The Yoga of Max's Discontent

February 29, 2016
A man renounces a comfortable life in the West to pursue spiritual enlightenment in India in Bajaj’s engrossing novel. In the wake of his mother’s death, a chance encounter with a sage falafel cook inspires Max Pzoras to quit his Wall Street job, leave his friends and family, and embark on a quest of self-discovery that carries him from the snows of the Himalayas to the droughts of southern India. As varied as the subcontinent’s locations are its characters, including freewheeling young bikers and ageless yogis whose silences last for decades. Bajaj paints his colorful cast in bright—albeit broad—strokes. A yoga instructor raised in the Himalayas, Bajaj is best at balancing the tensions of place and practice: India’s privilege and poverty, Max’s mind and body, yoga’s mix of the spiritual and the terrestrial. Though its style fails to match the profundity of its ideas, the novel pays equal mind to the personal and the universal, guiding the reader along a pleasurable journey.

March 1, 2016
A young New Yorker goes to India to seek enlightenment. "In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna's sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness....Your discontent with the world as it is will lead you to your union." Bajaj's debut novel updates the classic formula of the yogic quest, from the first glimmer of dissatisfaction with worldly things all the way to universal consciousness in a frozen cave. Here, the disillusioned householder is a young Wall Street analyst named Max, the son of a Greek immigrant mother who managed get him out of the projects and off to Harvard. But when she dies of cancer, the meaninglessness of his existence overwhelms him. Inspired by a lunchtime conversation with an Indian falafel vendor, he goes back to the office, "switches over from Excel to Chrome and [begins] searching the Internet for information about Himalayan yogis." Within days, he's on a plane to Delhi. All the steps and missteps of Max's path, including ashrams, gurus, false leads, long hikes under terrible conditions, and a panoply of extreme spiritual practices and privations are dramatized in exhaustive detail. "Max walked to the edge of the lake and concentrated on the caves on the opposite side. Closing his eyes, he inhaled and exhaled one hundred and eighty times....He retained his breath ten, twelve, fifteen, seventeen minutes....Next he exhaled quickly....Max performed samyama on his navel and visualized every root nerve of his body alive with the same stream of minute energy particles that the water in front of him was. He took a step forward. Energy merged with energy. There was nothing under his feet." Do not try this at home.

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