Indian thoughts through English Literature

Topic: Book Review

Name of the novel: When loss is Gain Name of the Author: Pavan k. varma

Submitted by: Kona. Vishnu Kumar Reddy BL.EN.U4ECE10090 IV ECE-A

Submitted to: Ms. Paromita Ganguly Asst. Professor Department of English

Acknowledgement
I, K.Vishnu Kumar Reddy, a student of Amrita School of Engineering Bangalore, would love to thank Amrita University for introducing such a concept of Book Review. I would also like to thank my faculty Ms. Paromita Ganguly, Department of English, for her help and co-ordination in completing this term paper.

Publication Details

In RAIN TREE by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd. , 7/16, Ansari Road, daryaganj,New Delhi 110 002 Year of publication: - January 2012 No. Of Pages: - 207 Price of the Book:-Rs. 395/-

Table of Contents
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1 2 3 4 5

Topic Name
About the Author Summary Authors View Characters Theme

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About the Author

Well-known non-fiction writer PavanVarma has produced his first work of fiction which deals with important and interesting issues such as the meaning of life and the age-old human dilemma between enjoying life to its fullest and making sacrifices for the sake of spiritual and material gain. As one may expect, Varmas prose is always elegant and beautiful, with dollops of fine verse in between, in the form of quotes from a range of poets. Writer-diplomat Pavan K. Varma, born in November 1953, is a graduate of St. Stephens College, New Delhi where he studied History (Honours) and received the first position. Subsequently, he acquired a degree in Law. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1976. His career as a diplomat has seen him serve in several countries, including New York and Moscow. In New York, he was with Indias Permanent Mission to the United Nations. He also served as Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Group of 77. In Moscow, he was the Director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cultural Centre in the Indian Embassy. His assignments in India include that of Press Secretary to the President of India, Spokesman in the Ministry of External Affairs, and Joint Secretary for Africa. He has also been High Commissioner of India to Cyprus as well as Director of the Nehru Centre in London.

Career
In addition to his diplomatic career, Pavan K. Varma has established a name for himself as a writer of depth and insight. His first book was the highly successful and critically applauded biography of the Urdu poet MirzaGhalib, Ghalib: The Man, The Times (Viking/Penguin 1989). This book has been translated into several Indian languages. His other books include the muchdiscussed Havelis of Old Delhi (Span Tech, London, 1992 &Bookwise, India, 1999), Krishna: The Playful Divine (Viking/Penguin 1993) a book on Indias most popular deity and an epic poem on two of the central characters of the Mahabharata, Yudhishtar and Draupadi (Viking/Penguin 1996). Pavan K. Varmas first book on a contemporary subject was the path-breaking The Great Indian Middle Class (Viking/Penguin 1998). Translated into several Indian languages, the book was an instant bestseller, and remains the focus of discussion and debate even today. As a sequel to this,
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he, in association with journalist RenukaKhandekar, wrote Maximize Your Life: An Action Plan for the Indian Middle Class (Viking 2000). This book was followed by the astoundingly successful Being Indian: The Truth about Why the 21st Century Will Be Indias (Viking/Penguin 2004), described by The Economist as one of the most subtle recent attempts to analyze the continent-sized mosaic of India and simplify it for the general reader. It was soon published by William Heinemann, in the United Kingdom, as Being Indian: Inside the Real India in March 2005. The Japanese, Spanish and French translations of this book were very well-received, and a Portuguese version is on the way. Being Indian has also had extremely successful runs in its Hindi and Urdu editions; the book is currently being translated into Bengali. Pavan K. Varma also has two published translations to his credit. Selected Poems: KaifiAzmi (Viking/Penguin 2001) is the English translation of the poems of KaifiAzmi who is perhaps Indias most well known living poet in the Urdu language. In December 2001, he published a translation in English (21 Poems, Viking/Penguin 2001) of the Hindi poems of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Prime Minister of India. Pavan K. Varma is a popular Columnist, both in English and Hindi. A compilation of his columns, People like Us, first published in the Hindustan Times, came out in book form with the same name (Har-Anand 2001). The Millennium Book on New Delhi, which he helped edit was published by the Oxford University Press in 2001. 2004 also saw the release of Love and Lust: An Anthology of Erotic Literature from Ancient and Medieval India (HarperCollins; co-edited with SandhyaMulchandani). Pavan K. Varma has also been the Chairperson of the Organizing Committee of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize held in New Delhi for the first time in April 2000. Pavan K. Varma is currently the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, New Delhi

