Skip to main content

Power of Authenticity


Book Review

What makes any personal discourse enchanting is the authenticity it exudes. Darshana Suresh’s book, An Ode to the Self, is suffused with authenticity that delights and disarms the reader at once. As the title indicates, the book is a result of the author’s self-exploration.

Self-exploration is a slippery slope for any writer, particularly one who is just entering the adult world from the much cosier student’s world. Darshana who describes herself as “a lover of dreams, rains and words” is a “computer science engineer in the making” who is “pretty close to entering the corporate world.” Her book carries more wisdom than one would normally expect of a writer of her age. She has learnt a lot from life. She has been open to the inevitable experiences that life hurls fortuitously before anyone.

The first thing that strikes any observant reader is the spontaneity of her style. Words flow elegantly and naturally from her pen. No, from her heart. There is poetry bubbling beneath the surface of the text and yet there is not one irrelevant word or unnecessary embellishment. She is blessed with an inborn talent for writing. What’s more is the genuineness of her intentions. She is exploring herself in this book as a sincere learner who wishes to understand herself as well as the world around her.

Most chapters begin with some incident or episode taken from the author’s life and that captures the reader’s interest instantly. Darshana connects the episode with the theme of the chapter seamlessly and the whole thing becomes a melody in the entire orchestra that the book is.

Pearls of wisdom stand out of that orchestra every now and then. The scariest thing about love is its vulnerability, Darshana says, for example. Love drives you to expose yourself to another person, give him “all the strength to empower you, but also to destroy you.”  Hurt is an inevitable part of the whole process. “If you tell me that it is possible to build a close bond without hurting ever, I wouldn’t believe you,” she says. Life has taught her otherwise. How you deal with hurt is what matters, Darshana tells us. And she is absolutely right too.

Like any person who stands a notch above mediocrity but is not sure where exactly she stands, Darshana takes an empathetic look at the whole rat race for great conquests. She articulates some of her attempts to excel: mimicking the best or competing with them. Eventually the realisation dawns upon her that she was another individual with her own words, her own truths, her own style, “blissfully free”.

The entire book is about that blissful spirit that longs to fly high and is already halfway up there. Here is a young writer who is destined to go a long way. She is a great learner and she has the required determination. This book of hers can be an inspiration to every reader particularly the young ones who are still involved in the many rat races of life.  
 
Darshana Suresh
PS. Darshana’s book can be downloaded here: An Ode to the Self
You may also download my addition to the same series, Great Books for Great Thoughts.

Comments

  1. This makes me so happy, thankyou very much. ❤️

    ReplyDelete
  2. Beautiful review sir... I have read her posts... Yet to read the book... But I am sure it must be one delightful read

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was following her April blog posts with interest.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...