Why Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard is a mountain of a book

…and why you must scale it, at least once in your life.

The Snow Leopard was lying on my bookshelf for more than five years before I picked it up. In those five years, it beckoned me often. But somehow, the silent pull wasn’t strong enough for me to make a physical move.

Until now. Beset by a strong desire to go visit the mountains, especially the Himalayas, but unable to do so for multiple reasons, I possibly did the next best thing: Picked up the book and traveled with its author, Peter Matthiessen, on a mystical journey of self-discovery to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan Plateau, near the border with Nepal.

When I was almost finished reading, a combined sense of fulfillment, dread, sadness, and joy took hold of me. Sadness at the knowledge that a wondrous journey was coming to an end; joy at the treasure chest of beauty and wisdom Matthiessen opened up, scattering its pearls all along the way, for countless readers like me.

The author undertook this journey along with the field biologist George Schaller in the 1970s, walking hundreds of mountainous miles for a little over two months. They wanted to study bharal, the wild blue sheep-goat of the region, with a faint chance at being among the lucky few to spot the amazing, revered cat, the snow leopard.

The book, The Snow Leopard, at first appears to be a diary-like account of that journey (date-wise entries of varying lengths double as chapters within sections). It is that but, thankfully, much more.

I’m in agreement with this blurb taken from a review by Jim Harrison for The Nation: “A magical book: a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred…The book has transcended the usual limits of language.”

The Snow Leopard is indeed transcendental, and not just on account of language. It is a timeless travel classic that can very well serve as a spiritual refuge in times of distress and doubt.

Besides Schaller, Matthiessen is accompanied by a curious mix of porters (Sherpas and Tamangs) to help with their load, cooking, and other routine tasks. Throughout the journey, he portrays these characters in witty detail and draws your attention to the rich variety of life ever-present in nature in a way that makes you feel as if you are right there, witnessing all this firsthand. His writing is not grandiose or lavish but simple, natural, endearing.

The most important bits, if you ask me, are his inner detours in which he talks about the workings of Buddhism’s various streams, the revered figures like Milarepa and Avalokiteshwara, what it means to seek one’s place in the universe, and what truly gives us peace and happiness. Profound as these things are supposed to be, Matthiessen makes them come alive and within easy reach as he melds his noble thoughts effortlessly with the daily ‘step and stave’ of walking on snowy, alpine paths, and surviving with barebone necessities in the company of strangers that seem to be living in another century yet whose simple acceptance of life and its harsh ways are so disarming, so uplifting at times.

Among the most charming, intriguing parts I found are the ones where Matthiessen describes Tukten, the enigmatic sherpa, and his equally enigmatic relationship with him throughout the journey (and possibly beyond it in another life).

Take this early passage, for instance: “Tukten has elf's ears and a thin neck, a yellow face, and the wild wise eyes of a naljorpa, or Tibetan yogi. He radiates that inner quiet which is often associated with spiritual attainment, but perhaps his attainment is a dark one. The other Sherpas are uneasy with him; they mutter that he drinks too much, uses foul language, is not to be trusted…This disreputable fellow is somehow known to me, like a dim figure from another life.”

Despite his “reputation,” Tukten exerts an extraordinary influence on Matthiessen—without actually doing any exertion. For he is an effortless, easygoing being who seems unperturbed in the most trying of circumstances.

Toward the end, when Matthiessen is parting ways with Tukten, shaking his hand and watching him go in the cab, he draws parallels between the sherpa and himself: “Without ever attempting to speak about it, we perceive life in the same way, or rather, I perceive it in the way that Tukten lives it. In his life in the moment, in his freedom from attachments, in the simplicity of his everyday example, Tukten has taught me over and over, he is the teacher that I hoped to find…”

There appears to be a fine, mystic example at one place in the book of how some Tibetans “live” what most ordinary folk merely “perceive.” It occurs when the traveling party needs to pass a narrow stretch of cliff about a hundred feet above rocks at the edge of a lake. Matthiessen, who has been walking ahead, pauses at this point, leaning into the cliff to let the nine porters in his entourage pass by. What he witnesses next is nothing short of surreal:

