Cities make me sad; they always have. But the realisation really hit me one evening in 2017 when I was trying to cross a street in the Indian city of Jaipur. 

Behind me, there were vast crowds. In front of me, a never-ending trail of vehicles -- meaning, more people. It did not matter where you went in an Indian city, all you found was people everywhere. The sun was setting in the background. I looked around and thought about the giant machinery of the city. The hoardings. The factories. The corporations. The TV. The radio. The internet. It was as if they were all screaming for my attention.

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And amid all these, there was little me. Anxious. Worried. Stressed. Looking for an escape. Wondering, if there was anyone left who found beauty in ordinary things and ordinary beings?

The questions made me think of Walt Whitman's O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

...

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

What good amid these? I wondered. What's the point? 

Whitman said that the fact that you exist is the whole point. I couldn't fathom it properly. If existence was the point, why did I long to escape?

A few days later, I found another answer, this time in William Wordsworth's writings. It wasn't me, it was the city, his writings informed me. 

Wordsworth insisted that the city life not merely affected our health, but it also hurt our souls. He accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. 

City-dwellers had no perspective, Wordsworth alleged; they were in thrall to what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend.

It seemed that cities were invented so that people could come closer and live apart.

"One thought baffled my understanding," wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London, "how men lived even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and not knowing each other's names."

That was exactly what I was becoming, I suspected. And that was exactly I did not want to be. So, I packed my bags and moved to a little town in the Himalayas where I could appreciate ordinary things and ordinary beings.

We may not always realise, but our surroundings are constantly trying to talk to us. They are telling us what they think, how they feel.

One place might say:

I care more about cars than about you; I care a lot about advertising, so I am going to make you look at a huge sign every single day of your life, even if you never want to buy the product it is selling. I am often in a bad mood. Your little sorrows and pains don't matter to me. Life is tough and I don't care. I don't know who you are and I don't ever want to know.

Whereas the other might have something else on its mind:

I am very gentle, playful and sweet. I care about you. That's why I want you to have a lovely balcony where you can sit and have a really interesting conversation. I want you to be able to stroll down the street without having to worry that a car is going to bump into you. I have got soft sides. I believe in friendship. I like it that anyone can wave to you from their window. I think calm is important. That's why I wear soothing colours: I don't want you to feel agitated. I hope you'll be happy here.

This is not merely a poetic conceit. Winston Churchill made much the same claim to the House of Commons in 1943, arguing that people shape their buildings and afterwards their buildings shape them. If he was right, then the street that ignores you and the street that welcomes you are not neutral backdrops to a life — they are educating you in how to feel, day after day, whether or not you ever notice the lesson.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard went further still. In The Poetics of Space (1958), he suggested that the rooms and corners we inhabit are never simply physical — they are stored inside us, shaping memory and imagination long after we have left them. A childhood staircase, a kind window, a cruel car park: these become part of the architecture of the mind itself, not just the street.

Martin Heidegger, in his 1951 essay Building Dwelling Thinking, pushed the idea further again. For him, building and dwelling were not two separate acts — one practical, one emotional — but a single continuous relationship between people and place. To truly dwell somewhere, he argued, is to be at peace within it, to have been gathered in by it rather than merely housed. By that measure, a hostile street does not just fail to please us; it fails to let us dwell at all, leaving us permanently, subtly homeless within it.

So perhaps the task is not to design places that merely look attractive, but to design places that speak kindly — because we become, in some important and lasting way, the sum of everything around us that has ever bothered to address us gently. Listening to our surroundings, then, is not a whimsical exercise. It is how we learn which of them deserve to stay.

Dear ,

I have been trying to write to you for a while now. But there were a couple of problems. First, I did not know your address; and second, I did not know what to write. But, the thought of writing to you has been there.

You may not realise, but you have been here, with me, all the time. You are a witness to the tragedies of this world, along with me. The world is fucked, as you would know. The ones at the top, have done nothing for appreciation, and the ones at the bottom, have got nothing for celebration. And the ones who call themselves “the common men and women” – their lives are only limited to noise generation. Which makes me wonder – What good amid these, O me, O life?

Then I hear the answer. You.

, this life is strange. One may get lonely, even in large crowds. It happens with me. And I am sure, it happens with you too. When no one understands you. No one. Not even your best of friends, or your own self. During such unbearable moments of pain and hopelessness, the thought of you always consoles me. The thought, that somewhere in this world, you are going through the same emotion – it heals me.

Talking about emotions, I have experienced many shades of them; some vivid, some plain. That’s because, I am an imperfect, vulnerable human being. And it does not bother me anymore. I am tired of presenting my perfect self to everyone I meet. The same kinds of frustration I get when others try to hide their imperfections. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth – I say, and no one listens. One of these days, I might give up. But then… I think of you. That you are going through the same. That if I give up, you may do that too. And I don’t want that to happen.

I don’t know how wise, intelligent, or smart you are. But I know, you are little crazy, just like me. You too dance like an idiot when it rains; you too stroll around the mountains until your feet suggest otherwise; you too speak with strangers and laugh with them; you too cry when everyone expects you to be strong. But you know you are you and you stay that way, despite all the objections. You don’t change just because others expect you to, and that, in my opinion, makes you pretty special.

Who are you? A man, a woman, a kid, an oldie? Someone from the future? I don’t know, and, to be honest, I don’t want to. None of these things concern me. I don’t want to be your lover, friend, acquaintance etc. You are still a stranger. And you are special that way. Although, the curiosity still remains – who are you? Maybe you exist, somewhere, far away. Maybe, you are someone close, a friend, a lover, or an acquaintance. Or maybe, the parts of you are divided among all these people. I am not certain about the form of your existence. But, does it matter? To me, it does not. All I know (and all I care about) is that – you exist. And the thought completes me.

, I don’t measure my life with the work (or profession) I get involved in, yet, I feel, writing remains very close to me. Now, let me tell you a secret. A lot of people ask me, why do I write? And I say, it’s a path towards self discovery. I never tell them that it’s more about discovering you. Are the two really different? At this point, I don’t think so.

I am a dreamer (I know you are one too). And I have this eerie feeling that one day our paths shall cross. Not for long though. Maybe a conversation over coffee, or a quick discussion at an event, or a long chat during a short journey. We will talk about everything. History, mythology, poetry, music, religion, politics, economics… Or maybe, we won’t talk. You will look at me, and I will look at you, and we will smile. We will know that we have met. And that’s just about it.

On the other hand, we may never meet. But as you know very well, our words never die. Which is why, I am leaving them here for you. If I don’t ever find you, then no-problem, my words will. And just for a moment, you will find yourself smiling. I hope. And I hope you read this while I am still alive. I don’t expect you to write back to me, but if you do, it will definitely make me smile.

Cheers!

This story is around the time of the Covid lockdown, in 2020. We were all confined to our homes, working on our laptops, and occasionally, peering out windows with uncertainty—would we see this through? Thankfully, we did... and both you and I made it here.

I was living down in Dharamshala, near that mela place called Dari. If you want me to be more specific, it was on the Darnu-Barol road. I used to be all alone in the house, except that a female dog had adopted me.

Two things to note here: one, I hesitate to use the word bitch as I have kept that for more suitable purposes; two, I never adopted her, she did. She started frequenting the house, looking for a chance meal, and eventually, the frequency went up and then she never left.

Did she have a name? Not quite. If anything, I used to call her Dogan.

Dogan was no ordinary dog. She had a husband, or so I liked to believe. Because it seemed like a monogamous relationship. The two would stay together. Even when the lady got pregnant, the husband took care of her, and once the puppies (five of them) arrived, he took care of them as well.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a dog family, or a dog society, as the two are not very different. But they are different from a human family. In a dog family, if there is a biscuit on the table, the quickest puppy gets it. It’s simple. In a human family, on the other hand, the culture is slightly more complicated. If there is a biscuit on the table, you first invent a game, then you educate all the children about that game, and when the training is over, you ask them to play the game and then the winner of it gets the biscuit as a reward. To make matters culturally appropriate, you ask the winner to be more compassionate and share it with others. None of this happens in a dog family. Certainly not in the one I am discussing here; I cannot comment on what your dogs are up to.

In our story, too, the fastest of these puppies used to get hold of most of the biscuits. He was the shortest of all. I used to call him Dogu, for that specific reason. Dogu was short but he would make up for it by his excessive jumping drills. He would jump to such a height that the other puppies wouldn’t be able to get any biscuits. So, to bring some socialism into the dogs’ world, I had to grab Dogu while distributing biscuits to his siblings. That worked, on most days.

One morning, surprisingly, I found no puppy or dog outside. Had they been stolen? I was considering all these possibilities when I noticed a movement at one corner of the yard. I ran in that direction. It was Dogu, lying on the ground, sobbing. When I picked him up, his foot appeared to be badly hurt. It was hanging limply at his side. The wound was deep, revealing the tender flesh and pink muscle beneath the torn skin of the paw. Worse, Dogu was now puking, making me worried about his chances of survival.

I called the veterinary centre. Nobody picked. Then I called the dog rescue centre. They were quick to respond.

“Can you help me?” I pleaded.

“What’s the matter?” a man from the other side said.

“There is a little puppy that needs your help. He is badly injured.”

“Got it. Just tell me your address and we will be there soon.”

“Thank you. Just come to the Barol bus stand and let me know.”

I kept checking the time, each second stretching into an eternity. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling as I held Dogu. Half an hour went by, filled with panicked thoughts of what might happen. Would those people be able to help?

Finally, a distant rumble grew into the unmistakable sound of an approaching jeep. Thank God! The team had arrived. They took the puppy gently, his tiny body resisting as much as it could. My heart ached as they carried him away, but the team member comforted me.

“Don’t worry,” the driver said to me kindly. “We’ll take good care of him here until he’s back on his paws.”

“Should I come with you?”

“No, it’s fine. The COVID protocols don’t allow that,” he said. “We’ll call you once he recovers. Until then, he will be safe with us. Don’t worry."

I was relieved. At the same time, I kept hoping and praying that I would see that wagging tail again.

As the day went on, I got busy with chores. There was silence in the house, broken only by the occasional cry from the other puppies. They huddled together, confused and whimpering, the playful energy dampened by a shared anxiety.

Finally, as the sun was about to set, a familiar form emerged in the distance. It was Dogan, I could see through the window. Beside her, walked her husband. They approached cautiously, their ears perked and noses twitching. The puppies shouted, jumping around them in anxiety. But Dogan remained still, her gaze fixed on the empty space on the mat where her puppy once lay.

I could feel the helplessness in my room. Language, our main tool of communication, now felt utterly useless. How could I explain the sequence of events? Words seemed insignificant compared to the pain on Dogan’s face as she nosed at the ground, her frantic licks searching for a familiar scent that was no longer there.

“She could assume that I have harmed her child,” I thought to myself.

