A Book of Memory: Confessions and Reflections

Author: Sudhir Kakar
No. of Pages: 318
Year of Publication: 2011
Publisher: Viking

About the Book:
Kakar is as lucid as ever in this autobiographical writing. Not surprisingly, he has academised it as well. At the same time he has shared many vivid descriptions of his life or maybe, we should say, reconstructions of his life in great detail.
Needless to say it is a pleasure to read his autobiography. It not only provides a peek into his world, it also gives a deeper understanding of his area of work. If you are familiar with his works, his autobiography helps in understanding his varied interests, his own quest for meaning and identity. You will also find connections of many of his writings with his peas endeavours.
It is a pleasure to read his life also because he has underplayed his celebrity status and discussed his life as a common place occurrence. Also, his life is an example of an existential living in a strongly moralistic society.

Final Analysis:
Must read if you are a Kakar fan, a psychoanalysis buff or fond of autobiographies and do not mind serious reading.

Favourite Quotes:
“Every great philosophy, Nietzsche wrote, is a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” (p. 258)

“…there is no stronger goad to arousing a man’s fighting spirit than that of a woman mocking and challenging his masculinity. Militancy starts losing its vigour once the women turn away from demanding masculinity from their men and begin to think more of the survival and well being of their children. Unfortunately, anti-terro efforts are rarely directed towards influencing a community’s women.” (p. 268)

“Except for the spiritually gifted, the mystics who claim to have glimpsed a ‘true self’ independent of and lying beyond memory, for most of us the truth about the ‘self’ is laid bare by memories of loves that evoked our deeper emotion,s. these emotions are not only of the ecstatic kind which (in Ibn Hazmi’s words) are ‘beyond the reach of the most cunning speech to describe: the mind reels before it, and the intellect stands abashed.”, but also of almost unbearable longing, hurt and loss…. In life or art, ‘happy love’ has always suffered in relation to its more melancholic counterpart.” (p. 272)