I know for a fact that in India, people make too much fuss about your capacity to be an emotionally balanced human being if you have been raised by a single mother or if you have endured a broken marriage.  These days, I am so much into the young and supremely gifted Aatish Taseer’s, writing, that it really buries this line of thinking.  For someone, who’s a couple of years younger than me, to have come up with three works of fiction and one work of non-fiction in the last five years is a remarkable achievement by any standards.  And yes, he’s been brought up a single mother, the well-known journalist Tavleen Singh.

Back in the 80s when she was making a name for herself as a journalists, she met one of the prominent Pakistani politician and the time, the late Salman Taseer, who was in India to promote his book on his political godfather and former prime minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.  As they say, the cupid struck and both of them disappeared for a week in the mountains north of the country.  People in those days were pretty casual about any form of protection, and those were kind of hit and miss affair anyway.  Aatish Taseer was the result of that summer of love.  But because of the history bad blood between the two countries and the excess baggage that people from different religion sometime carry made it impossible for them to continue.  Salman knew that if the word got out that he was not only romantically involved with a non-Muslim and that too and Indian, and he had also sired a child with her, would sound death knell for his political career.  So, when it came to making a final choice between his political ambitions and commitments to the woman with whom he produced a son, and because he got so spooked by the barrage of negative publicity that was bound to come his way, that he chose the former and broke all ties and went back to Pakistan married and settled down, leaving the eighteen months old Aatish to be brought up by the feisty Tavleen on her own.

Of course, I have given this brief background only to illustrate the point that things don’t have to go to pieces if you didn’t have a ‘’wholesome’’ childhood and that you don’t have to act like being “damaged goods”, if your parents first drifted apart and then parted company in acrimonious circumstances.  I am a firm believer that what you grow up to become, depends less on what values were inculcated in you by your parents, and more on your innate and intuitive grasp of the environment around you and how you interpret and make sense of the world.  And what a finest specimen of a man Aatish Taseer has turned out to be.  From a boarding school in South India to one of the finest of liberal arts college in the U.S.  From working with Time magazine and also many freelance work for the leading publications around the world, he’s settled down now to writing fulltime, something he always wanted to do ever since he was a teenager.  But it took some time to find the right kind of voice, his own voice.  And the voice he has found as a writer is one of the most authentic voices in the subcontinent.  The power of raw prose and the astuteness of his observations have a starkly searing feel about it.  The rootlessness of the elite, the resentment of the underclass, old money clashing with the new, sometimes it’s hard to believe a thirty four years old man can be a Naipaul like chronicler of this half made society.  Whenever I read him, there is this intense desire to be like him.

But like he said about his father once, that the presence of him in his life can only be marked by his absence.  My feeling about Aatish Taseer is not too dissimilar.  

It was so refreshing to see the other day that popular Indian movie star Deepika Padukone talking openly about her battle with clinical depression and how with the help and support of the loved ones, not to mention some medicines and effective counseling helped her in her recovery.  Now only the horribly cynical would say that it was a publicity stunt.  I mean people would think what’s she got to be depressed about?  She has got everything going for her.  Her movies are always blockbuster, she has fans eating out of her hand.  That’s precisely the point I wish to make.

  According to the World Health Organization, India holds the dubious distinction of having the most number of depressed people in the world.  As if that isn’t damning enough, it also registers the highest number of suicides especially among the 18-25 age group in the world.  People often confuse being sad to being depressed.  They are not the same thing.  If you are sad, there is tangible reason for it.  Something you can put your finger on.  But depression is a kind of elephant in the room, and we are blind men who have tactile awareness of it, but can’t make out what it is.  Arundhati Roy described memorably this sense of depression in her seminal novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, where she likened it to an ice cold spider landing on your heart and would not go away. 

  I consider myself a bit of a manic depressive; I mean, the cold spider is not there all the time, there would be periods of intense energy, enthusiasm even optimism, followed by a period of dejection, depression and the futility of everything.  My mind would be consumed by all kinds of morbid thoughts.  I would start thinking is it any better for those who are long dead and gone?  Or do we, the living have some kind of an obligation to go on living, to those who are no longer among us?  You see, I am aware of the nature of the beast, so I know how to deal with it.  But for those who are chronically and clinically depressed, the situation is indeed very depressing (no pun intended).

I am no expert, but those who are, maintain that any chronic depression with clinical symptoms can be overcome by a good mix that involves counseling and some medication.  But here in India, there is so much stigma attached to any form of mental illness, that it becomes a festering sore in the family.  A malaise that dare not speak thy name.  When I see so much rage among the ordinary people, both inside their homes and out on the streets, I see in them the rage of a child but this rage is fertilized with an adult imagination, and it doesn’t know its direction.  In India, to accept any kind of mental issue is to admit failure in life.  It is like somehow you have let people down around you and that’s not an option for you.  On another somewhat lighter note, many renowned experts think that those parts of our brain which produce depressing emotions, are also responsible for some of the most creative impulses in human beings.  Some of the most celebrated works of art, literature and music produced by men like Picasso, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf and also Beethoven and Mozart, they thought themselves to be at their creative best when going through a mental turmoil. 

But we ordinary people don’t belong to that category, and I hardly have any answers much less the remedy.  My job is to keep asking questions, and I suspect not enough people are doing even that.