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Summary
The story itself is rather simple and relies on themes such as marital infidelity and desertion, which are as old as mankind. Anand is a lawyer working in a law firm run by Adi, his friend from college. Adi has everything, the right background, charm and money and a young son, though Adi is divorced. Anand plays second fiddle to Adi and gets paid for it. Very shortly after the reader gets used to the relationship between Adi, Anand and Tanu, Varma rocks the boat. Anand and his wife Tanu are unhappy since they havent been able to have a child. Adi turns nasty, doesnt give Anand his due, Tanu turns unsupportive and Anand rightly suspects Tanu of having an affair with Adi. When one thought things couldnt get worse, Anand is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. Tanu confesses to a dying Anand of her affair and tells him that she plans to marry Adi. It helps that Adi has a son from his first marriage. With success comes the expected descent into drink, alienation from his wife Tanu and the revelation that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with only a few months to live. Now comes the tearjerker. Tanu, whom he has neglected, leaves him for Advaita whose success has been through riding on the coat tails of his immensely successful father. But the diagnosis turns out to be wrong; Anand does not have cancer after all. This, as it would most of us, makes him the well on the meaning of life and the hankering for material things. After a chance meeting with the Bhutanese ambassador in Delhi, he sets off for a remote mountain retreat in Bhutan where his host Chimi nurses him back to some form of mental equilibrium. While there, he meets the mysterious Tara, who is also trying to find herself in these mystic mountains. Their bitter-sweet romance follows, and Varma comes into his own in the descriptions of this isolated land where even the cliffs are said to be alive and benign spirits haunt the landscape that Varma comes into his own. In many ways, the novel seems a tribute to the incredible beauty and majestic exclusivity of the land where he is now the Indian ambassador. His love for this country, where people are inherently non-violent, comes out in the second half of the book as Anand

