Namita Devidayal, in the book Tangerine: How to Read the Upanishads Without Giving Up Coffee, wants people to slow down, observe and appreciate the age-old wisdoms that seem to have escaped them in their busy lives, now overwhelmed with the rise of AI.
Divided into six parts, Tangerine is Devidayal’s personal account of navigating faith and belief in an increasingly masculine, intolerant, homogenised, and monopolised idea of Hinduism. However, she notes this context but doesn’t delve into it. Earlier in the book, she writes, “there is very little connection between [Hinduism] philosophy and Hindutva.”
But it’s also true that religion is often leveraged to divide people. If the self-claimed religious and spiritual leaders fool people by telling stories that inspire blind acceptance, then the dynamics certainly need more attention than Devidayal offers. But to critique her on that aspect would be to discredit the aim with which she wrote this book: to signal a possibility of self-actualisation in each one of us.
Devidayal begins the book with the famous rope-and-the-snake parable. She asks: Do you see what you actually see? Or do you, with all your biases and aspirations, ascribe meaning to what you see? She concludes the introduction by noting that “[w]hat we see is, therefore, not the whole truth.”
However, that’s where, at the very beginning, an alert reader would be suspicious, for the whole enterprise of truth-telling is complicated. Truth is subjective. Nevertheless, it’s a seeking that one is drawn to, which is tied to knowing truth, whatever it may be for the seeker.
It is this seeking Devidayal noticed in herself, and left a comfortable-uncomfortable life with all her “requisite masks and costumes” looking for answers to help explain a transition she was witnessing, noticing divorce rituals turn comedic and parenting demanding.
She sees a hypnotherapist first. Goes to a retreat to “detox mind and body”. But this “lingering thread of sadness would become an inflection point” for her, coupled with the realisation that “nothing in life is random”. She finally arrives in Rishikesh. She first learns to be patient, then meets Neema Majumdar, who, along with her husband Surya, “held an immersive retreat in [the Swami Dayananda] ashram by the river.”
To her credit, Devidayal admits that parts of what she experienced in that retreat were “fanciful”, alongside sharing her conviction that she “wanted to suspend reason and break down the ideas and ideologies that had for so long governed [her] thoughts and emotions.”
When the seeking begins, a path emerges. Devidayal follows it, noticing changes in her mindset and her body as she finds herself transformed. In telling the story of her seeking, she recounts anecdotes from her early journalism days. They never appear jarring and meld into her story, providing context to Devidayal’s “personal and collective histories”.
What’s sold as secrets, often in the kind of book that Tangerine is, is nothing more than logical acceptance in the face of events. Devidayal exhibits this acceptance throughout: be it meeting her husband with a philosophical bent while working with Sonny Mehta in the US, taking her child’s advice to avoid gyaan and just write her story, or believing in the power of a musical note while learning music, or in realising that “[W]hat you think you are is really not that, not that”—the key takeaway from the book.