Book Review: Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2010)

Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury,

POUNDS 12.99, 285 pages



In 2006, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir that simultaneously annoyed and fascinated the world so much that we couldn’t stop talking about it. Men hated it; as Gilbert progressed from weeping on her bathroom floor after a trainwreck of a divorce to personal revelation via pasta in Italy, ashrams in India and faith healers and the dashing Felipe in Indonesia, “whiny” was about the kindest thing most male critics had to say about Gilbert.

Many women hated it, but for subtly different reasons. Some, like this reviewer, were baffled at the fact that we were engaged and touched by a memoir where the author’s tone ran the gamut of emotions from chirpy to, well, whiny.

Some were horrified at Gilbert’s “selfishness”. It was bad enough that she had left her marriage and was a professed sceptic about the institution. What was far worse—even unforgiveable—was that she had found happiness, and even love. This was apostasy; how could you abandon marriage, skip off to travel the world, and still find a happy ending? (Many of us, of course, cheered.)

What pulled us in was Gilbert’s honesty and optimism—two undeniable, if occasionally irritating, virtues. Gilbert never expected Eat, Pray, Love, to become a bestseller, or expected more than a handful of loyal readers to “enjoy a rather emotional first-person chronicle about a divorced woman’s quest for psychospiritual healing”. Nor would she have written a sequel to it, if it hadn’t been for the Department of Homeland Security.

Committed catches the zeitgeist: the social contract we know as marriage has never been more open to question—or been the focus of such high expectations.

If, as Robert Louis Stevenson noted sourly in a line Gilbert uses as an epigraph, marriage is a friendship recognized by the police, there has also been no other period in human history where we have expected so much of that friendship. Your partner is supposed to be your ideal lover—and to keep the flame of desire burning over years of towels on the floor, chickenpox epidemics among the children and the other detritus of long relationships—your intellectual equal, your best friend, a great co-parent, the visible indicator of your social status and your soulmate. If we had similar expectations in the workplace, no one would ever draw salaries.

Gilbert and her Felipe do not intend to get married, until a “border incident” denies him access to the US, a country where he has been a frequent traveler for years. When Gilbert asks how he can secure a better, more permanent visa, the Homeland Security Officer looks at both of them: “Honestly? The two of you need to get married.” Given their resistance to the institution—Felipe, too, has been through a bad divorce, the conversation turns surreal. There are few of us who will receive marital advice from a deputy of the US Department of Homeland Security in an interrogation room in the bowels of the Dallas/ Forth Worth international airport.

Gilbert’s reaction, as displayed in Eat, Pray, Love, is to research the hell out of marriage and share the relentless self-scrutiny that ensues. She breaks little new ground here; it will come as no surprise to Indian readers, for instance, that non-Western forms of marriage often see it as a purely practical working arrangement, and the statistics that prove that marriage benefits men more than women have been common knowledge for a while. (Men in marriages tend to enjoy better health, more financial security, longer lives and a better quality of life. Women in marriages tend to have more financial security, and sometimes more emotional security. I know, life’s not fair.)

The parts of Committed that shine come from the personal journey, as she and Felipe struggle with being relatively privileged exiles living precariously in South Asia, permanently temporary residents. As Gilbert goes back through the history of three generations of women in her family, there are moments of splendid, and moving, revelation.

She shares a story about her grandmother cutting up a prized coat—a reminder of the glamour of her pre-marital days—in order to make baby clothes. “What my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. …. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle in life: They gave.”

This is not what Gilbert wants her shotgun marriage to be. And as she and Felipe struggle towards a more honest understanding of what they want and are prepared to work towards in this most basic, most challenging of relationships, it would be a hard-hearted reader who didn’t wish them luck. While Committed is unlikely to touch as many chords as Eat, Pray, Love did, it fills a gap. Most books on relationships stop at the traditional ending to fairy tales: “And they lived happily ever after.” Committed asks how this might be possible, especially in this century.

