Shantaram- A name that will remain close to my heart!

I guess this is the longest I took to complete a book. Maybe coz it was quite a big one..but I have read more than that many a times. Maybe I was tad lazy…but laziness never comes between me and words. I guess I did not want it to end.

I don’t remember when was the last time I felt this way for a character..or the words he said..or the emotions he felt. I don’t do reviews. For I believe I have no right to judge the feelings which empowered the writer when he penned down his thoughts. This is my way of thinking. I do read reviews though, but never let them decide what I want to take out from the story.

And from a book like this, I don’t think many would do justice to what a commendable confession, reality check and harsh truth it displayed.

I took as long as I could to complete it…and this is the closest to my heart. More so because I lived many phases in my life while I was reading it. I was happy with a new turn that took place in my life, both personally and professionally. It was fresh and it was hopeful. But as the book said “Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things”, and so I also had my heart broken, again. And the high which I was supposed to get in my professional life also got sucked up, at the same time. There were some issues in the family and now, on a Saturday morning when I was supposed to get ready and enjoy the weekend, I am writing this, which satiates my mind and my heart like nothing else.

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn”

I believe I mistook myself as a melancholic person. I though I don’t have the capacity to love and endure anymore. I am not left with the capacity to care or to give warmth to any person. Not even myself. In my life of 26 years, I cried my heart out in front of my parents, first time. That I am tired, of fighting, of hatred that people around bestow upon me. For all the failures, for all the lost loves, for all the heart breaks. And then, I asked myself, “Did I really loved anyone? Was it actually Love I felt that time or it was just the extreme attachment? The habit of being with them?

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.”

And that’s what happened. I was scared that one day, they will stop loving me. And today, when I look back, I feel, I don’t love any of them anymore. Even the people who changed my life upside down. I never had love in me so to claim that it got vanished with time. It was just a mere habit. Attachment. Nothing else. And the melancholy. It is of my own. It is of the fact that I should accept and accept with the whole of my heart that loving someone takes too much from you and loneliness is not a sin but a way to accept your inner thought and to accept that it is not disturbing or bad to be that way. This is the way some people are. Just like some people are less white than others. Some are less tall and some are less thin. It the way they are build. And good or bad, this is the way they are.

“I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

This book will remain the most special to me and If get a chance, I would re-read it again and again. And to conclude, “There's no such thing as forever.”