Veronika Decides to Die

Everyday our inbox is filled with forwards. Some asking us to ‘fwd’ a chain mail to save someone’s life, some with jokes, some with pretty pictures and some with beautiful thoughts. We read them and move on with life. How many times we would have read the line ‘we should all live like it was our last day on earth’? If not more, then at least 10 times.

And how many of us actually follow that? If I were to make a normal distribution curve, then most of us lie in the center, where we keep thinking and living in either our past or our future. The present normally is for the mad, who do no planning!

Veronika Decides to Die – a fabulous book by Paulo Coelho – gives a very important message through a very interesting story.

Veronika, the protagonist, is a beautiful girl with everything in her life. But suddenly she wants to take sleeping pills and commit suicide. She does that. But as fate had it, she survives and is taken to a mental asylum. There the doctors tell her that she has only a week left. During this week she will be given injections to ‘save’ her. But she would survive only a week. the hospital teaches her life’s most important lessons of living a life without guilt, doing what your heart desires, of living for others…

In this week she desires nothing but to follow her heart as she has nothing to lose. In the end we see that she survives a day more than a week. and her lover calls it a miracle. No one knows how long will Veronika survive, but the most important thing is that she will live each day as if it was a miracle and will follow her heart.

If only all of us could do that!

This book is a must read for anyone who has ever thought of committing a suicide, for anyone who thinks life is worthless, and for those who worry more and live less. That makes it the entire population of earth, doesn’t it?