Drugs and self-discovery

For the author, the city is a metaphor for the contradictory nature of life as she knows it and it frequently drives her crazy.

Bombay to Eternity
Uma Ranganathan
Penguin
2004
Pages: 304
Price: Rs 295
ISBN: 0143031236
Paperback


If you, like me, don’t know how to react when someone’s spilling personal details of her life, then you, like me, won’t know how to react to Bombay to Eternity either.

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Because the book dwells on Ranganathan’s search for the meaning of existence and though you’re curious about the things she does and the effect they have on her, sometimes you wish you hadn’t started this book at all. What can you say about someone else’s life after all?

If you’re the kind of person who thinks that people who look for the meaning of life are intolerable, don’t touch this book with a bargepole. But if you’re willing to accept the me-myself-and-I personality of someone who’s spent her life on an inward journey, then you may well be quite fascinated by it. So here she is: Uma Ranganathan, unplugged.

She isn’t what you may consider a ‘settled’ person. Has seldom done the expected thing for a woman of her background and education. Born and brought up in Bombay, the city for her is a metaphor for the contradictory nature of life as she knows it and it frequently drives her crazy.

Filled with angst, she leaves home to find herself, first by journeying around the world, living off random jobs in several countries. But when that doesn’t work, she travels inward instead. Psychotherapy to begin with, which helps her come to terms with a few things about her life, but doesn’t present her with the answers she’s looking for. But then, an encounter with a man called Mario and a mind-altering drug gives her a glimpse into aspects of herself she’d never noticed before, and so she signs up for a session with Dr Samuel Widmer, a psychiatrist in Switzerland, who had been given permission to conduct tests using mind-altering drugs.

The sessions do for Ranganathan what years of soul-searching hadn’t managed to unearth. One after the other, she understands things about herself and other people that had previously eluded her. She comes to terms with the years of suppressed anger within her; she becomes aware of the essentially indifferent nature of human existence. She learns to accept sadness in a world that insists on happiness. And finally, though it’s a struggle to actually practise it, she learns that letting go of stuff rather than break her head over it, is the way to achieve peace of mind.

In that way, then, Bombay to Eternity has a happy ending. Ranganathan has found what she was looking for. Phew! But as I said before: It’s impossible to judge someone else’s life, which makes it impossible to judge this book. Read it only if you’re on a similar quest.