Sunday, June 15, 2008

The quest


A strange kind of feeling has surrounded me these days... I use the word surround very carefully for I feel this feeling all around me. It travels with me as I leave my home for office or vice a verse... it comes back to me in middle of the night when I am dead asleep.... this feeling is beyond time and space.


Wait I can explain. All this began when one evening browsing through books at the Book Cafe I picked up Swati Chopra's Dharamsala Dairies. This is one book I wanted to read after I read about it in the Indian Express one Sunday. But then this is not just all, I have this special link with Dharamsala for I have studied in Sacred Heart Convent School, Sidhbari. I have spent the three best years of my life here... at least this is the way I think so.


At first I thought this book will just help me connect with Dharamsala and its environment once again which I had kind of lost in this humdrum of life. This was my simple idea. I began reading the book and thought, that I will be able to finish within a day or at the most two if I have to go to office. But then that was not to be. I would read, at the most five pages and put the book down so that the book never ends. No the style of writing is usual, just as the way most writers write in English these days. It is the journey of the author that I want to be a part of.


When the author talks about she sitting in the balcony of her guest house, I see myself, shuddered in a heavy woolen shawl with the clouds around me. Yes I remember the nights that I have spent as a child in a guest house in Barot where clouds would float in through the window in the dead of the night and I would try and catch them in my small hands...


When the author walks down the crowded bazaars of Mcleodganj I can see my looking at the shops from outside wanting to buy each and every thing that I can see... the dainty porcelain tea cup, the shiny jacket, the antique jewellery. And I end up buying steaming momos, eight for Rs 10...

The authors quest for Buddhism is slightly heavy for me. But I want sit in the monastery silently, lost in the thought, amongst the huge tall trees with a cold bare floor beneath me and look into the eyes of Buddha...

This is the book that I want to be for now..................

2 comments:

rkumar4141 said...

This reminds me of the days when ,i ,too was studying in SHHS Sidhpur(1992), and used to crave for ride to upper Dharamsala.It was fun, catching with old freinds in a cafe caled Dickie's(not sure if it still over there or not).When it was summer, a dip in Bhagsunag's so called water pool,used to be filled with fun and mastee.

Swati Chopra said...

Hi Amrita, thanks so much for reading my book, 'Dharamsala Diaries' with such deep appreciation. I am very grateful for your intensely personal account of the process of actually getting into the book. I hope you found the rest of the book fulfilling too, and not too 'heavy' :)

Best wishes,

Swati