struggles with the dilemma of coming back to the life he has left or staying forever away from the city. Meanwhile, retribution comes to the several, somewhat uni-dimensional, people who had harmed him. Varmas narrative, otherwise lucid, is spoiled by introducing too many couplets from Bulle Shah to Ghalib to Basavanna, which detract rather than add to the poignancy of his story. Clearly a throwback to his erudition in philosophy and spirituality, it appears out of place here. The charming book has many messages. That it is fraught with danger to lose oneself in the rat race. That to dramatically change ones course of life offers one undreamt of yet meaningful revelations. That from extreme despair can come extreme understanding of the human condition. Nowhere does Varma try to overwhelm the reader with over-the-top language. To me, the real hero of the story is Bhutan which seems to possess the power to heal broken souls. It is in this place of dark and haunting beauty that we, along with the protagonist, learn that it is best not to rail against destiny but to move on. Just as one starts to wonder how the story can go on for more than a few more pages, Varma jolts everything once more. It turns out that Anand did not have pancreatic cancer; it was something else, which can be cured with an operation. Anand gets a fresh lease of life and he goes off to Bhutan where he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Tara, a recluse from India, who is trying to become a Buddhist nun. After some desperate wooing and pursuit, Tara and Anand get hitched and turn to Delhi to lead a contended life. Though I really enjoyed reading this novel, though the story skipped along lightly on the wings of Varmas delightful writing and I read the 206-page book in a single sitting of around 8 hours, I didnt like many things about the story. Some of my dislike stems from the fact that I like some amount of detailing and more importantly, hate it when the loose ends arent tied up. From this one may gather than Anand is a litigator, one who appears in court, rather than a corporate lawyer who drafts agreements for clients. However, not once do we see Anand go to court. Rather we are told that he spends all his time behind a desk. Yes, Varma does tell us that Anand does all the background work for Adi to steal his glory. However, even Adi doesnt seem to spend much time in court. In any event, even the junior-most lawyer in a firm of litigating lawyers is bound to
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spend some time in court, seeking adjournments and making minor appearances. After Anand survives the cancer scare, he is offered a better job by a rival law firm, as a Senior Vice President in charge of International Clients There is no mention of any divorce proceeding, even after it is clear that Anand isnt going to die. But when Anand goes to Bhutan, there seems to be no obstacle to pairing up with Tara in a simple Bhutanese ceremony. We are told that Adis wife got custody of their son Arpit when Adi got divorced, but when Tanu has an affair with Adi, Arpit is conveniently brought back. In fact, the opportunity to be a mother to Arpit is one of the attractions for Tanu to marry Adi. Anand had a tough childhood, with his father dying when he was eleven and his widowed mother struggling to put him through school and college. We are told his mother died just before he graduated, presumably with a law degree. In another place, we are told his mother died before Anand turned nineteen. In India, one doesnt graduate with a law degree before the age of twenty two. Twenty three, if one gets the law degree as three-year second bachelors. Despite, having had such a poor childhood and not really making it big as a lawyer, when Anand decides to stop working and live off his savings, there miraculously appears a property he had bought as an investment, but never visited. When the savings are tallied, there is enough for Adi to lead a simple, but comfortable life till his death. Of course, towards the end of the novel, after Anand marries Tara, he does accept a job which requires him to work four days a week, as a consultant, at twice the salary he got from Adi. I do wish Varma had explained where one can get such a job in Delhi or elsewhere in India. I personally know of at least a couple of hundred lawyers who would jump at the chance! The tables are stacked in favour of Anand from Page one. Adi is built up to be an ogre, a man who has to be disliked by every reader. Tanu too is shown to be insensitive and there is an air of comeuppance when at the fag-end of the novel Tanu makes a re-entry, having paid for all her sins. Adi too comes to a nasty end. Everything comes easily to Anand once he has decided to change his rules for living and enjoying life. One morning while pottering around Humayuns tomb, he runs into the Bhutanese ambassador Kinsley who suggests that he take a holiday in Bhutan. For good measure, the ambassador, playing the role of ambassador to the extreme, takes
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Anands card and fixes for Anand to stay with the ambassadors niece Chimi who has one of the oldest traditional homes in Bhutan, at a place called Wangsisina, which she runs as a guesthouse. Chimi is conveniently divorced and pretty and plays the perfect host, trying her best to cheer up Anand, taking him to town to party and sleeping with him for one night only, after which they become very good friends, agree they are not in love and Anand is left free to pursue Tara. All of this brings me to an interesting question. Is a fiction writer entitled to play fast and loose with facts and reality in order to convey a particular point or to push an agenda? I should think No. In any event, When Loss is Gain did not convince me to quit my job and live off my savings for the rest of my life or at least try and get a job which pays less but has more comfortable working hours. It is a gripping novel dealing with myriad facets of human life and emotion. Humans have this tendency to take things for granted, especially life. Things that are scarce or lost are valued the most. Same thing happens with Anand, the protagonist of the book, whose world is shattered by a piece of news. His life takes a different course when he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and to top it all, his wife leaves him for someone else. Life however, gives him a second chance when he gets reprieve. His doctor tells him that the initial diagnosis was wrong and that he is cancer-free. The wrong diagnosis comes as a blessing in disguise. This time his introspects and questions if the pursuits he had earlier were worth having. Life changes when he meets a girl who is trying to escape her tragic past. It is a gripping story, extremely well written and a page-turner. Highly recommended! A year later Tara &Anand were blessed with a daughter, whom they named Yashodara. Tanu went to Wangsisina, and then moved further away. They never saw her again.

