Books from My Shelves
From Maugham and Ayn Rand to the Mahabharata and the Upanishads, a personal journey through books
By Indu Kumar Pande
My earliest influence as a reader was my mother. Though she had received formal education only up to high school, she was deeply fond of literature. Despite a demanding household routine that occupied her from morning till night, she always found time to read. I still remember her reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables with tears in her eyes, moved by the fate of one of its characters. She later told me that, henceforth, she would stay with W. Somerset Maugham, her favourite English author.
My own reading began with childhood magazines such as Chandamama and Parag, followed by Enid Blyton and books such as Gulliver’s Travels, Phantom and Mandrake comics. The first serious book I read on my mother’s advice was Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, generally described as a fictionalised account inspired by the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin. Maugham’s storytelling drew me in, and I later enjoyed his Up at the Villa, whose suspense and mystery made it a particularly memorable read, even though it is not usually counted among his major classics such as Of Human Bondage.
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was another landmark in my reading journey. The novel created controversy through its explicit treatment of sexual desire and its exploration of repression of sexual desire as convened to his psycho analyst by the main protagonist, Alexander Portnoy. Its candid treatment of subjects considered taboo by many readers challenged prevailing ideas about morality and social propriety. It brought into the open matters that conventional society often preferred to keep hidden.
Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock opened another window for me: the possibility of a rapidly changing social, cultural and economic environment in which established ways of thinking would constantly be challenged. Toffler’s emphasis on the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn appears especially relevant to an age of continuous change. The theme finds echoes in later discussions of the future and changing human society.
Closer to home, Dr V.S. Sukthankar’s The Meaning of the Mahabharata offered a profound analysis of the epic. The book is based on four lectures delivered at the University of Bombay; the fourth could not be delivered because the author died on the morning of the day it was scheduled. Sukthankar begins by examining criticisms of the Mahabharata and then develops an argument for its literary and intellectual significance. He considers the epic at physical, metaphysical and spiritual levels, presenting it as one of the great works of world literature.
My entry into Hindi poetry came through a colleague in service, Mr Avadhesh Rathore, who introduced me to Jaishankar Prasad’s Kamayan. However Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Kurukshetra made a deep impression on me. It reflects on the futility of war, though in the setting of the Mahabharata. It also examines the persistence of animal instincts in human beings throughout history. The poem becomes a sombre commentary on humanity’s failure to learn from its mistakes: whether victor or vanquished, both ultimately bear the cost of war and end up as losers. The problem is ego and selfishness of power hungry people who sacrifice their fellow beings without any hesitation.
My reading eventually returned to Vedic literature with the Mandukya Upanishad. In striking contrast to the enormous Mahabharata, this is an exceptionally brief text of just 12 verses with less than two hundred words, yet it opens up a vast philosophical landscape. Its seventh verse, dealing with the nature of the Self, has been regarded as central to Vedanta. The Upanishad describes four states of consciousness— waking, dreaming, deep sleep and turiya, the transcendent state beyond ordinary physical and temporal limitations. Its brevity is deceptive; commentaries running into hundreds of pages have grown around its two pages.
Max Tegmark hailed as one of the rock gods of cosmology has penned Our Mathematical Universe which he claims to be his quest for the ultimate nature of reality. It is about deep interface between science and philosophy. Starting from the singularity of the big bang to the eternal inflation it examines the cosmic issues of physical reality and mathematical reality.
The question about when and how did the universe begin and why we are here has been taken up by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in The Grand Design. It endeavours to find new answers to the ultimate questions of life. It speaks of a super symmetric theory of gravity. Stephen Hawking says that ordinarily these are questions which need to be answered by philosophy but since Phlilosophy is dead so Physics has to provide the answers. An observation which appears to be premature because philosophy is a word of Greek origin which conveys a love for knowledge.
The Meaning and Process of Culture by Prof. G.C. Pande defines culture as ‘tradition of values in self-realisation’. A very unusual definition which has strong philosophical connotations. It presumes a social group and a time series in which the tradition evolves. The historical process according to the author is governed by some kind of transcendental forces.Culture according to the author is not a social construct, but it comes from a transcendent source envisioned by an extra ordinary person, a teacher or a prophet, which the society imbibes. It is spiritual in its origin.
Looking back, this journey through books has been more than a record of reading. It has been a journey through different ways of understanding human beings: their individuality and society, their wars and desires, their traditions and philosophies, and their search for meaning. From a mother reading Maugham after a long day of household work to the vast questions raised by the Mahabharata and the Upanishads, each book has added another perspective. Together, they have made reading not merely a pastime, but a continuing conversation with the human experience.
(Indu Kumar Pande was born in Nainital on 4 December 1949. He did his graduation from DSB Government College, Nainital, and Masters in Physics from University of Roorkee. He was a lecturer in Physics in Almora College. He retired as Chief Secretary, Uttarakhand, in December 2009. He has authored Divija, a collection of poems and ‘That Thou Art, the Unknown Dimensions’ – a philosophical novel.)
