That’s the title of Vincent Van Gogh’s fictional biography written by Irving Stone.
A couple of weeks ago, I was killing time at Crosswords when I decided to call my best friend and book buddy Shruti. It was her strong recommendation that made me bug the store manager to locate the book which was sitting in a not so prominent corner, and it took him a while to dig it out.
I saw the book, turned it over to read the blurb. The cover page didn’t excite me, and I have never really followed art. Sure, I had heard of Van Gogh.I mean who hasn’t heard of the post impressionist painter famous for “Starry Nights” and “Potato Eaters”. But that was the limit of what I knew about the eclectic epileptic artist.
But why not art and I decided to pick it up. And am I glad I did!
I thoroughly recommend this read just to experience the pure emotion with which its written. A powerful,passionate,inspiring read which makes you sit up and wonder what passion and love can do to a man, when you let it take over.
He was told that he had no passion in life, because he dabbled in so many. He became an art dealer,teacher, evangelist, jilted lover, an almost Jesus Christ and then finally a painter.
A joke if there was one, he lived on his brothers income all his life, and lived for days with no food in his stomach.
And all for his love of art and painting and color. It made me realize how easily we crush our dreams today!
What we don’t realise is that its much easier to live them than to give them up.
For the love of money and the other pleasures (read: Prada,Gucci,Armani and the duplex) in life, we are taught to pretend from when we are kids. We are taught to be what people want us to be. Because its apparently easier that way- trying to read when we want to draw, trying to win a race when we want to learn how to sing, trying to dress up when we want to dress down, trying to give that presentation when all we can think about is that holiday that we had to miss because of this meeting at work.
And for what?! For the dreams that we gave up to live in what we like to call “Reality”.
Lemnysnippets 
A good take on Reality! We need to get the ‘real’ out of it now. Pass on the book please.
It is not because we are taught or because we find it easier- we judge ourselves via the eyes of people around us since ‘Social Reality’ informs us the best of our knowledge of our chances of survival (Survival of the Fittest, by Darwin)- If we choose to differ drastically, this makes us worried if this will challenge our survival.
What you need to be able to do is differentiate between the supposedly superficial needs to align ourselves with the ‘rat race’ and the real needs like ‘eating’, ‘sleeping’, ‘shelter’ etc. Then you can choose in a smart way where you need to conform or where not.
Happy Blogging!!!
Well said!And thanks for reading this. Keep visiting!