Eat, Pray, Love or Buy, Read, Regret?

Everyone I knew was going ga-ga over this new book. 

Oprah devoted 2 entire episodes to it. 

Women all over the world were claiming this changed their life for the better. 

Someone on the Oprah show, even referred to it as the "modern day Bible for women"!!! 

Reviewers were raving about how this was the beginning of a new age phenomenon - the search for self fulfilment by the spiritually starved urban dweller, as the Telegraph called it! 

Eat, Pray, Love in theory, sounded like one of those books you read for your soul - narrating a woman's journey through 3 countries in search for "self" and spiritual fulfilment through food and meditation, after a messy divorce and even messier affair. 

Now, I haven't had a divorce or an extra-marital affair but I could still relate to the feeling of wanting to leave it all and going off in search of answer to questions like "What on earth was I sent to this planet for?" or "What is the purpose of my existence?" and other such angst filled questions that come to hit you especially around birthdays! 

And pray tell, who amongst us hasn't embraced that extra helping of that seductive and sinful thing called carbohydrates to drown our sorrow or sought to restart our acquaintance with the Almighty when things haven't gone just right??? So you'd think that this of all books is going to be one I can empathise with, right??? 

Well, that's where I got my predictions wrong!
It sat on my night stand much longer than it took Gilbert to write it. And finally, after soldiering through it stoically for a few months, I did something I have never ever done before with any other book, no matter how dreary or annoying.
I quit reading it halfway!

I just couldn't go any further. My tortured soul cried out for its own “bathroom floor moments” each time I tried to pick up the book and read! Finally the only way I could save myself was to stop unleashing on myself what was unarguably one of the most boring, most superficial books I have ever read in my life, and make a clean break for it!!! 

Now after all these months (it took me an yr to even gather to courage to proof read and publish this draft review!!! ), the question I ask myself is why a book that meant so much to millions of women, who still, even after all these years, cry and scream when they see Gilbert appear on TV, left me feeling highly annoyed and irritable. 

Am I a weird creature from another planet? 

Or do I completely lack empathy? 

Well, since I promised to be objective, to an extent the answer is yes. 

I have difficulty shedding tears.
Lachrymally challenged is how I like to think of myself.
Movies that have people weeping by the buckets leave me, well, feeling just somewhat sad. 

Self-fulfilment books are not my cup of tea. Infact even the most revered of inspirational gurus like Paulo Coelho, Mitch Albom and Richard Bach leave me absolutely unmoved. No let me rephrase that; most of them do affect me but only as a sure shot cure for the nights when I have insomnia and am unable to sleep! 

And I DO NOT read chick-lit. Never have, never will. 

So that could partly be one of the reasons I didn't take to this book. 

Now while I may be an insensitive b@#$%, Gilbert herself leaves no stone unturned in making it difficult for one to even feel the mildest of sympathy or relatability or even palatability as we progress along!!! 

There is no absolutely reason provided as to why there is so much unhappiness in what seems like, pardon me for being shallow enough to point out, a seemingly perfect life!!! You never understand what caused the “death of her marriage” as she calls it; and because there is no context, no rationale to her angst, you end up feeling she could do with being a little less whiny and self absorbed and by being a little more thankful for her blessings!
Infact, a few pages in, I even started wishing Gilbert’s publisher had insisted she go in for some sort of therapy instead of the trip - that would have spared a few of us the torture of having to go through pages and pages of whining about men, divorce and David! 

Secondly, I find this whole touting of the East as the ready-made solution to Life’s existential miseries, as a ridiculously blinkered point of view, held by some people, who more often than not, really have no understanding or appreciation of the land they are in or it's spiritual resume beyond the fact that they are now in the land of Yoga!!!. 

No, I am not saying that meditation or finding the right Guru or ashram will not help you come to terms with your problems or what you seek within! But one cannot help feeling that to Gilbert who hasn’t much clue about the East except for Yoga (Dear Lord, why does it always have to be this predictable!!) and a visit to her lover’s Guru (having come to Bali, she is surprised and shocked to discover her heaven of paradise has a violent history!); the East was just a short-cut to fixing a messy situation, a Band-Aid applied without much thought and with the "show" value of the latest i-Gadget! Such blinkeredness only spawns a culture of mindless, non-thinking readers who look at the East only as the destination points of an Eat- Pray-Love tourism package, complete with pictures with of their own medicine-man to be displayed at an Oprah show!!! 

Finally, let’s come to Gilbert’s writing - 

The book starts off quite okay – it is a bit too cutesy but it is also personal and funny at times. There are even a few occasions where Gilbert makes you laugh with her self-deprecating humour. But these are soon overshadowed by her very banal writing style and her very juvenile remarks! Her observations come across as shallow, self-indulgent and annoyingly trite! For instance information such as, “I like kissing” is something you would expect to read in a book meant for teenyboppers but not one written by a 34 yr old out on a journey to find herself!!! And then there are phrases like “'I'm gonna have to see you, like, Thursday…" which makes you wonder if she took tips from Paris Hilton on sentence construction!!! The section on Pray is also filled with meaningless drivel like “If you take the word No and spell it backwards, it is almost OM”. Err, No!! Can someone please point out to her, No spelt backwards is ‘On’ and maybe I am being really unimaginative here, but to me it looks nowhere close to Om!

The part in Italy is the most engaging while "Pray", based in India is the weakest! There is no observation or insight on the local culture or traditions that she experiences nor is there any ambiguity in her discoveries. Everything is neatly tied up into a happy ending with her depression and unhappiness being replaced by love, happiness, peace and a boyfriend on the arm!!!

In it's defence, EPL is not meant to be one of those books you take seriously! At best, it makes for a day's reading by the beach but self enlightenment it is not! And, the good news is that Gilbert only focusses on her experience and doesn't try to convince her readers that her path is the route to salvation. Nor does she pass on any deeper thought or philosophy. Or if she did, I must have completely missed it!

So, if you are one of those, who cried or still cry on the bathroom floor, just because your life is so perfect and you still don’t like it, go ahead and read this book. 

And take your own trip to some destinations of your choice. And snap up a book deal!
I'd do 4 months in France drinking wine, 4 months in Menorca or Maldives by the beach and then 4 months touring through Europe, visiting all the beautiful cities, towns and villages on my must visit list, absorbing new cultures and ofcourse drinking more wine, but then, that's just me!!
You, ofcourse are free to choose your own EPL tourism package!

Or you could get just to a therapist and spare poor, long suffering souls like me the torture to having to read another EPL!