The kite flies high

Well, it has been a very busy two months for me both personally and officially. I had to travel to Chennai and Vijayawada (Man! That place was hot!) to visit my parents and grandma. And then I had to spend the weekends preparing for my presentation on SQL Server 2005 to the entire tech community in my office. Adding to these, I had to do a lot of shopping. Over all this I had to keep up my schedule of watching atleast one movie every weekend!. I was so busy :)

Amidst all these work, a book offered me something I hadn't experienced before. I had cried before not of sorrow nor of happiness but due to pain. The last time I cried was in my 8th grade when my father slapped me flat out across the face because I was disturbing my brother too much from preparing for his all important +2 exam. But I cried now because I read a book. It was Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. It has a simple story, probably that could have featured in a good tamil (Autograph -II?) or malayalam movie. But it's Khaled's style that tells more stories that the streamlined one.




The author shows us a small town in Afganistan with amazing detail. I had always thought Afghanistan would be one of the last places I want to visit on earth. It still holds true given its present condition, but the situation might have been different 30 years ago. There were only a couple of instances that showed the Taliban's atrocities, but trust me, they were more than enough to explain the plight of the Afghans.

You will enjoy this book better if you hail from any of the South asian countries as most of the things that the author alludes are the ones that you come across in your daily life. The fact that I cried after reading it for the first time in 10 years, itself stands as a strong testimony to this book. And I did, because I felt happier and lighter when I finished with the last two words of the book 'I ran'.