A Lazy Sunday

How do you spend a Sunday, when you have practically nothing to do? Ideally, if you are in a new place then exploring the place is what you should do. But if the mercury has touched 42 degrees at 11.00am itself, venturing outdoors can be suicidal. So your options are limited to doing something in your house (in my case in my room). But then what do I do? This was the dilemma that I was in yesterday. Somehow I have become an early riser. I get up at 5.30 itself and my morning chores are over at the most by 7.00. Breakfast was over by 8.00. Went for a head massage and was back by 9.30. A long day ahead with two companions, a novel which I intended to start reading and my Laptop.

One of the reasons for me to take this particular room was that there is a bathtub in the bathroom. But once I started living in this place I realized that the bathtub is pretty small for me. I guess it to be at the most four and half feet in length which is good enough for some one between 5'3" and 5'8". Myself being just a bit over 6', I would have a real difficult time adjusting in it. Once I realized this, everytime I looked at the tub, I felt a pang of jealousy. The other thought that kept me away from the tub was that having come from Chennai and seen the acute water shortage there, I felt a bit guilty using so much water! But yesterday I decided to throw caution to winds and venture out into an unchartered territory, a frontier that was as of then unconquered by me. I decided to use the bathtub. Once the mind is made up, nothing can stop the implementation. I filled up the tub, set up an assortment of songs ranging from my favorites like Brayan Adams, Chris de Burg to Aerosmith and Junoon on dear old winamp, took the novel and entered into the tub. It was a bit of a struggle fitting into it, but soon I was comfortable enough, I could relax and read the novel which was what I wanted.

O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapier is what I had to give me company. I am not really into such serious reading. The only serious reading that I do is Ayn Rand, which I do time and again. Everytime I read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged I learn something new. Anyway this was my first Dominique Lapier. Having heard about City of Joy and Freedom at Midnight by the same author, I knew this was yet another unchartered territory for myself. O Jerusalem ! is a novel about Jews, their two thousand year struggle to get an Identity, to get a state of their own. It is the story of Jerusalem the City of Peace! A bibilical city which has seen birth of three religions from its soils. A city torn by war and bloodshed from time immemorial. It details the cirumstances in which the State of Israel was formed and the bloody aftermath that followed and is still following.

My only contact with Israelis, or Jews for that matter was in 1994-95. I was in Jaipur. There was some pact signed between the Indian and Israeli governments. To promote more people to people contact between the two nations, two Israeli students had been invited to tour various schools of India. They had come to our school too, and I was one among the few who were selected to interact with them. Their group consisted of a girl who was in her 12th grade and a boy who was in his 11th grade. There are a couple of things that they told that I still remember very clearly. In Israel people stay in places called Kibutz. A kibutz is a self-contained communal village. All activities in a Kibutz are community oriented, for eg there is community farming. The children above 5 years of age in a kibutz do not stay with their parents but in a common house run by the school. Schooling there is free upto 12th grade and compulsory upto 10th grade. Three years of military service after his school is compulsory for every boy and two years for every girl. They showed us a video of their Kibutz, and it was pretty impressive.

All this while I knew that Israel was created out of the erstwhile Palestine in 1947. It was a home for Jewish immigrants from all over the world post the holocaust. But did the Jews come to Jerusalem and its surrounding areas only after World War II? How did they establish themselves there? What is the official recognition for the State of Israel? All these were questions which I had not even thought about! Having started reading this book I realized that Israel was not created by a swish of a magic wand! Infact the Jews had started coming to Palestine right after World War I itself. Slowly the Jewish population started increasing and so also the movement to have a separate Jewish State gathered momentum. The state of Israel was created out of a UN resolution which partitioned Palestine into Israel and Palestine. What followed this vote was a blood bath which is continuing till today! Surrounded by Arab nations on all sides, the Israelis have fought many a battles, to ensure their survival.

The pace and the content of the book was so engrossing that I did not realize that I had spent three hours in the bathtub. It was only when a friend living in the next room started banging my door, asking me to join for lunch, that I realized so much time had passed. Well I haven't finished reading the book, but in whatsoever I have read so far, I can without hesitation say that if History is your cup of tea, if you want to read about the struggle of a race to establish their identity, then this is one book that you cannot afford to miss. I will surely write more about this once I have finished reading it.

Wish you all a great week ahead!
Cherio!!