Excerpts from the interview:Q:Whatprompted you to write Tangerine?A: I have been immersed in the study of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and many related scriptures over the last 10 years with a very good teacher. And what I found is that despite it being such an integral part of our heritage, I had no idea about the level of literary, poetic and value systems that I was being exposed to. I also found that there were some really beautiful connections that I was able to make in my training in Indian classical music and in parts of my life. It started out as a sort of a letter to my son, who’s now 24 but at the time was about 17-18, and ended up as a book. Q:It’salmostas if you’re speaking to the reader.A: Rereading the book, I realised that it has a slightly simple quality. But it was honestly because I was addressing a young boy… I think that we do unwittingly tend to have a certain intellectual elitism. Human beings are, I think, inherently taught to other…We’ve been raised in a very competitive, capitalist world… I have come from a place of being a very high achiever; and so there was a tendency for me to just feel like I was in some ways superior. But now I’m very clear that whether it’s a farmer or a writer or a person cleaning the house or the person who drives the train — they are absolutely equally important and interconnected in their particular context. So I think that tone has come into this book.Q:There’s a calm acceptance that emanates from the pages as you flit between cultures. A: I remember my music teacher telling me her teacher had once said, let one side of yourself surprise the other. And I love that idea because I hate the kind of silos that we’ve all put ourselves into, whether it’s personally or even in geopolitics. It’s become such a strangely polarised world, and everyone has facets of different things within them. So I never consider myself to be too serious, too light, too maternal, too professional. You play the role that is required of you at the time… And even in spaces of friendship, I find that I’m a little more engaged than I was because I treat every aspect of my life with a certain meditative quality now. I’m monotasking more than multitasking. Q:You’ve in some sensewritten the self–help book you used to run away from. A: I’ve found that the study of this literature has helped me live a more fulfilling, a less anxiety-ridden life. Not to mention, the literary merit of some of these texts are mind-blowing. We know the politics of religion has made many of us very wary… In a very sly way, I’m also kind of trying to extract something very beautiful that has gotten a bit distorted, a bit appropriated. Q:You were not facing the religionyou wereborn into.You’vecome to terms with it.A: The most interesting thing for me is the fact that this in no way requires you to change your lifestyle; to start waking up at 4 in the morning and meditating; to stop certain things that you do. This in no way has anything prescriptive or instructive. All it does is change a certain lens with which you approach life, yourself and everything around you… You have a certain lightness of being, a certain humility, a certain unselfing of the self that you thought you were. You’re not trapped in that version of the self, that pressure to prove something. Q:You talk about Hinduismbeing afaith whichis all–encompassing,but itdoesn’t stop you from referring to other faiths.A: Anyone who tries to other is actually not even talking about Hinduism because everything about Hinduism is that all that is here is one. So where is the question of the other? Instead of going and finding the source, we’ve started just bashing each other… I think the minute human beings come in, we cause chaos. But when you go back to the essence of the original text and the Upanishads… They use different kinds of metaphors that just make it logical to believe that, yes, we all come from mud and return to mud. And these ideas that we’ve heard in songs of Kumar Gandharva, the idea of ‘Nirakar’ or when Channulal Mishra sings the ‘Ramcharitmanas’, it’s all there. The essence is very much the idea of unity and oneness. But it’s gone into all its different territories and contexts and time periods. Q:Given themilieu thatwe are in,how challengingwas it to find that sweet spotto write this book and cut out the noise?A: I’ve never really engaged much with that noise because it’s a pointless cacophony. It’s not like there’s anyone actually paying attention and trying to understand. I also believe that things are not in a vacuum. And so when we are in a current sort of dispensation and dealing with really divisive forces, it’s come from somewhere. It’s perhaps come from a post-colonial India, which is now trying to reassert itself and it’s coming out in this crass way. And by attempting to offer one small, elegant way of saying what I think… it’s like decolonising that. But not trying to say we are better, nothing is better or worse. If I had grown up in Italy, I may have been studying Christianity. Sometimes I read Augustine and St Francis of Assisi. They’re saying the exact same thing. He talks about, I think, the invisible human footprint of unity. I happen to be born Hindu in India. I’ve been watching Ram Leela since I was a child. I’ve been exposed to these texts. I’ve learned Indian classical music, which is honestly an expression of this philosophy. It’s got the same ideas. The cyclical quality, the idea of abstraction beyond the human being, the authorlessness. And they all come from a certain way of thinking — what I call our spiritual superpower. Q:There isa beautifulpassage aboutyour mother–in–law,where yousay Hardevi battled the trauma of early widowhood and overbearing patriarchy by turning to God. She studied the Bhagavad Gita and translated it into Sindhi, patiently writing it in the Arabic script, for she hadattendedschool inpre-Partition Karachi.A: I was so astounded when I heard that that Tulsidas in the ‘Ramcharitmanas’ used Urdu phrases like garib nawaz. Because his whole idea was to have it be available to many more people. Honestly it sounds like we’ve been syncretic forever, it’s idiotic to believe that we’re not. And even today I’ve noticed that, even if a person may say something, they’re actually living something else… Like how people pray to a tree or a river. Why they have a Tulsi plant in their angan. How my mother used to paint these wayside shrines. You see it all over India where you have a stone and you smear tangerine on it. Put some flowers over there and suddenly it becomes Hanumanji or a totem towards something larger than ourselves. And that idea is so beautiful, it’s so ambient, it’s so non-claustrophobic. Music is another way in which people express themselves… I honestly haven’t found such an extraordinary coming together of the intellectual, the aesthetic, the spiritual and even the magic realism that we all applaud in literature. Some of these mythologies are tapping into parts of ourselves and the universe and that idea beyond time and space that even physicists talk about. They’re not just quaint little stories. As Joseph Campbell says, they’re going into those parts of oneself that we don’t know how to otherwise reach. Go to Source