"Even death has a heart."

Here is a small fact: You are going to die.

Reading this written in such an offhand way is quite unsettling, isn’t it? Well, maybe death won’t seem so brutal once you read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The credit goes to En, for recommending it to me and Chee, for sending it to me, very promptly I should add, as a complete surprise.

What intrigued me the most was when I got to know that the entire story has been narrated by Death. It is set in Nazi Germany, where death was very busy and tired. One line that stuck with me was when death says “I am not violent or malicious. I am just a result.” Wow. That is so profound. Death is what happens to us, after all the bad stuff has already happened. It’s when our soul is finally at peace. Death isn’t evil. It is only a consequence. Most people dread it, but probably every one reaches that stage in life when they wait for it to finally embrace them. Where the soul sits up and welcomes it with a smile. The song "I'll fly away" comes to mind at this point:

"When the shadows of this life have gone, I'll fly away,
Like a bird from it's prison bars has flown, I'll fly away"

I loved how the author shaped the characters. I loved how he exposed the kindness and the brutality humans are capable of. Because that’s what makes them who they are. Humans. It was beautiful how he played with words, and shuffled between the past, present and the future. It’s like he put them onto a gargantuan palette and mingled and mixed all the colours together, to bring to life an enthralling picture on the canvas, made of contrasting hues. Red with yellow. Black with white.

I wish I could write like that. I hope to, some day. Writing that would move someone to tears. Mixing beauty and destruction together with tragedy and love. 

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

-Liesel Meminger.

Incendies

I still haven’t recovered from the shock after watching Incendies. After watching it, I couldn’t sleep or talk. I just wept. We sit here, so comfortable in our daily lives, shrouded by our own trifle issues, that we do not realize our life could have been tremendously worse that what it is.

War, famine, poverty, epidemics, discrimination, abuse, murders, terrorism.. we never envisage these things could even touch us. They only happen to others, they cannot possibly happen to us. And yet, people have gone through things we cannot even imagine.

I wept not only for Nawal Marwan, but for the entire humanity. For the injustice, for the atrocity, for the circumstances that compel humans to become so hard-hearted that they do not even blink before ending somebody else’s life. What must go through them to make them like that? Their conscience has to be dead for them to become so heartless. I wept for the destroyed homes and souls of the people who cannot get the undemanding pleasure of living a simple life. I wept for people who pray, for people who have faith and for people who have none. I wept for the silent, greasy tears that stream down a weary soldier’s cheek and fall onto a land which is divided into fragments for pathetic, greedy reasons. I wept for the blood baths, for the ravaged, raped, abandoned bodies and the withered consciences. I wept for all the pain, for children who lose their mothers, for families that are torn apart, for dreams that are shattered beyond repair, for hearts that are broken into smithereens. I wept for the millions of souls that are burnt and bludgeoned and tortured and killed and scorched in a world where that almighty being in the sky still looks down upon us and for those who believe he loves us all.

Veronika Decides to Die

Yesterday I finished reading this book by Paulo Coelho which I'd bought at the Nizamuddin railway station, Delhi: Veronika Decides to Die. It is a story about a young, good looking, 24 year old girl with a steady job and plenty of boyfriends who attempts at killing herself by consuming an overdose of sleeping pills. Why did she want to kill herself at all?

Monotony. She felt that her life was too boring, too predictable and from then on it would only go downhill, with her becoming frail and weak and diseased and watching her loved ones die. She didn't see any point in living any further. She believed that every human being had a choice to take their own lives if they wanted to and 'God' shouldn't punish them for doing so, in fact, if anything, He is the one who should be apologetic for putting them on a place like the Earth in the first place.

Anyway, she survives somehow and wakes up in a mental hospital where she gets to know that her heart has been irreversibly damaged and she only had a week to live. While she waits for death to arrive, she suddenly realizes that she needn't care about what people think about what she says or does or how she behaves because she had nothing to lose. She needn't care about the walls she had constructed around her, trying to be correct, to be precise, to be proper. And so, for the first time in her life, she allows herself to be free. To do things she had never done, to experience beauty and love and hatred and perversion.

It is when she is so aware of death lingering around her that she finally understands what it is to live, to fall in love, to experience extreme emotions, to find joy in simple things. Isn't it ironical? Her decision to die teaches her how to live.

I read somewhere "The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost." It's only after we lose something that we realize what it meant to us. Veronika realized that she hated the way she had lived her life. She never let herself be a little mad, a little crazy; she always tried to be a cistern, containing all the water inside her; but never a fountain, overflowing with emotions and enthusiasm. She never took risks, she never liked adventure, she was never rude or spiteful, she never made moves on guys thinking they might dump her; she never lived life on the edge. There was no excitement, no meaning, no purpose in her life.

I guess this is what happens to most people somewhere through life. They lose the spark, they are too afraid to go out of their comfort zones, they don't live life on the edge, and they end up existing, instead of living. Reading the book has once again changed my perspective about life (earlier it had happened after I watched The Secret) I guess we should all live our lives like its going to end very soon. Like we only have a few days to experience everything we can and to do everything we wanted to do. Like there's very little time left. Like there's no tomorrow.

Be crazy. Be daring. Try things. Try things which are considered wrong. Make mistakes, make lots of them. Experience bitter resentment and extreme anger and maddening euphoria. Weep with happiness, jump with joy and laugh out loud. Live. Life is too short and there is a lot to be done. Like a wise man once said, "There is no time to act dead; for one day, we will be."