WORLDLY WISE

Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen, Liveright Publishing, $40. Have you been asked, “Where are you from?” I have been, and have offered Toronto, Bombay and Bangalore at various times with a short footnote explanation. Amartya Sen acknowledges having called Dhaka (in Bangladesh) and Kolkata (in India) and Trinity College (in Cambridge) as homes. Indeed, these “homes” are our collective reality today.

The book’s title is a nod to Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 novel Ghôre Baire, Home and the World. Sen’s connection to Tagore is personal. His maternal grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, a well-known scholar in Sanskrit, taught in Santiniketan. When I was born, Rabindranath persuaded my mother that it was boring to stick to well-used names and he proposed a new name for me. Amartya, by inference, means immortal in Sanskrit.

How many in the world can lay claim to being named by Tagore!

He imbibed much from his grandfather through osmosis. This led to a great interest in learning Sanskrit very early in childhood, and later in his life he was commissioned by Penguin to be the English translator of Kshiti Mohan Sen’s Hinduism. Mathematics was his other love, and he has a thing or two say about the currently popular Vedic Mathematics, “a largely fictitious field”.

Sen interweaves scenes from his remarkable life with philosophical reflections on economics, politics and social justice. His first-person accounts of the Bengal famine of 1943 and India’s struggle for independence are moving. He contrasts the idealism that informed the India of Gandhi and Nehru with the passionate “nationalism” that drives the political narrative today.

Cities come alive through his vivid experiences. The Mandalay of Orwell and Kipling that he spent childhood years in is interspersed with Burma of today, “a country of great interest to me”. This admiration was further enhanced by my coming to know Aung San Suu Kyi, a remarkable woman who led the country with much courage and vision to resist the rule of the military...

Home in the World offers penetrating ideas of people and places. A peek into the mind of a Nobel laureate, a citizen of the world, at home in so many places.

CRONE-OLOGY

If I Knew Then by Jann Arden, Vintage Canada, $19.95. A crone, as we all know, is someone to be avoided. “Very disagreeable, somewhat sinister and malicious,” as Jann Arden writes.

“That all sounds completely delicious to me. She sounds like somebody I’d like to invite over for a few pots of Earl Gray tea and a platter of carbohydrates.”

And with that Arden sets the stage for owning our years, for celebrating the wisdom that comes most often with wrinkles, because, as she sagely points out, “it takes a long time to become a person”. And that it’s possible to bloom extremely late in life.

On her way to becoming a whole person, Arden had her share of confusion and failure, bad days and bad relationships, battles with addiction, all of which she shares openly and with the generosity that characterized the luminous Feeding My Mother.

Grateful that her misadventures from the seventies and eighties “aren’t trapped for an eternity on the World Wide Web”, she has advice on getting one’s life in order. Wise, useful, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

Don’t get distracted from living your own life. Make a will. And pick your final photograph.

I am for sure not going to let anybody else pick the photo that goes with my obituary.

It’s a tad New-Age-y, in that it has sentences like Good things come out of bad things scrawled across two pages, sprinkled through the slim book. Making me think of how many trees might have been saved had those pages not been there, but the thought is what counts, isn’t it?

Time has given me the clarity that only comes when the days and the months and the years pile up on each other so you can stand on top of it all and have an unobstructed view... you are not what you did, you are what you will do.

Like I Feel Great About My Hands in which Shari Graydon gathered the views of notable Canadian women on ageing, the book is lively and uplifting.   

A JOLLY GOOD TALE

A Holly Jolly Diwali by Sonya Lalli, Berkley, $23. Nikki Randhawa is the “good Indian daughter”. Practical, people-pleasing.

But someone who realizes that she didn’t like who she was when she was with her boyfriend – “a woman who made herself quieter and smaller, even submissive. A woman who was made to feel bad for needing him to be a better boyfriend, for expecting respect”.

So when the suitable “good Indian boy” from a family her parents approve of dumps her, and when some years later, she finds herself suddenly unemployed at 29, she begins to question the choices she has made in her life. And for the first time ever, she acts on impulse and books a last-minute flight to her friend Diya’s wedding in Mumbai.

