July 2018

I resisted reading this book initially.

When I finally laid my hands on it, I devoured it in two days.

I cannot explain my feelings. My initial reluctance arose (unfairly) from scepticism and my subsequent reading, from the simple and honest way in which it is written.

The book is a factual account of Anita Moorjani’s fight with cancer. The relentless progress of the disease and the irrevocable prognosis of imminent death.

Yet, she survives, against all odds.

The book describes her ‘Near Death Experience’ and all the insights it gave her. This is the part when eyebrows might be raised. But she ploughs along diligently.

Ms. Moorjani explains the reason why she got the disease and how she healed… It makes for fascinating reading.

Had her experience of disease and recovery not been backed by credible proof from hospitals, this book would not have had any staying power at all.

She explains the biggest dilemmas in life in the simplest of language.

“We are here to discover and honour our own individual paths…”

“I am at my strongest when I let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs and leave myself open to all possibilities…”

“The very act of needing certainty is a hindrance to experience greater levels of awareness. In contrast, the process of letting go and releasing all attachments to any belief or outcome is cathartic and healing…”

So, what’s new? You might say, and you won’t be wrong … But it’s not in my place to allay your doubts.
It’s yours. 

Give me a book that has a story weaving around art and nature and you have my unswerving attention !

Once again, it was this cover of watercolour tablets spilling their paint that attracted me to this book. The fact that it is written by Anuradha Roy just added to its allure, having read most of her previous novels as well.

This is a novel in which fiction and history overlap.

Set in the 1930’s when the world in general and India in particular is going through a surge of patriotism. Into this backdrop wanders Gayatri, a vibrant, beautiful free spirited artist, whose heart wants to soar and travel but feet are shackled deeply into domesticity. The tug of war within her has been vividly portrayed by Anuradha.

The novel captures her angst, and that of her son Myshkin, in a staggeringly beautiful way.

How everyone is affected by the decisions we make… How lives change because of them… How you live to regret… How life always remains incomplete, despite our hardest struggles… All this has cemented this beautiful book into what it has become…

‘All the lives we never lived,’ is also a travelogue of sorts. Lovingly creating a space for the reader to bask in, be it in a small hamlet in Bali or a small town in India with its surrounding villages and vibrant culture.

While the language is poised and graceful, the sentences crafted with elegance, it is the underlying skeleton of the story that never leaves you to enjoy every word. There is an ache created, that is palpable… This is a book that is ‘put-downable’ not because it is boring… But because one needs to surface up… To breathe, before plunging back into it again…