Book Review: A Fistful of Memories by Prithwis Mukerjee
A Fistful of Memories is a delightful and deeply personal memoir by Prithwis Mukerjee, offering an evocative tapestry of anecdotes that span his academic, professional, and spiritual journeys. Told with clarity, humor, and introspection, the book captures the life of a man who has lived through India’s transformative decades—from the analog era to the age of AI.
Mukerjee’s writing shines when he recounts seemingly small, intimate moments—be it a telegram that changed the course of his academic future, an emotional confrontation with a corporate titan, or the spiritual surrealism of encountering a naked ascetic on a train. His stories from IIT Kharagpur, Tata Steel, PwC, and IBM are laced with wit and candor, offering a behind-the-scenes look at India’s tech and corporate landscape of the '80s and '90s.
What sets the book apart is its ability to turn the ordinary into the memorable. Mukerjee is not trying to be a hero; he is a storyteller with a keen eye for the ironies and serendipities of life. His anecdotes are not just recollections—they are reflections on ambition, disappointment, friendship, courage, and, above all, the joy of remembering.
Highly readable and richly human, A Fistful of Memories is not just a memoir—it is a celebration of a life lived with curiosity and conviction.
Recommended for: Readers interested in memoirs, corporate India, IIT life, or simply well-told stories that blend humor, nostalgia, and insight.
Review of A Fistful of Memories — In the Style of W. Somerset Maugham
There is a certain quiet pleasure in reading a book that asks for nothing but offers, in return, the texture of a life well observed. A Fistful of Memories, by Prithwis Mukerjee, is not a grand narrative of conquest or catastrophe, but a mosaic of recollections—each fragment tinged with affection, irony, and the peculiar melancholy that shadows all things past.
Mukerjee writes as one who has lived not for glory but for meaning. In his tales of engineering colleges, corporate corridors, telegrams that arrive too late—or just in time—he presents life not as a sequence of triumphs, but as a curious interplay of chance and choice. He is not interested in dramatizing the trivial; rather, he ennobles the ordinary. His prose is unpretentious, yet seasoned with a sly humour that suggests a man who has tasted both ambition and absurdity.
In the end, the book resembles one of those modest garlands the Hindus offer their gods—faded flowers perhaps, but strung with sincerity. And like all true offerings, it speaks not of the gods, but of the devotee who made it.
Review by Microsoft CoPilot - in the style of Times Literary Supplement
In a world increasingly shaped by curated perfection and algorithmic brevity, A Fistful of Memories feels like a handwritten letter — intimate, idiosyncratic, and defiantly analog. Prithwis Mukerjee’s memoir is not a conventional autobiography, nor is it a linear narrative. It is a mosaic of recollections — some luminous, others sepia-toned — that together form a portrait of a life lived at the intersection of technology, tradition, and transcendence.
Mukerjee, a mechanical engineer by training, a consultant by profession, and a metaphysical tinkerer by temperament, offers us a collection of essays that are as much about the world he has moved through as they are about the world that has moved through him. From the corridors of IIT Kharagpur to the boardrooms of Tata Steel and PwC, from the temples of Badrinath to the virtual landscapes of Second Life, the author traverses geographies both physical and philosophical with a voice that is at once wry, lucid, and deeply humane.
The book opens with a disarming confession: “I share something with a billion-plus fellow citizens of India: pure anonymity.” Yet what follows is anything but anonymous. Mukerjee’s prose is marked by a quiet confidence, a refusal to embellish, and a gift for the telling detail. In “Summer of 1979,” he recounts his journey to IIT with a mixture of nostalgia and precision, capturing the texture of a pre-digital India where telegrams could change lives and rotary phones carried the weight of destiny. In “Boiling Point,” he stands up to the Managing Director of Tata Steel — a moment of corporate defiance rendered with the clarity of a fable and the tension of a boardroom thriller.
But it is in the more eccentric chapters — “Mohua and the Goddess,” “Bitcoin,” “The Box and the Tower” — that Mukerjee’s voice truly comes into its own. Here, the memoirist becomes a metaphysical raconteur, blending the surreal with the sincere. A naked ascetic boards a train in the dead of night; a virtual temple in Second Life becomes a portal to real-world cryptocurrency; a birthday gift at IIT turns out to be a girlfriend in a wooden crate. These are not mere anecdotes; they are parables of a world in flux, where the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the sacred and the profane, are constantly being redrawn.
Underlying the entire collection is a philosophical current that draws from the deep wells of Sanatan Dharma, Vedanta, and Indic cosmology. Mukerjee is not content to merely remember; he seeks to understand. In “Parashar 21,” he attempts to build a machine-learning model for astrology, not to predict the future, but to explore the epistemology of prediction itself. In “The Chronos Trilogy,” he reflects on his science fiction novels as vehicles for metaphysical inquiry, where time is not a line but a labyrinth, and consciousness is the only true constant.
What makes A Fistful of Memories so compelling is not its breadth — though it is vast — but its coherence. Despite the diversity of its subjects, the book is held together by a singular sensibility: curious, skeptical, reverent, and unafraid. Mukerjee is a man who has seen the tiger in the forest and the algorithm in the machine, and he writes with the calm authority of someone who has made peace with both.
There are moments when the prose veers into the didactic, and some readers may find the sheer range of topics — from rocket launches to tantric symbolism — dizzying. But these are minor quibbles. What Mukerjee offers is not a polished narrative but a lived one, complete with its digressions, contradictions, and unresolved questions. In that sense, it is truer than most memoirs.
In the final chapter, Mukerjee invokes the Sanskrit exhortation Charaiveti, charaiveti — “Keep moving, keep moving.” It is a fitting coda to a book that is, at its heart, a meditation on motion: the motion of memory, of time, of the self through the machinery of the world. A Fistful of Memories is not a book to be read in haste. It is a book to be savoured, revisited, and perhaps, in the quiet hours of the night, remembered.
Top Ten ?
- Midnight Meeting
- Fear is the Key
- Mohua and the Goddess
- Morse at Malanjkhand
- HSBC and the Ten Dollar Solution
- The Box and the Tower
- Summer of 1979
- Telegram Tales
- Daddy Dear 🔹
- Full Moon over Manas
