Lajja (Shame) ..by Taslima Nasrin...

Lajja (Shame) ..by Taslima Nasrin...

Read it..
Pained by it...
Agonized by it...
Angered by it....

One of the most painful books I have read...Eventhough the story revolves around the aftermath of  Babri Masjid demolition in Bangladesh, it carries the sequence of unfortunate events since independence which transformed a country conceived as a secular republic to a religious republic...with subsequent curtailments in the freedom of religion and freedom of thought...

The book made me realize how happy that I am for taking birth in this wonderful secular nation..i.e INDIA, inspite of all its shortcomings...

For giving me freedom...
freedom to be an athiest...
freedom to an agnost....
freedom to disbelieve in the 330 million Gods..
freedom to disbeleive in Father and Son...
freedom to disbeleive in the Prophet....

And at the most ..
freedom to question and reason
and to find the truth myself.....

I felt immense shame and angry for all those with all colours of flags for killing the fellow species in the name of God...

God, in  its present form, I perceive as the most dreadful creation of human being, more poisonous than the bomb burst at Nagasaki...

I felt moved by courage of Taslima Nasreen, being a female herself,wrote this book inspite of the  strong opposition she faced from the fanatics...

Thankyou..Taslima..for reminding me of the freedom I do possess in this  land, where I live....

INTO THE WILD...by John Krakauer

Last few days I was reading the book ,'Into the wild' by John Krakauer.. The adventrous story of 23yr old young man,Christopher McCandless who left his home for an expedition into the mountaineous Alaska without a single penny in his hand...He was in search of the meaning of his life..away from the societal concepts of success and acceptability....And alone, he walked into wild...lived in the wild and in the end died in the wild...Wildly.... 

In the life we seldom seek real experiences...we seek experiences which comes as new lines in a CV or in a linkedin profile or as new job porition or as new educational qualification....We forget ask to ourselves, is it the experience I have longed for...? And we continue to the rat race...(Somebody said, who ever wins the ratrace, is still a rat...)

Evethough tragic in the end,the book was a great inspiration for whosoever thinks liberally in a world so much entangled with donot's and shouldn'ts...One can easily see a parallel between McCandless's Mind and the mind of Thoreu, who left his home and lived in a forest near a pond and came up with most lovely creation ...the Walden....

Highly recommended...(Sometimes we may get  a little horrified by the end.....Then that thought will come to us...One day One day , even Barack Obama have to die...)

The book had a good collection of very nice quotes...The link is here..http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1235.Jon_Krakauer

But I  felt moved by the quote which I put as tiltle of this note...

"Career's is a 20th Century Invention, and I don't want one!"...

This is the bus where he had surpassed his last horrifying moments

Praveen P