Skip to main content

Dominique Lapierre's 'City of Joy'.....A Reader's Testimony

There come occasions in your life when you find yourself at loss of words to describe them. Your vocabulary loses you midway and you get rolled over in sense of awe. I had only one such occasion to moon over until this moment of course, it was when Sachin retired. To this day, I don't know why I didn't write anything about it but I am probably wiser now to not fret about it anymore.

Dominique Lapierre's magnum opus 'City of Joy' is what induced my second moment of 'blackout'. I am not entirely sure whether I would ever be able to read a book as good as this one again in my life. It comes from 'non-fiction' genre and is a profoundly religious books that mixes the elements of 'compassion' and 'generosity' from all religions in a mythical proportion. At the core, however, it's a book that tells the story of 'Anand Nagar' or 'City of Joy' as more popularly known from the viewpoints of two persons: Stephan Kovalski, a Polish Christian Priest and Hasari Pal, a well-to-do farmer once now turned into a peasant. Anand Nagar is a slum of 70,000-strong population and this population lives in an area that's barely three times the size of a football field. How they live there is anybody's guess but Dominique will nevertheless expose you to myriad other truths that would be hitherto unknown to you. Meticulously researched over the period of two years, it's a book that is rich both in details and emotions. It demands an 'intimate' reading of weeks if not months from readers but one will definitely be a 'changed' person after having read it. This book is 'epic' and thus without further belittling it with my petty words, I shall borrow the words of glorious recommendation made by my more capable companions. Here they are:

Pope John Paul: "A lesson of hope and faith for the world."

New York Times: "No less than Bible in its messages of human nobility. Dominique Lapierre is now changing thousand of lives the world over."

Mother Teresa : "A magnificent homage to the courage of the poorest of the poor".

Los Angeles Times: "A positive, uplifting experience....lending hope and joy to us all".

Read it, your life and perception shall never be the same again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Love and Friendship

Friendship is an aspect of life that’s not controlled by its beholders. Ideal friendships, well they are the things of past now. Many a times we have seen our parents or their parents talking about their old great friends and how amusingly they tell us about their bonding, the moments they spent together and we see a ‘priceless’ twinkle in their eyes…..that’s something which is missing from modern friendships. There are terms & phrases like ‘yaar tu to apna bhai hai’, ‘yaar tu to ghar ka aadmi hai’ which even today invoke something very beautiful inside our hearts but we all know that the feelings underneath them are ‘hollow’, they are just mere words, ‘emotionless’ and ‘impassive’. Well who am I to comment on such an indefinable ‘qualitative’ perspective? I’m one of you, those wretched creatures that are still in need of true, great friendships. Well I certainly can’t say that I haven’t got friends. I’ve got friends, plenty of them in fact, and some of them are real great. I s...

Racing Extinction (2015) : A Commentary

It's really hard to switch on to a different language from the one you have constantly been tinkering with. I grew so accustomed to writing in Hindi in last few days that it started dawning on me that I might never be good again with my English. So this is a tester, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, one of my movie group friends, an American by nationality, questioned my fondness of documentaries. I specifically wrote in one of my columns that documentaries demand your unwavering attention and once you gave 'that' to them, you are rewarded much more handsomely than a proper, narrative, fictitious film. My reasoning for believing so is that a documentary is an experience of a creative process. It doesn't get made to 'entertain' you. They are there to reveal something to you. They teach you something. You get overwhelmed by them. 'Racing Extinction (2015)' was one such documentary. I watched it in last couple of days. I couldn't complete it in one ...

What Virat Kohli Could Learn from Sourav Ganguly's Career

This IPL season might be dubbed as 'Kohli's IPL' in years to come. He is unarguably the best exponent of white-ball batsmanship going around. However, for someone like me who places a great emphasis on longest form of Cricket i.e. Test Cricket, until and unless he proves himself in seeming and swinging conditions of England and New Zealand (I believe in him and thus shall wish him luck), I shall still rank him behind Kane Williamson and Joe Root. Just to make sure I'm impartial to this debate, I put my favorite cricketer of all time i.e. Sourav Ganguly behind Sachin, Sehwag, Laxman and Dravid when it comes to rank him in FAB FIVE of Indian Batsmanship because he simply wasn't as good as them in test cricket. Many call him a very good test cricketer and maintaining an average of 40 in test cricket from the very beginning till the very end signifies their reasoning but still, he fell short of 45/50 that makes a batsman statistical behemoth in purest form of Cricket. ...