Skip to main content

Let yourself bloom

 


Book Review

Title: You are Blooming

Author: Swarnali Nath

Amazon E-book, 2020

 “Let noble thoughts come to us from every side,” Rig Veda exhorts. We live in rather ignoble times. A global pandemic has revealed more potently than anything else our vulnerability even before a microscopic virus. In spite of that, we don’t seem to learn the essential lessons. We keep fighting in the names of gods and religions. We keep chopping people’s heads to prove the might of our gods. Nations threaten one another for a few acres of land in the border areas. Men rape and kill little girls for reasons that only they and their gods know. No, we won’t ever learn lessons.

That is why certain lessons become more and more relevant in spite of the fact that they are not new. Certain stories of love and compassion, grace and beauty, sunshine and bliss need be told again and again. We need be reminded again and again of our capacity for regeneration, the urgent need for that regeneration. This is what Swarnali Nath’s e-book, You are Blooming, does. It is yet another much-needed reminder that we can redeem ourselves at any time, however tough the going is getting.

The book is divided into three parts of equal lengths: Hope, Beauty, and Grace – each part has 7 chapters. Rather, 7 letters addressed to the seeker of happiness. The author speaks in the voice of a spiritual guru speaking to her disciple. The style is conversational though monologic and it is meant to touch the heart rather than the intellect. Certain transformations need to take place in the heart and not in the intellect. Swarnali is speaking about such transformations.

Here is a voice that seeks to bring more light into an increasingly darkening world, more love into a world being smothered by bitterness, more hope against the mounting despair. Here is a book that seeks to release the bird with broken wings back into the sky to which it belongs. This is a book that adds grace and charm to life, bringing noble thoughts from every side.

The book is available here.

PS. This blog is participating in the #MyFriendAlexa campaign of the Blogchatter.

Comments

  1. What a lovely review. I've read some of Swarnali's articles and I'm sure the book will be awesome. But your insights are equally great.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very befitting and precise review! Completely agree that the book is a beautiful 'much-needed reminder that we can redeem ourselves at any time, however tough the going is getting.'

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice review! Must read this book soon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a beautiful review of a beautiful book.

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a beautiful review Sir. Very rightly said certain things really need to be repeated again and again to ourselves if not to others and this book of Swarnali's is certainly a reminder of how we can awaken that goodness within us.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you so much for the beautiful review Sir. I am overwhelmed and honoured. I am grateful for the abundance of love you have showered on my book. This means world to me. Thank you Sir. Gratitude 😊🙏🏻

    ReplyDelete
  7. I have started reading it and I agree it's a voice of positivity in these turbulent times

    Ruchi Nasa https://thevagabond.me

    ReplyDelete
  8. There is a certain softness in Swarnali's writing and it comes across in the book. Yet to read it on Amazon. I just say that from my memory of it on Blogchatter. Wonderful review sir.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What a crisp & beautiful review sir. certainly during trying times, certain noble thoughts need to be repeated.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...