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Oh, So Emo! by Gayatri: Book Review

Imagine a world where all of us are emotionally aware and direct our energies to understand our own selves.

Now, think that we pass on this knowledge of reflection and subsequent clarity of thought to our children, so that they can make sense of the world around them, how they react to situations and identify and manage their deep-rooted emotions.

Book Blurb

Psst! Here’s a secret – we understand what you’re feeling.

Some days you’re soaring high, on others you’re down, and sometimes you’re blank as a canvas, not even bothered to tie your shoelaces. Feeling nothing at all. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

YOU are not alone.

It’s all there, mapped out on the Wheel of Emotions. You’ll see when you join Amit, Susie, Moin, Frenny and Neela on their journeys through emotional ups and downs, showing you exactly where your feeling fits. Once you’ve located it, the Wheel is like a lantern guiding you through the twists and turns of life. Showing you how your feelings affect your thoughts, words and actions.

Oh, and let’s not forget Sku. Who’s Sku, you ask? Just a rare and dazzling ‘mind finder’, a sunbird who’s flown all the way from Tibet, and who knows what’s what. He’s carrying the secret of the Secret, which he learned from the boy-monk Dorji. And he’s willing to share the secrets with YOU.

Review

Oh, So Emo! by Gayatri, a therapist, a qualified practitioner of Buddhist psychology has penned a wonderful book that can used by children and adults alike to name their emotions, identify what they are feeling, work out and work with their emotions on a deeper level with positive affirmations to keep them going.

The book starts with the story of Buddhist monks walking through Tibet towards the India border. Dorji, a 10 yr old wise boy and his rescued sunbird Sku engage in a discussion and conversation about emotions, feelings and actions and how they manifest in the body.

The conversation is deep but engaging and relatable for children. Sku goes on to get other winged friends later, all of them as intuitive as Sku, helping children as they struggle to terms with the world around them.

The circumstances that the children in the book face are very realistic, without being cliched. As the stories unfold, the reader is presented varied emotions in a very engaging manner.

While reading the book, I quite looked forward to these emotions, an explanation of what they feel like, how to recognise them, practical tips on what to do about it, along with brilliantly worded affirmations.

For young readers, there is a colourful, detachable poster of the Wheel of Emotions for quick and easy reference.

Oh, So Emo! is a good book to have in your home library. The children would of course not read about all emotions all at once and maybe find a few too unfamiliar and complex but the book would serve as a good reference/reminder to them over the years.

With delightful illustrations by Shamika Chaves and a bright book cover, the book is like a friend, supporting and accepting and always there for you.

About the Author

Gayatri holds a Masters in English Literature, PG diploma in Journalism, Counselling Psychology, and Applied Buddhist Psychology and Ethics, a Nalanda Diploma in Buddhist Philosophy and is a student of the 5-year Nalanda Masters in Buddhist Philosophy, under the aegis of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She is a practitioner of Vipassana, and the Ngondro Gar under the lineage of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. She studied Vedic Culture & Spirituality and Indian Philosophy at Sri Satya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Puttaparthi.

She has worked in the Indian media for 22 years and is a mental health columnist for MoneyControl. Her non-fiction work has appeared in the Hindustan Times, India Today and Mint Lounge, and also as part of an award-winning anthology of Out of Print edited by Meena Kandasamy and Samhita Arni. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2021 and featured in the Converse Anthology commemorating 75 years of Indian Independence in 2022, among others. She’s lived in Lagos, Nigeria; Kodaikanal, TN; and Thane, Maharashtra, and is currently a resident of Mysuru. She is the founder of Shamah | a mind-body-spirit alignment practice.

You can buy the book on Amazon.

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Reading in 2024: here is a plan

Every December I see people doing their year-end round-up posts of books they have read through the year. There are loads of reading challenges too, promising to get you to read more, read diversely and have fun while doing all that.

