Illi bande summane
The book is Ignorance by Milan Kundera. And the subject of the book is nostalgia.
The word nostos means to return. algia comes from algos a Greek word, which means pain. So nostalgia is deep wish to return home.
This nostalgia can be many times as bad as real physical pain. You are away from your home, from your people. You remember happy memories and think of good old days you spent there. Yearning to go back, but knowing too well that you can not.
You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. So nostalgia is also ignorance.
But one thing you do not apprehend is, the home is not what it was
earlier. Places have changed, people have changed and so have you.
The source of your nostalgia is no longer present.
The story line of Ignorance revolves around Irena who has emigrated to France from
Yugoslavia because of communist tyranny there. But now the country is no longer communist. So it is safer for her to
return home. But will she uproot her life here in France to go back?
The checkered events of her own country has deep effects on the exiled life of Irena and all others who have fled from communist regimes.
Irena recollects reading about a poet, who has quoted that he will wrap his sadness around himself and go to sleep for 300 years.
Milan Kundera - the author, had emigrated to France from Yugoslavia because of hardships he faced there. So the nostalgia is a common theme in his books.
I am not an emigre myself. I am in my own country, in my own state. People here
do not speak a foreign tongue. But I am not home. I have always maintained that I am
not Bangalorean. Proudly. I never tried to become one either.
I do not belong to my home town either. So where is my
nostalgia directed to ? To Haliyal - a small town in interior Karnataka, where I spent my childhood? To
Muscat - where I spent few years after marriage, a small village near Sirsi - where my ancestors lived? Or mother ship :)?
I really don't know and ask often - ellide namma mane?
Comments
Post a Comment