What do you think?

– from A River Runs Through It.

How true is that in your life? How much do your closest know about you? And, how much do you know about your closest ones?

Talk about identity, allegiance, and what the little things mean…they are all a part of this book… well, it isn’t a complicated story — a simple story about a family. However, there are touching moments, moments of realization, moments of fear….everything you’d find in real life.

I really have no idea why I picked that book – when I bought it, I didn’t know the story, the outline, that it was made into a movie, that the author also wrote ‘Interpreter of Maladies.’

One of the few books that have humour and profound thoughts in equal measure – complimenting each other…..

http://www.shantaram.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantaram_(novel)

As she grew into womanhood, her power began to filler her with doubts. The gift of affecting the course of events positively, of being able to change the world, but only for the best, ought to have been a source of joy. Nazarébaddoor was cursed with a philosophical cast of mind, however, and as a result, even her innate good nature could not avoid being infected by a strain of melancholy. Difficult questions began to nag her. Was it always a good thing to make things better? Didn’t human beings need pain and suffering to learn and grow? Would a world in which only good things happened be a good world, a paradise, or would it, in fact, be an intolerable place whose denizens, excused from danger, failure, catastrophe, and misery, turned into insufferably big-headed, overconfident bores? Was she damaging people by helping them? Should she get her big nose out of everyone else’s business and let destiny take whatever course it chose? Yes, happiness was a thing of great, bright value, and she believed herself to be promoting it; but might not unhappiness be as important? Was she doing God’s work or the devil’s? There were no answers to such questions, but the questions themselves felt, from time to time, like answers of a sort.

In spite of her reservations, Nazarébaddoor continued to employ her gifts, unable to believe that she would have been given such powers if it wasn’t okay to use them. But her fears remained. Outwardly, she continued to behave with happy, outspoken, flatulent ease, but the unhappiness inside her grew; slowly, it’s true, but it grew. Her greatest fear, which she shared with nobody, was that all the misfortune she was averting was piling up somewhere \, that she was recklessly pouring out Pachigam’s supply of good luck while the bad luck accumulated like water behind a dam, and one day the floodgates would open and the flood of misery would be unleashed and everyone would drown. This was why the pot war affected her so badly. He worst nightmare had begun to come true.

Have you ever wondered about the need for pain and sorrow? Have you been ‘cursed’ with a philosophical cast of mind? A mind that can’t help but wonder about the greater cause in life, a mind that can’t help but look beyond the obvious…. God’s work or the devil’s? have you thought about all the thoughts that race across your mind?