A few days ago, while I was still hiking in a little hamlet of Himachal far from the daily dose of information avalanche, I missed a news that doesn't have much relevance to my present life- Michael Ondantje's 'The English Patient' won the Golden Man Booker Prize.
It's a book I had picked up during my days of solitude, and I feel I lack words to describe how I felt reading it - but my heart did race while browsing through the underlined paragraphs again, for "the heart is anorgan of fire."
This book was made into a movie (Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, William Defoe, Colin Firth), which is beautiful in it's own right, and I wouldn't criticize it for ignoring a main character who turned out to be a Sikh. It's not upto Hollywood to capture the intricacies of a Sikh soldier fighting in a World War, falling in love with an English woman, so I guess cultural imperialism aside, it was smart in ignoring it. For those who haven't read it, I whole heartedly recommend this not so fat book that teaches you about loss and love, and more - its set during the second world war, a war that was the product of a rabid nationalism- it's another treatise on what war does to the human psyche, how love transcends customs , reasons and boundaries, how it consumes one, how time heals the spirit, how despite being unique we are all too similar -
"We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste and experience."
Thank you Michael Ondaatje for writing this book.
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