Sad prof gets happy
An economist takes stock of his life after major blows to his ego and health.
The Nobel Prize in Economics 2016 belongs to Professor Chandra. The Cambridge professor, “like Mrs Clinton in November”, is the favourite who can’t lose, according to the media.
The inevitable happens and 69-year-old Chandra is tipped into a personal crisis. Musing on whether he has squandered his life to end up living alone like “an Indian Miss Havisham with a takeaway menu”, he is knocked over by a cyclist, has a silent heart attack and ends up in hospital. There, an expat Californian doctor tells him to relax and follow his bliss.
Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss starts off as a campus novel but morphs into an oftencomic exploration of unrealistic parental expectations, status anxiety, work obsession and the growing menu of self-help courses offered to ameliorate the damage.
His wife, Jean, left workaholic Chandra for Steve, a hippie psychiatrist in Boulder, taking their troubled youngest daughter. Now in search of his bliss, Chandra flies to Boulder and punches Steve on the nose. Steve manoeuvres him into doing a personal development course, “Being Yourself in the Summer Solstice”, at the spiritual retreat centre Esalen in Big Sur, California. The rationalist Chandra, who believes meditation is best suited to “those with less mind to be mindful of, sociologists, for example, or geographers”, benefits hugely, mainly by gaining insight into his problematic family relationships.
The Esalen retreat is portrayed positively (I kept seeing Don Draper in a yoga pose at the end of Mad Men), as is the Zen mon-
The visits to Boulder, Big Sur and Hong Kong are fascinating.
astery in the beautiful mountains around Boulder later in the book. Thankfully
(for readers like me, who enjoy a touch of cynicism), the Institute of Mindful Business run by Chandra’s son, Sunny, in Hong Kong comes in for a gratifying amount of lampooning. Sunny makes millions by saying such things as “when we own our desires, we can be the change
we want to be” (misquoting Mahatma Gandhi for his own mystical, capitalist ends). Sunny, who had been evangelised by the real self-help book The Secret, is a lonely figure, trying desperately to impress his father.
The diversions into New Age spirituality and visits to Boulder, Big Sur and Hong Kong are fascinating, but the book’s main concern is love versus work.
Balasubramanyam has astute and thought-provoking things to say about how parents can unintentionally hurt their children by pushing them towards the parents’ idea of achievement. There are some good jokes, too, especially about economists.
PROFESSOR CHANDRA FOLLOWS HIS BLISS, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam (Penguin Random House, $35)