I’ve read three books by Sankar (as he likes to be called.
‘If You Feel Good, You Work Good’ (2021), which was a compilation of experiences and advice as an HR person, which he once was. He says about himself: ‘After my post- graduation in human resources management, I had a great professional career working with multinational corporations in India and the Caribbean. In my career of 17 years, I managed many functions in Human Resources Management and rose to become a Director and Head of HR.’ He runs ChangeWorks, a boutique consulting organization along with a few colleagues, to help facilitate transformation in individuals, groups and organizations. He adds: ‘… I’m a student of myself- self-awareness has been a preoccupation for the past forty years of my life.’
Then came ‘Leela’ (2022), a successful attempt at amalgaming fiction and philosophy. It allowed readers to reflect on the crossroads of reality, perception and impermanence. Questions of religion, rejection were woven into glimpses of Indian culture and social norms.
He says: ‘The only thing that I’m certain about is my presence. I exist. I experience the world all the time. I see, hear, smell, taste and touch. The world also brings a range of emotions and thoughts in me. Just because I experience the world, does it make it real? What about other people and even God? Are they all appearances and a play (Leela)…?’
And now comes this third book, ‘Asanga’, which I’ve liked the best so far. (There’s another book coming up in February, ‘Organizational Transformation Through Appreciative Inquiry: experiences and reflections on drenching processes’, with Wasundhara Joshi, of that later.)
‘Asanga’: After reading it, I’m beginning to wonder whether my dreams, of falling-falling-falling from a height and suddenly getting up with a start in the middle of the night, or trying to complete an exam with no ink flowing out of my pen and no answers in my brain, are sometimes real, even though I’m now sixty-eight, and not climbing even stairs, nor taking exams.
Sankara weaves the wandering of the mind with the physical here and now in this five-chapter novel that made me want to eat whatever he was, to trigger that kind of imagination.
Is the world real at all or a bubble? ‘Asanga’ the word, he explains, means you are never not free, even when bound by bills to be paid and jobs to be done.
Some quotes. In the chapter on Death, he writes, ‘Imagine if you were not born, the world would have continued as a flat line without the interruption of breaking energy. …. Everyone’s birth is a big bang cosmic event. … is the phrase ‘being born’ the launch of a new being, or is it like the unfurling of a new leaf in an already existing life?... maybe my father was one of the fallen leaves, and I still stand unfurled.’
Sitting in a Taverna, he contemplates, ‘Luck is such a magical phenomenon. It is very difficult to explain it because we are not sure whether it really exists. We say a person is lucky when they benefit from something good that they didn’t deserve or weren’t impacted negatively by something, not getting injured in an accident, for example. We might say luck is by chance, karma or God’s grace. Or is it determined in our genes? I think the fact that I was born and am now alive is luck. There were many who were never born or lived long enough after birth… I had an elder brother who died very young ... .if he had lived, (my parents) would have decided not to have any more children. Maybe his death was luck for me, because (they) decided to have another child… or, I could have been born to parents in Switzerland.’
In the chapter, Dream, he experiences something akin to the mystical. He wonders, ‘Is someone putting on a show, or am I hallucinating? I pride myself as a person who wants proof for anything to be believed. However, I also see that there are many experiences that cannot be explained. ….When you look for the rationale of any experience, you miss the experience.’
In Waking Up, you realise, the book is part memoir, part discussion about Advaita Vedānta and Buddhist philosophy. Asanga, non-attachment, is explained through a gripping story. Moksha is not a reward after death; it is a realisation in the present moment, as another reviewer notes, ‘often obscured by identification with the body, mind, memory, and roles.’
The Rite of Passage is the second last chapter: ‘…as a child, I wanted to be an adult… when I became one, I felt more like a child and didn’t want to be an adult. It was difficult to … embrace the responsibility of the adult… when I moved from adulthood to middle age and now to old age. I keep clinging to my old self, not wanting to let go and see my freedom taken away one by one as I keep aging. Or maybe, I’m more conscious of losing freedom from the previous stage and don’t recognize the new freedom that I get when I move to the next stage of life.’
For those interested in philosophy, religion, speculative fiction, this is a book to read between Friday evening and Sunday night. A drink or five might help; or a chai or coffee; or just plain buttermilk if you aren’t the kind that needs a ‘kick’ to start reading. The book is gripping enough to see you through many hours.
Asanga.
Sankarasubramanyan Ramamoorthy.
Publisher: Storydea Publishing
Price: Rs 225.
Number of pages: 86