Another Sort of Freedom is as much a memoir as it is a treatise on Das’ secular idea of moksha or freedom. Three of his previous works—India Unbound (2000), The Difficulty of Being Good (2009) and Kama: The Riddle of Desire (2018)—had dealt with three of the four goals of the ideal life (artha or material wellbeing, dharma or morality and kama or desire) according to the ancient Indian concept of the purusharthas. He had shied away from the fourth, moksha, because Das, who identifies as an agnostic, did not believe in the concept of the afterlife. During the pandemic however, when leafing through a copy of the Monier-Williams Sanskrit–English dictionary, he learnt, he says, that moksha’s original meaning was simply to be free. “Historically, moksha had nothing to do with religion or spirituality. It just meant to be free. If you go to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit–English dictionary, it gives many examples of moksha, from a person who repays a debt, a prisoner released from jail, to a horse without a harness,” he says. Das, who had always felt his life was an attempt to free himself from the expectations of others, could identify with this secular notion of moksha. Through the concept of moksha he found the lens through which he could attempt a memoir. “Every book of mine is partly in the first person. And as I started thinking about moksha, I thought, well, this may be a good way to think about my own life and I started connecting the dots,” he says.

Another Sort of Freedom

‘Reliving your life is superior to living it,’ says Gurcharan Das