Erich Segal is Dead!

Yeah, the chap who wrote Love Story. That’s what this article I read about his death in, about a week back, said too. But that’s not why I’m writing about him here, give that book and its movie a break. The only reason the whole matter of Segal’s death stayed in my head all this time to end up with the dubious honor of being mentioned in my blog is one of his other slightly lesser (but still quite well) known books, Doctors. For those who haven’t read it, its the story of two kids (a boy and a girl) who grew up as neighbours, both from totally different backgrounds and with different inspirations but with the same aspiration of becoming doctors. The books starts with them getting accepted in the Harvard medical class of 1962 and follows their experiences in the med school (while digging a bit into their pasts) and out of it, all this finely marinated in the usual Segal flavored emotional sauce.

Segal, a Harvard graduate himself, though not a doctor had researched extensively and in depth the lives of doctors and researchers to write the book. I read the book in my second year of MBBS and it felt great to know that I could identify myself with the main character and his batch mates all the while the story was set in the first two years. But more than that what really made me finish that book, inspite of all the emotional mush mush that made me chuck Love Story after some ten pages, was how I saw bits and pieces of the other characters in my own friends and batch mates. He wasn’t writing about just one character and his life there (leave that to Jeffery Archer) but about a whole experience or a way of life, that made me identify my experiences in the present and in a med college in India with something in the past and happening in Harvard.

I read this line in some book I cant recall the name of, ” an average writer touches Life once in a while in his books, a bad writer rapes Her mercilessly and leaves Her in nothing but shreds but a good writer caresses and loves Her and leaves Her much more beautiful than She was.”

(Im not sure i got the quote word to word either, but you get the gist right?)

And thats why my first post about something other than my own narcissism at successfully starting a blog, is Eric Segal is dead !

(And for people too lazy to click that link at the beginning, he died of a heart attack at the age of 72 on January 17th.)