Interesting on Several Fronts

Nitin Shankar’s autobiography Permanent Ghosts is interesting to me on several fronts. One is historical: India’s independence, partition, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, as remembered through events that touched on his child’s world. There is also an account of life in post-war Berlin, and a gripping, in-the-thick-of-it account of Ayatollah Khomeini’s take-over in Iran.

The second front is “prototypical” if I may call it that: the forces that shaped Shankar’s life were multicultural, multilingual, global, and (within comfortable levels of the middle and upper classes) seesawed across class and socio-economic boundaries. The author had the adaptability to roll with this, to revel in it even.

I call it “prototypical” because Shankar had a head start, by over 50 years, on what many people are only learning to come to terms with today. It’s no longer about small unchanging communities, speaking just one language, guaranteed jobs. What Shankar has known so gracefully how to surf is becoming commonplace and never more so than in the present economic downturn: we move, we travel, we switch jobs, we go up and down on the money ladder, alternating in many cases between working for others and working for ourselves. And like Shankar, we also feel a lot freer about marrying outside our race, nationality or religion, and adopting very personal sets of values and spirituality.

Here’s the third aspect I like particularly about this book: what we can learn from the choices Shankar made, strong on fairness, compassion, and self-awareness particularly about his own conflict between commitment and, as he puts it, a need to “live on the edge.”

He is non-judgmental (this book is entirely free of score-settling and vindictiveness, or didacticism for that matter), never loses his excitement about living, recharges batteries by communing with nature, and is in tune with his senses. He also shows tremendous gratitude. Many of the very qualities that so many coaches and spiritual helpers tell us are necessary to live effectively and well in this new world of ours, Shankar has been doing. That, and communicating.

Which brings me to the fourth, and probably the major quality, I like about Permanent Ghosts: Shankar’s respect for others, his lack of snobbism, and his active nurturing of relationships. In short, he’s emotionally intelligent, tuned into his intuition, and has a great gift for relating – communicating effectively – yet with humor, and we never lose sight of his struggles: he’s certainly not making a bid for sainthood.

The author heads each of his chapters with a quotation, like the one from American writer Cynthia Ozick from which he takes the book’s title: “What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” I certainly don’t disagree, and childhood and other parts of life already lived are certainly ‘ghosts’ insofar as they are of the past. But in examining that past, Nitin Shankar has given us something of value in the here and now, and for the future.