Where she meets the handsome and charismatic musician Sameer Mukherjee, or Sam. And sparks fly. It’s Diwali, after all! But things don’t quite pan out and they part ways.

While Nikki’s being clueless about Diwali – having grown up in Seattle – is possible – her mother’s being equally so is a little strange.

Sam describes it as “a Hindu Halloween”, quoting Steve Carell in The Office. But full marks to Sonya Lalli for using that to educate her non-desi readers about the traditions associated with the festival.

She falters a little while describing Mumbai, positioning Bandra as “neighbouring both the ocean and glamorous South Bombay” (which it doesn’t) and describing food at “Marathi” restaurants (Maharashtrian being the cuisine and culture, and Marathi, the language). But there are very real moments when Nikki enjoys the food or when she feels unsafe walking down a street alone, followed by a bunch of leering men.

Followed by an unreal but hilarious run-in with none other than Shah Rukh Khan in Goa!

There’s poignancy in the conversations between Nikki and her parents. In her mother admitting that she shouldn’t have encouraged Nikki to compare herself with her sister Jasmine. “You are both your own women, and you must both lead your own lives.”

Or when they say that they were so busy creating a life in America, trying so hard to be American, that they didn’t connect their daughters to their roots. Many an immigrant parent will recognize himself or herself in these exchanges.

Oh, but what of Nikki and Sam? Here’s where the Holly part of the title comes into play. Sam shows up on Christmas – will things work out now?

ON TARGET

The Archer by Paulo Coelho, Random House, $30. It never ceases to surprise that many of those who list The Alchemist as one of the books that transformed their lives – or at the very least, their thinking – aren’t as aware of Paulo Coelho’s other works.

The Archer is another inspiring story about a young man seeking wisdom from an elder. Tetsuya illustrates the tenets of a meaningful life, showing how action and the soul are inextricably connected.

Starting with, “We should never judge people without first learning to hear and to respect them”.

And, “The arrow is the intention. It is what unites the strength of the bow with the centre of the target. The intention must be crystal clear, straight and balanced”.

BRILLIANT!

How To Be A Genius by John Woodward, illustrated by Serge Seidlitz and Andy Smith, Penguin Random House, $25.99. Want to paint like a prodigy, experiment like a scientist, or invent the next new technology? How To Be A Genius shows young ones how! It is packed with puzzles and activities to boost their brain power, but also comes with the advice to always check with an adult before doing any of them “so that they know what you are doing and are sure that you are safe”. A book that kids and parents will love!

IT’S YOUR CALL

First Phone by Catherine Pearlman, Tarcher Perigee, $20. With access to their own “devices” at a younger and younger age, kids are extremely tech-savvy these days.

Chances are high that someone on your list will receive their first phone for Christmas or a birthday that’s coming up. This is must-read provides the information kids need – on everything from clickbait to phishing – and the peace of mind parents crave.

TEEN REVIEW

By JASJEET SIDHU

The Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee, Rick Riordan Presents, $34    The Dragon Pearl mixes Korean mythology and science fiction.

The main character Kim and her family are fox spirits forced to keep their power a secret. Kim overhears her mother saying that her brother Jun deserted the space forces. He leaves a note for Kim, which has things she knows her brother would not say or do. She knows her brother is trying to send her a message through the note. After Kim accidentally reveals that they are foxes to an investigator, she overhears her mom and aunts talking about sending her away, so she runs away to find Jun herself.

She first stumbles into Nari  who claims she is also a fox spirit and Kim’s mother’s cousin. Kim soon learns Nari wasn’t associated with the rest of her family because she uses her fox magic to trick customers and hide from the police. Kim escapes from Nari and ends up on the ship Jun worked on. There, Kim meets a ghost named Bea Jang who makes a deal with her: he will find out what happened to her brother, and she will find out who killed Bea Jang.

The narrative is engaging. I enjoyed reading about Korean mythology and culture, and the way the family of fox spirits is incorporated into the modern world was intriguing. I couldn’t connect with the characters though – there was little development.  

• Jasjeet Sidhu is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.