I Release You ! I release you oh loved one from the pitter-patter of my heart
For I was a bird caught in a cage of love soo far beyond
In loving you I loved myself not knowing it came with shackles
For I have been too seared to fathom a world without the constraints

I hoped that by loving you I would feel so alive
Like a free bird soaring around the sky soo blue in sight
But to my surprise I felt so chocked I struggled even to breath
And this is how the elixir of life became a poisonous sip

Even when you pushed me out I was soo scared to fly
and again again I came back to cage to take a breath alive
But now I have decided to let go of you,
This unrequited relationship has become unbearable
But I have decided that I will forgive you
For not loving me as I would have assumed
Knowing that by forgiving you I release you of all the blame
Not waiting for any apology that would be now in vain
For forgiving you is forgiving me and the world around
And releasing you is releasing me from a pain so far beyond #review #aparajita

I like writing reviews of books, below is the review of of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz We spend most of our times going through life without anything making much of an emotional impact. The days are spend being slaves to causes we don't actually feel, but once in a while we come across an experience which takes us by surprise (pleasant or otherwise) and demands our attention, “Survival in Auschwitz” is one such experience. Given that I am home bound due to COVID-19 and in a glum mood, I was very reluctant to read it, as the very title suggested that it would be about atrocities of SS during the WWII, which did not seem like an appropriate topic for lifting my spirits. Anyways, the holocaust has been one of my favourite topics, given the insight its presents into what human beings are capable of once all their civil institutions are defunct.

Primo Levi is an author who will connect with you on such a deeper level that every few pages you will halt to take a deep sigh and wait for the lines to sink in. I, on many different occasions, found myself crying mid-paragraph, sympathetic to the pain of people who had lived a century before me. The pain I felt soo excruciating, the helplessness so disgusting, that once in a while I had to remind myself of what Robert frost said: “ In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on”. I know the story being told to me had its central characters dead, but the folds of their skin and the screams of their silence inhabiting my soul, were very much alive.

To put it succinctly its not a story of Primo Levi surviving Auschwitz, or the cold-bloodedness of the Nazi regime and its enablers, but the story of every nameless human being who perished during this time mind body soul. The prisoners may have lost their everything but as Levi wrote humanity as a class lost its consciousness and nothing could happen ever good and pure to rub out the scare of this outrage. Levi talks about how the holocaust was a gigantic biological social experiment more than anything else, which classified people as drowned and saved. But to me, as an outsider, there were no survivors in this experiment, only sections of society left with a plethora of disgust, thirst for revenge, moral capitulation, denial, weariness among other things. #review #aparajita