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From Me to You: Writings
on Love, Life and Learning
It made a lot of sense to read what she had to say. Yes, it would be about people and fashion and trends, but it was not faffing about. Her columns came straight from the heart, narrating incidents that were important to her, random episodes that touched her, daily little happenings that impacted her in some way or the other and, through her, the whole legion of her devoted women readers. She didn’t give moral lectures, but she did influence morality of the sensitive reader. Somewhere, sometime, something would strike a chord with her readers and they would, without even knowing that they did so, quietly imbibe it within their beings. Suddenly, we also saw ourselves noticing things that she had spoken off, whereas in the past, we would have just passed them by. We started noting people on the street, flower girls at the temple, little girls with tight braids, attitudes, faces, and styles and just found ourselves being better people, at least for the time being. "`85 my column `85 is about women exploring themselves and striving for the better, in addition to looking at the world with new eyes and empathising with the people’s troubles," Saran said. From Me to You`85has selected columns of writing over the past couple of decades. "Writing brings me closer to God. It’s my bridge, my vacation and my delight. I find stories everywhere, in the blind student’s eyes and in the glossy nails of supermodels." Saran writes as a blog post and we tend to believe her as we read her column that started with Femina but continues till date in Me, the magazine she now edits for DNA. The book is divided into various segments: Encounters, Musings, Cityscapes, Tangents and Perspectives and Reflections on Nature. The sections are pretty definitive of what you will find in there. In Encounters, we meet an old Muslim taxi driver who shares a bit of his family with her; her meeting with Gloria Steinem, the feminist legend, whom she is in awe of to begin with but later strikes a warmth with; tea with the Maharani on an unknown state in Gujarat, a simply dressed lady, with immense charm, who told stories of her girlhood and along with Saran, we unravel the secret of the beauty of the Rajmata of Jaipur, Maharani Gayatri Devi. "There is a spirit which will fire any face into arresting your attention, regardless of what age does to it." Probably, the most poignant piece is the account where the Miss India contestants met with Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Charity. In the section, Musings, she speaks of a spider that she killed in the bathroom and then felt terribly guilty about her action. She tells of a rooster strutting in his own small world that reminds her of human beings in pursuit of material happiness, who forget their own mortality. She talks of the loss of her dog: "Come off it, some of you will say, he was only a dog." And then goes on to say how deep and affectionate was the bond with him. In Cityscape, she speaks of Mumbai, as if it has a soul of its own, she tells of people in the city, people who visit, who live and suffer and labour there. Tangents and Perspectives are vignettes of the things people do and the multifarious reasons that could be their overwhelming motivation. Of her aunty Aneesha, who was forced to live a life strange to her, of her cousin Rakesh, who had suddenly decide to disappear and as suddenly, to re-appear. Reflections on Nature is all about her love for trees that grow and rivers that flow and the one single universal life spirit that flows through every living thing in nature. From Me to You`85 is a good read. Easy to understand, effortless to peruse, Sathya talks straight from the heart and shoots straight from the hip! The columns are carefully chosen so that they may be universal in their appeal and not appear dated. It’s a nice nostalgic read for the Femina generation, who may even recollect reading some of the columns that specially impressed them then!
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THOSE of us, who have
grown up in the cultural ethos that the magazine Femina fashioned,
are quite familiar with the column, From Me to You, by Sathya
Saran. Without a doubt, we may say that Saran was one of the foremost
voices of conscience, who "raised issues", when we were not
even familiar with the concept of "issues". The chief reason
that we read the column with interest was because it was never ever
preachy but just simple tabulations of facts and little episodes that
Saran came across. Of course, she lent her own perceptions to these
incidents, and thus influenced the Femina generation!