Everything happens for a reason :Review

Review

Along with spirituality and culture, the west regularly imports brides from India. In fact, a bride, a ‘girl from a good family’, is the very embodiment of Indian culture. The more docile and domesticated she is, the better. She need not be well educated, but she should be a good cook. And if she is pretty, then even the husband is happy.

Priya is all of these, and something more, she knows not what yet. The American package she gets married to, is an Indian family with all the Indian values in place. All, except one. They want their ‘bahu’ to work. Not for job satisfaction, nor for liberation, but for the most simple, basic of all reasons. A little more cash flow.

And the woman who has led a sheltered, jobless existence all  her life in New Delhi, suddenly has to go job-hunting in Los Angeles. Luckily, she gets a receptionist’s job in a gossip magazine. Her new status as a working woman does nothing to alter her duties at home. She is still the glorified maid, the more than ideal daughter-in-law who cooks and cleans up and makes a buck.

While the in-laws are secure in their presumptions that Priya is ‘just a receptionist’, fate has something new and exiting for her. One afternoon, she is asked by her boss to fill in for her, to go meet a movie star and simply jot down whatever he says. Although she is nervous during the interview, the actor finds himself opening up to her and Priya brings back a juicy story.
Without asking for it, she is pushed up the ladder, to become a journalist. Naturally, she dare not mention any of this at home.

Will she get caught? Or will she get the courage to confess and deal with the monsters? And, more important, will she be able to strike a relationship with her husband and get his support?

What I didn’t like about the book:

The plot is interesting, the language is clear and free-flowing, but the characters are rather caricaturist. Priya’s husband is such a non-person that one wonders what she sees in him. The in-laws are stereotypes, cruel mother-in-law, selfish sister-in-law, indifferent husband. The dilemma would have been more interesting had they been a lighter shade of black.

What I liked in the book:

The very fact that an ordinary, non-ambitious girl can make it in a glamorous set up in Los Angeles, because she ‘has what it takes.’ ‘Something about her presence made me open up to her,’ says the Hollywood star, whom she interviews for the first time.
It is always very heartening to see an underdog wagging her tail. Although the novel could have had more depth, the haphazard way in which Priya jumps up the ladder to success is very convincingly etched.

Perfect Digestion, by Deepak Chopra

Book review

If the phrase, ‘Perfect Digestion’ evokes a feeling of wistfulness in you, then leave those novels on the book rack, abstain from those fried snacks, get this book and read it.

No, you don’t have to take laxatives every day for the rest of your life. All you need is a slight change in perspective. It is time we stopped putting blind faith in doctors and made an attempt at understanding some basics about the relationship between health and digestion. Digestion plays a critical role in the natural healing process. The constant renewal of every part of the physiology is dependent on proper digestive functioning.

Deepak Chopra explains that in Ayurveda, it is recognized that the process of digestion is deeply connected to the intellect. And he does not mean the brain. We are used to associate intelligence with the brain, not with stomach or intestines. But ayurveda recognizes the intelligence that exists in every organ, in every cell, of the body.

This book is a step by step guide to understand how and why we should change our sedentary habits, what we should eat, and live a happy, medicine – free life.

To understand the patterns of our daily life that affect our health, Deepak has drawn out an IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome) tracking chart. This chart lists the meals taken on the previous day along with the stress levels. Simply making yourself aware of your symptoms in an organized way

can have powerful therapeutic benefits.

To deepen our understanding of the body, Deepak takes us into the three doshas in Ayurveda. A dosha is a tendency of the flow of the intellect in the physiology that manifests itself in terms that can be easily understood and classified. For example, Vata dosha controls all movement, Pitta is responsible for all digestion and metabolism, and Kapha governs the structure of the body.

In Ayurveda, the whole process of digestion is described through metaphors of heat and fire. When we say Pitta is responsible for digestion, we are referring to Pittas control over agni, the digestive fire. But the physical movement of food through the digestive tract is governed by Vata, while the digestive fluids are governed by Kapha.

Even for the non-medical reader, the classification of the doshas is simplified by charts and symptoms. Strangely enough, if you are the kind of person who cannot make quick decisions, you get marks in Vata dosha. Don’t freak out, just carry on reading.

Deepak Chopra gives very basic tips to ‘make friends with your gut.’ Something as simple as ‘sitting down to eat,’ and getting into the habit of sipping hot water as an at home detoxification formula. Something your grandmother might have insisted when you were a kid. Deepak explains why one should rest for a few minutes after eating, and not rush out, as we usually do.

Irritable bowel syndrome, he explains, is translated as a ‘nervous stomach.’ So an important aspect of treatment is a self oil massage, along with deep breathing meditation.

