This is not an easy undertaking, but I will try.  Reading this slim memoir 'When Breath Becomes Air' has been a revelation.  Dr. Paul Kalanithi was cut down in the prime of his life by lung cancer, he was only 38.  He was an accomplished neurosurgeon, a good son and husband and by all accounts a deeply caring human being who had a world of possibilities ahead of him, until the calamity strikes.

  To be visited upon by such a terrible misfortune as cancer can be and is tragic, but death itself is not tragedy, and the way Paul lived and boldly confronted his own demise is an object lesson in courage and fortitude for everyone of us.  Somehow, through the book I feel I have come to know him as a person.  I can almost sense a strong kinship with him.  He had a deep and abiding love for English literature, but like many sensitive souls, he was also fascinated by the idea of dying.  In fact, one of the chief reason why he went into neurosurgery was because he wanted to explore free will as represented by our minds.  If art and literature explain the human condition, then he believed that neuroscience could perhaps give him an insight as to what makes our life meaningful.  Being a neurosurgeon is the most demanding profession in medicine where even a millimeter of wrong manipulation can result in a catastrophic disaster for the patient. 

  Paul thought that merely literature is insufficient to gain full measure of the arc of human experience in all its forms and dimensions, nothing ever can be.  At the very least, or so he thought neurosurgery would provide him with the ringside view of this magnificent human theater that human mind is.  He imagined himself at the frontier of a unique place where there was a perfect synthesis between art and science, between idealized reality and lived reality.  By understanding death, the goal was to understand life and also the other way round, because ultimately life and death are the two sides of the same coin. 

  Now, the rapid decline has begun.  The normal human response in moments like these is a cry of anguish ''why me''?  Then you could also say ''why not me''?  No matter how much you delve into scriptures and literature or even modern science and ancient philosophy, you can never exactly understand death until you come across it face to face, and even then you have no idea what lies beyond that heavy curtain.  It was as if the grim reaper was showing his wacky sense of humor; it was mockingly telling Paul that fine, you were always obsessed and enchanted with death and dying, so now I am going to pay you a personal visit after all.  It so happens usually that when people learn about a terminal illness, they either shut themselves completely off the world around them and just passively wait for the inevitable; or they burn the candle at both ends and let themselves go the whole hog, in other words they indulge their every passion and desire before the time is up.  Paul chose neither.  They say that too much suffering also clarifies your thought, things are distilled to a point where only the very essential matters.  He accepted and came to terms with his mortality with a kind of grace and humility which is nothing short of monumental.  Going through the pages of his book was a surreal experience, knowing full well that every sentence was a race against time, every passage was goaded by the cock and the realization that you might not even live to see your labor bearing fruit.  Paul died on 9th march 2015 surrounded by his friends and family.  He can be justifiably proud of what he achieved and many more he influenced in his short life.  Whatever I write, the words are hollow and inadequate.  I am hopelessly unequal to the task of mapping out the true measure of the man.  All I can do is just spread the word about the man and his last will and testament that is this book WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR.