Man’s Search for Meaning

140020015

Summary

This book talks about the expected wearing down and unexpected suste-nance of certain human traits and mentality through forced attrition. An individuals mentality and the flip-side his spirituality get affected by the brutality of the regime imposed on him and a person either breaks down or gets through by his character and/or willingness to live for his loved ones. The book wants us to have a deeper understanding of human will and psychology.

Thoughts

My first reaction on this reading this book was that we cant even begin to imagine the torment and suffrage a common man went through during the world war. We have the idea about a general suffering but to see the small picture, the suffering ,in context of just one normal person makes me shudder even more.

While reading the book there was a peculiar urgency in completing it, I usually tend to read faster as the end approaches but in this read I couldn't invest myself out of the book even as the cruelty unfolded page by page to an unbearable extent. I think this was on account of it being a real life story ,not an open-close sorry feeling story you could forget about, and the author does have a genuineness while writing this book to make us know and understand that human strive and love can exist even through constant attack and prejudice and to look for a deeper meaning in our disparate lives.

Passing any kind of judgement on the changes in behaviour of an individ-ual in the concentration camp is futile as we cant begin to imagine the kind of atrocities these ‘ordinary’ people had to face and survive through those odds. The author lived through these hardships and has a much bet-ter understanding of the psychologies evolved in the camp. The author did remark on this particular aspect and hoped he could give a sense of the human psychology developed in the camps to both the outside people and the prisoners who survived to give them a handle on what happened to them in the camp. He remarked on inner life taking a hit to its lowest to

its most primitive level ,regression in a prisoners mental state. He has talked about the psychological levels and the reaction of the prisoner who is at that particular state. The prisoner usually had a huge impact on his self-worth his ego per se as he logged more and more months in the camp till he was a mere shadow of his former self . If a prisoner would ever get liberated ,like the author, he would also be freed from his former self, a wholly disparate, different person.

Analogy

There was and hopefully will not be a perfect analogy in my life to the dire situation of the people stuck in the concentration camps but here is how it applies to me.. The biggest psychological change that ever happened to me has to be the moment when I transitioned from an average school-goer to an IIT aspirant .The change in workload was tremendous and hav-ing a casual attitude would be highly detrimental to my ambitions. But just as in the book there were levels from frustration to mild hope to just giving up to freedom aka passing the entrance test. Its not even compara-ble to the prisoners situation as it was something I could get out from and they obviously could not but it has a similar unfolding of experiences as mentioned by the author. A rollercoaster ride that changed me inside out ..

They say the world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for. At the end the freed prisoners, probably only believed in the second part. . . .