The BS column: The lure of the local litfest

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2010; that would be the friendly Kala Ghoda cat, who had a better haircut than me at the time)






Almost the first person I run into at the David Sassoon Library at Bombay’s Kala Ghoda festival is an old schoolmate who now heads one of India’s top 100 companies. We met just a few weeks ago at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

“I’m here for the headliners,” he had said then, explaining that the JLF allowed him to maximize his (rare) holiday time by corralling Niall Ferguson, Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright and Anne Applebaum in one location. Surprised that he would be attending sessions on children’s writing, local Bombay histories and Dilip Chitre’s poetry at the much-smaller Kala Ghoda literary festival, I ask whether he comes here often. “Yes,” he says, and introduces me to three other men from the corporate world. “This might be smaller, but it’s our best chance to catch up with local writers. I’m here every year.”

Kala Ghoda is relaxing in a way that the increasingly adrenalin-fuelled JLF can no longer be. The latter offers a kind of intellectual crack cocaine; it’s exhilarating, attention-getting, but “restful” is not the word that comes to mind if you’re attending back-to-back sessions at the Diggi Palace.

Just a few years ago, Kala Ghoda’s litfest, a spinoff from the main arts and cultural festival, was one of the few decent festivals in India where readers had any chance of catching up with writers. For publishers, it was a great venue to launch new writers, or to showcase more established authors; and for Bombay writers especially, it offered a way of redressing the often-Delhicentric view of Indian writing.

This year, as with years in the past, I’m enjoying Kala Ghoda strictly as a reader—and for the abundant tamasha that spills over onto the road. You catch up with friends over a cup of chai at Jehangir or at the rather lovely Kala Ghoda café, and agree to meet after litfest sessions at the buckets—the installation of plastic baltis done by a local artist—at the beatbox guy’s gig, or at “the backside”.

This last being the backsides of the two elephants and giraffe, also an art installation, which you can locate at the front side of the iconic Kala Ghoda itself. The cats at the David Sassoon library make up for the mosquitoes, and as the evening cool settles on us, writers’ voices compete with the sound of police sirens and traffic for attention.

Many of us here—writers, publishers and readers—have come to Kala Ghoda post-Jaipur, and we find ourselves easing into the more laidback space, not lamenting the absence of the big-name international stars in the street-circus atmosphere over here. Chetan Bhagat causes a brief flurry and a slight swell in crowds when he makes a pitch in favour of writing that is accessible and that doesn’t intimidate the first-time or insecure reader. But even the Big Bhagat isn’t mobbed the way he was in Jaipur. Which leads Peter Griffin, one of the friends of the festival, to ask: “Will there still be space for festivals like Kala Ghoda?”

I ask local writer Amit Varma, fresh from his Galle Literary Festival experience, what he thinks. “Big festivals can feel a little rushed,” he says, thinking back to his visit to Jaipur as a blogger and reader some years ago. “This is a charming local festival that needn’t aspire to be a JLF: it works for local readers, local writers and serves a different purpose. At the smaller festivals, everyone is drawn together for the love of books and reading. I don’t think it needs to be either/ or: why not more Kala Ghodas? Why not a Kanpur festival, or a Vizag festival?”

Spread over nine days, what Kala Ghoda offers is a chance to drop in and pick up on a reading or writing conversation at any time; and it also offers an odd kind of continuity. Three years ago, the poet Adil Jussawalla spoke with passion about the changing ethos of Bombay; the year after him, Kiran Nagarkar picked up the thread by commenting on the rising culture of intolerance in his city, an intolerance that he felt was alien to the spirit of the city. This year, MS Sathyu departs briefly from his tribute to the late Habib Tanvir to make a point: “This is my Mumbai too. I’m Kannadiga, but I lived here and worked here for years. Cities can never belong to only one section of people.” This is the kind of continuing conversation—or heated debate—you could only have at a city festival, not at a more international festival.

We’re famous for our excess as a nation, and perhaps what we need is more, not less. The small tents at Varanasi, the local, laidback festivals in Delhi or Hyderabad or Bombay, and the big top of Jaipur: there’s room for all of them.