For the longest time, I have not read fiction. One sunny afternoon, I find a book that my brother shipped thinking I’d enjoy reading: The Hindi-Bindi Club by second generation Indian-American Monica Pradhan.
This book is about 3 women from India settled in the United States, and about each of their daughters. The way the book is written, each character speaks for herself.
There is Saroj Chawla from Punjab who is a great cook and runs a catering business. Her daughter is Preity, the Miss Perfect, as viewed by one and all. The other character is Meenal Deshpande who hails from Maharashtra. She is more philosophical than others and has learnt from the experiences she had to deal with. Her daughter is Kiran, a physician and a divorcee in her early thirties who comes across as smart and stubborn. And then its Uma Basu, a Bengali scholar and professor. Her daughter is Rani, a wild child growing up but now an artiste.
From the eyes of these three mothers and daughters, you get to experience their wonder years growing up, their challenges with motherhood/daughterhood in a foreign country and all the gossip of what the girls call “The Hindi-Bindi Club”. As I read on, at different points, I could identify with some, the goosebumps, the nostalgia. And above all laughed and laughed at the humor! Saroj has her roots in the cosmopolitan Lahore, a part of India before the horrifying Partition, to become a part of Pakistan. With the character, you go back to the days half a century back with the description of the beautiful city, the festivals, the cheer, the Basant (Spring) in Lahore. Its poetic. Reminded me of the old Hindi movies. Meenal represents the typical and realistic Marathi woman and her life as a girl in Mumbai. The Mumbai rains, the paper boats, the street food, the beach etc. Uma is from Kolkata – the city of so many shades and contrasts. She is an intellectual, has a tough past, how she deals with it and her triumphs, her perspective towards life- its all is very inspiring.
Then there is the second generation of the daughters and their lives and challenges. Thus, it is a seamless patchwork of old and new Bollywood movies into a spectacular melange; now who wouldn’t like that! The book is very entertaining and brings that warm and fuzzy feeling. Its one of those I didn’t want to end. I highly recommend it to women, especially women from the Indian subcontinent settled abroad. They can most identify with it. I will be surprised if no one makes a cross-over movie out of it.
The best part is, each chapter is followed by a recipe. That is a real treat in more ways than one! I actually tried out a few!
My last word: A delightful book that is a must read! 🙂
My love affair with Apple started the moment I saw the iPod Touch with a colleague back in 2007. I was impressed by the magic the device could do and it’s beauty that was simply fantastical. I owned the iPhone later and the iPad. And they never let me down. Before I knew it, I was already in awe of this cult called ‘Apple‘. I watched the company’s CEO Steve Jobs giving the Stanford commencement speech. It left a deep impact on me, like it did on thousands. It was unostentatious, simple and above all, great!
The news of Steve Jobs’ death came to me with the grief that you’d feel for the death of someone who could have been your personal hero. Since I didn’t know much about him then, I very much wanted to. I got my first iBook, “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson. As I read from the Preface to the last page, it unraveled this man who had many facets, great as well as dark. Reading excerpts or news articles on him online, and watching a 60 minute documentary on TV just shows the tip of the iceberg. That’s really not him. If you wish to know this man, you got to know all the complexities that Jobs was, I felt. These words here are not meant to summarize the book; his life will need more words than these to tell the story. Many many more. This is but a trailer to entice you to watch the movie, if you wish to.
Initial reaction?
Honestly, I was slightly disillusioned towards the beginning as I was prepared to get inspired. It shattered my myth of a perfect hero to reveal the real person in real circumstances, and how he was ‘not a role model boss or a human being tidily packaged to be emulated. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair’. He would have his own version of reality which people around him would call “reality distortion field”. To his coworkers, he seemed too idealistic to be realistic. He was a control freak. He was straightforward to the extent of being rude, brutally rude, more often than not. He didn’t mean to be like that, he was just made that way.
Why read the Biography?
So what’s the big deal about Steve Jobs? Why read the biography? Well, there’s much more to him than this. Steve was an artist always striving relentlessly for perfection amidst imperfection. He was an ardent admirer of art and music, and was a great Dylan fan. A visionary with a beautiful vision of the future. An idealist who aimed to be, and to do things, greater than the greatest. He had an unusual ability to focus and make the impossible happen. He had a zen-like austerity, simplicity and a sense of minimalism that is reflected in all his creations. He always wanted to be at the intersection of technology and humanities.
Jobs’ passion was to create products that were great, or “insanely great”, as he would put. He was so detail oriented that he even made sure the inside parts – which the customer would never see- also be assembled very carefully and beautifully. He didn’t believe in market research or finding out what the customer wanted (Henry Ford is believed to have once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses!”) His philosophy was to think two steps ahead and he gave products customers didn’t know they wanted.
Quick exercise- A world without Steve / Apple?