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Purpose of the Book (or) Authors View

How many of us get a second chance in life? More importantly, what would we want to do were we to get the near-magical chance to start over? Would we fall back into the old pattern of habit and custom? Or, would we do all those things that we ordinarily wouldnt or couldnt? Pavan K. Varma captures this fleeting idea and teases out a tale of frailty and courage, defeat and victory, loss and gain. In this, his debut attempt at fiction after a dozen published works including meditations on the Kamasutra and the middle class, the Urdu poet Ghalib and the havelis of Delhi as well as translations of KaifiAzmi and Gulzar, he displays once again his uncanny ability to seize an idea, a moment, and make it come alive to the fullest. Carpe dime, the ancients called it; in Varmas lexicon, it is called When Loss is Gain. When Loss is Gain is definitely a deeply philosophical work insofar as it looks at ethical and moral questions related to everyday life in the light of principles culled from Hinduism and Buddhism. And, yes, it has plenty of drama of ideas, too. Yet, in another sense, it moves away from its philosophical underpinnings and becomes a sort of coming of age novel dealing with the moral and psychological growth of its protagonist. To flesh out the drama of ideas, Varma employs a series of dichotomies: life and death, loss and gain, happiness and fulfillment, physical and spiritual, rational and irrational. A dialogue between Dukkha and Ananda -- sorrow and its conjoined twin happiness -- lies at the heart of this drama which moves from cosmopolitan Delhi to the majestic mountains of Bhutan. And, all along, the weft of poetry runs through the woof of plot and character to create a tapestry that is as jewel bright as it is richly textured. An eclectic mix of verses from sources as diverse as BulleShah, Basavanna, NidaFazli, HairatAllahabadi, Amir Khusro, Kabir, and of course, Varmas old favourite, Ghalib leavens the narrative with the yeast of a robust, full-bodied flavour. Readings from Shankaraachayas Nirvana Shatakam as well as recitations from the Isa Upanishad fit in seamlessly. A cataclysmic turning point, a moment of epiphany usually reserved for the climax --happens early in the novel. Anand, a hard-drinking, a hard-working, ambitious lawyer, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Within hours of the doctors pronouncement that he has only few months to live, his carefully constructed life unravels: his wife leaves him for his best friend, who also hapix

pens to be his boss. Faced with the prospect of death, Anand realizes how wrong all his priorities had been all his life: I would had the gift of life, and I had treated it so utterly, utterly shabbily. Only when he is condemned to die, does he realize the sheer waste of it all and no time to make amends. So much had been heaped on my plate, and I had but nibbled at it, he rues. However, the prognosis of cancer turns out to be wrong. This entirely unexpected reprieve causes Anand to review the wreckage that was his life and do all the things a high-powered life as a Delhi lawyer enmeshed in petty office politics had not allowed him to do. He decides to just hang out, to live from day to day, to float without direction, to immerse (himself) in the natural eddies and pools of existence, to live for a whim rather than a goal. To live this life, he invests his lifes savings to maintain a modest lifestyle, travels to watch the sunrise on the Ganga in Varanasi and the sunset on a sand-dune in Jaisalmer before finally taking off for a retreat in the remote mountains of Bhutan. Here, Anand meets Chimi who teaches him he cannot just sit by the river bank of life; he must wade in. Chimi, with her vigorous love for life, makes him wonder: By sheltering myself from the possibility of pain, was I also building barriers to the possibility of joy? When he falls in love with the lovely but haunted Tara, who is training to become a nun, he realizes that the gift of life must not to be renounced. The bridge between dukkha and ananda is as narrow as it is precarious, but it must be walked.

Characters
Anand: Anand is protagonist. Anand is an assistant advocate in his friend Adhisoffice.
Anands presence was felt at every point in the office. Anands wife name is Tanu. Anand, Tanu and Adhi were friends from their college days. Anand dont like work at Adhis office, but he had to work because of poor financial status. Anand feels that being in prison is better than working at office. Anands father died when he was 11 years. Anands mother could only help to complete his college education, later she also passed, leaving anand alone in this world with many problems. Anand worked hard and completed his post graduation. Anand is not a romantic person, he never opned up his heart with his wife. Throughout his life Anand faced many probx

lems until he started a relationship with tara. At every point of life, Ananddidnt gets what he wanted. He had many chances to live the remaining life happily, but he refuses all. Rest of life he want to live like No anger, no ambition, no want.

