Essays in Love: Books that fall into your life..

On a spring day in Neemrana, I was handed Essays in Love. There were so many things happening then, that shed light around this event like rainbow crystals, so many tears, so much joy and some of the days that surely I would remember as the most difficult in my life. So when the book fell into my life it was something that I wanted to throw out before I even picked it up.

Alain de Botton irritates me.. this maybe because I started at the wrong end of him, Somewhere in the middle of a messy break up do you really want to be handed a book that explodes the frailty of coupledom and love right from inside.. that forces you instead of looking at a cataclysmic moment in your life, rewind and look at your life like a bomb exploding caught in slow motion that makes it seem like the catastrophe started happening just minutes after the first post coital moment you had together.

Ah!!! Now that i think about it.. I can see the seeds of destruction in that conversation already. (riiiight!!!)

But there are good things to say about him as well. Alain De Botton takes away all anxieties from imperfect people who worry that they look bad in this light and from that angle, whose arse looks large from the side and whose stomach protudes a bit, whose teeth might be askew and whose hair (and this is meant for you, you perfectly coired AfroQueen.. who just went bald before this post went up!) doesn't quite ever discover its true personality (am i straight, curly, rough, silky???)... Anyway for all those flawed, Alain De Botton gives hope.. he says you never fall in love with those who are perfect in every light from every angle.. you fall in love with those who reveal their beauty in a suddenness .. only in a certain light (soft yellow lighting, left side only please)

The Romantic Movement is a better exploration of what the woman goes through during the course of an affair, though it actually ends up being more patronising. Very sweetly at one point he admits that he's the intelligent man's self help book, akin to why couples fight or men are from mars, women are from venus, and you wonder why he quoted the whole galaxy of philosophers to you.

To take a slight detour .. if you've seen the movie Elizabethtown (one of Cameron Crowe's not so great films) .. it has within it one of the most amazing gifts that a human being can give another. A road map for the body, soul, a music map, a map of sights, of sounds, of places to eat and of trees under which to dance alone and of farmer's markets where to find the one they could love...

If I had to make that map to deal with loss of a feeling so dear to your soul, then Alain de Botton is one of those brightly blinking lights on that map, for sure. To argue with, to lie down next to still bickering and complaining, to smooth your lines and put you to sleep, to slip in the slenderest of erotic possibilities of the future into your soul and still hold your hand and watch you the next day as tears fill your eyes at what you've lost.