Human dignity could flourish under what most people would think of as impossible conditions.Dominique_Lapierre
"Nowhere did I understand better what was life, with a big L, than in some of the most rotten places in Calcutta," ''When I arrived in Calcutta in 1981, I had no intention of writing anything,'' Mr. Lapierre said during a recent visit to New York. ''My wife and I adopted a home for 150 children of lepers in northern Calcutta. Mother Teresa took us to one of the slums in a small area that translates as City of Joy. The people live there on less than 10 cents a day. And yet I saw more joy, more compassion, more God-loving than anywhere in my 30 years as a writer. It was an inspiration.''So one day I went to a bookshop and bought 10 notebooks and 12 ball point pens and stayed in Calcutta for two years. I knew I had to tell this epic of hope and love and joy. Half the royalties from 'City of Joy' are going back to Calcutta in the form of mobile medical units and other aid to the gallant people working and living there.''
'The City of Joy'' is about suffering, sorrow, cruelty and deprivation; about practices so hideous as almost to suspend belief, though they are shockingly true. It is about filth, rags, wounds, disease, even leprosy. Repulsive words. Yet even more, the book is about other words that wonderfully leaven the whole: loyalty, kindness, tolerance, generosity, patience, endurance, acceptance, faith, even holiness. And it is about such love that we cannot pass by on the other side. In any case, it is too fascinating to allow us to do that."
Far more important than such quibbles, the book is, in a way, too overwhelming. It tells so much that the mind becomes numbed, as happens in a famine or cyclone - I have known both - when compassion ceases simply because the heart can take no more
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/03/books
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