectual confusion and emotional turmoil in his quest for his destiny in life.
This is one book that I will take a while to come out of. And this is one book I hope to read at least once again before my faculties shut down for good.
While in the spirit of that book....Hare Krishna..Gopi Jana Vallabha...
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