“At that dangerous point of cliff, an extraordinary thing happens. Not yet in view, the nine fall silent [the porters were chattering before that] in the sudden way that birds are stilled by the shadow of a hawk, or tree frogs cease their shrilling, leaving a ringing silence in the silence. Then, one by one, the nine figures round the point of rock in silhouette, unreal beneath big bulky loads that threaten each second to bump the cliff and nudge them over the precipice. On they come, staring straight ahead, as steadily and certainly as ants, yet seeming to glide with an easy, ethereal lightness, as if some sort of inner concentration was lifting them just off the surface of the ground. Bent far forward against the tump lines around their foreheads, fingers wide spread by way of balance, they touch the cliff face lightly to the left side, stroke the north wind to the right. Light finger-tips touch my upper leg, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hands, but the intensity is such that they seem not to distinguish between cold rock face and warm blue jeans. Mute unknowing, dull eyes glazed, the figures brush past one by one in their wool boots and sashed tunics, leaving behind in the clear air the smell of grease and fires. When the bad stretch is past, the hooting instantly resumes, perhaps at the point where they left off, as if all had awakened from a trance.”

I read the above passage a couple of times, as if in a trance myself.

Later on, Matthiessen wonders about the incredible incident, thinking it to be a form of lung-gom, a Tantric discipline that permits the adept to glide along with uncanny swiftness and certainty, even at night. He also compares it to the yogic concept of prana: lung-gom literally means wind-concentration and prana is the vital energy or breath that permeates everything.

There are several passages in the book where Matthiessen shines a light on meditation—both by dwelling on Tibetan-Buddhist teachings and by his own sincere attempts at its practice.

What I really liked is the author’s openness in not restricting his writing to any one particular sect but embracing multiple streams and cultures. So, even as he is talking about Tibetan yogi Milarepa’s teachings, he doesn’t shy away from dwelling on meditative experiences as varied as those of bushmen and dervishes. Consider the following excerpts:

“Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every   culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga. In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal…

“Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this "void", this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as "great death". This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.”

In November 1971, before Matthiessen started his Crystal Mountain journey, he and his wife (her name is Deborah but he affectionately refers to her as D), who was suffering from cancer, attended a Zen meditation retreat in New York. In one of the meditative sessions, they both happened to sit opposite each other. Just the night before, Matthiessen had quietly perceived his wife to be dying and on that morning when they both meditated, his heart was full of compassion. He chanted the Kannon Sutra, which is dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion who is known by several names, including Kanzeon, Guanyin, Avalokiteshwara and, of course, Kannon (an aside: the popular Japanese company Cannon derives its name from it.)

Matthiessen recalls, with incredible grace, what happened in that deeply-moving session during his Himalayan journey:

“Before dawn on Sunday, during morning service, D chanced upon to sit directly opposite my own place in the two long facing lines of Buddha figures—an unlikely event that I now see as no coincidence. Upset by what I had perceived the night before, by pity and concern that this day might be too much for her, I chanted the Kannon Sutra with such fury that I “lost” myself, forgot the self—a purpose of the sutra, which is chanted in Japanese, over and over, with mounting intensity. At the end, the Sangha gives a mighty shout that corresponds to OM!—this followed instantly by sudden silence, as if the universe had stopped to listen. And on that morning, in the near darkness—the altar candle was the only light in the long room—in the dead hush, like the hush in these snow mountains, the silence swelled with the intake of my breath into a Presence of vast benevolence of which I was a part: in my journal for that day, seeking in vain to find words for what had happened, I called it the “Smile”. The Smile seemed to grow out of me, filling all space above and behind like a huge shadow of my own Buddha form, which was minuscule now without weight, borne up on the upraised palm of this Buddha-Being, this eternal amplification of myself. For it was I who had smiled; the Smile was Me. I did not breathe, I did not need to look; for It was Everywhere. Nor was there terror in my awe: I felt “good”, like a “good child”, entirely safe. Wounds, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart lay at the heart of Creation. Then I let my breath go, and gave myself up to delighted immersion in this Presence, to a peaceful belonging so overwhelming that tears of relief poured from my eyes, so overwhelming that even now, struggling to find a better term than “Smile” or “Presence”, the memory affects me as I write. For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone; there was no separate “I”.”

