India’s ’90s kids grew up in an offline world and graduated to one that’s hyperconnected and seemingly always on fire. This generation’s psyche is riddled with qualms about identity, politics, capitalism, technology, relationships, selfhood, and what it means to live authentically—and in Famous Last Questions, Sanjana Ramachandran strikes at the heart of their confusion.
She is sincere and ironic, self-flagellating and observant, and witheringly funny. In a heroic attempt to understand why she is the way she is, she takes a scalpel to her childhood trauma and ends up with the socio-political machinery that set the scene for it, thinking out loud: Why is ‘Science, Arts, or Commerce’ how we decide the course of our lives? Why must we believe in God? Should women get married before the age of thirty, or die trying? Why is domesticity so difficult when she isn’t the ‘perfect’ housewife? How has the internet exposed Indian culture? And can virtue actually kill people?
Motivated by the impulse to heal; to prove her genius; and to win love, fame, and ‘enlightenment’, Ramachandran unravels the entire idea of the self. In the process, she studies dysfunctional family dynamics and her relationship with her quintessentially #IndianParents, her upbringing as a Tamil Brahmin girl, confronting the ideas of caste, religion, morality, gender, and sexuality that define and often betray her generation.
Above all is her insight into the universal nature of suffering—the dynamics of who gets to suffer publicly and why, and also how no privilege—whether in terms of caste, class, gender, or sexuality—can ever really escape it. Unafraid to be disliked, she talks plainly about millennial narcissism and her own ‘supposed’ transition away from it, towards spirituality, authenticity, and self-acceptance. From describing life in Big Tech to days spent in Vipassana meditation, this is a book unafraid of contradictions, a heartfelt chronicle of the ‘modern’ Indian woman’s tumultuous journey from needing to achieve everything to searching for wholeness.
Famous Last Questions plays with the boundaries of memoir, reportage, and research, unburdened by the need for absolute answers. The author holds ambiguity closer to heart than any fixed ideal of ‘truth’, conflating the Buddhist notion of no-self with Hindu and Jungian ideas of a deeper, abiding self, and Godël’s Theorem with the inadequacy of organized world religions. Ramachandran is both the heroine and anti-heroine of this story—which, ultimately, is the story of us all.
Sanjana Ramachandran is a writer and marketer from Bengaluru. Her essays and reportage have appeared in The Caravan, The Print, VICE, NDTV, Fifty Two, New Lines Magazine, and other Indian and international publications. She was part of the South Asia Speaks fellowship for outstanding emerging writers in the class of 2022. She has led marketing for brands across consumer goods, media, and tech start-ups, and is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and BITS Pilani, Goa.