‘Without proper diet, medicine is of no use, and with proper diet medicine is of no need.’

Once they make sense to you, it is easy to follow the diet specifications that are suitable for your body type. Some of them are even tasty: asafetida, amla, and nutmeg. Ayurveda provides a number of means for locating and identifying the qualities of intelligence in food. And the most interesting technique is based on the taste of food itself.

The most important aspect digestion is its absolutely central role in physical and emotional well being. You are not only what you eat,

as has often been pointed out, you are what happens to what you eat while it is inside your body. If what happens causes you pain and discomfort, your entire experience of living is diminished.

So chuck those laxatives and adopt a healthy life style. Why should you settle for anything less?

The Sugar Baron’s Daughter

Book Review

Ever heard of the story in which the female spider eats up her male counterpart after seducing him? Can you imagine how it begins? If you can’t, read ‘the sugar baron’s daughter’.

When a man is dissatisfied by his family, his career, how can he disregard an offer to go back to his roots? Especially when that offer comes from his ex-flame? Anmol is leading a typical, middle class life. He has a nagging wife, two noisy children, dis-satisfied and grumbling parents, and a good for nothing younger brother. His work in Delhi is hard to articulate. All he does is meet ambitious people who want to get things done by the ministry and take hefty bribes from them.

When a woman is repeatedly spurned by her rich husband, and realizes the emptiness of the party life, how can she keep away from her father’s sugar mills that are undergoing turbulence? Nagina, Anmols’s childhood friend and first love, is a beautiful woman who is an expert in manipulating the men her life.

With two negative characters as protagonists, Loveleen Kacker takes you on a spin that is entertaining and political. The view is from the top, but the frame is a wide angled one. Like a telescopic image, the author throws light on a poor farmer’s plight while actually writing from the pen of the sugar mill owner.

The uniqueness of the book lies in the art of the exposure. The youthful fight for the first sugar ball that is made in a sugar mill can spark off a hot scene. Passion is followed by a brief spell of sentimentality, not the other way around. A mentally retarded child can rob a woman of all motherliness. The Mandal commission is something that gets the wife out on the streets protesting and dinner is late. The farmers go on a strike, but the leader is not sure if he is doing the right thing. A politician admits that adulation of the masses turns him on. A criminal asks for and gets the blessings of a sadhu, and the victim dies a dog’s death.

Loveleen Kacker has portrayed a beautiful landscape of majhauli, the place in UP where the sugar mills are located. The characterizations of both the place and the people are deep and clearly etched.

What I didn’t like about the book:

This book cheats your habitual sense of loyalty. The author has taken a politically neutral stand and not given us a single hero, ideology or path to worship.

What I liked about the book:

Although the author is a woman, she has ventured to adopt the voice of a man, Anmol. We are usually quick to criticize a man who deserts his family for another woman. But the way Anmol writes about the total lack of connection with any of the members living in the house, it seems almost natural to exit.

Ageless Body, Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra

Book Review

Ageless Body, Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra

‘Why did grandmother die?’ you might have asked your mother when you were five.

‘Because she was old, my dear.’ You still didn’t get it.

‘So?’ you asked your mom again. ‘She was old yesterday too, wasn’t she?’

‘All old people die some day or the other, kid. I will die, you will die, your little pup will die when he grows old too,’ said your dad, rather sternly.

And if dad said it, it had to be right. And then you saw other relatives dying, most were old and sick, and now your mind has accepted it as truth. People grow old, they get feeble, they stop having fun, and finally we are all going to die.

What if someone told you that death is a concept? A concept being, something two people can have different opinions about? A concept is not the final truth.

Would you believe it if a reputed doctor practicing medicine in the US, told you that you can live forever? This is the claim made by Deepak Chopra, the bestselling new age guru. In Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Deepak Chopra presents a quantum perspective, a theory which defies whatever we believe about our bodies. We do not have to age, and we do not have to die.

Deepak treats death and aging as myths, to be questioned, to be researched. He talks about a qualitative shift in consciousness that will make us take a quantum jump into good health.

That mind is superior to matter is a given with Deepak, him being an ayurvedic physician. But intelligence, as stated in the book, is far more powerful and proactive in a baby’s body as compared to a grown up. A baby has no sense of time, no worries, and it is superbly defended against time’s ravages. If a baby could preserve its nearly invulnerable immune status, we could all live at least two hundred years, according to Deepak’s estimate. If a baby could preserve its glistening smooth arteries, supple as silk, cholesterol would not find anywhere to lodge, and heart disease would be unknown.

