Author: Karan Bajaj
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!
Errata:
"utersus" should be "uterus" (p17)
"out of batter power" should be "out of battery power" (p58)
"every hue of color" is wrong. Hue relates to variation of a color, not to all colors. It should be something like "all hues and colors" (p82)
"...perineum - the region between the navel and the anus..." No! The perineum is the region between the scrotum (or the fourchette of the vulva) and the anus! (p92)
Let me note to begin with that I am certainly not into New Age (so-called) or mysticism. Nor do I have any faith whatsoever in organized religion. Everyone's religion, or lack thereof is their own choice. The minute you start allowing someone to tell you what to believe, you're already and hopelessly lost. For me, I don't buy any of it and I don't buy reincarnation, which makes just as little sense as does a single life followed by judgement and an eternal jail sentence based on a tiny three-score years and ten "test". That said, I love an engaging story about good v evil, or about mysticism. This novel is in the latter category, and I confess I had a few issues with it, but overall, I liked it. There were some parts where I doubted I would, and the last forty pages were turning me off, but the very last few pages brought me back.
This book seemed to my weird and warped imagination to be a companion read to the Superyogis book I reviewed recently. Although the two are by different authors and not at all connected as stories, they do have a common thread in eastern mysticism, specifically yogis and gurus, and what can be called super-powers, so I thought I'd give it a look. I'm glad I did because I liked this better than the other. It's divided into three sections: The Traveler, The Yogi, and The Sage. I assumed that sage referred to a wise person and not to the herb!
It begins with Max and his sister Sophie, exiting the hospital where their 49-year-old mother lies dying of cancer. When she dies Max, frustrated and disillusioned with his job, suddenly quits and travels to India, looking for a yogi to give him spiritual enlightenment. There's really no good reason given for this, and the first real enlightenment he gets is how blisteringly cold it is in the Himalayas in winter! Why didn't he stay with his sister, whose very name means wisdom? I don't know! I thought she would play some part in this later, but she really didn't.
Max also seems to have all the luck in the world in getting where he wants to go through the snow-covered and frozen mountains, but once he starts up the mountain, heading for his final destination, he becomes lost in the ice, snow, and bitter cold, on a mountainside hundreds of feet above the river Ganges, and night is falling. When he thinks he is about to die, he starts thinking of someone called Keisha. I had no idea who this was - the name was never been mentioned until then, and we have to wait for a flashback many pages further on to learn about her. Even then it really wasn't that important - except to Max, evidently.
There was some odd writing in this novel. For example, on page 73, I read this:
"They were good for my purpose," he saidThe first person speaking was Anand, the second, Max. That's not at all clear from the way this is written. Other than one or two instances like that, the writing in general was very good, the descriptions very evocative. This is one of the reasons I liked this novel.
"To express love for the divine?" he said
Max seems to be rather ill-informed about the planet's capacity to support a large population. He rages at one point: "The planet can't support so many people. There has to be an end to this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth." This is the guy who just a short time before didn't believe in reincarnation (for which there is zero evidence beyond anecdote and wild new age claims), but the fact is that the planet could quite easily support this population if we were actually smart about using our resources. If everyone became vegetarian for example, it would free up all of the grain we now feed to livestock, and this would feed all the starving people. Giving up even a fraction of your meat diet would work, too.
Plus we do not make anywhere near good enough use of marginal land, especially given the technology that we have. On top of that, farmers pretty much everywhere rely purely on rainfall instead of making irrigation work using other means. The planet's surface is some seventy percent water. Yes, it's salty, but this can be fixed using filtration plants. Yes, they demand energy, but this can be supplied using solar panels - which are especially apropos given that most of the water shortage is in the areas of the planet which get the most sunlight.
I think that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this Eastern religion approach to life - it relies too much on ancient ignorance and gullible and/or delusional thinking, like all religions do. You cannot rely on things which go through your head when you're hyperventilating and/or starving yourself and baking in the heat of some Ashram somewhere as Max was when he made this ignorant assertion. This doesn't mean of course, that it's wise to go on populating the planet at the rate we have been doing over the last two or three hundred years. Moderation isn't a bad thing!
But at the Ashram and later back in the mountains, Max really departs from reality and the story takes on increasingly absurdist tones. Fortunately by then it was very close to the end so I didn't anticipate quitting reading before the end. One of the absurdist claims sounds disturbingly realistic: Max claims that your navel has 72,000 nerve endings but to my knowledge this is nonsensical.
The T10 dermatome is there, but that's one nerve! Other than that, your navel has no more nerve endings than the rest of your abdominal skin. At one point your belly "button" was an open tube connecting you to your mom's placenta, but other than that, it's nothing special. That doesn't mean some people don't have ticklish or sensitive navels, however.
Once Max reaches his guru, we get into the meditation and breathing practices, and some of these struck me as ill-informed at best. At one point we're told that oxygen is energy, oxygen is life, and oxygen would revitalize the cells, but the fact is that oxygen is one of the most corrosive and dangerous gases on the planet, notwithstanding our acute reliance on it.
Radicals (commonly but redundantly referred to as free radicals) are very dangerous to the body, and most of them are derived from oxygen! Too much oxygen is just as bad for you as too little. In some circumstances, radicals are helpful; one of these is in fighting invasive germs, but the reason they are so useful for this is because they are highly destructive. Radicals possess an unpaired electron which is the source of their deadly behavior, including damage to cell membranes (hence death to germs). This is why antioxidants are good for you and your body loves to manufacture them if it can.
Some of the descriptions used in the mountains lacked a little something - such as describing ice sheets as glaciers, for example - but other than that, I enjoyed the mountain and the subsequent trek to the opposite end of the temperature scale when Max heads to an Ashram in a desert region, This is where he finds his path, even though he doubts it every day, It's also where the story lost me a little bit, towards the end, when he begins developing super powers, That was a but too much, but I survived it and enjoyed the end whee he really does learn some truth, and if you've read this review closely, you might guess what it is. In short, I recommend this novel as a worthy read even though in some regards it was unsatisfying to me. Your karma may differ!
