“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,” French writer Marcel Proust wrote. It’s an incremental change in perspective enveloping author Amish Tripathi, who left Mumbai for London, where he took charge as director of the Nehru Centre in January, this year. Amish confesses that the posting allowed him an escape from the personal losses that have eclipsed his last two years. In the foreword to Legend of Suheldev: The King Who Saved India, he writes that the period has been paradoxical, productive yet profoundly bleak. He has had to cope with the sudden loss of loved ones, divorce, separation, relocation and transition into a new professional role.
In the four months of the lockdown, he has been unable to connect with family – he feels the separation from his anchor, his young son Neel; his older brother is afflicted with Covid-19, his mother is ailing and his former mother-in-law has suffered a heart attack.
“What really causes the inability to handle is not one thing, but a series of things happening one after the other. Especially if you are deeply family-oriented. You can take it if it happens to you, but you can’t take it if it happens to people you love,” says Amish.
Amish has to cope with the sudden loss of loved ones, divorce, separation, relocation and transition into a new professional role
(
Prabhat Shetty
)
Standing at this crux of compounded change, Amish is evolving a personal philosophy of acceptance.
Take a break
“They tell me grief is good for an artist,” director Shekhar Kapur said to Amish recently.
“No artist goes looking for grief,” Amish had replied.
“No, beyond a point grief paralyses you, and it is not the grief but the paralysis that causes the suffering,” Kapur responded.
Amish has found that small ways of coping are the stimulus to his forward movement, the only certitudes in this time of personal and global impermanence.
“Sometimes it’s good to escape your pain. I don’t know if it’s a male thing, but taking a break helps.”
He isn’t one for talk therapies. He prefers the escape route. “Sometimes it’s good to escape your pain. I don’t know if it’s a male thing, but taking a break, it helps” he says. Sometimes the grief is all consuming. He cites a line from his book, Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta: “They say time heals all wounds. They lie because sometimes the grief one is cursed with is so strong that even time surrenders to it.”
Amish is in the phase of “drown yourself in work, push the grief into some deep dark dungeon of your heart, don’t look at it again, when you’re 75-80, have a nice fatal heart attack and it’s all over.”
Sometimes, he says, it’s just wise to take a break and hold on to small points of permanence to anchor him. “Happiness is overrated, what gets you through life is purpose,” he says.
The core of it currently is his central sense of home, motherland and duty. “I’m an India boy. There’s no way I’ll die in a foreign land,” he says. The work at the Nehru Centre, his plans for a museum, his reclaiming of a space for Indian culture from the artist’s point of view above the diplomat’s, his writings to reclaim his sense of history, are the sources of his purpose.
The author has found that small ways of coping are the stimulus to his forward movement
(
Prabhat Shetty
)
Black & white = grey
Expansive Indian philosophy anchors him in this ideal, karma, dharma, you reap what you sow. “Good karma is critical,” he says. The purpose of ‘right action’ is what he throws himself into.
He’s also moving away from the idea of one’s self as bliss. The lens in Hinduism is Sat Chit Ananda: you are fundamentally bliss. You are not able to experience it because you have too much garbage. The spiritual journey strips that garbage away, he explains.
“Social media is nice, but friends and family are essentially those who will die for you…”
In Buddhism and Jainism, the lens is different. You are dukkha, suffering. “The first of Gautam Buddha’s 4 Noble Truths is grief.” When you realise everyone is suffering, you stop asking, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ and you begin to accept, Amish says. This sets the path to move ahead.
“I know this sounds pessimistic but this approach gets to me a lot more,” he says.
In the past two years, Amish has been renouncing all things familiar while being anchored even more than usual in family, work and community.
He courses a journey as both a householder and a bairagi, the renunciant, from seeking joy to seeking purpose. Life is not just the black and white of pain and joy, it is a blurred balance. “You realise life is a lot more complicated,” Amish says.
Opening up
He is rethinking his personal philosophies. Amish used to be rigid about rights and wrongs. He once had a lot of ‘shoulds’ in his life – should be married, settled. Now, he’s flowing with life as it comes.
Long video calls with his son, Neel, are his mainstay. He spends hours on video calls with his siblings and sisters-in-law on Sunday mornings. “I read somewhere that it’s not what’s said and done but how you feel that you remember,” he says.
He’s returning to things that carry memories from a simpler time. He had stopped singing for 25 years. He was the lead singer of two bands in his IIM Calcutta days. He’s just posted a bare-voice rendition of More Than Words by Extreme to Instagram via an app called BandLab, which he uses to jam with his former band mates. He used to sketch and is returning to practise his caricatures.
“One isn’t a bairagi in the sense that you give up everything, but that you take a fresh approach to it,” he says. The strength of his family bonds, including the one he retains with ex-wife, publisher Preeti Vyas, is everything to him.
Amish used to be rigid about rights and wrongs, but now he is rethinking his personal philosophies
(
Prabhat Shetty
)
“Social media is nice, but friends and family are essentially those who will die for you and who you would die for, and that’s never more than five to 10 people. It takes a lot of strength to be a monk, to live life by yourself. I don’t have that.”
Amish goes jogging in Hyde Park. He takes long walks to admire the architecture of central London. On weekends, he escapes. Before the lockdown began he went to Edinburgh, where he wandered The Royal Mile for three hours, long enough to come up with inspiration for yet another story. He’s reading The Insider by P V Narasimha Rao and When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy, admiring the scholarship of one and the gallows humour of the other.
“Being happy all the time is not practical. In War of Lanka (his forthcoming book), Ravan says people who are happy all the time are no different from those who are drugged. Goddess Sita tells him, ‘you are speaking nonsense’,” Amish chuckles. “Moments of happiness make the day,” he says.
He once wandered out without an umbrella and had to shelter from sudden rain in a closed café on Mayfair lane, when he saw a rainbow emerging to fullness. It made him smile.
The writer is an author and a counsellor
Also see: HT Brunch Cover Story: The Kevin Kwan interview
From HT Brunch, July 26, 2020
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