1
I hated this love that I had for my family–love that demanded my time and energy, that sought to control my life down to every thought and action. I now realize that it was not love but an unhealthy attachment, born out of a need for security and a sense of duty.Indu Muralidharan
2
Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time.Indu Muralidharan
3
Real gases behaved like ideal gases as long as they remained in stable conditions. When the environment changed, either with increased temperature or mounting pressure, they began to deviate from their regular nature and at some point, crossed over to the less-than-ideal state. If deviating form perfection was the law of nature, why were children expected to be perfect in an imperfect world?Indu Muralidharan
4
How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from hiscreation? They create each other. On a mutual plane of reference, one has no existence without the other.Indu Muralidharan
5
Depression weakens a person at every level and bullies can smell weakness like dogs smell fear.Indu Muralidharan
6
I felt part of a group for the first time in my life. Not a family, just a group of people who liked being together, who sat as we did, leaning towards each other, leaving just the right amount of space in between, whose thoughts and words flowed easily and naturally, whose voices and accents were so different from each other and yet mingled in harmony as though in a song.Indu Muralidharan
7
A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one shouldnot live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you.Indu Muralidharan
8
Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.Indu Muralidharan
9
Trying to find answers to why and how my life got into such a dismal mess, I sought answers in the scriptures, in religion and philosophy, but it only confused me further. Stories, on the other hand, helped me cope, heal and recover.Indu Muralidharan
10
When you feel that unpleasant darkness invading your mind, read this book and these stories will help you return to the light and warmth of life.Indu Muralidharan
11
Voices have a language of their own and communicate much more than the words that they say.Indu Muralidharan
12
O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed within the pages of memory, savoured for a moment ortwo on quiet Sunday afternoons.Indu Muralidharan
13
Someday, Chinmay, perhaps when you are as old as I am, you will realize that we calibrate time as per our own convenience. The dates on the calendar do not matter by themselves, nor do the numbers on the clock. Only this moment counts, this moment alone, and that is because of the awareness that we bring to it.Indu Muralidharan
14
Become aware of yourself. Everything will come to you, Chinmay, when you are in that most wonderful place on earth, the centre of your being. If you learn just one thing from this book, let it be that once you are aware of yourself, depression cannot hold you back any more than a tiger can be trapped in a spider’s web.Indu Muralidharan
15
I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, goingabout his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.Indu Muralidharan
16
Everything has a reason, though it cannot always be deduced for we cannot see the full picture of a life at any point in time.Indu Muralidharan
17
I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.Indu Muralidharan
18
I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.Indu Muralidharan
19
Often, people get a temporary high, a fleeting sense of belonging and well-being from the illusion of strength that comes from attaching themselves to gurus, without realizing that the energy they associate with the so called holy person comes from within themselves.Indu Muralidharan
20
Recognising clichés is a sign of aging.Indu Muralidharan
21
Our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. ‘How sweet, ’ he exclaims as he relishes its taste. I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we areall going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did. .Indu Muralidharan
22
Work is of utmost importance in a person’s life and not only as a means of meeting one’s needs at various levels of Maslow’s pyramid. Believe me, I speak from experience when I say that good, focused hard work is also one of the most effective remedies for depression.Indu Muralidharan
23
Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati. .Indu Muralidharan
24
Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Gulmohur trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia’s eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive. Only time had no colour in the library. In the library, time simply ceased to be.Indu Muralidharan