Peter Matthiessen died in November 2014, a little over a year after I started my own meditation practice. My only “interaction with him” has been through reading The Snow Leopard—and yet, I can see some of my own experiences reflected in the crystalline waters of many of its passages. How gladly I would have treated him “as my own Tukten” were we to meet somehow!

When Matthiessen describes nature and the birds and the streams and his own presence in their midst, he does so with an effortless mastery over words, stringing them together in a beautiful, fragrant garland:

“The ground whirls with its own energy, not in an alarming way but in slow spiral, and at these altitudes, in this vast space and silence, that energy pours through me, joining my body with the sun until small silver breaths of cold, clear air, no longer mine, are lost in the mineral breathing of the mountain. A white down feather, sun-filled, dances before me on the wind: alighting nowhere, it balances on a shining thorn, goes spinning on. Between this white feather, sheep dung, light, and the fleeting aggregate of atoms that is "I," there is no particle of difference. There is a mountain opposite, but this "I" is opposite nothing, opposed to nothing.

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the rough-hewn Tartars in their braids and homespun boots, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do. We have had no news of modern times since late September and will have none until December, and gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely: I am returned into myself.”

Matthiessen’s is one of the few books I’m sure to return to more than once—one of the few, too, I cannot recommend highly enough. There’s so much more I wanted to excerpt from the book, but I must pause now and content myself with what follows (and no, there’s no conclusion to this; only continuity):

“Near my lookout, I find a place to meditate, out of the wind, a hollow on the ridge where snow has melted. My brain soon clears in the cold mountain air, and I feel better. Wind, blowing grasses, sun: the dying grass, the notes of southbound birds in the mountain sky are no more fleeting than the rock itself, no more so and no less—all is the same. The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves into the sunlight, tears fall that have nothing to do with “I”. What it is that brings them on, I do not know.

In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter) they appalled me with their "permanence", with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.

My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the centre of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.'' The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is "to paint eyeballs on chaos". When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present—even while I think of it—is gone.”

Before I bid adieu, just one more thing, which rings like a divine chant throughout the book: Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus.)

Namaskar! Thank you for reading :)

There is something special about chai

There’s something about chai that no other beverage offers by way of sukoon—just as there’s no word, other than sukoon, that describes the supreme feeling of contentment it induces in those who take a deep, soulful sip.

Chai (called tea in English with not exactly the same flavor) is like a divine gift for its hundreds of millions of lovers around the world.

Global it may be, but chai has a special connection with four countries: India, China, Japan, and England.

Legend has it that Bodhidharma, the renowned 5th century monk who taught at the Shaolin monastery in China, once took it upon himself to meditate for a long time. But he fell asleep before his avowed period of meditation could end. When he woke up, he was so enraged that he cut off his eyelids in repentance and threw them to the ground.

Tea leaves grew for the first time at the very spot where the monk’s eyelids fell.

And from then on, tea is said to have become the favorite drink of monks who wanted to stay awake in their meditation practice.

Another Chinese legend attributes the origin of tea drinking to the mythical emperor Shen-Nung (also called Shennong or the Divine Farmer)—several centuries before the Christian era. It says that he discovered the medicinal properties of tea when some leaves from a wild plant accidentally fell into his pot of boiling water.

It was not until the Tang dynasty (618-907), however, that tea consumption became widespread in China. It was also during the Tang dynasty that Lu Yu wrote one of the first authoritative books on this subject, The Classic of Tea.

Japan, too, saw the introduction and spread of tea drinking through monks. In the Heian period (794-1185), Saicho and Kukai were among the first to bring tea seeds to be planted in Nippon—though it is the Zen monk Eisai who is credited with popularizing the drink in the late 12th century. Eisai also wrote a book, Record of Drinking Tea on Health, whose Japanese title, if you ask me, has a cute Hindi ring to it: Kissa Yojoki.

