Zen and the Art of Curmudgeonly Redemption

~ Professor Chandra Follows his Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam ~

Professor Chopra is the quintessential cantankerous, opinionated, elderly Indian man. He is also a very distinguished Cambridge academician in the field of economics. How distinguished exactly? The novel opens on the day the Nobel Prize in Economics is to be announced, and he is sure this is his year. He lies in bed imagining his celebration, his magnanimous comments to the press. He falls asleep an hour before his daughter wakes him up to say he didn’t get it.

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he said, pulling the covers over his body and realising that, were it not for his daughter, he would probably remain in that position until next year.

For the following month people he barely knew stopped him in the street to offer their sympathies, men and women who couldn’t have named three economists had their lives depended on it.

Professor Chopra works his way through most of the stages of grief, and by page 4, he is wishing he had ‘just one Swedish student he could torment mercilessly’. He thinks his anger is internal, but students have started complaining about his temper, and the Master of his college suggests that he take a vacation.

He is a lonely man. His marriage ended in divorce a few years ago, his ex-wife Jean and their teenage daughter Jasmine live in America, his oldest daughter Radha no longer speaks to him, and his son is minting money running an Institute of Mindful Business in Hong Kong (“a hugely successful enterprise that emphasised ‘positive thinking’ and ‘financial karma’, the result of an ideology best described as ‘capitalist mysticism'”). Despite his tetchiness, he has an abiding affection for his children, and is deeply hurt by the estrangement from his oldest daughter. He is beginning to wonder if he made the right choices in his life.

Now he was a year away from being seventy and had set not only the department but the world on fire, and yet he could not shake the feeling that he had squandered his years, drained them of all that was worthwhile

‘In the forty-five years since he had left India, he had failed to develop any capacity to withstand winter’, so a sabbatical in Orange County, California results. An additional attraction is that it is on the same continent as Jasmine, who is going through a troubled teenage phase, and whose SAT scores are grim.

Prompted by his ex-wife’s new husband Steve, the Professor spends a few days at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, (‘pioneering deep change in self and society‘) — meditating, unwillingly exploring facets of himself, making internal sarcastic comments about the other residents, but in the end, changing, in what may seem to be a rather pat result.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s writing is effortless and fluid with never a false grammatical step. The Professor is entertainingly tetchy and ironic, and the jabs at economists are lightweight enough to be accessible to a layperson.

Slightly reminiscent of A Man Called Ove, this is a novel about finding oneself, not in adolescence or early adulthood, but late in life. Backmans’s Ove, though, was not an academic, and his thoughts were distinctly less sarcastically professorial, and more practical. There are some artificial situations in this novel, and it lacks the humanity of Ove, but the humour makes up for it.

Some of the later sections of the book are more heartfelt and therefore less entertaining, especially for those without an interest in spiritual growth, but overall this is a sweetly amusing book with a distinctive protagonist.

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam. Vintage, 2019