Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

By: Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Narrated by: Ramon Tikaram

Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, read by Ramon Tikaram.

There’s no problem Professor Chandra can’t solve. Except for one: the secret to happiness

In the moments after the accident, Professor Chandra doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes, but his life’s work.

He’s just narrowly missed the Nobel Prize (again) and even though he knows he should get straight back to his pie charts, his doctor has other ideas.

All this work. All this success. All this stress. It’s killing him. He needs to take a break, start enjoying himself. In short, says his doctor (who is from California), Professor Chandra should just follow his bliss.

Professor Chandra doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to embark on the trip of a lifetime.

©2019 Rajeev Balasubramanyam (P)2019 Random House Audiobooks

Critic reviews

I loved this beautiful beautiful book. It's tender and compassionate, written with exquisite care and verve, and so so SO funny (Marian Keyes)

Chandra is a delightful creation: peevish, intolerant, intellectually exacting, unwittingly eccentric, nerdy, needy let lovable. The book, like its picaresque hero, is a one-off (Patricia Nicol)

This brilliant and eloquent novel, which puts into words so many unutterable annoyances, is a sort of Zen satire in which tolerance and understanding mingle with hilarious criticism of contemporary mores. It’s a wonderful read (Wendy Holden)

Rajeev Balasubramanyam gently pokes fun at the modern fondness for positivity, but tells a disarmingly positive story... The writing is elegant and witty and the comedy is always underpinned with humanity; a life without bliss is no life, and the gradual dawning of Chandra’s self-awareness is genuinely uplifting (Kate Saunders)

Balances satire and self-enlightenment... a surprisingly soulful family tale that echoes Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections in its witty exploration of three children trying to free themselves from the influence of their parents (Ben East)

Schmaltzy

Self-Obsessed 70 Year Old Divorced Academic Has Deeply Unlikely Epiphany, Gets In Touch With Feelings, Has Unbelievable Rapprochment With Children And Ex-Wife In Sentimental Bourgeois White Christmas.
The narrator Ramon Tikaram does such a fantastic job of reading this, his voice is beautiful and not only does he do believable South Indian accents, he’s so good at voicing all the other characters too which is no small feat.
However I haven’t felt this let-down by a story in a long while, it’s as if the author was rushing to make a publishing deadline and was compelled to wrap things up quickly in a neat, Disney-sequence bow.