By the 15th century, the tea ceremony in Japan had evolved into a highly refined art form, reaching its pinnacle under tea master Rikyu a little later. Chanyou, the Japanese “Way of Tea”, has four key principles to the whole regimen of serving and drinking tea: Wa (harmony), Kei (respect), Sei (purity), and Jaku (tranquility). Applied together, they guide you to a more balanced and mindful way of celebrating tea.

The term “Teaism” was coined by the Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Kakuzo to describe the unique worldview associated with the Japanese way of tea, going beyond the presentation aspects that Westerners usually focus on.

In his celebrated classic, The Book of Tea, first published in 1906, Kakuzo writes:

“The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Lao-tse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.”

Beautiful words that evoke the serene, profound imagery that nothing but tea can encompass in its majestic sweep of history.

There are not-so-elegant aspects of history associated with tea as well, to put it mildly. In Europe, tea consumption remained confined to the elite after Dutch and Portuguese traders first brought it to the continent in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Soon after, the British East India Company established a monopoly on the tea trade from China. When taxes were reduced to make tea more accessible, its popularity exploded, requiring huge imports from China to satisfy demand.

But massive imports of tea [besides porcelain and silk] from China caused a silver deficit, prompting Britain to smuggle opium from India to China (When the Chinese tried to stop it, this led to the Opium Wars.)

To reduce over-reliance on China for their tea, the British went about setting up tea plantations in the Indian states of Assam and Darjeeling (the first one was set up in 1837 at Chabua in Upper Assam). The first few chests of Assam tea arrived in London from India in 1839; by 1888, the British imported more tea from India than from China. By the turn of the century, Chinese tea imports were just a pale shadow.

As for its consumption in India, tea was initially shunned by the people. This was partly because of the crushing, sub-human conditions under which the indentured laborers used by the British colonists worked, and partly because of tea’s high price. Besides, the majority of Indians had never tasted the beverage. After the Great Depression brought down the prices and created a surplus of tea waiting to be exported from India, however, the British rulers turned their attention to the market within India. They undertook what’s arguably the largest marketing campaign in Indian history, using hundreds of “tea propagandists” and “tea vans” that dispensed millions of free cups of tea to anyone who was interested in tasting it.

The marketing tactics used in the campaign were later duplicated and built upon by private companies, including Brooke Bond and Lipton. But it would take several decades of concerted, persistent effort to make the foreign tea into local chai, the unofficial national drink of India.

As of today, the sound of “chai-chai-chai” forms the ubiquitous buzz at thousands of bus and train stations across India. The banter and gossip of the milling workers, laborers, and good-for-nothings over chai at countless tapris and tea joints mingles effortlessly with the silent march of a nation perpetually suspended in motion.

I think that’s more history than our brains can handle at a given time!

So let’s get back to chai and sukoon.

The Japanese ceremony is marked by elaborate rituals, the art of arranging flowers, attention to details regarding the utensils, and the performative steps for serving, drinking, and washing up.

But for me and, I suspect, millions of Indian chai-lovers like me, it’s fairly simple and straightforward.

Boil some tea leaves in water. Add milk and sugar to taste. (A hint of ginger for ginger tea aficionados would be great!) Serve with an ear-to-ear grin and unmistakable warmth.

Within minutes, the server and the served are co-travelers to a land where worries dissolve in the vapor-mist wafting from the cups. Where stories are shared with loving memories or unrestrained laughter. Where you can nod your head with understanding or shake it in disbelief with equal ease.

Be it the scorching summer of mid-year, the freezing cold of December-January, or the redeeming drizzle in between, if you have chai at hand and someone to share it with, there’s nothing much else to ask for.

Bun-maska or biscuits, perhaps. But that’s about it.

To borrow a line from Chaayos, “Wo sukoon se jeete hain jo chai peete hain.”

Yes, there's nothing quite like chai.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital offers a beautiful window into the mind of an astronaut

 

At a time when Indians are celebrating the return to earth of Sunita Williams, my mind is still afloat with the thoughts of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
 
Don’t get me wrong: the space station I’m talking of is from Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker prize-winning novel.
 
And what an amazing book it is!
 
Like millions of Indians, I’ve enjoyed Williams’s videos of her extended stay on the ISS. But after reading Orbital, I can happily say that I’m “witness” to much more.
 
