a habit reborn

This year was unlike any other year in my 22 years of existence. I am sure it’s the same with you. We all coursed through this year differently. Some healed and progressed. Some couldn’t. This year was quite a balanced year for me. I studied very little. But read, wrote and learnt a lot. I started reading books very young. But I was never obsessed with it. And somehow, during my adolescent age I withdrew from reading. But, I revived it after quite some years, and this is how.

Many months back, I used to share a room with two other young ladies. Very compatible, not the ones who snore or talk or chew loud. One fine evening, I was back from work early. As I was binging on Netflix, I heard whispers. My roommate was tucked under the bedsheet and there was no one else in the room. And I couldn’t fathom decipher where I heard the whispers from. I got curious. I had my doubts on my roommate if she had the tendency to sleep talk. I had to distract the whisperer, so I threw my bottle down which clanged on the floor, only to see my roommate arising from her comfortable quilt with a book in her hand. It seemed that my roommate was struggling with English and she got a few novels to improve her fluency. She used to read those books aloud, but because of my presence, she whispered them. Now, the curiosity died. But those whispers knocked on the doors of my monotonicity, strenuously woke the dormant habit and helped to get over the laziness that always hatched in me whenever I wanted to read a book.

Books became the very source of a healthy habit ever since then. I started reading all sorts of them. I focussed more on the novels that altered, churned and questioned my thinking and thoughts. They helped me get closure on feelings that lied abandoned in my mind. They helped me accelerate my habits, thought process and lifestyle. They made me think more, thus giving more work to my brain. They gave me company. They stirred up my intelligent and emotional quotient.

So, here are my top 5 books of 2020 suggested by some friends and internet. And NO, this isn’t a blog reviewing books. I just want to highlight what I learnt and unlearnt this year through books.

1. 1984, George Orwell

This cult classic, suggested by a friend, completely squeezed my brain alluring the lengths and depths of my imagination. It took me a while to let the context and the reality of the novel sink in. George Orwell, came up with a mind consuming way to write about totalitarianism and made us imagine a future taken over by communism (possibly). Just living the book in my head was alarming.

The author coined several words in his novel, one of which is “thoughtcrime”, where thinking against a political culture is considered a crime. We all fall under a nation, a government, a state, a jurisdiction. We are given rights. Also we are restricted from committing a written rule book of crimes. This book talks about a dystopian world where people are restricted from approaching their undivided mind and the thoughts that advances from it. “If both the past and the eternal world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?”

Books escalate emotions. Unlike movies, they let me imagine the whole of it, on my own terms. So I would be living their lives in my head. And by doing so, the entire experience of the story is intensified. This book literally put me on the field, where I watched the characters die and suffer, and every pain that graced their bodies, I felt the intensity of it in mine.

We have all imagined the future. Flying cars, man on mars, world war 3. I have imagined even farther. I believe we are a reflection of our thoughts. And to that, our surroundings play a significant role. I cannot imagine the world he would have seen, the things people did, to write such a gripping novel that twisted my pensive mind into a melancholy.

2. Man’s search for meaning

When I bought this book, I thought the author is going to talk about the purpose of life, bold and underlined and decorated with bullet points. And after reading a few pages, I thought this was a book on the holocaust and the concentration camps. But this book is an amalgam of both, but not decorated with bold, underlined bullet points.

The author says that there is no one single purpose in life. It changes time to time, with situations demanding it.

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

The life the author lived, the death he once escaped, the life after his survival comes as an inspiration when dealing with an existential crisis. The author talks plenty number of times about suffering, and how inevitable and omnipresent it is. There is nothing but an abstract meaning for one’s purpose in life. We decipher it slowly and unsteadily over the course of time. There is never just one purpose in life that we are all marching towards. We indeed thrive and strive to achieve one that subsequently births another, thus making life worthwhile for every unit of time spent.

3. Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts

Whom do you take advices from? Who gives your life lessons? Who do you think can tell you about life and the purpose of it? Where do you take your inspiration from? I am sure, a successful person, a parent, a monk would be the typical answer. That would have been my answer as well, if you had asked me before I read this book.

This autobiography is a beautiful story about an Australian convict/ drug dealer/ thug who escapes to India from a prison and how he manages to become a member of the underworld in Mumbai. I was initially baffled about how, a convict could teach you anything resourceful in life. This is not a sympathetic or a heart whelming story. But definitely a resourceful and an inspirational one.

The author talks about so many things. Little things. Big things. And he aesthetically sheds light into a myriad of subjects like drugs, sex, happiness, suffering, revenge, betrayal, love, forgiveness… We greet these facets of life with tears, smile, anger and empathy. He weaves his thoughts with tender words and pens them with truthful colours.

This was a kind of book that made me to pause, let my thoughts ponder over his words, and wander around all my memories adjoining it, relate my past with the authors’ and contemplate.

Being a lover of oceans, this particular line from the book where he correlated the ocean with humans is my most favourite — “But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.”

Inspiration can we taken from all corners of life. You are learning something every day, even if you don’t want to. Life is a finite cycle of learning and unlearning. And yes, sometimes you can take life lessons from a convict who kept running all his life for answers.

4. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

I have a theory. “God is future”. To elaborate, God is omnipotent, unimaginable and a complete miracle. Now, we have evolved over millions and millions of years, to be who we are today. We have been apes, foragers, hunters, navigators, sailors, kings, scientists, soldiers, astronauts and what not. A forager would have considered engines a miracle, when only legs were his mode of locomotion. If a sapien from 3500 BC, saw an aeroplane or a mobile phone or a television, he would call us God. To know the future, we need to understand our past.

To read about the customs, traditions, mind sets, inventions, polity of all the kinds of people who lived before us, is something I suggest all of you to do. Because trust me, doing that opened my eyes.

We are born with a predefined set of rules that is a baggage thrown to us from the past. Thousands of years back, there was no such thing as marriage. Men and women fornicated, whenever desired with whomever one pleases. A woman did not devote her entire life to be with one man and vice versa. Their terms and conditions were different. Millions of years back, the world suffered global warming, much more critical than the one we are facing today, which lead to the ice age. We have PETA, UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO today. But, foragers killed and hunted, and people cheered. Millions of years back, men and women roamed without clothes, drank no coffee, had no roof.

Our evolution is one of the greatest phenomenon in the universe. And it will always be the greatest phenomenon in the world, come what may. We are just a speck in this enormously fast evolution of humankind. We have come a long way. And to know that, somewhere and in some way I have played a part, even as a speck, gives me a feeling of inclusion. This book disproved much of my self-assumed beliefs, thoughts and conclusions. This book made me realise, I did not know much about my very own species.

5. Becoming, Michelle Obama

This was one of the books I could completely relate myself with. No, not as the First Lady of the United States of America. But I could relate to Michelle Obama as a teenager, a student, a sibling and a daughter. Over the course of the book, I envied her, I aspired to be her, I loved her and I was obsessed about her. She talked about her mistakes, her inspiration, her problems, her tenacity, her love, her job, her stubbornness, her steadfastness and her goal.

For someone who didn’t come from money, who had to support her family, who had to outstrip colour and race, she led a phenomenal life, breaking stereotypes and inspiring people. Indeed after reading the book, I googled her, followed her on YouTube and Instagram. I went to the extent of writing a personal message to her on Instagram on how she inspired me. No. She did not reply.

I love what she made out of herself as a wife, a mother, an accomplished and an independent woman, and as a FLOTUS. She wanted to make a difference. I am glad she achieved it. As it made a difference to someone thousands of kilometres away from her, not even in the same country as the one she served, just by reading her book.

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”