Official Review: Soul Call by Abhay Mishra
-
David Dawson
- Posts: 304
- Joined: 02 May 2014, 21:39
- Bookshelf Size: 12
- Reviewer Page: onlinebookclub.org/reviews/by-david-dawson.html
- Latest Review: "The Mystery Factor" by Michael Brightman
Official Review: Soul Call by Abhay Mishra
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Soul Call" by Abhay Mishra.]
Share This Review
Soul Call by Abhay Mishra is a self-help book, in which Mishra seeks to use his experience of life and his thoughts about philosophy to provide help to the reader. The author has clearly had a very eventful life, having made his way from poverty in rural India to what appears to be a fair degree of professional success, and along the way he has picked up useful life lessons to share with the reader. Share is a pertinent word. The book is never particularly prescriptive, rather he tells stories from his life and draws conclusions without translating them into rules for living. I regard that entirely as a positive. At the very beginning the author states that the book need not be read sequentially, but can be read in any order. Cynic that I am a voice in my head immediately suggested that it sounded like the book was a bit of a mess. I was wrong. He is almost entirely correct that it need not be read in order; in the chapter "Transformation" he tells a story featuring a bullet that he had previously introduced, he glosses the word Haveli long after he first uses it, but otherwise it is comprised of short, non-linear chapters that do not navigated linearly to form a coherent whole.
The stories he tells are powerful and affecting, whether the unflinching honesty when it comes to the last days of his grandmother or his moving tribute to a childhood friend who has subsequently died, it was here I felt the book was strongest. There is a very effective and articulate argument in defence of trust. There is, in short, much to enjoy here.
And some things to enjoy less. I struggled with the spiritualism, not for its own sake but because he at times seems to rejoice in being wilfully anti-scientific, referring to the "misuse of intelligence."
I also found my enjoyment marred by a generational and cultural disconnect with the author. At one stage, when discussing sex, he mentions that "Men and women...need each other to do it", which does seem a little dismissive of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who do not require someone of the opposite gender in order to have sex. He also uses a word that is deeply offensive. It is clearly not done with any malice, and I am aware that it is a word that was common parlance not all that long ago, but it was still very jarring.
At one stage he does complain about political correctness and, as someone who is inclined to regard political correctness as just another name for good manners, I do not have that much patience for his complaint. Particularly when in talking about astrology he states that it is regarded as "improper", which does seem a little reminiscent of those keyboard warriors who insist "I'll probably be modded for saying this, but..."
There is a separate argument that runs through the book, a deep-seated hostility to ideology. He is adamant that "Life principles cannot be derived from Utopian theories." It is a case that Mishra makes passionately, but occasionally incoherently. He argues that life principles such as "Justice, Fair play, Honesty, Liberty" are tested and universal, rather than the product of idealism and theory. I could not help but wonder if the difference between those principles and those he derides as Utopian is that they are principles with which he agrees. A suspicion reinforced by his exhortation "may we never doubt." In one section - entitled "The man in the rubber slippers" - he tells the story of a man who joined the Naxalite rebellion and was subsequently tortured by the police. It is another example of what I have discussed above, the powerful stories that Mishra tells, but he ends by asserting that it serves as an argument against ideology, that the torture of the man in the story is attributable to his own dogmatism. I do not know enough about the Naxalites to pontificate upon the rights and wrongs of the movement, but Mishra's argument does rather seem to blame the victim for being tortured. The idea that someone should not pursue principles because of how others may treat them is unsatisfactory to say the least.
That section of the book does include the beautiful sentence, "And all that it left behind as a legacy was the pain of dealing with life in a pair of rubber slippers." It is not a freak occurrence, the writing is often of a high standard, although it does occasionally slip into cliché: "when all is done and dusted" is employed at one point, so too "failing is not a crime - not trying is." The book begins with a plethora of multiple exclamation marks. I incline towards the view that even one exclamation mark needs a pretty powerful justification, using more than one next to each other is never acceptable.
Nevertheless, I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives sufficiently for me to rate this book 3 out of 4 stars, but only with one very significant caveat. I can only recommend this book to people who like self-help books and who regard themselves as being, in some way, "spiritual." If either of those descriptions does not apply then Soul Call will not make you a convert.
***
Buy "Soul Call" on Amazon
Share This Review
The stories he tells are powerful and affecting, whether the unflinching honesty when it comes to the last days of his grandmother or his moving tribute to a childhood friend who has subsequently died, it was here I felt the book was strongest. There is a very effective and articulate argument in defence of trust. There is, in short, much to enjoy here.
And some things to enjoy less. I struggled with the spiritualism, not for its own sake but because he at times seems to rejoice in being wilfully anti-scientific, referring to the "misuse of intelligence."
I also found my enjoyment marred by a generational and cultural disconnect with the author. At one stage, when discussing sex, he mentions that "Men and women...need each other to do it", which does seem a little dismissive of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who do not require someone of the opposite gender in order to have sex. He also uses a word that is deeply offensive. It is clearly not done with any malice, and I am aware that it is a word that was common parlance not all that long ago, but it was still very jarring.
At one stage he does complain about political correctness and, as someone who is inclined to regard political correctness as just another name for good manners, I do not have that much patience for his complaint. Particularly when in talking about astrology he states that it is regarded as "improper", which does seem a little reminiscent of those keyboard warriors who insist "I'll probably be modded for saying this, but..."
There is a separate argument that runs through the book, a deep-seated hostility to ideology. He is adamant that "Life principles cannot be derived from Utopian theories." It is a case that Mishra makes passionately, but occasionally incoherently. He argues that life principles such as "Justice, Fair play, Honesty, Liberty" are tested and universal, rather than the product of idealism and theory. I could not help but wonder if the difference between those principles and those he derides as Utopian is that they are principles with which he agrees. A suspicion reinforced by his exhortation "may we never doubt." In one section - entitled "The man in the rubber slippers" - he tells the story of a man who joined the Naxalite rebellion and was subsequently tortured by the police. It is another example of what I have discussed above, the powerful stories that Mishra tells, but he ends by asserting that it serves as an argument against ideology, that the torture of the man in the story is attributable to his own dogmatism. I do not know enough about the Naxalites to pontificate upon the rights and wrongs of the movement, but Mishra's argument does rather seem to blame the victim for being tortured. The idea that someone should not pursue principles because of how others may treat them is unsatisfactory to say the least.
That section of the book does include the beautiful sentence, "And all that it left behind as a legacy was the pain of dealing with life in a pair of rubber slippers." It is not a freak occurrence, the writing is often of a high standard, although it does occasionally slip into cliché: "when all is done and dusted" is employed at one point, so too "failing is not a crime - not trying is." The book begins with a plethora of multiple exclamation marks. I incline towards the view that even one exclamation mark needs a pretty powerful justification, using more than one next to each other is never acceptable.
Nevertheless, I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives sufficiently for me to rate this book 3 out of 4 stars, but only with one very significant caveat. I can only recommend this book to people who like self-help books and who regard themselves as being, in some way, "spiritual." If either of those descriptions does not apply then Soul Call will not make you a convert.
***
Buy "Soul Call" on Amazon
Latest Review: "The Mystery Factor" by Michael Brightman
