Veronica Decides To Die

The fifth one from same author and second in the trilogy of “On the seventh day”. Most of the part one would feel quite sad, especially the initial one as all talk is negative. But in spite of that it still manages to catch hold of reader’s attention. That is one common thing across all the authors book I have read so far (at least for me). The story is about young woman named Veronica who decides to take on her own life as she doesn’t see any good reason to live longer due to the same routine path every day. She has become bored with her current life. She swallows some dozen sleeping pills but the death doesn’t come that easy. She finds herself landed up in a hospital, not usual but mental. The reason I guess one would figure out. To her surprise she doesn’t seem to believe first but then as soon as she gains consciousness she again start thinking of ways to eliminate herself. The doctor says she has just a week to live as the swallowing pills have done a severe damage to her body. The book explains in details about the people she meets, their lives, about madness in those 7 days and how it changes the way she thinks of life and its meaning. The book finishes off at a happy ending which doesn’t look to be till the very last part. Plenty to think and ponder on from this read as well. I also feel all of us are crazy/ mad in some way or other. A person too occupied by something is generally considered crazy or asking questions which others generally consider as too stupid but for which others also don’t have an explanation. It’s the way it is, no questioning about the common rules which have been defined by don’t know who.

Quotes/Facts:
-Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. Its as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.
- Laws had not been created to resolve problem, but in order to prolong quarrels indefinitely
-Some things are governed by common sense, other things however become fixed because more and more people believe that the way they should be.
- Why the arrangement of the keys on typewriter the way it is?
The first such machine was invented by Christopher Scholes, in 1873, to improve calligraphy , but there was a problem: if a person typed very fast the keys got stuck together and stopped the machine working. Then Scholes designed the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that would oblige typists to type more slowly. It so happened that Remington- who were sewing machine manufacturers at the time-used the QWERTY keyboard for their first typewriters. That meant that more people were forced to learn that particular system, and more companies started to make those keyboards, until it became the only available model. (…. I also thought about same but then assumed its because this way one could type fastest, some research done and people would have arrived at this combination being the fastest…..till I read in the book)
- An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely. This reminds me of the movie Griffin and Phoenix. This is exactly what the 2 people do (suffering from cancer and knowing they would die soon ),living and doing what they always intended to do but resisted. They were living out their dreams :).