Thankfully, she did not. The minute I opened the door and went outside, she came to me and started licking. There was no aggression, no growl to accompany the sharp barks that erupted from her throat. Instead, a heartbreaking whine trembled through the air, a sound that spoke of a mother’s deep anguish. I could feel a lump in my throat.

If only I could bridge the language barrier, explain what happened in the day, the assurances, the promise of Dogu’s return, and more. I wish that could happen. In reality... faced with those mournful cries, being human felt utterly inadequate.

Note: The above story is excerpted from my 2024 book Dharamshala Diaries: Stories from the Mountain Town. Click here to buy the book.

Last evening, when I was about to step inside my house, I was greeted by a snake at the door. A long, brown snake, slithering along the floor. The sight terrified me. I hushed myself and rushed straight into my room. And as soon as I had locked myself in, a strange thought occurred to me. The thought of those stray dogs that were roaming - and barking - not very far away. They still had to live with the snake in the vicinity. Unlike me, they didn’t have any place to hide themselves in. In other words, they didn’t have a home.

What a tragedy it is to not have a home! To not have a place to retire to at the end of the day. To see others entering their concrete structures while you roam around the streets aimlessly. (If this sounds like a Bob Dylan song, trust me, it’s not a coincidence.)

Anyway, coming to not having a home…

True, a part of us does seek freedom beyond all bounds, but there is also a part of us that prefers to be caged, shielding itself from the threats of this cruel world.

We all need a home.

Now, allow me to go a step further. Home exists as much in the psychological sense – if not more – as it does in the physical sense. Often we call our dwelling place our home. But the idea of home goes much beyond that. There is our house (which we call home), then there is hometown, or home country. And then, of course, we have our families with whom we share our home, and without whom this home would just be an architectural wonder (or blunder).

To make matters more complex, along comes the Theseus paradox: all the above-mentioned aspects of a home are likely to change. We shift our residences, relocate to new cities, and even family members change as new ones arrive and old ones leave.

What, then, is a home?

No doubt, home is our dwelling place but it is spread across past, present and future, in our memories and dreams, in real as well as in a metaphysical world. Where we spent our childhood (which shaped our idea of home) is still our home, and so is where we are planning to move next. Then there is an abstract idea of a home in our head and we strive towards it. That is our home too. How much abstraction are we able to bring into reality – that’s a different matter. But there is always a home in the head which is a beautiful blend of all our identities, our hopes and desires, even fears. In short, home is an identity.

This means, you can be homeless even if you haven’t lost your house. That’s the modern-day homelessness I am speaking of. Where there are houses upon houses, but few homes. No one quite knows where they truly belong.

There’s a strange kind of spiritual crisis one can see all around where people believe nothing (and they cannot accept it either). The way all cultural and religious identities are dying a slow death, it’s worth pondering. There remains nothing and no one else, except the individual – the lonely, miserable individual. That (identity) too is under threat now. The age-old question ‘Who Am I?’ has become meaningless, adding more meaninglessness to life if there wasn’t enough in it already.

All this has rendered many to become homeless while sitting comfortably insides of what they describe as their homes and pitying the homeless of the world. That, to me, is a bigger tragedy than that of the stray dogs dealing with a snake in their vicinity.

Like many concepts in Eastern philosophy, "Zen" has no precise English equivalent. Derived from the Chinese Ch'an and ultimately from the Sanskrit Dhyana, it is often translated as "meditation," though that word scarcely captures its meaning. What is fascinating is how Dhyana travelled from India to China, then to Japan as Zen, and finally returned to us, only for us to embrace it again as Zen rather than our own Dhyana.

Perhaps that is who we are: we often find the familiar too ordinary and fall in love with it only after it has travelled the world and returned with an exotic name. Yet, at its heart, the meaning remains the same. In India, Dhyana signifies a state of direct communion with reality itself, and in Japan, Zen carries this same spirit: not a retreat from the world but a deep presence within it. It is found not in isolation but in the ordinariness of life, in chopping wood, cooking rice, or cleaning the floor. If we must translate it at all, "enlightenment" comes closest, though Zen is both the light and the path towards it.

How does tea relate to the idea? Well, an ancient poet once said:

The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my inmost being… The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrongs of life pass away through my pores. At the fifth cup, I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of immortals. The seventh cup – ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Heaven? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.

Such were the feelings that became associated with tea-drinking, and by the time it came to Japan, it was no mere commodity; it was something much more than a drink made from dried leaves, for a Zen master could say, "Mark well that the taste of Zen (Ch'an) and the taste of the tea (Cha) are the same."

In the Zen tea ceremony, we find the Zen philosophy in its most peaceful aspect, expressed as the highest spiritual freedom and detachment, as an absolute contentment with the natural sufficiency of things. It was an expression of poverty, of separation from earthly belongings, and its basic principles were an insistence on the transience of the objective world, a profound love of nature, of her unending changes, her infinite variety, her avoidance of repetition and symmetry, and lastly the indefinable quality called yugen, which is described as "the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement."

Can we recreate that rich experience in our tea ceremony? Well… we can certainly try. I did.

The tea leaves that I had brought from the estate, there were a few of them left. I made the green tea, packed it carefully in a small flask, and began walking towards the river.

I walked close to what was called Hideout Cafe, near the river. I think it is better that the cafe remains a hideout, and nobody ever finds it. Because there is a big dump of garbage, an eyesore that lies right next to it. A few steps on and there is a slaughterhouse. The generous Dhauladhar sight cannot redeem the smell of rotting waste that drifts across the bridge where sometimes travellers sit. Clearly not the place you would want to be.

I kept walking upstream, following the sound of the river until the air grew clean again. The smell disappeared, replaced by the freshness of pine trees and water.

I found a flat rock, sat down, and dipped my feet into the cold water. The river flowed around my ankles as I poured myself a cup of tea. The sun was setting right in front of me – soft gold scattering across the ripples, steam rising gently from the flask. For a moment, which felt like eternity, there was nothing else I needed.

There are two ways to have a tea experience. We have these two choices every time – and they are not just about the tea. One is to immerse yourself in the act of drinking tea, relishing every drop of it – its taste, aroma and sensations that it stirs in you. The other is by letting your mind wander to the past or future, and missing out on the experience of tea while having tea. The first is what mindfulness asks us to do, something I experienced on that day at the river; the second is what most of us do most of the time.

It's easy to tell which way is better. But then, we cannot keep obsessing over it, right? That will defeat the whole purpose of it.

Let’s go a few moments back in time. If, while washing dishes, you think only of the cup of tea that awaits you, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then you are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” In other words, you’re not being mindful.

What’s more, you are not alive during the time you are washing the dishes. In fact, you are completely incapable of realising the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If you can’t wash the dishes, the chances are you won’t be able to drink your tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, you will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in your hands. Thus, you are sucked away into the future, and you are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

This is what we mean when we use the word mindfulness. It is the acceptance of the present experience. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it. Simply experiencing things as they come. Without worrying about our thoughts or letting them spoil every other experience that we have.

The act of drinking tea can be therapeutic, it depends on how well we do it.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.

There's a dread that we normally keep at the far edges of our minds but that occasionally, particularly at three o'clock on a restless night, floods our thoughts. It's this: if we don't constantly strive to achieve, if we slip up or if some new catastrophe strikes the economy, we'll lose pretty much everything and we'll end up having to live in a tiny room somewhere or - God forbid - a hut in the middle of nowhere.

Like most of you, I am no stranger to such train of thoughts. And believe me, these thoughts are more likely to find you when you have given up a job and you live in the foothills of the Himalayas, away from the cacophony of the urban life. It starts with one thing. The worry could be about a health concern, something I discovered that day, or sometimes even a social media post. One thought leads to another and soon it spirals out of control. Suddenly all my worst fears come into the picture and I know that the night is ruined. In such difficult times I have often found consolation thinking about Kamo no Chomei who lived in the 12th-century Japan and lost almost everything.

Chomei's father was a well-to-do head of a prominent religious shrine near Kyoto, which was then the capital, and Chomei grew up in luxurious circumstances. He received a refined education and in the early part of his adult life had an elegant social circle. When he was still in his twenties, hus grandmother left him a big house and his future looked bright. But then it all started to go wrong. He made enemies and was sidelined in his career; he got into financial difficulties and, by the time he was fifty, he had alienated his former friends, had practically no money - and was going bald.

Chomei was forced to reform his existence and survive on the most slender material base. Far out in the country, where no one else wanted to live, he built himself a tiny hut - just ten feet by ten. It was, he reflected, one hundredth of the size of the mansion in which he'd grown up. It wasn't even a permanent structure; his situation was so precarious he had to ensure that his home could be dismantled and carted away.

It was in this hut that Chomei wrote a short book, which is now titled as The Ten Square Foot Hut, and regarded as one the great masterpieces of Japanese literature. It's not - one we might expect - a lament, poring over the misfortunes and betrayals that led him to this degraded condition. Instead it's full of good cheer, happiness and pleasure. The most touching line in the whole book is the simple affirmation: 'I love my little hut, my simple dwelling.'

Alain de Botton, in his book A Therapeutic Journey, highlights some key lessons that we all can learn from Chomei's life. Let's take a look at these lessons:

BEAUTY IS VERY IMPORTANT

Normally we associate beauty with elegant possessions, a gracious home, trips to Europe, but that's not entirely true. Around his modest home, Chomei - with a sensitive eye discovered endless sources of beauty: autumn leaves, fruit trees in blossom, melting snow, the sound of the wind rustling through the trees and the rain beating down on the roof. All were free.

It's partly the idea of having to cope with constant ugliness that makes a lower-level economic life so frightening. But Chomei's experience shows otherwise. We can find beauty in abundance even when we have lost everything and are living in a small hut.

TIME IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MONEY

Chomei wrote: 'I can choose to rest and laze as I wish, there is no one to stand in my way or to shame me for my idleness.

Many of us say that time is precious, but our actions reveal our real priorities. We devote a huge portion of our conscious existence to making and trying to accumulate money. We tend to have a highly concrete and detailed sense of accounting around finances, while time invisibly slips away.

Chomei understood this aspect and therefore chose to make best use of his time. He read and reread the same few favourite books, which he came to know almost by heart. He had time to reflect and write. He meditated, took long walks and spent a lot of time contemplating the moon.

We don't have to leave everything behind in order to accomodate some of these elements in our lives. We can, consciously, make our choices to have a plenty of time at our hands so that we can devote ourselves to more meaningful activities.

EVERYTHING IS TRANSIENT

Chomei opens his book with a metaphor comparing human life to a river: 'On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does the water ever stay the same. The bubbles that float upon its pools now disappear, now form anew, but never endure long. And so it is with people in this world, and their dwellings.'

It's a reminder that our existence and all our pleasures and troubles are fleeting. Because our lives are so brief it is the quality iof our experiences, rather than the extent of our possessions, that matters.

So, focus on experiences. The richer the experiences, the richer will be the life.

