In a tete-e-tete with India TV, author Amrita Sharma, who writes regularly on relationships, spoke about her book – “Taken For a Metro Ride”, which touches upon several issues, including mental health.
According to her "the journey is as interesting as the destination" and all one needs is mindfulness and interest in everything around us. How does one achieve that while juggling activities in day-to-day living?
Let’s read what the author has to say:
Q: What is your book ‘Taken For a Metro Ride” about?
My book “Taken for a Metro Ride” is a fiction on a girl's struggle with mental health and her journey to get a grip on her life through her encounters with strangers during her daily rides in the Metro.
It’s a slice-of-life novel, about human experiences, observations and lessons about life that come to us in unusual forms and in places where we least expect. But the condition is that we have to be aware of our surroundings, be present in the moment and be open to experiencing it all. That’s what the protagonist of my novel embodies. She makes a conscious decision to experience life, observe lives of strangers and be mindful, rather than being oblivious to her surroundings.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
I have always been fascinated by this quote, often attributed to Robin Williams, but also to Ian Maclaren and Brad Meltzer, which reads: "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."
During those times when I took the metro, I encountered many diverse groups of people, who seemed nothing more than numbers and faces to me. But when I started observing them more closely, I realized that each one seemed overwhelmed by their own baggage, by their own lives and their own situations. And that’s when I began seeing people differently and responding to them with more empathy, more acceptance and understanding.
When my bucket of experiences started filling up, I decided to share this kaleidoscope of lives and experiences with everyone. And that’s how the book came about.
Q: You have also touched upon the issue of depression/mental health in the book. Why and how did that come about?
The subject of mental health has always been of interest to me. I had grown up reading literature in school and savoured novels by writers like Charlotte Brontë, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, R L Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald to name a few, who touch upon the issue as well.
But it was during my college days in LSR, where I studied English Literature and had amazing lecturers that my interest intensified. We used to have a lot of discussions around the mental health issues in novels by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, D H Lawrence and even Hannah Green, whose book “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” happened to be one of my favourites on the subject. Since then, I have been reading up a lot on this issue, and which prompted me to weave it into my story as well.
The fact is, that even though people in India have now started talking about it, many still have reservations and decide against seeking help. That sometimes can prove debilitating and that’s what I wanted to highlight in my book.
Q. How do you think the book will inspire others?
Even though the book is a light read, I hope that it inspires people in three ways --- (1) by making them more mindful of their surrounding and be aware of the world unfolding around them (2) helping them become empathetic towards those grappling with mental health issues and (3) to know that ultimately the power to change your life, to a great extent, lies with us. But we have to take the first step towards reclaiming our life.
