The Kite runner - some thoughts.

I read "The Kite Runner" today. How did I like it? It is something you cannot dislike. It rings like reality.

Yesterday someone was asking why I prefer fictions to non-fictions. She asked if it is fantasy that I look for, do i try to run away from reality. To tell the truth, I was caught off-guard. It actually is a truth. Books always give me a way to move around in a different world. But I didnt see it as 'running away' atleast not until she said so. It was something I didnt want to agree to. I'd rather have agreed if she had used the word 'escape' and not 'run-away'. I replied that its not fantasy of the fiction that fascinates me, its the creativity of the author, the ability to create characters, world, situations in his book. Yet when I read "The Kite Maker", I felt it ring like reality, no make-believe world there and that fascinated me more.

It is a sad story. So I was told. So I found. But actually it is much more than just a sad story.

Here are aome thoughts that I found in the book.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too. [Page - 48]

It is difficult to know which is harder, to think everyone means what they say or to think nobody means what they say. To decide who means and who does not is probably the hardest. Yet this should be the way. Isn't it? How do these people react when they discover the superficial world around them? Do they break down or do they too get drowned. Is it possible to live genuinely when everything around you is superficial? For Hassan it was. He moved away, or rather was moved away, far way and finally farther away. But what happens when moving away is not one of the options? Or may be such people don't exist, are not let to exist.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life.
Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it. [Page - 315]

This gives a new perspective to "silence". I never thought it this way. I may have been wrong. We do sometimes shut down our windows. Pull their shutters down. In some way or the other everyone does that till we need that sunlight again, till we want to feel the wind again. But not forever, not forever. Yet do you think it can happen that we just forget that shutters can be up again?

Running after butterflies

When I started blogging, I didnt intend it to be my online journal - the ones that say 'i went to office today, we had a lot of work... etc'. I wanted it to be the window that would connect my thoughts to outside world. I wanted to catch the momentarily fleeting thoughts and pen them down here. May be that precisely is the reason why my post count has dwindled over time. It will be wrong to say that thoughts don't fleet anymore. They do but I just don't get to pen them down.

It is something like, you see the colourful butterflies, you smile but you don't run after them like you used to. It has nothing to do with the absence of butterflies, nothing to do with your growing up, nothing to do with your not being able to catch them - because catching was never the fun, it was always the running after them- yet today you just don't run after them.

Why do you think, we stopped running after them? Was it that we realised the futility of it? Or is it that we forgot to have fun or may be we just changed our ways to have fun. Then again, what actually is 'funny'. So often I find the distinction between humour and sarcasm blurring. I realise laughing is not an indeliberate effect anymore but actually a deliberate action. We laugh because we are supposed to. We smile for the same reason.

I wandered away (as usual). I was talking about blogs. Sometimes I wonder there are so many blogs in this blogsworld that have been abandoned, lost, left unfinished, forgotten, ... dead. Its all like phases you know, we get crazy about something for sometime. One month, two at most then forgotten. Then I look at my blog and think how often did I come close to abandoning it. Yet what is it that brings me back again to run after the butterflies!

May be its not futile after all.