I feel scared to commit to reading challenges. What if I change my mind about the books I was supposed to be reading? What if, I find more books that I want to read first? What if, I cannot read the required number because life gets in the way (just a phrase though, reading is life).

Casting aside all misgivings and doubts I am going to join an interesting reading challenge this year, Reading with Muffy 2024 Reading Challenge!

Why, you might ask? One, Muffy is an adorable Golden Retriever and getting an approving glance from the doggo while you are reading is motivation enough. Two, the prompts are quite interesting and seem flexible. Three, while I do have to read 12 books through the year, I can do that at my own pace. (And a secret reason, I found that quite a few of the prompts matched the books I am already planning to read). I haven’t yet mentioned that there is a very interesting set of readers who have already joined in, so that is a bonus, getting to read good bookish posts, and possibly picking up a few book recommendations as well.

In the hope of converting you, my reader, to be part of this cool reading challenge, here are the details.

12 prompts for 12 months, though you can read fast or slow. I am including the handy graphic I got to keep track of the prompts.

Write a post, either on your blog or socials, talking about your participation, tagging the gracious host, Shalini.

Keep adding your views on the books you are reading to a linky that is open for 12 months. There would be other links there so you can see who else is doing the same challenge and what they are reading.

Not to make you greedy but only more motivated, there are goodies sent out very regularly for sign ups, active participation etc.

Convinced? Here is the place you can get all the rules and sign up too.

I am looking forward to this reading adventure. If you are joining in, let me know in the comments so that we can discuss which books to pick for the prompts.


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This Year I Plan to Go Slow…

…with my reads. I am pleased to report that in 2023 I read a lot of books. Well, number wise they were not many, but stories-wise, content-wise, themes-wise, it was sizeable. I almost feel like I have conquered something.

I read all kinds of books, picked some that others were reading – other readers whom I admire for their tastes and discernment. A few other books that I read were simple, easy reads because I could not get my pace for complex ones.

One reason I feel I have achieved something is that I went back to reading books without getting distracted by devices, internet and work. I got back to reading paperbacks and that felt very comfortting as well. In the beginning, I would read half a page and pause to take stock of what else was I supposed to be doing at that time. I even felt that committing to reading everyday was akin to not living. But then, I got my pace, my interest was alive and reading once again came effortlessly (phew, it was never supposed to get hard but that is life). I have read a lot of ebooks in recent years but I realised that holding a book and turning its pages was good therapy for me.

And anyway, with a group, we did a very cool readalong of the longlist of the JCB Prize for Literature books and found so many gems. We also discussed it with fellow readers and that was such a rewarding experience.

The books I read at that time begged to be savoured. I would start reading fast, realise what I was doing and slow down once again. A book that spoke to me a lot (Sim sim by Geet Chaturvedi, translated to English by Anita Gopalan) had me cooking cuisines from that area. It was like I wanted to live that life.

Another book (The Colony of Shadows by Bikram Sharma) led me down a series of articles written by the author where they talked about how the dog in the book was inspired by the strays they would feed.

Yet another book opened up a chapter in Indian political and economic history (I named My Sister Silence by Manoj Rupda, translated to English by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar) that reminded me of the news items I would hear, and read in my childhood. I googled a lot of places and people.

Reading slow gave me a a feel of the world, beyond the words. It was as if I was living the story and the author experiences in part. And that felt wholesome — not just chasing the story and capturing my impressions in a blog post or a social media post or in a review, but being part of it.

I started this year with a Graphic Novel (Starry starry Night by Nandita Basu). An unlikely choice, given that I have read zero, ok, maybe 2 graphic novels before. This book is lilting, it speaks of music and art and as I read so many impressions jump out to me. How children are more straight forward, how they ask questions that need answers, unlike us adults who emphasise politeness. There is a backdrop of art and music and right now I am lost in classical music, listening to Beethoven and the piano renderings of 90s pop music. Already, I feel a sense of calm pervading me.

Hence, the resolution to go slow and to savour.

