Grasshopper in DNA

While I was sitting on my doorstep pulling oil this morning, I opened the newspaper and saw the cover picture of my novel, in the DNA newspaper. Yes, I know one is not supposed to multitask while oil pulling, but tell me, can health be more important than name and fame? ;)

Here is the link, but its not readable, so I have stolen it. Here is the review:


DailyNews & Analysis

Sunday, April 05, 2009

DNASundayBangalore Page10

Hopping into the inner self

Previous life connections answer existential questions in the practical world

SumaaTekur

The characters of A Grasshopper's Pilgrimage operate on a different, intangible plane.
It's a world where people recognise each other from previous lifetimes, where "shining
eyes" mean that the person is on a glowing spiritual path and where instincts and
premonitions play out in lif e's drama exactly the way the mind had seen them.
Gopika, a single PYT (pretty young thing) from Calcutta, braves the grime, dirt and
the crowded train rides of Mumbai to work in a television channel, a perfectly sane
job which she finds absurd. Gopika rebuff s potential boy friends, has long
conversations on existential questions with her colleague, Sujata, and is on a hunt for
a guru who can answer all her questions.

Her heart is hooked to various anchors as she flits from one guru to the next. In
Mumbai, she finds solace in the teachings of spiritual teacher, Ramesh. He say s that
we are all nothing but screws in a large piece of machinery that is life. This becomes
her life mantra.

Written in a simple and lucid style, A Grasshopper's Pilgrimage is not a book just
about spiritual quest. It would then have been just another 170-odd pages added to
the "fiction-spiritual" genre. The story is about a practical world that strives to meet
conventional expectations and a world which wants to break the mould and start over. What makes the book a

pleasurable read is that the author has managed to f ind a meeting point f or the two worlds — one that has not y et started asking questions and another that has all the questions and is struggling to f ind the answers. It would be more appropriate to call it the butterf ly 's pilgrimage, perhaps.

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