Book Review – The Book of Woman, Osho

The one thing that I find disgusting about the publishing industry is that sometimes it tends to behave like music industry. If you are a lover of instrumental music, you might have come across those innumerable CDs and collections named ‘Music of the Earth’, ‘Music of the Water‘, ‘Music for Meditation’, ‘Music for Pregnant Women’ and other such myriad titles. According to many renowned musicians, these are nothing but a sham to sell music that couldn’t otherwise be easily sold. When a CD doesn’t have much prospects of being sold easily, they are bundled as music for this and music for that. Of course, there are some commendable exceptions but a majority of such packages are said to be nothing but a marketing trick.
 

Oftentimes, reading the works of Osho, I have felt similar emotions. No doubt this controversial monk (?) has some truly rebellious ideas and worthy advice for the young minds to follow. But most of the while, I find his words to be repetitive and of single dimension. Only with his eloquence that helped him convey the same idea in a variety of ways did his followers manage to have a flurry of books and CDs published against his name. Speaking of books, there is this fact that most of his ‘books’ are nothing but transcripts of his discourses to his disciples, domestic and international. Now, when you have a question-and-answer mode of conversation between a sage (!) and his followers, it becomes easy for you to pick and choose questions and publish them in various permutations and combinations.
 

With his having given thousands of such discourses, it becomes easier for his followers to publish ‘books’ on various topics with different combinations of such questions and answers. ‘The Book of Woman’ comes across as another such publication that helps the publisher mint money using that ever-attractive name of Osho. ‘The Book of Woman’ is just not what it claims to be. It is a bunch of questions by disciples and Osho’s answers to the same, gathered under various titles like Female, Sexuality, Family, Motherhood and such. But honestly, except for a chapter or two, the book  doesn’t directly deal with the woman or her uniqueness. The book doesn’t do justice to its title. Adding to the woes will be Osho’s now boring repetitions about women’s having multiple orgasms and men’s having only one and thus men having developed a sense of ‘inferiority complex’! Really?!
 

The book is filled with the same old ideas of Osho, about having an open mind about relationships (bordering on promiscuity), about both genders being unequal but unique, not repressing one’s emotions, sex being a brief glimpse into the vast awareness, women’s libbers being incorrect and the glory of meditation. If you haven’t read any book of Osho, this book can give you an idea about his way of thinking. If you’ve already, then this is a book that you can skip with much ease, without losing anything new at all. This is just old wine in an old bottle with a new label!

Book Review - The Absent Traveller, Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala

All amidst our mundane lives, we humans find pleasure and seek succor in two ways. We either indulge in beliefs, hopes and dreams of lofty kinds, think of the afterlife and believe in a divine scheme of things that handholds us all through our lives. Or, on the other hand, we celebrate our basic carnality by diving deep into pleasures of the senses. Art, music and poetry have been three channels through which we try to bridge the gap between our carnal and ethereal selves. While the spiritual aspect of life has been left for a few of us to lead with a fair degree of success, the rest and the most of us face and celebrate our carnality on a day-to-day basis. This book is an example of such unabashed celebration and it celebrates our concupiscent nature with candor.

Lovemaking had never been a thing that people shied away from discussing in ancient India. For ancient India, sex was not just an act for procreation but was one of deep pleasure too, no matter how short-lived the pleasure may be. Our paintings portrayed it with élan, our sculptures depicted the various ways of copulation and the standards of beauty for men and women. And, who can forget that the much-talked about treatise on love, the Kamasutra, emanated from this land? Or, Kokkogam? Not to forget the greatest gallery of the art of lovemaking as hewed on stone in Khajuraho. All that was before the Victorian mores of a hypocritical nature invaded our land, but let me not digress.

Talking about poetry, this book is an example of how even banal topics like adultery can be presented with unparalleled aesthetics that even the most self-righteous mind would relish reading for the sheer poetic value, without any sense of judgement and aversion. The love and the lust, the blissful and the banal, the surreal and the venereal have all been arrayed here in this collection of poems and poetic excerpts from Prakrit literature. Extracted from the works of various poets - both men and women - and peoples from across ages, they prove that love and lust have both been topics of equally pleasurable pursuit for us Indians. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, said to be a renowned poet on his own, has done a commendable job in selecting and translating the works for the benefit of poetry lovers.

This book is a glimpse into that lost age, when people were candid about their physical passions and unpretentious in embracing their animality without the modern-day hypocrisy of finding cheap titillation in 'wardrobe malfunctions', all the while pretending to have risen above the lesser physical nature. And all this, centuries before 'Lolitas' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lovers' caused furore in the 'civilized world'!

This is a very worthy read that one can enjoy for the aesthetically presented amorous themes!

Book Review - On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti

I picked up this book with a lot of hopes, since this was the treatise that was said to have influenced the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. However, the much lesser mortal that I am, I couldn't gain much out of reading this book. Though Leon is said to be a Renaissance master himself, modesty seems not to be one of his virtues. Ego oozes out of his words in many pages. He seems to have believed that he could do nothing wrong and people can all start painting in a much better way by merely following his techniques. And, those with alternative view points are simply brushed aside. Such a egoistic attitude leaves a poor taste behind!

As for the book, it comprises of three chapters, or, as he calls them, three 'books'. The first one is mostly about geometrical patterns and viewpoints. Though it begins easily, soon it devolves into genius-talks. Only the second and third 'book' speak in a normal tone and are easily comprehensible and useful. The second and third chapters indeed make for a breezy read. But, as already said, his egoistic attitude shines throughout the book. Don't read this book just because it is called a 'classic' and don't read this book, if you are hoping to learn much about painting. This is a very casual work that you can do without!