The concept of home computers would not have started and the great GUI that made easy for one and all to use computers. Without Pixar– which broke open the frontiers of digital imagination and kids, young and old -we’d be deprived of brilliant cinema ( Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up and so many more). Without the iTunes store music piracy would become the order of the day for none to contain (and we’d be deprived of the great feeling of legally buying a song – not the whole CD-just for 99 cents..’click’). Without the App Store the world would be deprived of the great apps for users and the billion dollar industry that it has become. Without the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the boundaries of engineering and design would not be pushed to unimaginable limits and we would not have the joy of owning and using them (think of a music composition or a movie that most impacted you- what if it was never made?). He really didn’t ‘invent’ anything, but he was a “master at putting together ideas, art and technology in ways that invented the future”.
This is a story of a man who forever changed our world, for the better.
On the Biographer…
Walter Isaacson has more than succeeded in doing justice to the subject as a biographer, is what I believe people who knew Jobs would agree. The book progresses eloquently from Steve as a child to a college dropout to his phases of extreme diets for months, dropping acid, meditations and attempts to find enlightenment. Then are his days of becoming a millionaire in his mid twenties to a series of failures and ousting from Apple. Followed by that is his final comeback to write history and build which is now the most valuable company on earth. With these eventful circumstances one gets to know the complex personality of the man. A lot of instances in the biography, the author gives his own take on people, things and situations, starkly different from how Jobs had seen them based fact finding he did himself. He is said to have had over a hundred interviews with Jobs family, friends, colleagues and competitors and over forty interviews with Jobs himself. He seems to be very transparent and has tried the subject play a second fiddle to nothing; his writing style is simple rather than complicated verbosity.
Young Steve Jobs with his Macintosh
The final words…
Most creative people in the history of human species want to express their appreciation for being able to take advantage of the contributions that came before us, and want to add something significant to the flow. To be able to contribute was the genesis of his intense drive.
Any literature that touches you leaving an impact, my father would say, is great literature! This book too leaves you with a strong sense of inspiration. You also get a sense that, the void you’d have for filling with accomplishment, has risen higher towards greatness.
Haven’t yet made up your mind to read the book? ‘Think different’!
Love at first sight… Not sure if that really exists. I would have said otherwise if I were still in my teens.
But what I do believe in is the what you know and feel of a person when you meet him or her for the first time. As I look back into my life and the people I have met, and who of those were to be relationships for a long time to come, I did have some kind of a “gut” feel about them. There would be strong vibes and a “connection” that could be felt.
There are a few theories that seem to support this directly or indirectly, that I have read of. The first one is the few pages of Blink where Malcolm Gladwell explains how “logic” is more often than not, not be the best way to conclude something. In other words ‘spontaneous decisions/conclusions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones’.
The second one is the the concept of past life, as I read in the books by Dr. Brian Weiss where he talks about souls travel in groups across lifetimes and how we meet those who we have to settle our “karmic relationship”. And so even if we meet someone for the first time, we get a feeling that we have known them for a long time! Reincarnation is something that I being a Hindu have grown up believing, as it forms a part of the Hindu philosophy.
It appears so strange yet fascinating, both at the same time. The more I think of these, the more intrigued I get by the mysteries of life and living!
When I look back at the years gone by, I feel that I had an eventful life. I always had a certain structure in mind that I thought my life would fit into, or will look like. But things that happened to me threw me off my premeditated ideal. I didn’t know to what I should attribute it all to: the choices that I had to make (there’s such an irony in the statement) which would turn out to be ‘wrong’ in time to come, or to ‘fate’. The latter approach, I realized, seemed comforting as it salvages you from the never ending ‘analysis – paralysis’ loop and you concede to the fact that things happen the way they have to irrespective of the choices we make.
None of the above theories could convince me deep down, until a few years back, when I came across this interesting book that caused a paradigm shift in me. Illusions by Richard Bach has been one of the best books I have read so far. It spoke to my soul, and when I most needed it. At the beginning, there is this parable that is very profound which is reproduced below:
“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all — young and old, rich and poor, good and evil — the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current was what each had learned from birth.
But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.” The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!” But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Illusions by Richard Bach
Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the messiah, come to save us all!” And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.”
But they cried the more, “Savior!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a savior.”
The current, the flow probably knows where it is going, if we don’t. That’s so reassuring. This philosophy could be likened to the higher concept of being “sahaj” found in the Hindu philosophy, and in Sikhism. So is it reflected in the teachings of great saints known to be associated with various religions. Spiritual teachings and the philosophy therein does offer answers to problems, difficult life situations and ambiguity life puts us into. On an individual level, I did find solace in these teachings and this theory.
"What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?" -- Annie Dillard
Life according to one of life’s truly gifted naturally born wafflers… an open diary of a Saffer in a different land... life in the greater Dublin & Leinster area. (Blogging since 2011) My quests fuel my dreams… my dreams fuel my quests!!
For the longest time, I have not read fiction. One sunny afternoon, I find a book that my brother shipped thinking I’d enjoy reading: The Hindi-Bindi Club by second generation Indian-American Monica Pradhan.
Madame Zenista 