Semicolon, an intricate, beautiful tattoo created by Mohit; is inked with stream-of-consciousness; effectively capturing the mental turmoil of those dealing with traumatic past

 

Semicolon, an intricate, beautiful tattoo created by Mohit; is inked with stream-of-consciousness; effectively capturing the mental turmoil of those dealing with traumatic past

Book Review by Dhiraj Sindhi

Semicolon: a novel by Mohit Narbada Joshi

Semicolon: a novel by Mohit Narbada Joshi

Author: Mohit Narbada Joshi

ISBN: 978-9390909810

Genre: Contemporary Philosophical Fiction 

Length: 288 Pages

Publication Date: 25^th October 2021

Publisher: Kalamos Literary Services LLP

Cover Designer: Rishikumar Thakur | Instagram: @bookcoversbyrishi

Order your copy right now: https://amzn.to/3CFkSEV

About the author:

Mohit Narbada Joshi is a PhD Scholar in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur. Graduated as an engineer, and post graduated in English Literature, he could no longer ignore his calling. He has been writing since middle school, and this would be his first published fiction work. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor of English with St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur. One can find his writing page on Instagram: @harsh_writes where he shares his short poems and musings.

Mohit Narbada Joshi

Instagram: @harsh_writes

Disclaimer: This review is only intended for initiating discussions. The opinions and views presented in this article are my own and do not reflect anything about the book's author. 

REVIEW

Contrary to the apparent perspicuity of semicolon (punctuation), Mohit Narbada Joshi tattoos an intricate yet beautiful philosophical fiction—Semicolon using the ink of stream-of-consciousness in different experimental ways; effectively capturing the emotional turmoil one goes through while struggling with mental health issues stemming from a traumatic past; ‘fresh’ in all aspects, including romance, this debut from a promising author defies conventions of the most popular Indian contemporary works.

Semicolon follows two independent storylines, that of Keshav and Dhara. Keshav’s part of the story is narrated using interior monologues and Dhara’s, in first-person point of view. Keshav is troubled by this voice in his head that knows everything that is going to happen and everyone he is yet to meet in his life. These words at the beginning of the novel, ‘future is not something to be created, but just the past that needs to be revisited’ establishes the element of magic realism that is characterised by the mystery that somehow the protagonist knows what is coming next in his life and the next moment.

Dhara is utterly distressed that she is being forced to see a psychotherapist after she has lost (almost) all the people she had ever loved. She is afraid of the “anticipated” closure that she ‘would end up breaking all her ties with all that once mattered to her and detach her from the remains of a life she fell in love with.’ Being a medical student herself, she knows how this is going to play out if she complied with how she was expected to just. Let. Go. I think this is the thing about therapy and mental health that people need to understand that it is really difficult to let go of the past and how? Mohit has successfully illustrated this elaborately throughout the book in Dhara’s account. The journey starts by admitting that you may need or want closure, but that might never happen. In fact, one believes that holding onto the past is logically the best possible way to be secure; this sense of security convinces one to carry the burden of traumatic experience at the cost of being in a state of hopelessness. And ‘;’ is the very symbol of affirmation against this hopelessness.

Apart from being an addition to the semicolon movement, this book contains countless other metaphors. The philosophical writing style complements the interior monologues, which form the foundation of the book. The book is divided into three parts following the three-act structure, which is often used in works of narrative fiction. The first part is as usual, dedicated to the character development and problem definition. Here, you get to know what protagonists are dealing with and how do they perceive it. 

In the second part, the story actually moves forward and so do the protagonists. Here, you come across many philosophical discussions and pieces of poetry while you are also being familiarized with more characters. Besides, the protagonists are undergoing the change of scene in their life for good. However, they’d have to confront their fears sooner or later and towards the end of the second part, they eventually find themselves on the path they dreaded for a long time. The structure of the book appears to be non-linear and readers may find it hard to connect the dots until the third part. In the final part, a proper climax takes place, which is absolutely mind-blowing considering how it resolves all the conflicts in the lives of protagonists. Readers are finally able to outline the actual sequence of the events and the mysteries are solved too.

It had been an emotional saga all along, although the climax had a pronounced effect on me. I could relate to both the protagonists on multiple levels which made me root for the characters till the end. Sometimes, I wasn’t able to keep up with the writing style, but I’m glad I put effort to understand the characters well. In the climax, it all did pay off.  The most I resonated with was Dhara, I could literally see myself in her shoes. I will end this review with her words from the iconic climactic scene, which also made me cry, even the second time as I read it to quote “I was too scared of what lay beyond the answers to the questions I had grown comfortable with.”