First and foremost, the wondrous, all-too-human thoughts of Anton, Pietro, Roman, Shaun, Chie, and Nell—whom Harvey has compared to the spaceship’s heart, mind, hands, soul, conscience, and breath.
 
But embodying what goes on in their minds and hearts, I suspect, is the author’s own voice. A voice so beautiful and enchanting that the Guardian called Orbital “an uplifting book, in every sense.” 
 
When I started reading the book, I picked up a pen to mark a few lines or paras I particularly liked. By the time I finished it, however, the markings engulfed much of this tiny treasure (it’s less than 140 pages but its scope and imagination are vast).
 
The best parts I liked concern the sheer beauty and uniqueness (thus far!) of the pale blue dot we call Planet Earth—our only home in a seemingly endless universe, not counting the astronauts’ occasional sojourns outside. And I completely second the spacefolk’s thoughts, echoed so poignantly by Harvey in her book, about how the humans’ non-Sapiens behavior is ruining it beyond repair.
 
When the astronauts arrive on the spaceship, the lights of the “night earth” impress them most. As Harvey writes: “From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone…The night’s electric excess takes their breath.”
 
After a week or two of “city awe,” however, the astronauts’ senses begin to broaden and deepen and it’s “daytime earth” they come to love, the author notes. 
 
With the space station orbiting the earth at over 17,000 miles an hour, there’s a new daybreak for them every ninety minutes. And the kaleidoscopic play of night and day casts a mesmeric spell on how they observe the earth.
 
“It’s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges; then the spindle of Central America which drops away beneath them now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida and the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds. It’s the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation to the shunning void.”
 
The love for a shifting, turning, breathing earth is also accompanied by the realization of how human choices and politics have wreaked havoc.
 
“Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush…or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed meter by painstaking meter and turned into land to house more and more people…or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses whose plastic makes the entire southern tip of Spain white in the sun.”
 
When they look upon the earth, Harvey writes, the astronauts come to see the politics of want, of growing and getting—a “billion extrapolations of the urge for more.”
 
Inside the spacecraft, the astronauts go about their duties with mechanical precision—often marveling at the meaning of it all. They tend to mice and plants brought along for scientific experiments, do the chores of maintaining the ship, and engage in small talk like most people would do back here on earth.
 
On occasion, Harvey skillfully melds sensitive moments with the critical realities of living in the extraordinary environment of a spaceship. For instance, when Chie shares a memory of climbing a mountain with her mother (who recently expired in Japan while Chie is here on the station), Anton finds himself crying. His tears form four droplets which float away from his eyes—which he and Chie “catch in the palms of their hands.”
 
Liquids are not to be let loose on a spacecraft.
 
Harvey narrates the life and challenges of astronauts in a way that stays with you long after you have read her words.
 
“Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past. But every day the six of them have to fight this urge to dissipate. They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet.
 
Sometimes they wish for a cold stiff wind, blustery rain, autumn leaves, reddened fingers, muddy legs, a curious dog, a startled rabbit, a leaping sudden deer, a puddle in a pothole, soaked feet, a slight chill, a fellow runner, a shaft of sun.”
 
One of the astronauts, Shaun, once receives an editorial email asking his views about an imminent moon landing. The question posed is this: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?
 
While Shaun answers the email in the customary and predictable way (“There’s perhaps never been so exciting and pivotal a time…”), he turns the question to his fellow-traveler, Pietro. The answer Pietro gives is more pointed (and perhaps apt, given our current situation): “With the gilded pens of billionaires, I guess.”
 
The gilded pens of billionaires indeed seem to be writing our future in space, perhaps without as much thought as should have gone into it. And often in a “tearing” hurry.
 
Which is why we must take a pause and go with Harvey on a considerate “Orbital trip”. The book doesn’t have all the answers—but at least it compels us to ask some questions that urgently need to be asked.
 

Taking Delight in What Makes Us Human

Unlike Ross Gay, who wrote The Book of Delights, his book of essayettes, in long hand, I typed this review of the book into the Microsoft Surface given to me delightfully by Freshworks when I joined the ‘love-your-software kudumba’ three years back. (Kudumba means family and it is Freshworks’ mission to make software people love to use.)