WORLDLY PEOPLE ARE LESS HAPPY THAN THEY SEEM

A thought that erodes our willingness to live a simpler life - in a hut, if need be - is the haunting feat that other people are having a wonderful time out there. Maybe we are missing out on A LOT!

That's simply not true. The so-called 'worldly' life is not as wonderful as it seems from a distance. The fashionable world is full of what Chomei called cringing. You worry over your least action. You cannot be authentic in your grief or your joy. In high society, it is always paramount to consider how opinion will be judged by the other members of the social beehive. Envy is widespread and there is perpetual anxiety around losing status.

In the end, Chomei us showing us that it is possible to live in a materially minimal conditions while being good humoured, ambitious and in search of true fulfilment. He is dismantling our fear that material modesty has to mean degradation and squalor. We can, if we embrace his ideas, live more simply anywhere, including a hut, should we have to. And in the meantime, as we now know, we do not need to be so afraid.

Cheers!

Hope you’re well. Thank you so much for finding time to read.

That I am a big fan of books by The School of Life is no secret to anyone who follows this newsletter. They have over fifty books — all of them around the subject of emotional health — and I have read at least half of them. The other day I was rereading one of my favourite books from the collection. It’s called Small Pleasures, and true to its title, it offers a glimpse into the ordinary, fleeting moments of joy in our lives. One of the pleasures they had mentioned — and which I enjoyed reading — was the pleasure of having a grandmother, especially in the early years of one’s life.

I am reminded of Louisa May Alcott’s line, “Every house needs a grandmother in it.”

I hope you can relate with it. In case not, let me take you back in time.

Perhaps when you were a child, when your parents and siblings were away for some reason, you spent a couple of days on your own just with your grandmother. Perhaps you noticed her unique way of cutting fruits, or telling stories, or doing ordinary things with great care. Perhaps you also helped her in the kitchen which had such a distinct smell that you can sense it even today. Speaking of grandmother and her kitchen, Ray Bradbury beautifully described its magic in his novel Dandelion Wine.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple. Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred.

Naturally, the details of personal experience vary enormously, but there is a charming ideal of what a grandmother is that we can imagine or piece together from fragments of memories. Maybe you did have (and remember) the above-mentioned experiences, maybe you did not, but it is quite likely that you have your own memory of her that you cannot leave behind and you don’t want to either.

A grandmother can function as what the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object. A transitional object (like a favourite blanket) stands for home, but it can also accompany the child in its early forays into the wider world. It provides an extended psychological lifeline back to maternal love and security. In its presence the child feels emotionally safe and therefore can risk experimenting with things that are at first a little frightening or alien. The grandmother is kind and gentle, and in her reassuring presence the child can start to encounter ideas that are potentially distressing: the fact that the world is very big, with a huge, complex past and filled with strangers.

There is a sweet alliance of the elderly grandmother (who is gradually becoming weaker) and the young grandchild (who is slowly becoming stronger). But at the moment, from opposite ends of the spectrum, they both understand frailty quite well. There is an open-ended tenderness in the grandmother’s attitude. Her awareness of her own short tenure on life makes her feel the preciousness of mere existence. She will probably die before the course of your adult life is established, but she is very interested in knowing how it will turn out to be.

In her company you will see the greatest wisdom that mankind has ever acquired in action. The knowledge that success is in the long run overrated, that simply being comfortable sitting next to another person watching a programme on television, or carefully watering a houseplant in the company of a small person, can be deeply important. Sadly, as you will grow into your teen years (sometimes even beyond that), you will find it boring, even irritating, but I can promise you that as you grow in years (and in wisdom), you are going to understand her value.

There is something about grandmothers that makes them unique. The parent is desperate that the child will grow up well; the lover wants to be understood; the friend wants a companion in adventure — but the grandmother doesn’t want anything from you, except your happiness. And maybe your occasional presence, especially as you grow up and move out.

To all the grandmothers out there…

Cheers!

Eight years ago, I started Kalampedia with a single conviction: that books can heal. I didn’t have a plan then, just a feeling — that a poem written eight centuries ago in Konya, or a Stoic’s private notebook from Rome, or a modern novel nobody’s heard of, was doing something more than entertaining us. I thought these things were healing us, long before we had the language of therapy to describe what was happening. Eight years and a lot of essays later, I still believe exactly that — more than I ever did at the start.

That belief is what I’m now building into something with a name and a shape: The Literary Clinic.

The idea is simple to say and, I suspect, a lifetime’s work to do properly: to take the best of world literature — every era, every culture, East and West, ancient and contemporary — and turn it into something people can actually use. Not just a reading list. A practice. Reading paired with writing, a text matched to a specific ache.

Right now, this is taking shape on several fronts at once, and I wanted you to see the whole picture rather than one piece at a time. I’m currently writing a book that tries to put this whole philosophy properly between two covers. The YouTube channel has been growing faster than I expected, and it’s become one of the main ways new people find their way to this idea. And I’m building out courses — structured ways to actually practise this, not just read about it — which I’ll be launching before too long.

None of these are separate projects. They’re all the same conviction, wearing different clothes.

Here’s what I want you to know, though, more than any of the specifics: whatever form this takes next — a session, a course, the book, something I haven’t thought of yet — the commitment underneath it isn’t going anywhere. I’m not chasing a trend or testing an idea to see if it sticks. This is the thing I intend to spend the coming years building, properly, whatever shape it ends up needing to take. If a particular format doesn’t work, I’ll change the format. I won’t change the cause.

Which brings me to the favour I am going to ask you of.

I can build the individual pieces — the writing, the videos, the courses — largely on my own. But a clinic, in any real sense of the word, isn’t one person’s effort. It needs people who believe the same thing I do, showing up in whatever way makes sense for them.

So if this is something you believe too — that books and writing can hold us the way therapy holds us, that literature isn’t only for the seminar room but for the ordinary difficult day — I’d genuinely love for you to be part of this, in whatever way fits:

If you know an organisation, a school, a college that might want to bring this into their world, tell them about it, or tell me about them. If you’ve felt a book or a piece of writing heal something in you, I’d love to hear that story — some of what I build next will come directly from stories like yours. And if none of that applies right now, simply staying, reading, and telling one other person about this is its own kind of support. This has never grown through advertising. It’s grown through people like you passing it on.

You can reply directly to this, or write to me at [contactkalampedia@gmail.com].

Thank you for being here for however long you’ve been here — eight years, eight months, or since last week. I mean it when I say this only exists because people kept reading.

With everything I have,

Deepak.

They used to love us. We used to have a future. We would fall asleep in their arms.

We shared our fears and gave them a map to our inner insecurities. We loved their sense of humour and perspective on our lives. We travelled with them, understood their feelings for their parents, perhaps even decorated a home together. They were our best friend.

Now they are gone. And we are devastated.

We dignify this special pain with a powerful name: heartbreak — because it simply feels as if something essential, something fundamental in us has shattered. We struggle to describe quie what we are going through. Sometimes, for a few hours, it seems we will almost cope. Then we are abruptly reminded that everything good has gone from the world. What we feel most of all is alone — alone with the sadness and confusion, the anger and the incomprehension.

Everyone we admire, everyone we find interesting has had, or will have, their heart broken. Our heartbreak seems to cut us off from the rest of humanity —secretly it brings us closer together. Books, especially the ones that capture the emotion of heartbreak, therefore, connect us with those souls and help us heal. You have to give yourself that chance. The question is, will you?

And if the answer is yes, then let’s talk about some books which are going to help.

1. On Love (Originally published as Essays in Love) by Alain de Botton

De Botton’s great service to the heartbroken reader is explanation without humiliation. He shows how love is rarely about the other person alone; it is shaped by unconscious expectations, childhood patterns, and cultural myths that promise completion through romance.

Heartbreak, in this framework, is not proof that something uniquely precious has been lost, but evidence that a powerful illusion has collapsed. The pain is real — but its source is often misunderstood.

How it helps:
This book gently loosens idealisation and self-blame. It helps readers see that disappointment is not a personal failure, but an almost structural feature of romantic love.

Best read when: you are stuck replaying the relationship and wondering how it came to mean so much.

2. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

Werther does not manage his heartbreak well — and the novel never asks him to. Instead, it allows emotional excess to exist without correction. This makes it invaluable during the most acute phase of heartbreak, when feelings feel overwhelming, dramatic, and impossible to regulate.

The novel does not offer solutions. It offers recognition.

How it helps:
It normalises intensity. It reassures the reader that being undone by love is not weakness, but part of the human emotional range. Often, feeling seen is the first step toward healing.

Best read when: heartbreak feels consuming and disproportionate, and you are afraid of your own emotions.


3. The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Duras writes about a love that wounds precisely because it awakens something essential. The Lover is fragmented, restrained, and emotionally sharp. It explores desire shaped by inequality, secrecy, and impossibility — the kinds of relationships that leave disproportionate scars.

This is a book for those who cannot explain why this love hurts more than others.

How it helps:
It reframes pain as intensity of encounter rather than foolishness. The reader learns that some heartbreaks hurt deeply not because they were healthy, but because they touched something foundational.

Best read when: you are haunted by a love that felt necessary, even if destructive.

5. The Metaphysics of Sexual Love by Arthur Schopenhauer

This is perhaps one of the most bracing — and strangely consoling — texts on heartbreak ever written.

Schopenhauer argues that romantic love is not designed for individual happiness at all. It is a mechanism through which the species secures its continuation, often at the expense of individual well-being. Desire, attraction, and obsession serve biological aims far larger than our personal fulfilment.

From this perspective, heartbreak is not an accident. It is the cost we pay for being instruments of life’s continuation. Nature, Schopenhauer suggests, is indifferent to our happiness.

How it helps:
This essay offers a cold but clarifying consolation. It removes the sense of personal injustice from heartbreak. Your suffering is not a unique failure, nor a moral verdict — it is structural, impersonal, and ancient. For some readers, this impersonal framing brings profound relief.

Best read when: you are ready for unsentimental clarity and want to stop asking, “Why did this happen to me?”


From Reading to Writing:

Many would recommend you to write after heartbreak in order to heal, to understand, or to move on. This urgency often interferes with what writing can actually offer. In the early stages of heartbreak, writing is most useful not as repair, but as containment.

The practice below is designed to hold pain without rushing it toward resolution.

Step One: Write Without an Audience

Choose a notebook or a digital document that you will not share, edit, or return to. This writing is not meant to be reread for insight or shaped into narrative. It exists only to allow something unformed to move out of the mind and into language.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes.

During this time, do not explain, justify, or contextualise your feelings. Write in fragments if necessary. Write sentences that contradict each other. Let anger sit next to longing. Let clarity sit next to confusion. The aim is not coherence, but honesty.

If you find yourself trying to sound reasonable, slow down. Heartbreak is not reasonable.

Step Two: Write to the Relationship, Not the Person

Instead of writing a letter to the person you lost, write to the relationship itself.

Address it directly.