Happy Reading!

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How ‘If I’m Honest’ helped me identify and acknowledge my own mental health-related issues and showed me the way forward

  

How ‘If I’m Honest’ helped me identify and acknowledge my own mental health-related issues and showed me the way forward

Book Review by Dhiraj Sindhi

If I’m Honest: A Memoir of My Mental Health Journey by Sidhartha Mallya

If I'm Honest by Sidhartha Mallya

Author: Sidhartha Mallya

ISBN: 978-9390679447

Genre: Memoir

Length: 208 Pages

Publication Date: 27^th September 2021

Publisher: Westland

Book Editor: Deepthi Talwar and Kushalrani Gulab

Deepthi Talwar: Twitter - @deepthitalwar

Kushalrani Gulab: LinkedIn - @kushalrani-gulab-64673844

Cover Design: Saurabh Garge | Instagram: @garge_saurabh

Order your copy right now: https://amzn.to/3HhkJbR

About the author:

Sidhartha Mallya is an American-born, British-raised actor of Indian descent. He was born in Los Angeles, California to Indian parents, who moved to England shortly before his first birthday. He attended Wellington College, and then Queen Mary, University of London, where he graduated with a BSc in Business Management. After a short career in the business world, Sidhartha made the switch to acting. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, graduating with a Master of Arts in acting. He made his feature film debut in the Netflix Original Brahman Naman, which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Aside from acting, Sidhartha’s main focus has been on the promotion of mental health amongst the youth. In 2020 he launched an online series called ConSIDer This, which talks about the mental issues he has struggled with over the years, and offers advice to the public on how to deal with such challenges. If I’m Honest is his first venture into the writing world.

Anisa Butt and Siddharth Mallya | A still from his Netflix movie 'Brahman Naman'

Instagram: @sidmallya

Twitter: @sidmallya

Disclaimer: This review is only intended for initiating discussions. The opinions and views presented in this article are my own and do not reflect anything about the book's author. 

REVIEW

Here, I should add to the disclaimer that it is not always advisable to self-diagnose your mental health-related issues. If you have the resources like therapy, psychiatrist or even educational books (if you understand the scientific terminology) at hand then you should first give them a go. It is because, self-diagnosis may go extremely wrong considering how you approach, your relationship with yourself, your thought process, etc. To be honest, I haven’t self-diagnosed myself with these issues, rather I was able to recognise the patterns and identify them because of the several years of reflecting back on my life and getting to know myself, to which Sidhartha refers to as ‘Self-Work’ and ‘Self-Discovery’ journey. It is the best part of this book that the author has made it very easy to understand what he has undergone throughout his life and how he became aware of it all.

So, what do I mean when I say this book helped me identify some of the issues and showed me the way forward? One of the things that Sidhartha emphasized early in the book is that this is not a self-help book. It is rather a memoir of his life regarding what issues he had faced throughout his life and anything that has impacted his mental wellbeing. Truly, the book is an honest account, where he has shared a lot of personal and past traumas and what he is currently dealing with, without any filters; there’s something wrong he has done, he accepts it; something he thinks is wrong, he mentions it without the fear of being judged. At least that’s what I think. For instance, he chose to address the mindset that makes people believe that people who come from a life of perceived privilege or people having a certain financial, religious or ethnic background are immune to mental health issues. I know, some people reading this right now may think so, and will continue to do so. But that is exactly why I think mental health needs to be talked about, even if a greater part of society isn’t aware of it, even if an even greater part of society can’t afford it, even if an even greater part of society treats those having mental health-related issues with stigma and discrimination. We need to start taking care of our mental health just like we care for our physical health; we need to normalize seeking help while going through mental disorders, just like we do in the cases of other medical conditions like diabetes or injury. 

