A fine balance

[quilter]

Several weeks ago one of my neighbors commented that there were some break ins in our development. She commented "what do they think, we're rich? "  I said, yes, we actually are. We live in nice houses, can put the air and heat on, have all the food we can eat, health insurance and so on. she was speechless.

Anyway I ran across this book at the library that I had read years ago and it had a huge effect on my journey towards gratitude and mustachianism.  Set in India, it is a book of poverty and what people did to escape it. " a fine balance" by Mistry.   I got it for her and she was astonished by this book.  Similar to "city of joy" set in Calcutta, it can really help put things in perspective. Thought some might find it helpful as the switch from mindless consumerism to gratitude for all we have takes place.

[homehandymum]

Thanks for the recommendation - I've just placed it on hold at my library.

I've found that a helpful mind-shift also occurs when I read a lot of medieval mysteries.  It does a lot for your frame of reference to consider that being warm and dry is a luxury, and that only the very wealthiest of the wealthy had secure housing, more than 2 sets of clothes, and a bed.  In separate bedrooms.  And it's odds-on that our children will survive infancy.

Secure housing, secure food supply, clean water.  We are indeed wealthy :)

[iris lily]

I read that book years ago, it's great.

[pac_NW]

Agreed - great book. Disturbing, triumphant, fair, unfair, all of the above.

[arebelspy]

I was intrigued enough to look up a summary.

(Warning: the below has spoilers.)

A splendid tale of contemporary India that, in chronicling the sufferings of outcasts and innocents trying to survive in the "State of Internal Emergency'' of the 1970s, grapples with the great question of how to live in the face of death and despair. Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power. The four protagonists (all victims of the times) are: Dina, 40-ish, poor and widowed after only three years of marriage; Maneck, the son of an old school friend of Dina's; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om, members of the Untouchable caste. For a few months, this unlikely quartet share a tranquil happiness in a nameless city--a city of squalid streets teeming with beggars, where politicians, in the name of progress, abuse the poor and the powerless. Dina, whose dreams of attending college ended when her father died, is now trying to support herself with seamstress work; Maneck, a tenderhearted boy, has been sent to college because the family business is failing; and the two tailors find work with Dina. Though the four survive encounters with various thugs and are saved from disaster by a quirky character known as the Beggarmaster, the times are not propitious for happiness. On a visit back home, Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized; Maneck, devastated by the murder of an activist classmate, goes abroad. But Dina and the tailors, who have learned to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair,'' keep going. A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams.

Sounds depressing.

What did you get out of it?  Gratitude that your life isn't as terrible as theirs?

[iris lily]

...Sounds depressing.

What did you get out of it?  Gratitude that your life isn't as terrible as theirs?

Now this will sounds trite but this work is "a testimony to the beauty of the human spirit."  :) yes, I know, roll you eyes.

In reality, I love India and read a fair number of novels set in India because the place fascinates me. I love reading about the culture, food, fabrics, and architecture. Part of my fascination is with the incredible disparity of life there, and what that huge population of underclass do every day to stay alive and the conditions in which they live.

This particular novelist was good at presenting these four main characters as engaging human beings. You do not want to know what one of the men who underwent forced vasectomy goes through.

I'm the only person I know who actually likes receiving telemarketer calls from India, I like to imagine what the caller is experiencing (where he is sitting, what the weather is like, what is the building he's like, etc.)

[arebelspy]

Fair enough, that's a good explanation.  Thanks for clarifying.  :)

[Moonwaves]

Sounds depressing.

It is. Mind you, I've thought the same thing about most of the modern Indian fiction I've read - it's really not my thing.

I read this for book club a couple of years ago and didn't take much more than from it than that it was utterly depressing by the end. There were parts in it that were somewhat uplifting d as they were overcoming obstacles and getting on but by the end of it, when everything had turned to shit, I was just getting more and more miserable. [First-world problems to be getting miserable at reading something as opposed to having to be going through it? Undoubtedly.]

I was actually just looking at this book on my bookshelf last weekend and wondering why I kept it, as I have been very strict about only keeping books I will read again in the last few years. Perhaps I thought if I read it again I'd get something more out of it?

[iris lily]

... Perhaps I thought if I read it again I'd get something more out of it?

Oh good lord no! Life is too short to spend time on books that you don't like. Just because *I* liked it doesn't mean that you will, you don't have to!
go read something new that you like!