Write to the dynamic, the promise, the version of life it represented. This subtle shift often reduces shame and prevents the writing from turning into self-blame or idealisation. You are not pleading with a person; you are speaking to a structure that once held meaning.

Questions you might explore:

What did you allow me to become?

What did you ask me to silence?

What did you give me that I am afraid I will not find again?

Do not answer these questions neatly. Let them remain partially unresolved.

Step Three: Name the Cost, Not the Lesson

Many therapeutic exercises push toward insight: What did this teach you? Resist that impulse.

Instead, write one page titled “The Cost”.

List what this relationship cost you — time, energy, dignity, illusions, habits, futures. Naming the cost does not mean condemning the relationship. It simply restores proportion. Heartbreak often feels infinite because cost remains uncounted.

This step gently returns a sense of scale.

Step Four: End Without Closure

When the timer ends, stop writing mid-thought if necessary. Do not conclude. Do not summarise. Do not look for a final sentence that sounds wise.

Heartbreak is unfinished business. Allow the writing to reflect that.

Close the notebook. Do something grounding: drink water, step outside, wash your hands. Let the body mark the end of the practice, even if the mind remains unsettled.

Why This Works

Heartbreak overwhelms not because it is painful, but because it is uncontained. Writing offers a temporary vessel. Not a solution — a boundary.

This practice does not aim to make you feel better. It aims to make the pain bearable by giving it form without interpretation.

Over time, clarity emerges not from insight, but from repetition. The writing changes slowly — and when it does, you will notice without forcing it.

Write when you can manage, at your own pace. Healing does not require constant engagement. It requires pacing.

I wish you heal soon.

Warm regards,

Deepak Rana.

Another new year arrives. Quickly. Quietly.

There is noise around it, of course — messages, resolutions, celebrations — but beneath that noise there seems to be a pause. A brief moment when time seems to stop, when the previous year has not yet fully hardened into memory and the next one has not yet begun to demand things from us.

In that pause, that stoppage, I want to wish you a thoughtful and happy new year.

And I want to talk about reading. No surprises there, I suppose?

Today I don’t want to talk about what to read — lists are easy and endless, and I do that in every other newsletter — but I want to talk about how to read. I cannot stress enough how important it is. Because the way we read often determines what books give back to us. Two people can read the same book and come away with entirely different experiences, not because the book changed, but because the reader did.

We often treat reading as consumption: finishing books, collecting titles, moving quickly from one to another. But reading, at its best, is not consumption. It is a relationship.

And like all relationships, it deepens when approached slowly, attentively, and honestly. Let’s add more meaning in this relationship, then.

Begin by Asking: What Kind of Book Is This Asking Me to Be?

Every book carries an implicit invitation. It’s like a person in that sense.

Some ask you to think. Some ask you to feel. Some ask you to watch. Others ask you simply to be present.

When you begin reading Crime and Punishment, for instance, the mistake is to read it as a crime novel. The crime happens early; the real work of the book begins afterwards. Dostoevsky is not interested in suspense so much as psychological claustrophobia. He wants you to sit inside a restless, fractured mind. The right way to read such a book is not quickly, but patiently — allowing discomfort, repetition, and moral ambiguity to do their work.

By contrast, when reading The Old Man and the Sea, you must resist the urge to over-interpret too early. The power of the book lies in its surface — in rhythm, restraint, and repetition. Read it the way you would watch the sea itself: attentively, without asking it to explain itself too much.

The first act of good reading, then, is listening. Let the book tell you how it wants to be read.

Do Not Rush to Understand

One of the anxieties of modern reading is the pressure to understand immediately. We underline, highlight, annotate — mostly out of fear of missing something.

But many books do not reveal themselves all at once.

When reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, confusion is pretty much a part of the design. Names repeat, time folds back on itself, reality dissolves into myth. The book asks you to surrender the need for linear clarity and trust a different rhythm of knowing. Meaning arrives gradually, often long after you have finished the final page.

The same is true of philosophy. When you read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trying to pin down arguments too quickly will only frustrate you. Nietzsche is not offering a system; he is staging encounters. Read him slowly. Read him emotionally. Let sentences trouble you before they instruct you.

Understanding, in good reading, is often delayed — and that delay is productive.

Let Different Genres Teach You Different Ways of Attention

Each genre trains a different muscle of the mind.

A novel trains empathy and patience. A poem sharpens perception. Philosophy cultivates clarity. Memoir teaches honesty.

When reading poetry — say Gitanjali — speed is the enemy. One poem may ask for several readings. Meaning here is felt more than extracted. Read aloud if you can. Let silence do part of the work.

When reading memoir, such as Man’s Search for Meaning, notice not just what is being said, but why it is being said. Frankl’s book is about how meaning is constructed under extreme conditions. Read it not as self-help, but as a testimony — a human voice speaking from experience.

When reading non-fiction or history, resist turning reading into accumulation. With a book like Sapiens, the danger is mistaking information for wisdom. Pause often. Ask what changes in your understanding of yourself, not just what you now know.

Allow Books to Change You Unevenly

Not every book will change you dramatically. Most will change you subtly.

A sentence may stay. A mood may linger. A question may return months later, unexpectedly.

This is normal.

Reading is not a transaction where every book must justify the time spent on it. Some books accompany us in silence. Others confront us. A few reshape us entirely.

When reading The Brothers Karamazov, for example, you may find that different characters speak to you at different stages of life. What you resist at twenty may haunt you at forty. A book does not finish when you close it; it continues to read you over time.

Read With Your Life, Not Against It

Finally, read in conversation with your own life.

If you are grieving, do not force optimism. If you are restless, do not demand stillness. Let books meet you where you are.

Reading The Bhagavad Gita during a period of doubt will feel very different from reading it during a period of confidence. Neither reading is wrong. Each reveals something different.

Books are not answers. They are companions.

A New Year’s Invitation

As this new year begins, my only advice is this: read fewer books, but read them more honestly. Let reading be slower, more personal, more porous. Allow books to confuse you, comfort you, and occasionally resist you.

In a world that constantly asks us to move faster, reading remains one of the few places where slowness still carries meaning.

May this year bring you not just more books, but deeper reading.

Happy New Year!

Deepak Rana.

Anger is a lot of things, but, above all, it’s just a human emotion. Plain and simple.

Unfortunately, most of us are taught early on to either suppress it or fear it.

Don’t be angry.

Control yourself.

Good people don’t lose their temper.

None of these advices work. The anger persists — sometimes simmering quietly, sometimes erupting without warning.

Let’s make one thing clear. Anger is not an anomaly of the human mind. It is a deeply human response. It arises when something within us feels threatened, unheard, violated, or wounded. It can be born out of injustice, disappointment, helplessness, grief, or long-held resentment. Often, anger is not the problem, it is the signal.

What makes anger dangerous is not its presence, but our relationship with it.

Unexamined anger turns inward as bitterness or outward as violence. It clouds judgement, distorts memory, and narrows perception. Physiologically, chronic anger keeps the body in a state of heightened alert — tight muscles, shallow breath, restless sleep, elevated stress hormones. Psychologically, it traps us in repetitive inner narratives: blame, revenge, self-righteousness, regret.

And yet, anger also contains energy. Energy that, when understood, can become clarity. When listened to, can become wisdom. When held with care, can become compassion.

This is where bibliotherapy can help.

How bibliotherapy works with anger

Bibliotherapy does not ask us to get rid of anger. It invites us to sit with it, to observe it through the mirror of language. When we read, we slow down the emotional surge. Words give shape to what otherwise feels chaotic. A book holds our anger safely, without judgement, without urgency.

Reading allows distance without denial. It gives us language where there was only heat. It gives us stories where there was only reaction. Some books do something even more profound: they teach us how to be with anger gently, without suppressing it, without acting it out.

Below are a few books that have proven especially powerful in working with anger.

1. Anger: Buddhist Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thich Nhat Hanh

This book does not treat anger as an enemy. Instead, it treats it as a suffering child.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s central insight is very simple: anger is a form of suffering. When anger arises, something in us is hurting. The practice, then, is not to fight anger, but to care for it with mindfulness, much like we would hold a crying infant.

He invites us to pause when anger appears. To return to the breath. To recognise the physical sensations of anger before the mental stories take over. Tightness in the chest. Heat in the face. Restlessness in the limbs. By naming these sensations, we begin to loosen their grip.

One of the most healing ideas in the book is this:
You do not need to act on your anger in order to honour it.

Anger needs understanding, not expression. When we rush to express it (through harsh words or impulsive actions), we often deepen our own suffering. When we stay with it mindfully, anger transforms on its own.

This book is especially useful for those whose anger turns inward, or who feel ashamed of being angry at all. It teaches kindness without passivity, awareness without repression.

2. Letting Go of Anger by Ronald Potter-Efron

Where Thich Nhat Hanh works through mindfulness, this book works through self-inquiry.

Ron Potter-Efron explores different styles of anger: sudden rage, chronic resentment, passive-aggressive anger, self-directed anger, etc. Many readers find relief simply in recognising their own pattern and realising: I am not uniquely broken. This is a recognisable human pattern.

The book exposes how anger is often layered. Beneath anger lies hurt. Beneath hurt lies fear. Beneath fear lies unmet needs. When anger is the only emotion we allow ourselves to feel, it becomes a substitute for vulnerability.

What makes this book valuable for bibliotherapy is its emphasis on responsibility without self-blame. Letting go of anger does not mean condoning injustice or forgetting wounds. It means releasing the emotional charge that keeps us bound to the past.

For readers who feel stuck in repetitive anger — towards parents, partners, institutions, or even themselves — this book offers a slow, practical path towards emotional freedom.

3. Anger in literature: seeing ourselves in stories

Sometimes non-fiction explains anger, but fiction reveals it.

Literary characters often carry the anger we refuse to admit. Their rage, bitterness, sarcasm, and quiet resentment allow us to recognise our own inner weather without defensiveness.

Think of Dostoevsky’s underground man, burning with wounded pride.
Or Tolstoy’s characters, trapped between moral ideals and emotional reality.
Or even modern novels where anger appears as cynicism, withdrawal, or emotional numbness.

Literature shows us that anger is rarely pure. It is mixed with longing, loneliness, grief, and love. When we read such characters, we are not instructed—we are witnessed. And being witnessed, even by a fictional voice, is deeply healing.

How reading heals anger

Reading slows anger down. It introduces pauses where reaction once ruled. It expands the emotional vocabulary, making room for nuance.

Most important, books remind us that anger is not a personal failure, it is a shared human experience. When anger is met with understanding, it loses its compulsive edge. It no longer needs to shout.

Bibliotherapy works because it does not rush transformation. It trusts time, repetition, and gentle attention.

A writing meditation for working with anger

To close this newsletter, I invite you into a short writing meditation. You do not need to write perfectly. Just write honestly.

Set aside 15–20 minutes. Sit comfortably. Take a few slow breaths.

