Backman, Nupi Keithel and Churchill
These days, I am reading Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People. While I am embarrassed to acknowledge that it’s his first book that I am reading (he also authored ‘A Man Called Ove’ in case you have been living under a rock like I was), I have no doubt that he will be one author who I will follow in future. For more reasons than one. First, he writes well. You can test it by reading the first two pages of Anxious People, and I bet you’d fall off the chair laughing. Second, and the more profound reason for me to follow him, is this long essay that he posted on his website about his stint with depression. It was written in 2018 but I discovered it just now. Sample this prelude to the essay: ’This is the fifth of my novels to make it to the New York Times Bestseller list. I remember when the first one did, I thought to myself: “I made it”. This time around, honestly, it’s more a feeling of “I made it…out”. Because this book took nearly everything for me to finish, and I ended up in a breakdown late last year. I started waking up in the middle of the night with nosebleeds. Got headaches. Forgot things, small stuff at first, but then later on I looked at pictures from our family summer vacation and had to ask my wife “where is that from?”’. It helps that Backman writes lucidly, for he can create clarity around this complex subject with his words. He neatly describes how success can be destructing, and what it means to become an author (who is part of an industry) from a writer (who just writes, primarily for satisfaction). It’s a very personal piece that he has put out, and is absolutely worth a read.
Sitting at home during the pandemic, I have been doing a lot of armchair travelling. Also, I am curating a list of all the places that I will travel to when it’s easier to travel again. In that list goes this market in Manipur, India, that’s run solely by women. There are roughly 5000 of them running this farmers’ market. The market, called Nupi Keithel, has a long history of 400 years and is more than just a marketplace. For instance, it was at the centre of the protests in 2004 against the Indian Army. The women operating the market set an example, in the writer Trisha Mohanty’s words, of how ‘women living in far-flung corners of this country, with little to no privilege, ca assert themselves in a culture that oppresses and subjugates them’.
This short note from Cal Newport on Churchill’s D-Day To-Do list makes for a powerful reminder on how writing down everything that you ought to do, and which are expected from you, strengthen your resolve and help prioritise them. Best put in Newport’s words, 'Don’t retreat into frustration and despair. Write down everything that’s demanded of you, even if you can’t possibly satisfy all of the obligations. Then make the best plan you can given the difficult circumstances. The comfort comes from the plan, not the achievable outcomes.’
A quote that I read last week:
Because you’re up in the air. And when you’re in the air for long enough it’s getting really difficult to know the difference between flying and falling.
— Fredrik Backman