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The Colony of Shadows by Bikram Sharma: Book Review


Title: The Colony of Shadows
Author: Bikram Sharma
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy
Length: 256 pages
Publisher: Hachette India

Book Blurb


A GRIEVING CHILD.

A MYSTERIOUS COLONY.

A LURKING MENACE.

After the untimely death of his parents, nine-year-old Varun struggles to adjust to his new life in Bangalore with his perceptive aunt and bedridden grandmother. When he climbs through a hole in the wall of their back garden, he discovers a mysterious colony that lies abandoned and in ruins. It’s strangely familiar, and the more he explores it, the more it resembles his old home in Delhi. But the comfort of familiarity is deceptive, for something dangerous lurks in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to strike – and wreak havoc. Will Varun survive this threat? Or will he vanish from the world, swallowed alive by the colony of shadows?

In this gripping debut novel, Bikram Sharma tells an emotionally rich tale about loss, grief, and hope, and the lengths we go to for the people we love.

The Story


When Varun explores the garden in his aunt and grandmother’s house in Bangalore, he finds a mysterious, ruined place beyond the boundary wall, a colony that looks similar to his house in Delhi. His parents are dead and burdened by a sense of grief and a longing to go back home to his parents, he explores the place again and again while memories rush back.


But the colony is sinister and Varun’s sense of danger vies for space with his longing. His life is with Jyoti and Usha but will he learn to reconcile with the idea of a new family?

Review


The Colony of Shadows is a quick and easy read. The language and narration are uncomplicated. I liked that it had a very Indian feel to everyday events.

The book is a sensory delight because much of the story is through Jyoti, Varun’s aunt who is visually challenged. Poppy the pet dog has some of the narration, and we get to experience the world through her senses. Intuition, sensory perception and emotional awareness make the text so much richer. In fact, even emotions have scents when Poppy experiences them. She can smell curiosity, fear, grief and make sense of what the humans are going through. Grief becomes a rancid bitterness; inquisitiveness is expressed through muscles tensed in anticipation of action.

There’s so much of a woman’s perspective in the book. Jyoti, Anu, their mother Usha are the orbits around the child Varun.

Maleness sees a put-down again and again, be it Poppy’s fear of men, the male gaze that Anu despises, or Praveen, who is a grey character, veering towards malice.

There is a lot about disability, both physical and mental and those in the margins, orphans, animals who have been treated cruelly, all of it very sensitively handled. While Jyoti can navigate her physical limitations, Usha is unable to fight her mental demons.

The story has a beautiful juxtaposition of the mundane, everyday life, of power cuts, household chores and of a fantastical world, that lies beyond the boundary wall of the house. To Varun, it is a place where he can return to his parents and the life he once had; to Poppy, it is the other world beyond a tunnel of darkness, where people are lured to, never to be seen again. In this world, shadows have a life of their own, while everything else lies in ruins, inanimate objects like coins and sticks converse, warn, think aloud. This other world seems curious, enticing in a way, and the sense of danger grows more menacing as the book progresses.


There is a lot of Varun’s perspective in the book, the child’s remorse of doing something that you were not supposed to, of a child’s notion that something went wrong, because they broke a promise or that if you were good, nothing would go wrong ever.


There are some subtle nuances like the gramophone that plucks ghostly voices from nowhere or the book that Jyoti and Varun are reading (pop culture references are exciting, I looked up the book), Praveen stalking Jyoti after he’s unable to handle the happenings or his own emotions or ineptitude.

I did not want to look at the book from a disability lens but it’s very empathetic writing. In fact it is about the marginalised — women, disability, orphans, strays, people we imagine need comfort and we end up patronising them but they only need support, they can make their own way.

One thing that rankled as the story progressed was that Usha and Jyoti have rather similar thoughts and reactions. The characters are all cast from the same mould. With the exception of Praveen, they are all gentle, sensitive, and caring. Also, pennies drop or people come to conclusions suddenly, without any trigger of revelation. While Varun’s grief is real, there was little mourning on Jyoti or Usha’s end, for Anu’s death.