Aging is a mask for the loss of this inherent intelligence. Day-old bread goes stale because it just sits there, prey to humidity, fungus, oxidation, and various destructive chemical processes. A chalk cliff crumbles over time because wind and rain beat it down, and it has no power to rebuild itself. Our bodies also undergo this process of oxidation and are attacked by fungi and various germs, they are exposed to the same wind and rain. But unlike a loaf of bread or a chalk cliff, we can renew ourselves. Our bones don’t just store calcium the way chalk does –they circulate it. Understanding these facts is the first step towards re-interpreting your body.

There is a land where no one is old. India, China, Japan and to a lesser extent the Christian west have given birth to sages who realized their essential nature as the flow of intelligence. By preserving and nurturing that flow, they are able to overcome entropy. In India, this flow is called ‘prana’, meaning life force, and it can be increased or decreased at will, moved here and there, and manipulated to keep the body orderly and young.

Giving a clear scientific basis for his research, Deepak illustrates how awareness is the power behind defeating entropy. Breaking the spell of immortality is a simple step from time-bound towards time-less awareness.

The Naked Wind by Brinda Charry

Reading The Naked wind, is like traveling through a translucent mind scape of ethnic Indian characters. Brinda Charry has perfected the art of capturing pearls from the ocean depths. She weaves an intense pattern of individuals by inviting the reader oh so cordially into their inner chatter.

Everyone needs someone to talk to. To unburden to. To make a friend with. This is what the reader feels she is becoming when the character converses with you, rather than a monologue.

Sample this excerpt from Shanthi’s mutterings, when she talks of the days before her husband, Vasu, left home:

“I wanted my children around me once, their soft young bodies, their soft young bodies, the sound of their footsteps around the house. But now, as I get older I want to be left alone, alone with…

With what? No, not with my memories. Who told you that? You know that I can complete my sentences for myself.”

Almost fifteen years ago, Vasu left his wife, his home, his children, in search of a spiritual life. Having grown up without his presence, the children have more or less forgotten his existence. Vasu’s aging mother does not cherish any hopes of seeing her son ever again. There is, however, one person who is still waiting for him to come back. Shanti has gotten into a deep depression, waiting for him, year after year. She wills the chair on which he sat to turn towards her. Her yearning is probably stronger than his seeking, for Vasu does return home.

Another perspective to the unfolding family drama is Shanti’s maid, Rani. She is a woman who takes pride in matching her blouses to her sarees. The author follows this character right into her bedroom, or rather, the one room house in a slum, where she lives with her boring husband, where sometimes her drunken father parks uninvited. As she tries to sleep, her angst is clearly expressed in her own voice:

‘If I hadn’t been on my feet the whole day, if this hadn’t been a slum, I would go out for a ‘walk’ like rich people do, people who can afford to walk nowhere in particular, for no particular reason.’

There are more voices in the book, of the neighbors, relatives, and the narrative progresses with each set of mutterings in an intricate, interwoven string of events.

A few pages after Shanti gets a letter saying Vasu is coming back, her neighbor unexpectedly sees an old man who looked like Vasu walking into Shanti’s house. Just when you relax with one life style, some other life just jumps past, making the book quite a page turner.

What I didn’t like in the book:

The print is too small.

It takes a good fifty pages of reading to figure out who is whose neighbor, relative,etc. It’s a novel that demands attention and concentration.

What I liked in the book:

The language is very poignant. Each person’s voice, be it an old woman or the maid servant, has an individual and rare touch of poetry. It makes you wonder at the artist who lives in each of us, but gets crushed amidst all the chatter.

The struggle of a minority community to exist is revealed in an intimate and shaky atmosphere. Brinda Charry has a deep insight into how religious dogma is used to cover up personal inadequacies.
Jack, Ellens first child, however, is a survivor from age five. He burns down an existing church in the middle of the night so that Tom may get to build another. In the process of helping him, he also learns and inherits Tom’s dream to build a Cathedral.

Aliena becomes Jack’s wife, but she is actually a wronged princess. She has scores to settle and battles to win. The biggest battle, however, is with poverty. At a time when women were still practicing the oldest profession as the only way to make an independent living, Aliena dares to get into business.

What I did not like in the book:
It’s too long. The dark patches are sometimes too vulgar and crude. More importance has been given to the physical aspect of devotion: the structure of the cathedral, how it will arch higher and higher, and almost none to the spiritual aspect.

What I liked about the book:
The pillars that sustain this medieval timed book are the art force and the life force of the characters.  Without using the word, artist, Ken Follet has created a true blue character in Tom. Even if he is a little stereotypical, he is totally beleiveble.

Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the earth is a rare classic; it is popular with the masses and it is appreciated by the critics.
A story that unfolds in twelfth century England.  The theme of the thick book, as the name hints, is building of a cathedral. Ken Follett wrote this book out of a fascination for cathedrals, the people who built them, and the social fabric that somehow stretched itself to get a Cathedral built.