And while I agree with Ross on writing by hand being “a surprising and utter delight” I have taken as much delight, if not more, in sifting through his daily musings of whatever caught his fancy—and punching in these words on the laptop.

First, a little explanation of why this review and then I’ll share some delightful nuggets from the book, peppered (or sweetened, if sweet is your thing) with my own comments.

Ever since Freshworks chose ‘Delight made easy’ as our tagline, no mention of the word ‘delight’ escapes my attention. Plus, given that we have a thriving Freshworks Book Circle community of readers in our midst, I just grabbed Ross’s book from a bookstore on a recent visit as soon as the title caught my eye.

A few years back, on his forty-second birthday, Ross Gay, a professor of English at Indiana University and an award-winning poet-author, began the endeavor of writing one short essay each day about “something delightful.” By his own admission, he cheated some days and let them pass happily without writing. To use his terminology, he took delight in “blowing it off.”

But when he does get down to writing his thoughts and observations on any topic under the sun—varying from praying mantis and high-five from strangers to coffee without the saucer and airplane rituals—the result is a delight contagion spreading through whoever reads them. After an eyeful of reading, you are bound to change how you pay attention to the goings on in life around you. His delightful observations make you thoughtful and cheerful in equal measure.

The Book of Delights excels in noticing the joyous minutiae of existence and the connections that human beings make within their species as well as their surrounding abundance of thriving, pulsating life.

In his very first essayette (My Birthday, Kinda), Ross observed, among other things, a fly land on the handle of a cup of coffee. And it took him no time to tease the delight out of the spectacle. This is how he puts it: “A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say: ‘Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Coffee or tea lovers clutching their cuppas would approve.

In another piece (Hummingbird), he writes: “Once I saw a hummingbird perusing the red impatiens outside my building at school, and I walked slowly over to the planting, plucked one, and held it in my outstretched hand perfectly still, long enough that at least one student walking my way crossed the street so as not to get too close to me, until the blur of light did in fact dip its face into the meager sweet in my hand.”

How lucky and delightful the experience of feeding “the blur of light” (lovely expression!) out of one’s hand, I thought as I read the above passage (I must confess that my own experience of once trying to feed a squirrel out of my hand went awry, though the memory is still delightful and dear to me: the squirrel bit my hand before making off with the morsel). 

One of the key motifs in Ross’s book is that he always seems to be looking out for a nod, an acknowledgment, even a physical touch symbolizing kindness or appreciation in fellow human beings. Let me pull out two episodes that I particularly found noteworthy.

Once Ross was working on his computer in a coffee shop with his headphones on and swaying to a new De La Soul record when he found a teenage girl standing next to him, hand raised. And just as he looked up, confused, and pulled back his headphones, the girl said (presumptively): “Working on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!”

Ross high-fived with delight.

Then, in the essayette titled Tap Tap, he writes: “I take it as no small gesture of solidarity and, more to the point, love, or, even more to the point, tenderness, when the brother working as a flight attendant…walking backward in front of the cart, after putting my seltzer on my tray table, said, ‘There you go, man,’ and tapped my arm twice, tap, tap.”

Another observation I could immediately relate to, having seen it at multiple train and bus stations across India, came in the piece titled Sharing a Bag. In Ross’s words: “I adore it when I see two people…sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles.”

The way Ross further describes how the two people usually lug the bag makes you break into a spontaneous chuckle, followed by a nod of human understanding: “It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering, as the uninitiated, or the impatient, will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack, which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter—the good and sole rhythms we might swear we live by—to the one on the other side of the sack.”

As an aside, aren’t we all in the corporate world trying to modulate our pace, collaborating to carry and deliver the bag of goods (or goodies)?

The Book of Delights is a treasure trove of joyous observations, especially about the daily human experience and our shared bonds.

But before I bid you adieu, here’s one more tidbit which, I’m delighted to say, has a direct correlation with customer experience (though I believe one can find CX inspiration in a lot of Ross’s observations.)

