When you start flipping through the pages of How To Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia by Shreevatsa Nevatia, it is difficult, at first, to come to terms with the fact this is a book laying bare the deeply personal trials and tribulations of a man battling life with a diagnosis of clinical bipolarity. 

Broken down into chapters, each one is more like an essay delving into a delirious mind soaked in mania, Marquez, lithium and the writer’s exploits as a journalist, offering a glimpse into fragments of his life that have led him to where he is today — at peace with his conditional sanity. 

In the preface, Shreevatsa writes: “Confession is not an act of courage. It is more cathartic than it is brave. My purpose, if I had to find one, was to play, not pander.” And pander he does not as he takes the reader through his escapades in “Bombay” and Benares, a five-star hotel in Delhi to meeting Deepika Padukone and growing up in Calcutta to coming home here. 

The book begins with Shreevatsa sprinting down Breach Candy in Bombay the night before he was whisked away to Starlight, a rehabilitation centre. The episode is punctuated with flashbacks to his growing up years in Calcutta, much like in all the chapters. Religious motifs are recurrent throughout, not because of the author’s particular penchant for it but because it was so heavily a part of his upbringing. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to his visit to Benares with his family in 2001, his introduction to Diana Eck’s Banaras: City of Light and “becoming Shiva”. Through his own journey, the writer also gives us a view of the condition of mental healthcare in the country and the toll that such a diagnosis takes on one’s loved ones. The book’s title has much to do with the effect that his diagnosis has not only on him but also on those around him — girlfriends, editors, co-workers, friends and family — and to reach a place where he can dare to travel light. 

The book does not end with a cure but a point in the author’s journey where he owns his narrative — “For what is life without a little absurdity. For the record, here is some of mine.”