The ending did not work for me, even though it is neatly tied. In fact the book faltered after the 60% mark. After the elaborate world building, random things happened when it came to ghosts, shadows, or dead people.

Verdict


A very beautifully penned story that will make you feel warm, vulnerable and have an aching heart, all at once.

This post is part of Bookish League Blog Hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile.

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A book that makes me cry

If there’s one book I cannot read without breaking down, it’s Making a Mango Whistle by Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay. I later found out that it’s about Apu, the protagonist of Apur Sansar, immortalised on celluloid by Satyajit Ray.

The book follows the life of Apu and his older sister Durga over the period of a few years. The children are born in a house that doesn’t have much money. But the children are resourceful; they play, eat, create make-believe worlds with all the innocence of childhood. The little joys and their adventures are endearing.

The forest near their home has a very prominent place in the children’s life. Some scenes are so delicate and beautiful that I had a sense of forebearing that it was all too good to continue. For so many chapters, I read on feverishly, waiting for the axe to fall, for tragedy to rear itself. It’s an awful way to read a classic I know but that’s my relationship with this book.

I had written a review sometime back. You can read it here.

This post is part of Blochatter Half Marathon.

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Authors who Shaped my Reading Journey

Books that impacted the reader and writer in me, the post in which I go ga-ga over the books and authors I have loved.

*Takes a deep breath*. It started with Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, that lovely illustrated classic that I won as a prize. I had been reading for years by then, all children’s magazines, comic books, those delightful picture dictionaries (thanks Richard Scarry) that my Dad got from faraway and big book stores. Also thanks to the school library where I got my hand on Noddy books, loads of Enid Blytons (Amelia Jane and The Magic Faraway Tree still have a huge place in my heart), Caroline Keene (I quite loved the hardback Nancy Drews). The Perry Masons I borrowed from family book dumps, James Hadley Chase too. Of course, my reading was peppered with Sidney Sheldons and Arthur Haileys. I discovered P G Wodehouse from an office library and Louis L’Amour from a friend’s Dad’s collection, a book that had no cover.

Along the way, I found Daphne du Maurier and also werewolves in an unnamed book. Of course, I was reading voraciously. I was fascinated with Thomas Hardy and I haven’t even mentioned that I had read quite a lot of the classics by the time I was 16. Then came a time when I read the Russian masters. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and many others were part of my library. After that came the biographies and the introduction to art.

All along, I had been absorbing the writing style of all the masters I was encountering. Reading and writing are really two sides of a coin. We absorb, formulate our own opinions and put them forth in our writing. However, easing into our own style takes time, patience and practice.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Image courtesy Lil Artsy on Pexels.

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Looking back

I was looking for a book review on my blog that I had written sometime in the past. As I scrolled through older posts, I couldn’t help but smile. There was so much of me here, even though I often couch my feelings in talking of something very different from what’s foremost in my mind.

I still remember the excitement of the first blog post. Going back further, I remember how wide-eyed I was when I discovered the WordPress blogging universe. I looked at the prompts and the periodic challenges and what people were writing and it just felt like I was home. I read up on how to create a blog, what widgets were, how side bars could be customized, what design themes were and going through the tutorials felt like new learning. Incidentally I haven’t forgotten the typos of my first blog post.

At the beginning, all I wanted was to write about books. But looking back at the posts, there’s so much more that I wrote. I chuckle at my coffee posts, I think back fondly of the way I wanted a strict structure for my book reviews. I remember the year I wrote nothing but listicles, one every Wednesday, a completely non-negotiable thing, writing in train compartments, or in crowded temples awaiting darshan.

I remember the complete obsession with statistics that lasted a few months. I remember those deliciously delirious days when I chronicled my life, the places I visited and the adventures I found in painting a visual picture of little things that happened daily.