Then begin:

1. Naming anger
Write without stopping for five minutes, completing this sentence again and again:
“Right now, my anger is…”
Describe it physically, emotionally, without explanation or justification.

2. Listening beneath anger
Now write:
“If my anger could speak, it would say…”
Let it speak freely. Do not censor. Do not argue.

3. Discovering the need
Finally, write:
“What my anger is protecting is…”
This is the most important step. Often, anger is guarding something tender.

When you finish, do not analyse what you have written. Simply read it once, slowly. Then close the notebook.

This act of writing is not about solving anger, it is about befriending it.

Remember…

Anger does not disappear when we fight it. It softens when it is understood. This should be our lesson from the above mentioned books.

And books themselves help us achieve that. They sit beside us when we are heated and confused. They lend us words when our own language fails. They remind us that transformation is often not dramatic. It is quiet, patient, and deeply human.

If you are carrying anger today, perhaps you do not need to fix yourself.

Perhaps you need a book. And a little time.

Sending calmness,

Deepak Rana.

In the times of AI,

will there also be writing?

Yes, there will also be writing.

About the times of AI.

Can AI write better than humans? Of course it can. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then certainly the day after. Inevitably, technology will get better. It already has in so many areas. A chess software can beat any grandmaster; a music software can play the guitar or the violin with flawless precision, far better than any human musician. It surpasses us in technique, but — and this is crucial — only in technique.

There is no fun in playing chess against a computer unless your aim is to train so that you may one day defeat another human. The fun, the drama of the game lives in human error and human imagination — not in perfect calculation.

In the same way, AI will outperform human writers in the technical aspects of writing: grammar, vocabulary, structure, plot design, etc. These are necessary elements of writing, but they are never the whole of it. Just like listening to Siri or Alexa can never be the same as listening to another human. Surely, it’s functional and efficient, but it is also entirely without the texture of life. It does not make you feel anything.

Yes, AI will replace many writers in the future, and thank God for that. Academic writing, for instance, deserves to go obsolete. As a reader one often feels the urge to pull their hair out just to understand a simple point. If AI can explain a concept with clarity and simplicity, why should we resist it? Printing once replaced certain forms of painting and calligraphy, yet painters still paint, calligraphers still use their pens. Similarly, potters still create beauty with their hands even though factories produce millions of pots every day.

So, what will happen? It seems that some forms of writing will disappear. And some will evolve. But writing itself will survive. That much is certain.

But let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that you disagree. Suppose you believe AI will replace all forms of human writing. In that case, will human beings simply stop writing?

To answer that question, let me take you back to the early days of your own writing life. Why did you begin this journey? The reasons may vary, but at the heart of it lies a simple truth: you wrote because you had something to say. As long as you have something to say, you will write. No one can stop you. In fact, the more someone tries to stop you, the stronger your urge is going to be.

You may also wonder: what if there are no readers left? Who will read human writing when AI can produce endless polished pages? But if human history teaches us anything, it is that people always keep exploring. And at least some of them do seek the handmade, the imperfect, the personal. Some still buy hand-made pottery even though machines make “better” pots. Some stand in awe before a painting even though a camera could capture the scene with far more accuracy. There will always be readers who seek the human touch.

Ultimately, we must remember why we read. We do not read a writer because their grammar is perfect. We read them because we love their style. And style is inseparable from one’s personality. It is made of quirks, habits, oddities — certain imperfections that no machine can authentically possess.

I, for instance, begin many sentences with “And”. And when I ask an AI to do the same, it never knows how often to use it. It has no instinct for my rhythm. It can imitate me, but it can never be me. A mannequin may resemble you, but it is still not you. A mimicry artist may sound like you, but they do not become you.

Our works may be replaceable. We are not.

And as long as our inner voice exists — that stubborn, irreplaceable essence that each one of us carries uniquely — there will always be human writing.

If you’d like, I can also… Nah, I am kidding. Just trying to imitate these algorithmic loudmouths. Why should they have all the fun?

This post was originally published here.

We rarely pause to ask what our lives are about, yet the question remains. It appears when we are restless for no obvious reason, when our familiar routines don’t feel quite right, when success doesn’t satisfy, or when loss rearranges the inner landscape. Meaning is not a luxury, it is the very structure that holds us together. And yet, most of us go looking for it only when something goes wrong.

This newsletter is an invitation to think about meaning, without pressure, of course. The idea is to treat it not as a grand riddle to be solved, but as a slow discovery. Three books have helped me personally, and I believe they will offer three different, complementary doorways to you as well.

1. The Meaning of Life by The School of Life

Couldn’t be more apt, right? This is a book for the secular mind, for those who want depth but not dogma. It suggests that meaning is not bestowed from above but assembled through everyday life experiences.

The book outlines eight sources of meaning:

• Love

• Family

• Work

• Friendship

• Culture

• Politics

• Nature

• Philosophy

Each source is explored with clarity, without preaching. It invites you to look at your own life with fresh eyes.

What I appreciate most is its practicality: it doesn’t ask you to change your life overnight, it just wants you to notice what is already there. But the book also leaves out something essential — faith, in whatever form one understands it. For us, though, this absence prepares the ground for the second book.

2. A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy wrote A Confession when he was already a literary giant (he was well admired, wealthy, and accomplished) and yet deeply tormented by the sense that nothing truly mattered. The book is his attempt to confront the void honestly. He doesn’t rush to religion. Instead he reasons, doubts, argues with himself, and slowly arrives at the idea that faith can become a way of giving coherence to life that logic alone cannot provide.

What makes A Confession powerful is its sincerity. It shows how a person can move towards faith without abandoning the intellect. Once this door opens, you can continue the exploration through whichever spiritual or religious traditions feel close to you. Tolstoy doesn’t tell you what to believe, he simply shows why belief, in some form, becomes indispensable when meaning feels unstable.

3. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

If the first book helps you assemble meaning, and the second helps you anchor it, this one teaches you how to protect it. Even in situations where life itself seems to collapse. Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, writes with a clarity sharpened by unimaginably horrific experience. His central idea is this: even when suffering is unavoidable, we still have the freedom to choose our attitude towards it. And in that choice lies meaning. It’s an ancient idea but a powerful one.

Frankl calls his approach logotherapy: the belief that humans are driven not by pleasure or power, but by the search for meaning. He shows how purpose can be found through responsibility, love, and the courage to endure. The book does not romanticise suffering; it simply reminds us that meaning can survive even where hope fades.

These three books together form a path: from understanding meaning in everyday life, to anchoring it through faith, to sustaining it during suffering. They do not offer identical answers, and that is their strength.

If you are searching, questioning, or simply curious, start with any of them. Read slowly. Let the ideas settle. Meaning rarely arrives as a revelation; it grows, quietly, when we give it attention.

How about a writing exercise on the question of Meaning of Life?

We haven’t done that for a while now. I feel this one surely calls for us to go back to our pen and paper.

Let’s start then, shall we?

Find a quiet corner. Sit with a notebook, and no, no screen allowed. Give yourself ten minutes.

Step 1: Begin with a sentence.

Write this at the top of the page:

“Meaning, for me, begins when…”

Complete the sentence without thinking too hard. Let whatever rises come out, even if it feels vague or unexpected.

Step 2: Explore your present anchors.

Below it, make three headings:

What gives me strength

What brings me peace

What makes me feel alive

Under each heading, write a few lines. Don’t judge whether these things are big or small. Meaning often hides in the ordinary.

Step 3: Notice what is missing.

Now write: “One part of my life that feels lacking or disconnected is…”

Be honest. This isn’t about blame. It’s about clarity.

Step 4: Write an intention.

End with this line:

“A small step I can take this week to deepen meaning is…”

Let the step be tiny: a conversation, a walk, a page of reading, a moment of prayer or silence. Meaning grows through small consistencies, not dramatic turns.

Step 5: Close with gratitude.

Write one sentence about something in your life that already carries meaning, even if you forget it sometimes.

If you’ve come this far, you should be very proud of yourself. I am certainly proud of you.

See you next time?

Cheers! Keep yourself warm in winter.

Regards,

Deepak Rana.

I know I’ve been away for a little while, and some of you actually wrote to ask if everything was all right. Yes, everything is all right — it has simply been a season of busyness (not necessarily business). My new book, Tea Tales from Palampur, has just been released, and in those final weeks before publication I found myself completely wrapped up in edits, emails, promotions, and that strange mix of excitement and nervousness that comes with sending a book out into the world. It’s been quite an experience, but the mostly good kind.

I’ve missed writing to you, and I didn’t want to return empty-handed. So today, I’m sharing with you a small gift: a sample chapter from Tea Tales from Palampur. It’s one of my favourite pieces from the collection — simple but full of the quiet warmth that tea, hills, and stories bring into our lives. I hope it finds you in a moment of stillness, and that it carries you, even briefly, to the slopes and silence of Palampur. Amen!

Sample Chapter

Zen Way of Drinking Tea

Like many concepts in Eastern philosophy, “Zen” has no precise English equivalent. Derived from the Chinese Ch’an and ultimately from the Sanskrit Dhyana, it is often translated as “meditation,” though that word scarcely captures its meaning. What is fascinating is how Dhyana travelled from India to China, then to Japan as Zen, and finally returned to us, only for us to embrace it again as Zen rather than our own Dhyana.

Perhaps that is who we are: we often find the familiar too ordinary and fall in love with it only after it has travelled the world and returned with an exotic name. Yet, at its heart, the meaning remains the same. In India, Dhyana signifies a state of direct communion with reality itself, and in Japan, Zen carries this same spirit: not a retreat from the world but a deep presence within it. It is found not in isolation but in the ordinariness of life, in chopping wood, cooking rice, or cleaning the floor. If we must translate it at all, “enlightenment” comes closest, though Zen is both the light and the path towards it.

How does tea relate to the idea? Well, an ancient poet once wrote:

The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my inmost being… The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration— all the wrongs of life pass away through my pores. At the fifth cup, I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the Immortals. The seventh cup— ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Heaven? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.

Such were the feelings that became associated with tea-drinking. It was much more than a drink made from dried leaves, for a Zen master could say: “Mark well that the taste of Zen (Ch’an) and the taste of the tea (Cha) are the same.”

In the Zen tea ceremony, we find the Zen philosophy in its most peaceful aspect, expressed through the slightest spiritual gesture, and utter deficiency of things. It was an expression of the natural order— the harmony of belonging and its basic principles were an insistence on the transience of nature, of her unending changes, mercy, her avoidance of variety, her avoidance of flashiness, and lastly the indefinable quality called yugen, which is described as ‘the subtle, as opposed to the obvious.’

Can we recreate that rich experience in our tea ceremony? Well… we can certainly try. I did.

***

The tea leaves that I had brought from the estate, there were a few of them left. I made the green tea just as I had described in the previous chapter, packed it carefully in a small flask, and began walking towards the river.

