Daily dose of optimism

Anuradha Malalasekara

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it. - (Alchemist)

Do we ever dream? Do we ever wonder about life and its purpose? Do we ask ourselves the question; "Am I in harmony with the 'self' in me"? Or are these questions far too deep for our busy lives and we pretend to forget about their importance?

Questions raised

Paulo Coelho's best seller The Alchemist is a manifesto for today's dreamers; he advocates the courage of believing in one's dream; he teaches that the person's dream is the person's destiny, and negation of one's dream is a renunciation to pursue one's destiny. And if the sale of the book is a sign of the relevance to the public of the questions raised by the book; then Paulo Coelho has managed to voice out a vastly felt desire for giving more space to dreams in a world that seems only catered to measurable realistic gains.

Paulo Coelho was an aspiration to my young adult life. He names himself as a spiritual writer, and yes, he is, because he raises many questions and supply spiritual answers at the same time in his writings. In many of his novels including Eleven Minutes, he holds a feminist point of view.

Veronica Decides to Die and Alchemist were translated to Sinhalese by the time I left country, but I am pretty sure just merely those two might powerful enough to raise concerns about this fabulous writer among the Sinhalese readership.

Paulo Coelho was born in 1947 into a middle-class family, the son of Pedro, an engineer, and Lygia, a housewife.

Henry Miller

As it happens in most of the cases; Paulo's parents had very different plans for their son's future. They wanted him to be an engineer and tried to stifle his desires to devote himself to literature. Their intransigence and his discovery of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer aroused Paulo's spirit of rebellion, and he began routinely to flout the family rules routinely.

His father took this behavior as a sign of mental illness and, when Paulo was seventeen, he twice had him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where Paulo underwent several sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. He brings out these memories into Veronica Decides to Die.

In Alchemist Coelho emphasizes that 'Everything is one'.The soul of the world: the One. Everything we see, we feel, real and unreal, our consciousness our soul, they are all one and the purpose of our lives is to be one with the One. This is the message which I feel Coelho wants to give. This concept is very interesting as it can be related to the Indian Philosophy, where the One, the Spirit Supreme, is the Brahman.

Paulo Coelho believes that each one of us has a dream given to us by God and He gives us clues times again and again so that we recognize those clues( 'omens' as he calls them) and follow these dreams with great zeal. "Never give up!" Coelho says. Each one of us has a destiny. To discover these destinies and then follow them is the purpose of our lives. Difficult will be the challenges of the unknown, but what is easy is not eternal, it's finite and the unknown is infinite. Coelho believes in destiny, that everything is written. Maktub he says. Maktub is an Arabic word which has a similar meaning to what in English is 'everything is written'. But where it is written nobody knows.

I personally like his optimistic approach in his writings. At a certain stage, everyone of us wants a dose of optimism to fulfill our shortage of energy in the struggle of life.