What is love? The sunshine of the soul

Poets, authors, artists, philosophers, scientists and anthropologists have tried to define love for centuries. Love is one of the few subjects that has troubled, intrigued and fascinated everyone.

What is love?"Love is like pi natural, irrational, magical, unexplicable ."
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

Bob Marley put's it beautifully:

"Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.”

The Top Ten Hotel Novels by Guardian

The hotel is a seductive setting for a writer. It houses a wide spectrum of people who do not know each other, yet who spend nights under the same roof and are affected by one another's behavior in ways they may not be conscious of: they hear each other's bathwater draining away, they catch snippets of conversations in the lifts. A couple in a hotel lobby might be lifelong partners, or lovers making the most of anonymity. A gang of three who arrive at 2 am might be business colleagues who have just closed a deal in a different time zone, or murderers who've recently disposed of their victim.

With all this in mind, I set about writing my novel Hotel Alpha, which is based in a grand London hotel but comes with 100 extra stories to reflect the nearly infinite variety of life in these places. Here are some of my more illustrious predecessors in the "hotel novel" sub-genre.

1. The Shining by Stephen King

One of the worst advertisements for the hotel and leisure industry. A writer takes an off-season care taking job at the Overlook hotel, hoping to catch up on his work and put recent alcoholism behind him. Things don't go well. The film adaptation made the book famous, but the novel is darker and more perceptive.

2. Evil Under the Sun (and others) by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is one of literature's great users of hotels as a backdrop for maleficence. A good number of her novels see a chambermaid dropping a tea tray in shock after gaining entry to the room of a newly dead guest. In this one, Poirot is hoping for a quiet holiday: but as in every other situation where Poirot is hoping for quiet, he gets embroiled in a devilish murder.

3. Hotel by Arthur Hailey

Arthur Haileys novel is set in the mid-60s', the time the establishment in my novel opens: a perilous time for traditional, independent hotels, thanks to the rise of glossy chains. The book is about that struggle, and also about the thousand tiny acts and characters that make up a hotel's life – such as the cleaning lady who smuggles out steaks under her uniform.

4. These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach

A very good novel with a not-very-good title, Moggach's book became a lovable film under the name The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It deals with the Indian adventures of a cast of retired characters rebelling – some successfully, some not – against the coming of old age and the consequences of their decisions.

5. The Lady With the Dog by Anton Chekhov

A short story about an affair between a Russian banker and a naive young lady in turn-of-the-century Yalta, this haunting tale was adapted by Brian Friel into the play The Yalta Game, which examines the way memory plays tricks – and plays a couple of its own on the audience.

6. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

This tense, bloody bungled-drug-deal novel, adapted by the Coen brothers into an even tenser and bloodier film, sets a pivotal scene in an El Paso motel. It's particularly gripping if, like me, you have spent a fair bit of time in roadside motels feeling almost certain that you're likely to be killed in the night.

7. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

One of Irving's sweeping modern-Dickensian novels, it follows the various dramas of a family in two separate hotels, each called the Hotel New Hampshire. Among a huge cast, there's an author who kills herself as a result of writer's block, which possibly isn't the sort of thing you want to read while researching a novel about hotels.

8. Psycho by Robert Bloch

Another book which underwent a notorious transition to the screen: in this case, with a screechy soundtrack, a wily campaign of hyperbole by Hitchcock, and a then-unprecedented depiction of someone in the shower. Everyone knows the film, but the book reveals much more of Norman Bates's terrifying mind and still delivers potent suspense and horror, even when you've seen Hitchcock's version.

9. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem

A manic satire of utopianism and progress, whose plot is pretty much impossible to summarize but whose send-up of the world of conferences, delegates and seminars is eerily relevant today.

10. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Set not in a hotel but Paris apartment block, this massive, diffuse, fascinating but hard-to-follow work was one of the inspirations for my novel. All human life is there, but as a result it takes most of a human life to read it.

Everyone has a Story

Everyone Has a Story in Life

A 24 year old boy seeing out from the train’s window shouted…

“Dad, look the trees are going behind!”

Dad smiled and a young couple sitting nearby, looked at the 24 year old’s childish behavior with pity, suddenly he again exclaimed…

“Dad, look the clouds are running with us!”

The couple couldn’t resist and said to the old man…

“Why don’t you take your son to a good doctor?”The old man smiled and said…“I did and we are just coming from the hospital, my son was blind from birth, he just got his eyes today.

Every single person on the planet has a story. 

Don’t judge people before you truly know them. The truth might surprise you.

Always with love...