Follow your bliss

"You gotta follow your bliss, man. That's all there is to it."

Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

Professor Chandra has had a successful career as an economist, the Nobel Prize being the only goal that has eluded him. Yet with his own family he feels a failure. His wife left him for another man. His three children are estranged, his eldest daughter even keeping her whereabouts a secret from him. And so when Professor Chandra decides to follow his bliss in Rajeev Balasubramanyam's novel Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, it is his family, not the Nobel Prize, that he pursues.

His pilgrimage takes him around the world, for his family is scattered. He finds himself in a variety of Eastern religion/New Age situations, including one in India where his own son, spouting "wisdom" that seems like nonsense to Chandra, is the featured guru. Yet the novel's conclusion comes during the family's Christmas reunion in Colorado, thus giving Christianity a share in this odd spirituality mixture.

"He was helpless in most places save universities," Balasubramanyam says of Chandra. Certainly that seems true during the course of the story. He knows little about popular culture. His conversations with other people are awkward. He often offends without meaning to. Yet with his own family he is most helpless of all. Gradually he discovers what he has been doing wrong all these years and, most importantly, that his family, including the former wife now married to someone else, loves him still. And there he finds his bliss.

There is much to like about this novel. It is comic without being funny, serious without being tragic, easy reading without being simple.