The Zahir

Finally...Paulo Coelho mania is over! thank god...I was slowly on my path to spirituality...at 24...that would mean...cant even begin to explain what!

The Zahir - according to the author - is a state of madness that might come with love of someone or something. Here, the author was 'in love' with his wife,Esther, who left him because she thought that something was missing in their life.

According to them, they were happily married, had everything they wanted from trips to luxury to even love...still she left him without him knowing. The author spends two years in her search...in between he's in love with a woman named Marie. But he has to find his Zahir...for he is occupied by her thoughts day and night.

All this sounds like a ridiculous idea to me. If you had everything, but felt something was missing why didn't the wife try to talk it over. Lets assume that Esther wanted the husband to realize his madness for her.But why the hell he had other women in his life whom, according to him, he loved too!

Most chapters are on Mikhail(a friend of the wife whom the author suspects to be the cause for Esther leaving) and his sessions where people tell their stories in open to strangers, have fun and thus relieve themselves.

Sharing pain is good, but i feel sharing what you feel with your close ones builds stronger bonds and might even solve all misunderstandings which might be the cause for pain! And well, the whole concept of love in The Zahir is beyond me.

To each his own. And Paulo has his own thoughts. So I'll give him his due credit for some amazing work elsewhere. But lets just hope love remains love and all the unconventional blabber about this emotion stays away from earth!

Like the Flowing River

As I read Paulo's books my regard for this writer increases manifold. Maybe i never read the way I do now, but this man is truly worth all the adulation he gets.

Like the flowing river is as sweet and simple as it can get. Any person on this earth can write such a book. It has reflections from the writer's mundane activities and thoughts that arise from each.

But what makes him Paulo Coelho is the way he describes smallest of incidents and provokes thoughts that never occur to us when we experience what he does. A simple outing with his wife, meeting strangers on the beach, understanding different ways to romance, marveling at the thoughts of spiritual gurus, and just learning from short experiences in life.

Very simple yet profound, this book is extremely calming. It inspires you to be happy and just let things be. It also inspires you to take pleasure in simple things in life 'coz they are what makes life acually what it is.

Just in case, you want to read him everyday, heres his link:
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

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?