Advaita: Advaita is popular by the name Adhi .Adhis father is senior bureaucrat. Adhis father
is a rich man. Adhi studied at the best school in the city and was the captain for the cricket team. Adhi saw anand just as na employee but not as a friend. Adhi took advantage of every situation to get Tanu after her marriage with Anand also. Adhi used the tactic party to become popular in the city and gain more contacts.

Tanu: Tanu, wife of Anand, worked as a school teacher. Tanu had a soft corner for Adhi
.Adhis sons studied in the same school where Tanu worked. Tanu used the circumstances and often visited Adhis house to meet him. Tanu married anand only because his parents asked her to marry him.

Chetan Bahl: Chetan Bahl was the head of the biggest law firms in Delhi. He was impeccable
professional, and a good man. He gave the opportunity to Anand and that is Senior Vicepresident in charge of international clients. He understandthesituation of Anad, so he didnt force on this.

Khurana: Khurana is the best doctor in the town. He kept himself busy by spending most of his
time at the hospital. He also attended the parties hosted by Adhi .Dr.Khurana played an important role in Anands life by conforming that he has cancer, without proper detection.

Chimi: Chimi is Anands friend. Chimi is a tourist guide by profession. She was a pretty woman.
She helped anand to get into track again. She also helped him to start a new life with tara.

Tara: Tara is the second wife of Anand. Tara likes Buddhism. Their relationship started in a
strange situation, saving anand from an accident. Anand liked Taras attitude, which was very different from Tanus. Tara saved Anand twice. Tara also had a very bitter experience in her life before meeting Anand. They shared their experience and liked each others style of living.

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Theme
The story revolves around Anand, a Delhi lawyer working for his best friend Advaitas law firm. With success comes the expected descent into drink, alienation from his wife Tanu and the revelation that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with only a few months to live. Now comes the tearjerker. Tanu, whom he has neglected, leaves him for Advaita whose success has been through riding on the coat tails of his immensely successful father. But the diagnosis turns out to be wrong, Anand does not have cancer after all. This, as it would most of us, makes him the well on the meaning of life and the hankering for material things. After a chance meeting with the Bhutanese ambassador in Delhi, he sets off for a remote mountain retreat in Bhutan where his host Chimi nurses him back to some form of mental equilibrium. While there, he meets the mysterious Tara, who is also trying to find herself in these mystic mountains. Their bitter-sweet romance follows, and Varma comes into his own in the descriptions of this isolated land where even the cliffs are said to be alive and benign spirits haunt the landscape that Varma comes into his own. In many ways, the novel seems a tribute to the incredible beauty and majestic exclusivity of the land where he is now the Indian ambassador. His love for this country, where people are inherently non-violent, comes out in the second half of the book as Anand struggles with the dilemma of coming back to the life he has left or staying forever away from the city. Meanwhile, retribution comes to the several, somewhat uni-dimensional, people who had harmed him. Varmas narrative, otherwise lucid, is spoiled by introducing too many couplets from Bulle Shah to Ghalib to Basavanna, which detract rather than add to the poignancy of his story. Clearly a throwback to his erudition in philosophy and spirituality, it appears out of place here. The charming book has many messages. That it is fraught with danger to lose oneself in the rat race. That to dramatically change ones course of life offers one undreamt of yet meaningful revelations. That from extreme despair can come extreme understanding of the human condition. Nowhere does Varma try to overwhelm the reader with over-the-top language. To me, the real hero of the story is Bhutan which seems to possess the power to heal broken souls. It is in this
xii

place of dark and haunting beauty that we, along with the protagonist, learn that it is best not to rail against destiny but to move on.

Quotes that inspired me 1. The past loses its pleasure the moment and it has no future. So always be in present. 2. Joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin-we have to celebrate one and understand the other 3. More pressure fewer yields.

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