Now, Ross doesn’t like to have a saucer with his coffee—the cup alone will do, thank you very much. So, in Coffee without the Saucer, he talks about how he once had to “rescue” his short Americano that was “wobbling precariously on the little saucer” by placing it squarely on the table. “Phew. And the spoon clanging the whole time. For Pete’s sake.” (You can almost feel the disgruntlement on his face.)

And then he recalls a delightful experience of “a saucerless administration of a small coffee drink” at an espresso place. He loves the place not only for the “very fine small coffee drinks they make” but also for the curiosity of one barista in particular, who “studies my face as I indulge.” 

“No saucer, right, she observed after one visit. I love her.”

Delight is made easy when you deliver what people love: whether coffee or software.

(This post was written for and first appeared on Freshworks.com.)

Why We Love Reading Books

 

Photo by Olia Danilevich from Pexels 

When it comes to books, many of us will identify with Francis Bacon’s famous saying, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” But there’s no denying that for those who “just love books,” they hold enormous power over us.

To this day, I have not come across a higher tribute to the power of a book than this line in Talks on the Gita by Vinoba Bhave: “I have received more nourishment from the Gita than my body has from my mother’s milk.”

The sheer love that Bhagavad Gita evinced in one of India’s well-known social reformers clearly shines through his heartfelt words. 

That line and the childlike simplicity of Vinoba’s interpretation of the Gita’s 18 chapters in the book (which was initially delivered as a series of talks) have remained with me through the years. Permanently digested and absorbed, as it were.

What makes books, books

Books can get us started on an inner journey, inspire us to become great leaders, prod us on to pick up or drop habits, teach something new, or simply entertain us for a while.

Some bestsellers, when they catch the fancy of a Hollywood director, turn into big blockbusters.

There’s something about the term “book” that inspires trust, attracts admiration or instills confidence. For one, a book on a given topic is much more elaborate and “serious sounding” than, say, a social post or an article—after all, someone committed months, years, or even decades, to researching and writing it. Besides, it allows readers to engage in a deeper exploration of something at their own pace, in the comfort of their own space.

Images of readers lost in books and holding their favorite cuppa can be found all around us. Some of them evoke nostalgia or even jealousy, usually in a nice way that makes you resolve to “catch up on your reading” in the not-too-distant future.

Alas, if only wishes were books!

Books may demand more in terms of your time compared to watching a film or listening to a podcast, but once they hook you in and grab you by the lapels of your curiosity and hunger for knowledge and understanding, you can hardly, to use a cliche, put them down. You also find it harder to forget the protagonists, storyline, lessons or insights from a book you really liked.

Again, it’s probably true that films or videos provide a bigger visual feast than books. But it’s also true that books give better wings to your imagination and, if I may dare say, a higher canvas to project your thoughts and ideas.

A look at some of the bestselling books of all time—across genres—enables us to appreciate the breadth of their scope and the depth of their impact. From the Bible to The Lord of the Rings, from Principia Mathematica to Das Kapital, from Romeo and Juliet to A Brief History of Time, from Think and Grow Rich to The Innovator’s Dilemma, from The Origin of Species to the Harry Potter series...books have not only captured much of human knowledge but also kept us going in our constant pursuit of happiness.

Let’s catch glimpses of what a few famous folks have said about books and reading:

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” – Gustave Flaubert

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” – Mark Twain

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” – Neil Gaiman

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney

“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman

A book, to borrow a line from the poet John Keats, is a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever.

Three cheers to books, writers and readers!

(The above post was first published on Freshworks.com.)

Six Bright Gems to Shine a Light on World Book Day

Image: Pixabay.com

In this age of reality TV, Twitter and Pokemon Go (which seems to have really gone somewhere), one may be tempted to ask the question: Why read? In fact, the late Steve Jobs once famously remarked (while discounting Amazon’s Kindle reader): “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Thankfully, people continue to read—even though there are skirmishes about whether it is the printed books or the digital ones doing better (or worse) than the other. What one hopes, though, is that it is not the same book or set of books that most people end up reading—be it a JK Rowling in the West, or a Chetan Bhagat here in India (no offence to either writer, even though it may make Rowling squirm and Bhagat smirk). The diversity of both the readers and the books they read—and obviously the writers who write them—should grow, I feel. Okay, change that to must.