There were people I knew only through their writing, people who commented regularly, people I looked forward to reading. That knowing and yet not-knowing had a strange pull, one that made me open my blog nearly every day to read and write.

Well, here’s getting back to writing with abandon once again.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

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Weekend Reading

This weekend I am beginning with a book that I have been yearning to read for months. Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes has a gorgeous cover and the blurb makes me impatient to get to it. The book traces the history of opium and the poppy plant through dynasties, colonial rule and across continents.

I have read the first book of the Ibis Trilogy, The Sea of Poppies and the notes at the end of the book that talked about the research that had gone into writing the book had me fascinated. The Sea of Poppies is the kind of book you don’t forget. Deeti, who’s married to an opium addict, is hemmed in at home and the way she has to be resourceful to get freedom is etched indelibly in my mind. The prince, who sees a fall from a decadent and prosperous life to that of an indentured laborer, the life of village folk and those belonging to the lower castes, at the fringes of society, who know they lose nothing when they set sail on a ship to unknown lands. The life of the sailors, in terms of their living conditions isn’t much different from the passengers they are ferrying. Destiny brings people from different regions together on the ship, bound for a land they know nothing of, towards a life of hard work and perhaps disease.

It’s been long years since I read the book and I am sure another read would give me a different perspective. But one thing I am sure of, and that’s the amazing clarity and connection of he different threads of the narrative.

Do come back in a few days for a review.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Image courtesy Ena Marinkovic on pexels.com

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The Stolen Necklace by Shevlin Sebastian: My Thoughts on the book

True crime narratives are generally written because the human interest angle is very strong. For maximum leverage, sometimes the unsavoury bits are scrutinised a little too obsessively, because it’s what gets engagement.

The Stolen Necklace written by Sebastian Shevlin about V. K. Thajudheen’s story is a true account of wrongful arrest and subsequent incarceration. The role of the police in framing an innocent person on the basis of CCTV footage (which was not even conclusive) sounds horrendous and chillingly familiar.

Whether it’s Kerala or other Indian states, the menace of uniformed guardians of law is well-known. Wrongful imprisonment, mistreatment during custody and the common man’s fear of the police have been talked about in newspapers.

Thajudheen’s ordeal of nearly 2 months in jail, a reputation that took a dent from the moment the police apprehended him, the ways in which his family had to seek help from influential and politically connected people makes for a very relatable read.

The best part is that the narrative is calm, bordering on gentle which is a refreshing change from the sensationalism we see. There are no harsh judgements, the facts are presented and it’s up to the reader to take what they want from the story.

I would recommend The Stolen Necklace for a factual analysis and good narrative.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

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Energy Boosts

What energises you on a tiresome day, asked Blogchatter Half Marathon.

All I could think of is that tiresome days rarely come in ones or twos. I have had a tiresome week, in fact a tiring bunch of days where I vacillated between exhaustion and sparks of inspiration. The sparks made their way into a list and thankfully got acted upon. The exhaustion seems to be a combination of less sleep, not so healthy food, worrying and wondering, letting things run on auto pilot, not countering clutter and sigh, everything else that can be my fault.

I don’t know what lifts up days like these. Usually a long walk is my go-to option for getting clarity. However, it sounds like a lot of effort when you are already in doldrums. Things that give me comfort on ordinary days feel difficult to get to. Reading? Hmm, it needs to be an easy read because who can process complicated text? Writing? Maybe a rant will do me good or maybe it will just bring more negativity to my mind.

I have seen that routine can be calming. And the same is true for repetitive actions. Maybe time to begin doodling or a coloring book for adults. Which reminds me of the unrequited passion I had for painting terracotta pots. One of these days, I am going to buy a whole batch of planters, terracotta figurines, bells and what not and set to paint them all shades of the soil.

I may not have the perfect pick-me-up to a bad day but I can certainly dream and those possibilities are uplifting.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Image courtesy Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.