Alright, back to where I started—how did this book help me in any way? Sidhartha has mentioned this on the back cover itself, above the synopsis that ‘I felt like I had a dementor on my shoulder, sucking the life and happiness out of me…it was no way to live.’ It is this realization that something is wrong and you need to do something about it. You’ll know when something, a thought, fear or anything like that starts to get in the way of life, career, relationships, etc. For me, it was the year 2018 that I started daily journaling and I started taking into account that there were a lot of things that were and are putting me off the road I’m supposed to travel in order to fulfill my desires and dreams. Soon, I could recognise thinking patterns and could trace back my fears, anxieties, guilt, etc to their roots. It is not that hard to realize that this thought may have stemmed off the back of so and so reason; you just need the right resources and tools by your side to reflect on your life. After all, as we say, the person who knows you the best is yourself and getting to know yourself can incredibly help you. Sidhartha has mentioned ‘getting to know myself’ along with a set of resources/tools that you could put to use for your own self-work journey. However, these may or may not work for you, it’s completely subjective. Again, back to my point—what this book did for me is help me better express myself and my mental health-related issues. It also kind of identified a range of feelings and behaviour and actions for me that are most probably the result of some mental disorder. According to me, identifying and acknowledging an issue lifts up half of your baggage from your shoulders.  Now, you have a direction and you can start working on the issue without falling prey to the disorder. So, the next time you recognise a pattern as Sidhartha says, you can immediately identify, ‘Oh, that’s my perfectionism and I can let it pass without the automatic reaction of a compulsion.’

Just to give you context, I would share with you an example from my own life. I don’t like to do it but as Sidhartha says, therapy and self-discovery won’t be easy because rummaging through your past can be hurtful; you will have to put effort to see the result. This is similar to what Sidhartha had experienced regarding the Scrupulosity OCD. In my case, it’s not Scrupulosity OCD but something along the same lines. Touchwood, I have never had that fear-based relationship with God. I don’t know when this started, but I must be going through a lot of bad days among a few good ones. My offering of prayers to the deities in our small Pooja Mandir at home would start with burning incense stick and chanting of a specific verse. Seeking good days, I would ask God that if I finish the verse before the incense stick’s flame got extinguished, let it be a good day, otherwise, I accept the bad day. In other words, it was supposed to be an easy way to have a good day. This went on for a while; the day I get a ‘good day’ signal from God, I’d focus on only good things and when I get a ‘bad day’ signal, I’d focus only on bad things, reinforcing at the end of the day that I really had a bad day. In short, I started believing that it is actually working and that one verse and an incense stick started controlling my life. This continued for four fucking years. It took me four years to realize that it’s not God but my obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviour. Just recently, a couple of months before I completely eliminated that verse from my prayers and still, sometimes I automatically switch to that verse, however, I have learned to not associate with it anything fear-based. The bad part is it’s just one of the many such examples.

The book is written in very simple language and is effectively structured to get the best output. The vocabulary used here makes it really easy for us to understand everything, what he had gone through mentally, how it had impacted him and his reaction to it. As for any other memoirs, there are plenty of things you can take away from this book as well. As you read Sidhartha’s journey, you’ll come to know that there are issues completely avoidable or could be handled better and are not worth it. For instance, a sentence said to you in your childhood can have a lasting impact. The most trivial of things at an early age would show through one’s adult life or maybe throughout the life in a form of mental disorder. Not stretching it further, I will mention some of the key takeaways from ‘If I’m Honest’:

• You could be depressed without you knowing and you can be ‘not-depressed’ even when you think you are depressed. The best way to know is to seek professional help. But if you cannot, seek help from your loved ones or just share it with the person you think would understand.

• In the last chapters where Sidhartha has listed some tools/techniques/resources which I consider as ‘the way forward’ after you acknowledge that there is something wrong. One thing that everyone should note is the ‘power of listening’. When someone is sharing with you their mental health issues, you just need to listen ‘with your whole body’. You don’t have to try to fix their problem or give your invaluable advice; just keep your mouth shut and be a better listener.

• Let go of the prejudices regarding mental health and issues.

• It is okay to feel what you feel. You don’t have to feel guilty about feeling the way you do. Do not beat yourself up for that. Never.

• Be careful about selecting the best alternatives for yourself. What works for Sidhartha may not work for you. And it’s okay. So, don’t hold on to things recommended by someone else and that is not working for you. It can be anything/anyone from a therapist to medication.

• Be careful about how you treat children around you and what you say in front of them. You may consider it negligible, but they will remember your words and how you made them feel for a lifetime.

There is just a lot of stuff that will remain untouched in this blog like details on depression, OCD, dealing with trolls, divorce, guilt, alcohol, etc. But you can always pick up this book if you want to know more. I will just end this discussion here with a few words of wisdom from Sid. 

If you are going through anything, then know that you are not alone. It is okay to seek help and lastly, no one is immune to mental health issues.

Happy Reading!

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Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Don't forget to subscribe for more content. Thank you so much for reading!

Will see you in the next post. Till then buh-bye. Take Care. Peace. ☮