Having said that, I’m in a difficult position to proceed with this post. Because, out of a few hundred books I have read in my life thus far (should have been in the thousands, I know!), I’m only going to pick up six. (I promise to make a long-list of my favorites someday.)

So, without further ado, let me say something about each of them before the World Book Day gets over--and before some people might be compelled to think it is all right to skip reading books! Here goes (in no particular order):

The Old Man and the Sea: Master storyteller Ernest Hemingway indeed crafted an amazing tale of endurance in which an old fisherman is pitted against the might of the sea and one of its creatures he struggles to catch after a really long patch of bad luck. How he manages this adventure, what he says (I remember him saying something like that the fish he was trying to kill was like his brother in a setting I would never forget; you must read it to know what I mean), and how he behaves after his ‘victory’…The old man is a real-life hero and the book, a rare gem.

A Search in Secret India: Paul Brunton’s classic quest to seek out and meet the real yogis of India in the early part of the nineteenth century is largely credited with introducing Raman Maharishi to the Western audience. What endeared me to this book--besides of course the desire to know more about the Maharishi and his message of ‘Who am I?’—is the honesty of purpose and the integrity of a journalistic writer to get to the bottom of the truth (whether he did get to the truth or not is something I’m still exploring, since I haven’t read his oeuvre and am myself at a ‘seeking’ stage). He met lots of charlatans and frauds but apparently some genuine yoga practitioners as well, before finding his inner peace at the Maharishi’s ashram in southern India.

Autobiography of a Yogi: One of the most widely read books in the spirituality genre, what Paramahansa Yogananda did in this life-changing book was give a first-hand account of some of India’s sages and saints—besides a glimpse of his own tenacity to promote yoga and the teachings of his guru, Yukteshwar Giri. Not to forget the mystical, all-youthful and divine figure of Mahavatar Babaji—Google it to unlock a cornucopia of information. (Ironically, it is one of the books Steve Jobs is said to have read many times over, though we cannot be sure of how much he believed in the book’s divine incidents and miracles.)

Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse): That this tiny book continues to engage and enchant millions of readers more than 90 years after its publication is testimony to its power and message of spiritual journey and self-discovery. It doesn't matter that it draws from ancient Indian spiritual and Buddhist thought; what matters is that it weaves in a simple narrative the recurrence of everything in our lives, the deceptive nature of our day-to-day rituals, the joys and sorrows of mundane human existence and, ultimately, the "song of the river" that keeps humming forever in our soul. Beautiful, heartfelt, ethereal, simple and profound all at the same time, Siddhartha cannot be recommended highly enough.

Atlas Shrugged: While Ayn Rand’s more famous book is The Fountainhead (which I tremendously like as well), I have picked up this one here for two reasons. One, it is the bulkier of the two and you get to stay with Rand all that bit more (if you are a Rand fan, you’ll know what I mean). Two, I found it more detailed and expressive of her philosophy of objectivism through an even more richly woven tapestry of super-solid characters: Dagny Taggert, Henry ‘Hank’ Reardon (whenever I thought of steel after reading the book, Reardon’s name reared in my head!), Francisco d’Anconia, Hugh Akston (“Contraction does not exist; check your premises”)…and, how can anyone miss it, John Galt! Check it out yourself—who is John Galt to ask you to read it?

The Outsider (also published under the title, The Stranger): This quiet reflection by Albert Camus on life and what matters--through a seemingly simplistic but profound story of a man accused of murdering his mother (the accusation resulting mainly from the observation that he did not follow the norm of crying at her death, if I remember correctly)--is one of those books that touch you gradually but deeply, irrevocably. It is all right not to be too ambitious but lead a joyful and uncomplicated life—that is the message I get again and again from the book, besides revisiting the notions of what it really means to love, be loved and lose those you love to time’s strange ways. Simply superb and highly relevant in our consumerist, gadget-obsessed times.

Like I said before, this is a woefully short list—but I’m happy to have shared it with you for what it is worth. Hope you will find at least one or two of them useful.

Happy reading :)