Jottings - Slice of life - 202 ( When Breath becomes air - a Memoir Dr Paul kalanithi)
Jottings - Slice of life - 202 ( When Breath becomes air - a Memoir Dr Paul kalanithi) Rinku Kundu mentioned Paul Kalanithi’s book “ When breath becomes air” in her comment on my essay on Dr Sherwin Nuland couple of weeks ago. Since then, my pen has been throbbing to write about Paul and his book written in the last few months of his life, tragically taken away couple of years ago by lung cancer. What a wonderful title to a book, and to a life, which was as incandescent and light and seamless as air, yet so full of energy, intensity and meaning. Between the covers of 200 short pages, sandwiched between a luminous and thought provoking prologue by novelist Dr Abraham Verghese, and an epilogue written by Paul’s beautiful and compassionate wife Lucy, the book “When breath becomes air” is very much like the book of meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, who wrote his aphorisms on life and death on a battlefield strewn with bloody corpses. Only in Paul’s case the battlefiel