Sophistication of Simplicity

 

Book Review

Title: Random Thoughts on Random Words

Author: Rajeev Moothedath

Format: PDF E-book

There are some books which make you want to meet the author as you read it. Rajeev Moothedath’s new book, Random Thoughts on Random Words, is one such book. Reading it is like sitting in a relaxed seminar room listening to a motivational speaker whose personality is as charming as the wisdom that descends like the purple glow and the linnet’s wings of Yeats’s Innisfree. Let’s not forget that the author is a motivational speaker and a corporate trainer. He has been successful in translating the mood of his training sessions into this book.

There is nothing as charming as sophisticated simplicity. Imagine someone explaining the theory of relativity or the Euler’s identity in a language that a school child can grasp. Spice it up with a pinch of humour and a couple of anecdotes. Now add the grace of a self-effacing personality. That is what Rajeev’s writing is like.

This book takes up themes as varied as boldness and humour, motherhood and quarantine, fast food and zen, and keeps us engaged with conversational discourses. In the very first chapter, ‘Ability’, the author quotes a writer to exhort us to keep aside an exotic word like ‘passion’ and think of your ‘interests’ and ‘curiosities’. This eschewing of words burdened with layers of connotations added by over-usage and instead resorting to simple, ordinary, everyday words that strike a chord with our hearts is the primary key of Rajeev’s success as a writer.

Even his anecdotes come from quite ordinary people. Look at Venkatesh of VISL, Bhadravati, for example. Venkatesh was the message-carrier on the industry’s enormous campus in the olden days of cycles or plain walking. His job was to carry messages from one plant to another and the plants were quite far away from one another. As soon as Venkatesh returned from one plant, he might be given another envelope to be delivered “urgently” at the same plant from which he had just returned. He never complained. He would take the envelope and mount his bicycle stoically. “Venkatesh’s attitude and devotion to work is missing in many who are in so-called ‘Leadership positions’,” says Rajeev. There can be greatness in simplicity. There is no greatness, in fact, without a touch of simplicity. Rajeev quotes Tolstoy in support of that view.

Happiness is also a simple affair if only we discover that simplicity. Happiness can be as simple as a couple of drinks and a dance with friends in the weekend. But then there may come creeping in some altruists to show you how wretched your life is with all its sweat and stench of the workplace. It is as easy to lose happiness as to find it.

The book stays clear of politics generally. However, occasionally one gets a glimpse of the author’s displeasure with certain happenings in our own country. Are we Indians losing our sense of humour? Rajeev wonders while discussing the role of jokes, fun and laughter in life.

The chapter on pets brings out the tenderness of the author’s heart more eloquently than any other. His kittens become our own as we read his experiences with them. And his tenderness offers to accompany us if we let it.

The strength of the book lies precisely in that tenderness and the simplicity that goes with it.

PS. Rajeev’s book can be downloaded free now here.

This book is part of The Blogchatter’s E-book carnival and my contribution to it, LIFE: 24 Essays, can be downloaded here. And here is Arti Jain’s perceptive review of LIFE.