NavDharmyug

The year has just past by. Another year, another life, another sigh, another teardrop for the giant eye of the time. Many things can happen in an year. Lives can change- a country's life, an individual's life. How does one day differ from another? Does the tide turn, the Earth revolves in another direction? It is a psychological peg we devise to measure our journey. To measure how far we have traversed from where we started. Did we travel farther than others that we measure against? It sounds such narrow-minded to measure ourselves against others around us, but what other way do we have? This competition make us going, while in our heart of heart we know it will all end into nothing- cipher, a zero and only solace we will have, will be an unproven promise of afterlife. But as spaces around us reduce, shoulders rub against one another, we barely breathe, we sigh, long sighs, as if they would some day grow so big to swallow our whole lives. We need friends, camarad...

There are books and there are books. There are books which you read, dreamy eyed, amid slothful slumbers, floating between various stages spread between consciousness and unconsciousness. But then, there are books which hit you hard out of your stupor, drags you out of a protective Utopian shell, churns your heart and makes you want to cry out the truth, you are suddenly exposed to. This Novel by the great Russian is one such book. Having read it and wept over the pages, it makes you want to wander around like Nietzsche's Madman with lantern in his hands. It exposes one with the sadness in this world which embraces the Earth in its grey dullness extending across the continuum. Right when you are so dispirited to jump off the cliff, you find an audacious and stubborn dawn struggling to break free at the farthest end of the gloomy dark sky. This gloom, the dark and the sudden light at the end is wherein lies the beauty of the book.  Typical of Dostoevsky, ...

Honesty is a lightening that shines bright across the sky, as deadly, as sudden and as brutal. In a sudden flash, through raging squalls, suddenly the dead, dark Earth breathes into life for a moment as the white light spreads across its face with a sudden urgency. It is this feature which makes life worth living in spite of all its inherent bitterness, and which redeems any literature. The truth which slowly crawls across wonderfully and delicately crafted words, makes it alive, and the truth of life shines in the lightening of the honest penmanship, like a passive earth in the sudden lightening in a night rain.  Fyodor Dostoyevesky's "Notes from The Underground" is one such book. I started reading this book, a sad and lonely epoch of my life, thrown away from the family for a longish travel on work. It is untrue that when you are down and depressed, you want to read something bright and sunny to lift you up. At least for me it is untrue. When I am down and out, I ...