A comment I made at Chandrahas' excellent literary blog 'The Middle Stage'

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Chandrahas,

I had read some of the reviews and essays you have mentioned in this post right about when they came out, notably the ones on R.K. Narayan in NYRB and the Indian era of Soviet books. And Shama above has already aired the beef I have with Mishra's writing, both in style and content.

It seems to me that a sense of "Looke here, I have such a delicate James-ian sensibility even though I have had a screwed up mofussil youth in India", seems to infect both of his books, as well as a number of his reviews. I also think he sets up false dichotomies such as those between the provincials and the cosmopolitans, and flogs these for what they are worth. I admit I enjoyed reading his novel 'The Romantics', but found it tiresome when most of the subject matter of this novel was regurgitated in his latter book on, which is really not a book on, Buddha. Who gives a s**t if Mr. Mishra spent years in Mashobra brooding about Buddha, and fashioning himself into a public intellectual who will live a life of the mind? I certainly don’t.

Finally, his review of Virkam Seth's "Two Lives" in the NYT Book Review made me stab the newspaper with my letter opener. If Mishra wanted to write an essay on Hitler and British India he should have done so separately instead of flogging these 'ideas' out of place in a review on a memoir of, well, two lives. And in the process of deploying all this hot air, he forgets to tell the reader if he actually liked reading the book or not, and his qualified recommendations to the potential readers - cardinal sins by a reviewer IMHO.

Occasionally few lines of a book can turn one back from leaping into a self annihilating abyss, i.e., words can be a sheild. Most recently (wasn't it last night?), he was saved from the suicidal fever bird singing harshly in his brain on reading Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno, which describes how in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, all suicides are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees that are only able to speak when a branch is broken, and how they are torn at by the Harpies. Also since they are unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs.

Since this terrible fate had been revealed to him, he made a choice to climb back to, and then make an attempt to enter the castle in the First Circle (Limbo) of Hell, the residence of the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans known for their wisdom and reason, including the poets Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, as described in Canto IV.

In the last two days, I have been writing a few poems as a response to some evocative photos taken by my friend Joao on his ranch in the Brazilian country side - all of trees against the horizon as night falls.

And in this process the central question that I am grappling with is that even when paradise is so close at hand, why do the feelings of pain (both mental and physical), agnst, and loneliness persist in our lives? We possess/ or given few things (perhaps many things), and yet why are we are still unhappy?

Dante's "Inferno", in English translation, which I am reading to sleep, for the past few night, perhaps, will provide another direction to reframe such questions, as I descend with Virgil, Dante's guide, into the seven circles of Hell. But for now it is time to hit the road for the daily run - shedding salt in one fashion or the other is good, if not as tears as sweat.