I walked close to Hideout Cafe. I think it is better that the cafe remains a hideout, and nobody ever finds it. Because right next to it lies a big dump of garbage, an eyesore that even the generous Dhauladhar sight cannot redeem. The recycling processing unit nearby hums constantly, and the smell of rotting waste drifts across the bridge where a few travellers sit, sipping coffee and pretending not to notice. Clearly not the place you would want to be.

I kept walking upstream, following the sound of the river until the air grew clean again. The smell disappeared, replaced by the freshness of pine trees and water. I found a flat rock, sat down, and dipped my feet into the cold water. The river flowed around my ankles as I poured myself a cup of tea. The sun was setting right in front of me— soft gold scattering across the ripples, steam rising gently from the flask. For a moment, which felt like eternity, there was nothing else I needed.

***

There are two ways to have a tea experience. We have these two choices every time, and they are not just about the tea. One is to immerse yourself in the act of drinking tea, relishing every drop of it: its taste, aroma and sensations that it stirs in you. The other is by letting your mind wander to the past or future, and missing out on the experience of tea completely. The first is what mindfulness asks us to do, something I experienced on that day at the river; the second is what most of us do most of the time.

It’s easy to tell which way is better. But then, we cannot keep obsessing over tea, right? That will defeat the whole purpose.

Let’s go back a few moments. If while washing the dishes you think only of the cup of tea that awaits you, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then you are not washing the dishes to wash the dishes. In other words, you are not being mindful.

What’s more, you are not alive during the time you are washing the dishes. In fact, you are completely incapable of realising the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If you can’t wash the dishes, the chances are you won’t be able to drink your tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, you will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in your hands. Thus, you are sucked away into the future, and you are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

This is what we mean when we use the word mindfulness. It is the acceptance of the present experience. It is opening to (or receiving) the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it. Simply experiencing things as they come. Without worrying about our thoughts or letting them spoil every other experience that we have.

The act of drinking tea can be therapeutic: it depends on how well we do it.

Buy Tea Tales from Palampur

Shall we, then?

All right.

Well…

It all starts with love!

Alain de Botton, in his book Status Anxiety, makes this interesting point:

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone.

Both these quests leave us vulnerable. Envy takes root in the absence of what we desire; jealousy begins once we have possessed it. It feels as though we are eternally cursed to choose one of these two: either yearning for what is not ours or guarding what is.

One answer, as Buddhists would remind us, is to give up on desire altogether. Neither chase, nor cling. Really? Let's be honest. For most of us, that idea remains a distant dream. A more reasonable approach is to ask ourselves this simple question: how do we live meaningfully in the space between desire and detachment, between envy and jealousy?

It's not easy, I can tell you that. I am no stranger to either jealousy or envy.

Each time I have allowed myself to be truly sensitive, which is almost the price you must pay for any romantic pursuits (relationship or career), somehow jealousy has found its way to me. The desire to hold on, to possess, to keep what feels like belongs to me - I have experienced it in different shades. Even retroactive jealousy (jealousy of your partner's previous relationships) catches me if there is nothing to worry in the present.

Envy, too, returns frequently, for it is difficult not to measure myself against others. To be honest, I feel it the most when I read writers I greatly admire. I know I will never write with the eloquence of Gabriel Garcia or the philosophical genius of Milan Kundera, and boy, does that realisation sting! I know I cannot ignore these feelings. I have to live with them, understand them and grow past them.

If you find yourself in the same boat, let’s begin to untangle these emotions together. Through bibliotherapy, we’ll look for ways to heal, starting with jealousy, then we'll turn to envy.

Jealousy

As I mentioned earlier, jealousy is almost always triangular: it involves you, someone you love, and a rival you imagine or perceive. At its root, it rests on three things: the fear of losing someone, the comparison of your worth against another, and the stories you tell yourself to make sense of it all. The last part is important, because shifting the narrative can also shift the feeling.

In our everyday life, jealousy can appear in various forms: the sudden pain when a partner laughs too warmly at someone else, or the hurt when they are being critical of you while simultaneously admiring others, or in this digital era, the desperate urge to monitor their text messages (not to mention their social media activity). If you’ve experienced any of these symptoms, let’s try to find a way out.

The purpose of our bibliotherapy is not to erase jealousy (it is too deeply human for that) but to notice its shapes, examine its stories, and practise responses that do not wound either us or our partners.

On to the books then…

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Intention: To see the shape of our jealousy

Marcus Aurelius’s timeless work Meditations gives us a lens to see the shape of our feeling. Jealousy often grows out of comparison and the fear of losing our place in the world, and Marcus Aurelius reminds us that such fears come from illusions of permanence and control. By slowing down with his words, we begin to notice how much of jealousy is our own projection, how often it has more to do with our restless mind than with the outside world.

How to read: 10–15 minutes each morning. Write one short passage into your journal and go back to it whenever you feel the need.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Intention: To see and understand our feelings through fictional characters

Fiction lets you inhabit jealousy without being swallowed by it. Although this novel is not just about jealousy, but the theme comes up in different ways. It opens the door to our emotions by showing them lived out in others.

Through its three key characters Tomas, Tereza, and Sabina, we see love shadowed by jealousy, not as abstract theory but as lived contradiction. To read this book is to recognise our own conflicting desires reflected in fictional lives, and to see that jealousy, while painful, can also be a teacher of the complexity of being human.

How to read: Choose a short scene or chapter (max 10–15 pages). After reading, you can reflect or even do a ten-minute “character interview”: write questions you would ask the jealous character and answer them as that character. Note which answers echo your own inner voice.

Jealousy by Marcel Proust

Intention: Noticing jealousy slowed down to its mechanics

In Proust’s world, every emotion is stretched and magnified until we can see its inner mechanics. So is the case with jealousy in this short book, extracted from Volume V of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. The narrator’s obsessive jealousy towards his girlfriend Albertine is described in such slow detail that we almost feel trapped inside his restless mind. This can be unsettling, but it also helps us recognise the patterns of our own thoughts: the suspicion, the invention, the endless spirals. Reading Proust, jealousy stops being a vague feeling and becomes something we can observe, and in observing, perhaps loosen.

How to read: Take a short passage (no more than 3–4 pages). Read slowly, even aloud. After finishing, draw a three-step map in your journal: Trigger leads to Imagination (story you cook in your head) which leads to Action (or lack of it). Then repeat the map with one of your own jealous moments from the week. The aim is not to solve but to see the machinery clearly.

The Jealousy Cure by Robert Leahy

Intention: Understanding the psychology behind jealousy and find practical ways to deal with it

Unlike fiction or philosophy, Robert Leahy approaches jealousy with the tools of psychology. He breaks down what jealousy really is, how it arises, and most importantly, how we can deal with it in practical ways. His methods are grounded in cognitive-behavioural therapy, giving us exercises and strategies to question our assumptions, test our fears, and slowly reshape the emotional patterns that feed jealousy.

How to read: Practise one CBT technique per week (thought record, behavioural experiment).

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

Intention: Integrate with compassion and presence

The final step is not analysis but compassion. Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance (Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings will also do the same) teach us how to meet jealousy with presence rather than judgement. These texts remind us that beneath jealousy is usually fear: the fear of being unworthy or unloved. By learning to sit with that fear, by offering it compassion instead of resistance, we find a way to integrate jealousy into a larger practice of healing.

How to read: After a passage, do a 5–10 minute body-scan noting where jealousy sits physically. Offer the sensation a compassionate phrase (not a slogan, something calm and specific: “I notice fear in my chest. I will sit with it for five minutes.”).

Envy

Envy is different from jealousy because it does not form a triangle. It is simply you and what another person has that you secretly wish for. Psychologically, it works like a social thermometer: it shows you where you feel a lack, or where a hidden desire lives.

I am sure you’ve witnessed this sibling of jealousy as well. The twinge when a colleague is praised, or the anxiety when you scroll through social media and see someone living the life you wished for yourself. We instantly know this feeling is rarely healthy, which means, once again, we need to find a way out.

Once again, while practising bibliotherapy for envy, our task is not to scold ourselves for these emotions but to read the texts carefully, translate its message into a real need, and then convert that energy into a creative pursuit rather than a hidden resentment.

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Intention: Moving beyond comparison and gain perspective

Alain de Botton shows us how envy is not simply a personal weakness but a social condition. In Status Anxiety, he traces how our comparisons are sharpened by the culture we live in and how the modern world constantly measures success by wealth, recognition, and status. Reading this book is to stepping back and seeing envy with a wider lens, as something shaped by society rather than only by our own failings. That shift in perspective softens envy, making it less a private shame and more a shared human struggle.

How to read: Begin with one “Cause” chapter. Underline every example that feels uncomfortably close, and note it in your journal as a Challenge. Then read one “solution” chapter. For the next week, run a small experiment with that solution. For instance, if you read the section on art, spend ten minutes daily with a painting, poem, or piece of music that shifts your sense of value. At week’s end, try to answer these questions in your journal: What changed in my envy? Did it shrink, transform, or relocate?

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Intention: See envy more clearly through fiction

Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky, in very different ways, reveal envy as a kind of longing rather than mere malice. Gatsby’s glittering parties mask his desperate desire to be seen as worthy in Daisy’s world, while Dostoevsky’s underground man is eaten by resentment because he feels excluded from the life of dignity and recognition that others seem to have. In both, envy is a form of yearning: for love, for respect, for belonging. Through these characters we see that envy is often the shadow of a deeper desire to be accepted.

How to read: For each chapter, list what the narrator envies and what that thing signifies (status, love, belonging). Ask: “If this were a need, which need would it be?”

Envy and Gratitude by Melanie Klein

Intention: Understanding the structure, including both clinical and social frames

In this brilliant book, Melanie Klein unpacks envy with the clarity of psychoanalysis. She shows us how envy is rooted in our earliest experiences of love and lack, and how it shapes not only personal relationships but also the way societies fracture under rivalry and resentment. Reading Klein helps us see envy not as a random storm of emotion but as a structured pattern, with causes and consequences. By recognising this pattern, we gain freedom from it, and perhaps find some space to cultivate gratitude instead.

How to read: Read a short Klein essay slowly, then write: “What part of this feels familiar?” For Schoeck, underline passages that feel true in your local social life and note a concrete example.

Quite a few books, right?

I hope you find time to explore at least some of them. If not, then at least you get time to slow down. What I have learnt, both in reading and in my own life, is that jealousy and envy are strange messengers that return again and again until we stop and listen.

Like most human emotions, jealousy is often clumsy in its language, pointing at loss or longing in ways that unsettle us. Reading and writing helps because language takes out the abstraction and turns it into something specific. Writers give us a perspective which often helps. When we put the book down and turn to the page of a journal, we can continue that work in our own handwriting, slowly making sense of what these emotions are really asking from us. I know all this work is not glamorous, but it is real, and it leaves you a little more honest with yourself than before. It heals you.

I wish you well in your journey!

Cheers,

Deepak Rana.

