– John Green
“So dawn goes down to day, nothing gold can stay.”
Romance novels are cliché, some love stories die when the people in them die, but we learn a lot about human complexities from it. Just keep your minds open. The fault in our stars is a story of two Cancer patients (Hazel Grace & Augustus Waters) who fall in love, with the unwavering fear of death at the back of their head. In a journey difficult to hold on to each other, they often wandered to a post terrestrial third space created exclusively for the both of them, where
they talk about last wishes and of course living the best of whatever they’ve got left.
The protagonists were teenagers, I forgot it by the time I reached the end though. How can a bunch of teenagers be so mature and deal with terminal diseases like a smooth ride, not complaining about each and every bump on their inevitable destiny. Which reminds me of Anne Frank Of course, the book has a section where they take you on a tour to the Anne Frank house, I was totally ignorant of its significance the first time I read the book. But this time having read ‘The Diary Of a young girl’ beforehand raised the significance of the small section including the Frank house for me manifolds. There was a Slaughterhouse-5 reference too, which made me laugh out loud ! Would you ever cross countries to know the ending of your favorite book? To explore the realities that inspired your favorite fiction? Well, I would and so did Hazel and Augustus. An act so uncommon yet totally justifiable for me.
“It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” There’s a lot of mourning in the book, a lot! But it is crazy that I wanted to read more of the loss, as equally as I read about the happier times. We all need time to get over our lost ones, learning lessons the hard way, taking loads of time to recover the pain and eventually end up learning to live with the pain. I’ve had a varied outlook on death ever since, loved both sets of parents mentioned in the book, makes me want to be kinder than ever.
The book taught me brilliant lessons on the fear of oblivion. Whole lots of paragraphs on it in the book, would be disrespectful if I insert them here. Do check them out for a reality check.
One of the most famous quotes and a relevant one from this book is: “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities”, I totally agree. For instance, I craved a fiction to read (An Imperial Affliction) within this fiction. Read the book to know more about this one.
I’ve been on a fault in our stars spree this week, I finished the book, watched the English adaption and of course ‘Dil Bechara’ Last night. That’s what made me go back to the book in the first place, I’d read it 6 years ago and have seen the movie too but I wanted to re-visit those as I remembered loving both and also to gain myself the confidence to comment on the Bollywood adaptation.”It was exciting to live again in infinite fiction.” I loved ‘Dil Bechara’ for starters. It was Indian-ized obviously, regardless of the actor dancing and riding a bike and acting in a very silly movie, it made good sense (I’d expected much worse though). But it was a nice film. For someone who has had the privilege to watch it after the personal marathon, I loved it , it was less devastating of course if you compare to the other stuff but for Bollywood standards it was apt and crisp. Stop putting the movie on a pedestal or trying to bring it down because the actor commits suicide (which many think to be a cowardly act, sadly it is not) .Watch it without being on too high or low expectations and not as an act for respecting the deceased, you might enjoy. Also, on a different note, working on such a movie is difficult for someone with depression. The movie appears all fun and light-hearted until the end scenes but the script being the book I deeply adored might take a bad toll on your mind.
