Review of the book “In Praise of Laziness and Other Essays: Chronicle of Masterly Inactivity”
In Praise of Laziness and Other Essays, Indrajit Hazra’s most recent work, is best described as eclectic and unstructured. The author chooses the descriptor “themeless” for his latest collection because, as he states in the book’s preface, his “job at the papers” kept him “tethered to that kind of rubbish.”
It consists of twelve literary works, two of his grandmother’s recipes and a tale. However, the article with the same title—in which the author delivers his “encomium to laziness”—is the most thought-provoking and amusing of the bunch. Laziness is seen as a fault, especially in the unrelenting, productivity-obsessed age we live in today. In this post-pandemic era of burnout, a meditation on idleness is paradoxical, which makes Hazra’s article topical, pertinent, and stimulating.
Hazra skillfully highlights the ways in which inaction is associated with “greatness” and laziness is labeled as “anti-social activity,” drawing on examples from Milan Kundera’s thoughts on slowness to the Ramayana’s Kumbhakarna and Mark Twain’s writing to demonstrate that what Huckleberry Finn felt was “the beauty of the laze.” Nevertheless, he contends that laziness “is not the first refuge of the scoundrel.” Rather, “it aims to withdraw from both fairness and unfairness concurrently.”
It’s interesting to note that, similar to his attitude toward indolence, Hazra’s writing also deviates from deterministic viewpoints because he values consideration, even if it often comes at the expense of agitating the reader. The article titled “Why I Am Not a Miso Soup” reflects this. “So there I was, Rimbaudelaired to my gills and quivering to my tits facing the query, ‘Are you a miso soup?’ which, to be fair, came with the pretext (or is it context?) that I had a habit of killing off/maiming the female characters in my novels,” the author recalls, recalling what had transpired in Lille, France.
This article, which explains to the reader why the author is not a misogynist and seems to have been written in his defense, starts out with remarks on casual drinking and is filled with a variety of disparate ideas and material, making it difficult to read. The least that Hazra could have done was to not defend himself, even if arrogant men never listen.
Hazra may be something or nothing, but his writing is definitely not sloppy. It takes guts to pull off a compilation like this, which effortlessly and humorously touches on a wide range of delicate subjects. Growing Up: The main example is Dashorothi-Babu and Mr. Finn. Here, the author compares the passing of “his first-ever friend,” Rana, who was a slow learner in comparison to his friends, with the made-up characters Huck and Dashorothi. Hazra raises the bar for literary reflection on loss and mourning by using modern terms like “special,” which are primarily used for people with disabilities. Another essay about death, or more specifically, “public deaths,” exists: Everyone Enjoys a Well-Timed Sorrow. This statement, “The death of a person is serious business,” cracks one up in all its seriousness.
Then, Hazra discusses nation-building in A Man of the Great Indoors. He comments, “I could have just as easily called this essay ‘an investigation into nationalism’.” However, he refrained from doing so since it would be “hoodwinking the reader.” And for good reason—everything that has been published on this little-discussed, little-known global emergency—hypernationalism—is very boring to read. Hazra considers that a nation is a Dantean circle and uses Dunbar’s Number, which is defined as “the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships,” to highlight that, in a Benedictine sense, the social networking behemoth Meta (formerly Facebook) is the “closest model to the nation.” Another example is seen in This Man’s Place Is Not in the Kitchen. In his essay “Kitchen, for me, remains a sinkhole,” he advocates for both defamiliarizing and defamiliarizing the familiar. That so, like all new endeavors, this astute compilation will be enjoyed in sections.