For most of human history, we lived in forests. We found shelter in caves, roamed in wilderness, and jumped from one tree to another. Before that, we even swam in the oceans. Eventually, though, we built safe havens (these places kept growing from villages to towns to cities) away from the wilderness, but the memory of that earlier life still remains. Deep down, we long to return to nature. And each time we go back, we feel its therapeutic effect.

Whenever I talk about our connection with the rest of the universe, I am reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh's idea of Interbeing as he described in his book The Art of Living:

Imagine, for a moment, a beautiful flower. That flower might be an orchid or a rose, or even a simple little daisy growing beside a path. Looking into a flower, we can see that it is full of life. It contains soil, rain, and sunshine. It is also full of clouds, oceans, and minerals. It is even full of space and time. In fact, the whole cosmos is present in this one little flower. If we took out just one of these “non-flower” elements, the flower would not be there. Without the soil’s nutrients, the flower could not grow. Without rain and sunshine, the flower would die. And if we removed all the non-flower elements, there would be nothing substantive left that we could call a “flower.” So our observation tells us that the flower is full of the whole cosmos, while at the same time it is empty of a separate self-existence. The flower cannot exist by itself alone.

Take a moment to reflect on this idea.

…

We are connected. We belong to the same tree of life. We are leaves of a giant tree whose roots stretch deep into the past, while its branches reach far into the future. You can call yourself a leaf or call yourself the tree, I don't think there is much of a difference. That is what I mean when I say: We are nature.

I am sure, by now, you know that at The Literary Clinic, we try to heal and understand ourselves through words. And this is what I hope to do in this newsletter: to take you closer to nature through literature.

Let me give you a glimpse of appreciating nature through language. The first passage is from a book called Small Pleasures. It appreciates the quiet charm of daisies. Let's read it then, shall we?

They are very small. You have to lie down to see them properly in their native state, scattered in small groups or sprouting in isolation in the unmowed grass. They start showing themselves in April and can still be around in October. Bellis perennis, the common daisy, can live from year to year even if it gets regularly decapitated, so long as its roots can extract enough moisture from the soil. None, however, for certain, are known to have survived for more than twenty years. But this may reflect our limited curiosity rather than indicate the natural horizon of their being. At the height of their flourishing they may stand five centimeters tall. The conjunction of the golden yellow of the cluster of the tiny heads at the centre and the fringe of just off-white petals is nature's one of the most charming colour arrangements. It might make one think for a moment, of a fried egg, or of the interior of a Russian palace from the time of Catherine the Great. 

Once we pay them proper attention, daisies are not only beautiful and charming in themselves, they also provide an unaccepted, yet, telling point of access to a major cultural issue: the imperfect distribution of cultural prestige. Because, in spite of how nice they really are, daisies are not taken seriously. You can't actually buy an ordinary daisy. The nearest you can get is ordering a packet of daisy seeds, or at the extreme, buying a house with daisies growing on the lawn. But you don't see them in the shops, nor anybody delivers them at home. We don't give each other bunches of daisies to mark special occasions. We don't go on special trips to look for famous daisy gardens. Couples don't purchase a single daisy as a token of their love. This isn't the failure on part of the flower, rather, it's an oversight on our part. We disdain the daisy for an unfortunate reason. It is abundant. It's a victim of a pervasive idea that to be special something has to be rare.

Lovely passage on this lovely flower, right? I hope you, too, find a bunch of daisies today, and more importantly, you find time to appreciate them.

How about a poem now? When we talk about nature, Wordsworth is one of the first writers that comes to mind. So, let me share his short poem on rainbows.

My heart leaps up when I behold 

       A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began; 

So is it now I am a man; 

So be it when I shall grow old, 

       Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Now that you’ve paused a little with Wordsworth's words, let me take you towards books that can help you experience nature in deeper, more intimate ways. Let’s go.

1. The Book of Nature by Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond at his tender and observant best. He looks at birds, trees, rivers, and seasons as a true companion of the hills. He starts with his childhood experiences in Dehradun (it was a very different town, back then) and takes you on a journey spanning decades in the Himalayas. The book will remind you that nature’s presence is best felt in its ordinariness. It could be the call of a bird, the shade of an old tree, or the first rains on a dusty road.

Reading tip: Carry this book outdoors, preferably somewhere close to nature. Read a short essay at a time, and then pause. Look around you, and notice something alive that you hadn’t noticed before.

2. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Now you can go a little deeper and reflect on some fundamental questions about living close to nature. Thoreau's Walden is going to be a great company if you take that path. The book moves between the practical (such as building a hut, planting beans etc) and the philosophical: what it means to live simply, close to nature, and free of unnecessary possessions. At its heart, the book is more of a philosophical meditation on how intimacy with nature can free the mind from society’s noise.

Reading tip: Read it in small portions, perhaps a chapter at a time, and resist the urge to hurry. Let it accompany you in quiet spaces. Journal your thoughts after reading (especially the question he raises on economy), and see how your own philosophy of living begins to take shape.

3. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

This book is often called a modern classic of nature writing. Although it was published over a century after Walden, you’d find quite a few similarities in these two. Not just in terms of their style of journal-like writing, but also the underlying philosophy of American Transcendentalism. This movement emphasised the inherent goodness of people and nature, and the idea that individuals could have a direct, intuitive connection to the divine through their inner conscience and connection to the natural world. Which reminds me, you can also read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which is probably where this movement started.

Coming to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it’s again a spiritual inquiry through the lens of the natural world. Dillard lingers on dragonflies, frogs, light on water, and even violence in the natural order. She then asks what these reveal about existence itself. Makes you think, really.

Reading tip: Once again, not a book to rush through. Read a few pages outdoors, if possible. Sit with her questions. Allow discomfort as well as beauty to settle in you. I feel it is in that tension that her writing does its best work.

4. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Let's get out of philosophical meditations and maybe try to understand the nature through a scientific lens. In this book, Wohlleben draws on both science and his years as a forester to show us that trees are not solitary but deeply social beings. They nurture one another, warn of danger, and share resources through vast underground networks. Trust me, once you’ve read this book, you will never walk through a forest the same way again. You’ll see communication, cooperation, bonding, literally magic in every cluster of trees.

Reading tip: Read with patience, imagining yourself beneath a forest canopy. After each chapter, take a walk among trees (even a single old banyan or neem will do) and try to observe their community.

5. Cosmos by Carl Sagan

There are two ways to appreciate nature: one, by getting close to it and being a part of it, and two, just wondering at its immensity and beauty from a distance. The second approach allows to you experience what the writers have described as the feeling of sublime. And that's the intention here. Carl Sagan, in this book, opens the universe for us. And you feel like at home. With wonder and humility, he reminds us that the atoms in our bodies were forged in ancient stars, that we are literally made of stardust. The book weaves science with awe, showing that to look at the stars is to rediscover ourselves as part of a vast, living cosmos.

Reading tip: Read at night, under the open sky if you can. Let the pages expand your imagination until you feel both small and immeasurably connected. Read slowly. Pause often to gaze upwards.

6. The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

For our last recommendation, let’s engage with nature at a more intimate level. In this book David Abram argues that our senses, our language, and even our imagination are rooted in the more-than-human world. We need to start looking outside our species and connect with the rest of the life forms. The rustle of leaves, the flight of birds, the voice of wind. They all speak to us, if only we care to listen. Modern life, he suggests, has dulled this connection, but we can relearn how to live sensuously, in dialogue with the earth. Inspired by various indigenous practices, particularly of East Asia, this book changes how you listen, how you touch, how you read, and how you speak with the world.

Reading tip: Read it slowly, sometimes aloud, preferably outdoors. After each chapter, practise mindfulness. Feel the ground beneath your feet, listen to sounds around you, notice how your body is part of the landscape. It is less a book to finish and more a book to inhabit.

I have been discussing these books on my podcast as well. You can follow the podcast on below links if it interests you.

A Book A Day podcast on Spotify

A Book A Day podcast on Youtube

Writing with Nature

Reading the books, of course, is one way to reconnect, but there is writing too. Writing slows us down and makes us pay attention. When we write, we begin to notice what might slip past us in our reading.

So, here is a simple practice you can try. Just follow these steps:

• Choose a spot outdoors. It could be a garden bench, a balcony with plants, or even a window that looks onto the sky.

• Sit in silence for five minutes. Do nothing except breathe and look around. Notice what calls your attention. It could be a really small thing, even a distraction, let’s say.

• Write freely for ten minutes. Describe what you see, hear, smell, and feel. Do not worry about style or grammar. Just let the words flow.

• Return the next day to the same spot, and do it again. When you do this for a week, you will notice how the place changes, and how you yourself change with it.

If you keep such a journal, you’ll gradually build a personal history of your relationship with the outside world. It’s a record not just of your days, but of the seasons, the weather, the birds and trees that share your life. You’ll feel more grounded.

I really hope you get a chance to experience nature closely. I hope the above mentioned books and practices help you. Just a small request before I sign off. Do not treat these works as tasks to complete. Let them be companions. Read a little, then step outside. Take breaks. Allow the words to reshape how you walk, talk, look, and breathe. The joy lies as much in the process as it is there in the peace that we are seeking.

I hope you find that joy.

Cheers! I will write to you soon.

Deepak Rana.

1. Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage through India by Alexander Frater

2. Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (Edited by: Imke Rajamani, Margrit Pernau and Katherine Butler Schofield)

3. Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas by Ruskin Bond

4. Meghaduta by Kalidasa

The five-letter word carries a weight far greater than the sound when uttered.

Grief is a void. That is, perhaps, the simplest way to describe it.

A hollowing.

A sense of loss.

It may be caused by the absence of someone you loved (human or pet) or something less tangible: the end of a relationship, the fading of a dream. You had something, and now you do not. It’s gone. How does one go on living? How does the body and mind learn to adjust to the new reality?

It's not easy; it wasn't supposed to be. The Buddhists warned us long ago. They said that the more attachments we carry, the more we suffer. But I wonder if the Buddhists themselves understand the human condition. We are, after all, human: fallible, tender, endlessly prone to attachments. No matter how often we are reminded of non-attachment, our instincts only reach out to second part of that teaching. We want to keep close what we love. We want to hold on to people, places, objects, moments. They matter to us in an otherwise meaningless movement of matter. And so, attachment is inevitable. Which also means suffering is inevitable. For everything we have, at some point, must be lost.

So what then? What do we do, knowing this sad reality? What do we do, after we have lost them? Can we turn to books for the answer?

That's what we do here.

Bibliotherapy for Grief

Books cannot take away grief, but they can walk beside us through it. They remind us, first of all, that grief is not ours to carry alone. Others before us have felt it, written of it, endured it. In their words, we can trace our own experience, and that in itself can be comforting.

Secondly, literature (like all art) has the power to lift an emotion out of the heart and give it a form. Grief, when left unspoken, sinks deep into the body and can stay their for long without our approval, or acknowledgement. Often, what weighs on us lies beyond the reach of reason or logic. But art has its own language, one that travels into those hidden corridors of the subconscious and stirs what has been waiting there.

