The chief protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is Tomas, a medical doctor, twice divorced, now in a relationship with Teresa, a photojournalist. Their love story is set in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when Prague was invaded by Russia. And both flee to Zurich
The presentation of the story was made by Faisal Kerala, and developed further by Apeksha Kakkar and Minakshi Khanna.
Tomas is kicked out of the hospital and given the job of a window cleaner..
Tomas meets Teresa in a small Czech town and comes to feel inexplicable love for the all but complete stranger.. As the author observes, a serial womaniser, Tomas’ love for Teresa is something he cannot himself understand..
Teresa is entirely committed to him. She does not look at another man. And is unhappy at his flings So Tomas marries her and gives her. a puppy. Whe Russia invades their country, both flee to Switzerland.
They have been in Zurich for seven months or so, when Tomas comes home to find a letter by Teresa saying that she was returning to Prague. He realises that his love for Teresa is beautiful but it is also tiring. He had to constantly hide things from her,sham, dissemble, make amends…….
Teresa did not want to take revenge on Tomas. The author explains she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.
Thereafter Kundera talks of the regime where the love affair takes place. He observes that anyone who thinks that the communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.
And in such a regime Tomas became a window washer because the Communist regime persecuted Czech intellectuals. And when his former patients found out, they would phone in and order him by name. Then they would greet him with a bottle of champagne, sign for 13 windows on the order slip and chat with him for two hours.
Dr Gautam Vohra launched the discussion with the statement that given Teresa and Tomas relationship, women were essentially monogamous and men not necessarily so. There was considerable disagreement on this point and Nalini Tyabji and Meera Gupta said that they knew several men who followed the straight and narrow.
Anil Nauriya talked of the deft manner in which Kundera related the love story, never giving in to sentimentality. Shiela and Sudhir Sahi were particularly taken up by the constancy and strength of character displayed by Teresa. Kapilesh Manglik and Prdaip Bhide felt that while Tomas was true to type in some respects, the author had not sufficiently developed his persona. And so the discussion continued.