Who would want to build a Cathedral? A pope, or a monk, someone with a religious bent of mind, we suppose. But Pillars takes a completely different angle. A cathedral is a work of art and craft. So the basic impetus to create one has to come from an artist.

Tom Builder, a humble stonemason who once worked on a cathedral, got fascinated by the intricacies and complications of the process. He realized that the walls of a Cathedral had to be not just good, but perfect. This was because the Cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely correct level, could weaken the structure fatally. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with a merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes to the wonder of his craft. The Cathedral, however, did not get completed for lack of funds. But Tom Builder was so very attracted to the idea of building another Cathedral that he sacrificed security and left his town with family to look for another town where a Cathedral might be being made. And so began a ten year journey on foot, braving England’s cold winds, which led not to a Cathedral but to abject poverty and the death of his wife.

Ellen, Tom’s second wife, is almost a witch. She lives all alone in the wild, and she fears neither God nor man. Although she loves Tom, and understands his dreams, she cannot tag along, her spirit is too free to be tied down to the shackles of society.

Jack, Ellens first child, however, is a survivor from age five. He burns down an existing church in the middle of the night so that Tom may get to build another. In the process of helping him, he also learns and inherits Tom’s dream to build a Cathedral.

Aliena becomes Jack’s wife, but she is actually a wronged princess. She has scores to settle and battles to win. The biggest battle, however, is with poverty. At a time when women were still practicing the oldest profession as the only way to make an independent living, Aliena dares to get into business.

What I did not like in the book:
It’s too long. The dark patches are sometimes too vulgar and crude. More importance has been given to the physical aspect of devotion: the structure of the cathedral, how it will arch higher and higher, and almost none to the spiritual aspect.

What I liked about the book:
The pillars that sustain this medieval timed book are the art force and the life force of the characters.  Without using the word, artist, Ken Follet has created a true blue character in Tom. Even if he is a little stereotypical, he is totally believable.

A New Earth

Book Review

A New Earth is a spiritual book. Because it is spiritual, we need to first know about the author, Eckhart Tolle.

‘Which school does Eckhart come from? Is he an advatin? Or is he a dualist? What is his lineage? Who was his Guru?’

Sorry, but Eckhart is self taught.

‘Ok, no problem. We have a lot of self taught masters in our culture. They inspired new religions. Where is his ashram? How many people has he healed? What kind of meditation does he teach?’

If these are your concerns, Eckhart is not the man for you. For Eckhart talks to the seeker who is done with all traditional aspects of spirituality. He talks to the aspirant who is willing to give up al his notions about God and seek the truth within himself.

In a simple analogy, the sun shines when the cloud disappears. Truth will shine when the ego dissolves. But what is the ego? Is there a torch bright enough to see it?

This book is the torch that Eckhart holds for you, and it shines inside your heart.

It begins with an appeal for your attention. Eckhart very clearly presents the present state of affairs and talks about the need for individual transformation. The reference to the title of the book is a promise made by Jesus, a promise that is renewed by Eckhart: A New Heaven and A New Earth.

The current state of humanity is lost in egoist manifestations. I crave for peace and well being but I pay for violent entertainment. I am always right, they are wrong. The weather is lousy; can’t God do a better job?

The core of the ego is revealed in all my thoughts, all my actions.

‘Whatever form it takes, the unconscious drive behind ego is to strengthen the image of who I think I am, the phantom self that came into existence when thought – a great blessing as well as a great curse, – began to take over and obscured the simple yet profound joy of connected ness with being, the Source, God.’

In our quest to cover our backs, we forget the inner body. Although he does not give instructions on meditation, the entire focus of the teaching is inwards. It is not possible to just read and read this book. The sincere reader will have to take a pause, maybe once every paragraph. And if the teaching sinks in, meditation happens. Thoughts fade out.

A new term that the author has coined in this book is the pain body. The pain body is the intangible knot of our negative emotions with our minds. What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning. Fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, all disrupt the energy flow in the body , affect the heart, the immune system, digestion, etc.

The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. It consists not just of childhood pain, but also painful emotions that were added to it later in life, much of it created by the voice of the ego. It is the emotional pain that is your unavoidable companion when a false sense of self is the basis of your life.

The energy field of old but very-much-alive emotions that live in almost every human being is the pain body. The book explains how the pain body feeds on our thoughts, on drama, how it continuously renews itself. Breaking free of the pain body is possible, if it is used as a means to become aware.

The pain body is a concept that might be the master key for those who are battling with chronic health problems.

Reading this book is not a smooth sailing experience. If you can manage to go through it sincerely, taking a pause whenever required, it will gut wrench the ego out of you.