A story, a poem, even a single line of prose can name that heaviness, bringing it to the surface where we can see it, recognise it, and breathe with it.

Then there is the act of reading itself. To sit with a book is to slow down the flux of thoughts. It allows us to step into a new world, shifting our perspective to a better narrative. The grief is still there (it will always be there, where can it go?) but our way of holding it begins to change. We learn to live peacefully with it.

That, perhaps, is the most precious gift of books in times of grief. Not only do they take us towards the solutions, but they also offer companionship while doing so. And in that companionship, our healing begins.

In this newsletter, I will share a few steps and practices (don't worry, nothing complicated here) that may gently guide you through mourning, towards a more bearable way of carrying loss.

Step 1. Naming the loss

We are rarely good at articulating our emotions with clarity. Often, the feelings are there but the words are missing. At such times, we need an outside voice. A writer can make us feel seen, heard, and understood. That is why the first step is simply to find words that resonate with us. Begin slowly, perhaps with a poem, a quote from a book, or even a single phrase. Ease yourself into the act of reading. Sometimes, just one sentence is enough to open the door. Let me share a few passages that might resonate with you in times of grief.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

G Snow

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an event. We imagine the moment of death itself. But we do not anticipate the shock of the absence, the void that comes after. We might expect to be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. Instead, we find ourselves strangely mechanical. We go through motions: answering calls, writing thank-you notes, eating because others put food in front of us. We look up and discover days and weeks have passed. Yet in some deep way, the world has altered. Something essential has shifted, and nothing will be as it was.  

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I also found the below letter quite valuable. It was written by singer Nick Cave in 2018 to a fan named Cynthia who told him about her family’s losses and asked the singer how he and his wife Susie dealt with the loss of their son Arthur, who died tragically in 2015.

Dear Cynthia, 

This is a very beautiful question and I am grateful that you have asked it. It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

Step 2. Understanding the shape of grief

It is important to recognise how grief moves and changes within us. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Grief and Grieving is especially helpful here. In this book, she offers the five stages of grief:

• Denial – the stunned silence, the refusal to believe.

• Anger – at fate, at the situation, even at ourselves.

• Bargaining – the what ifs, the regrets, what could have been.

• Depression – when the reality sets in, and the heart weeps.

• Acceptance – learning to live with the loss.

Remember that these stages are not always in order. They circle, overlap, and return. But knowing them helps us understand the shape of what we are feeling.

Step 3. Sitting with silence

We run away from our emotions when it gets too painful. But at some point, we have to face them.

The courage to sit with raw emotions may not arrive at first, but there are ways to cultivate it. Mindfulness could be one. Thich Nhat Hạnh’s book No Death, No Fear can be a perfect guide here. It reminds us to breathe, to rest, and to find courage when we are struggling with fear.

Step 4. Finding companionship in books

When you are ready, you can then start reading a book. Reading books can offer meaningful connections through characters who carry grief of their own. Their stories remind us that we are not alone. Here are some of the books that you can consider.

Losing a spouse or lover

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis – a raw journal of pain and faith after his wife’s death.

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – an honest account of loss, memory, and the disorientation of grief.

Losing a parent

• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald – a daughter turns to training a hawk to process her father’s death.

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer – a child searches for meaning after losing his father in 9/11.

Losing a child

• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – narrated by a murdered child watching her family’s struggle to heal. As they say, the smallest coffins are the heaviest, but I just hope through this shared grief we help each other in our healing journey.

Losing a pet

• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez – a woman inherits her late friend’s Great Dane, finding healing in companionship. The novel will take you back to the wonderful time you spent with your pet.

Losing a relationship

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami – young love, loss, and the silence that follows.

• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee – an exploration of dignity and relational loss, and it goes well beyond romance.

Anticipating one’s own death

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy – a man only confronts the meaning of life as he approaches its end.

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi – a doctor reflects on life and meaning in the face of terminal illness.

Step 5. Creating meaning

Beyond survival, grief invites us to search for meaning. Once again, I find Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear is especially consoling here. With simple explanations on life (clouds becoming rain, waves becoming water) he helps us see death not as an ending but as transformation. Another book you can read is Ram Dass’s Still Here. It offers deep comfort, blending wry humour and compassion as Dass reflects on ageing, change, and dying.

Step 6. Writing as healing

Writing has a great healing power. Putting emotions onto paper allows us to see them more clearly. The burden feels lighter once it has been written down. The story in the mind begins to shift; clarity grows word by word. It’s okay if you feel a little hesitant to write at this point. Take your time. Start slow. Writing, after all, is not just about putting out words there. It’s about creating a space where healing can quietly take root.

I hope these literary prescriptions help you if you’re going through difficult times. In case you are looking for more personal recommendations or bibliotherapy sessions, please do reach out. I would be glad to help you in every way I can.

Wishing you gentleness and peace,

Deepak Rana.

How have you been?

It’s been a while since we last connected. Maybe months? But here’s something that you might like. After taking a literary hike across different corners of India (hope you read the previous newsletters), I’ve been quietly working on something that has long been close to my heart: the healing power of books.

This journey has led me to reconsider the title of this newsletter. It will be The Literary Clinic from now on. Here, I will focus on this simple practice: using books as tools for healing. Just as a doctor might prescribe medicine for the body, I want to prescribe stories, poems, and books that can soothe the restless mind, lift a heavy heart, more importantly, bring clarity in times of confusion.

Every newsletter will focus on a specific theme or emotional challenge, and I’ll share a carefully chosen reading list that acts as a kind of literary prescription. Sounds good?

I hope you’ll walk with me on this new path, as you have so warmly done in the past. Your support has kept this work alive, and I’m deeply grateful.

Now, let’s open today’s prescription. Our focus this time is on something almost everyone wrestles with at some point. Anxiety!

Some thoughts on anxiety:

Every human worries on occasion, but for some of us, the suffering is on a quite different and more threatening scale: we are, without wishing to be ungrateful or absurd, more or less permanently anxious.

Can we define it, to make matters clearer? Let's try.

Alain de Botton, in his book, The Consolations of Philosophy, defines anxiety as: a condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the worst. He further suggests that anxiety typically leaves its sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social.

Psychologists say that there are some well-founded reasons for us to feel anxious, some of which are:

1. We are intensely vulnerable physical beings, a complicated network of fragile organs.

2. We have insufficient information upon which to make most major life decisions: we are steering more or less blind.

3. We can imagine so much more than we have and live in mobile-driven, media-driven societies where envy and restlessness will be a constant.

4. We are the descendants of the great worriers of the species, the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals, and because we still carry in our bones.

5. Visible objects and locations, hills and beaches, can only symbolise calm to our eyes rather than instil it in our psyches.

6. The progress of our careers and of our finances play themselves out within the tough-minded, competitive, destructive, random workings of an uncontained capitalist engine.

7. We rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own.

Clearly, there are valid reasons to feel anxious. But the real problem begins when anxiety grows so strong that it starts affecting our daily life, when even simple tasks feel overwhelming.

At that point, it’s important to seek extra support. A medical professional or a therapist can guide us. It also helps to talk to loved ones and share what we’re going through. And sometimes, books themselves can be part of the healing. That’s where bibliotherapy comes in. And this is exactly what we’re exploring here.

Books on anxiety:

I’m going to divide these recommendations into two stages—something I learned from traditional Indian meditation practices. In these teachings, the mind is compared to a mountain lake. The first step to clearing the lake is not to stir it up, but to let it settle and become still. Only when the ripples fade can we see the bottom clearly.

In the same way, the first set of books will help you find calm and stillness. Once your mind feels steadier, the second set will help you look deeper, understand the roots of your anxiety, and begin working through it.

Books to help us feel calm:

Calm: The School of Life has been doing exceptional work in the field of emotional health, and Calm is a valuable offering. It’s a gentle, wise guide that helps you untangle the knots of worry and find clarity.

How to Relax: Thich Nhat Hanh brings the depth of Eastern meditation traditions into simple, everyday moments. His approach to mindfulness is tender and profoundly grounding. It’s like being reminded to breathe again. This is a short book but quite helpful.

The Art of Living: For those who appreciate Stoic philosophy, this is a timeless companion. Epictetus teaches that while we cannot control the world, we can shape our response to it. Reading this can be like having a calm, rational friend beside you, someone who gently reminds you to stand steady when life pushes hard.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog: All right, enough of non-fiction, let me suggest a novel now. If you enjoy philosophy and thoughtful, intelligent conversations, this novel is a quiet treasure. It’s the story of unlikely connections, of beauty found in hidden corners, and of minds meeting across divides.

Books to work on anxiety:

Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind: Once again, a wonderful guide by The School of Life. The book is not about quick fixes, it’s about understanding the anxious mind with compassion and clarity. It helps us understand ourselves better, while reminding us we are not the only ones battling this struggle.

The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook: If you want something practical and structured, this workbook is like a toolkit you can open whenever anxiety takes hold. It offers exercises, strategies, and step-by-step ways to handle everything from panic to worry.

Hope and Help for Your Nerves: Dr. Claire Weekes, the author, has helped countless people break free from the cycle of anxiety. She speaks directly, almost like a trusted elder who knows exactly what you’re going through. Her simple methods can make you feel that recovery isn’t just possible, it’s very much within reach.

The practice of daily journaling:

Enough of reading, we can also try some writing now. How about journaling?

Journaling is like sitting down with a trusted friend who listens without judgement. Except in this case, the listener is also you. When you pour your thoughts onto paper, you give your restless mind a safe place to rest, and almost instantly, there’s a softening — a little more space to breathe, a little more calm in the storm.

Over time, as you return to the page day after day, patterns begin to appear. You start noticing what sparks your anxiety, what situations or thoughts keep repeating. You can recognise the patterns This awareness is powerful, because once you see the roots of your anxiety clearly, you can begin to tend to them. You can change what you can, and make peace with what you can’t. In this way, journaling becomes both a daily act of self-soothing and a quiet path towards deeper healing.

And to make your journaling even more special, you can use a handmade notebook. Something that I have been doing for a while now.

You can get these at Minchole Papers. Its creator crafts exquisite handmade stationery that feels like art in your hands. Every page carries a quiet elegance, perfect for capturing your thoughts, sketches, or dreams. If you’re looking for a journal that inspires you to write, I can’t recommend them enough. Treat yourself to the beauty of Minchole Papers.

Remember, dealing with anxiety is rarely about “fixing” yourself overnight. It’s about creating small, steady moments of calm that add up over time. Whether it’s through reading, journaling, or simply pausing to breathe, each step is an act of care. You deserve that patience and kindness from yourself. Keep showing up for these moments, and slowly, you’ll find that the weight you carry feels a little lighter.

I hope it helps!

Thank you for taking time to read this letter. I’m always happy to hear from you, whether it’s a question, a thought, or simply how you’re feeling today. My inbox is open.

Cheers!

Deepak Rana