"No Regrets: The Guilt-Free Woman's Guide to a Good Life" | Weeding out culpability and repentance

Complete women are those who can obey every word of their parents before marriage, take good care of their husbands and can raise their children well. This very same complete woman may work outside but on a secondary priority basis. Women have to always prioritise their household chores before stepping into professional life. These characterisations form the fundamental thought process that has become an unwritten reality for women. But, even after handling everything single-handedly, most women left are leftover with a surplus of guilt or long-held regrets.

Drawing from such experiences of women who have gained a strong foothold in their respective fields of work while handling personal life at the same time, author Kaveree Bamzai penned down a book which details the author’s prescribed method for how a woman should pursue a guilty free life.

No Regrets: The Guilt-Free Woman’s Guide To A Good Life tells you to follow your dream and the importance of maintaining a health balancing act for all things. The book is a collection of 19 chapters, each of which share the experiences of renowned people and the author herself.

“The biggest challenge I faced in my career was when my girls were young, when I had to rush home at 5 pm like Cinderella. I had made good arrangements for them at home in my absence. But it was those days when they fell sick or when things went wrong with them that made life difficult. But like everything, it was just a passing phase. Nothing in life is permanent, least of all the troubles,” said Nandini Harinath, Deputy Operations Director of Mars Orbiter Mission while quoting her experience in one of the chapters.

Her designation sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It is a given but it takes a lot of courage, hard work and innumerable sacrifices to reach and achieve such a prestigious role.

Certain chapters pick up on the author’s own experience in leading and creating a guilt-free life. Bamzai who is a renowned journalist, was born in a Kashmiri pandit family. In one of the chapters, she shared childhood memories and the way she was raised by her mother. The author also talks about the different perceptions of having faith in something and how her understanding of faith began or even how she became more religious after marriage.

This book itself is very refreshing to read even if it deals with a substantial and serious topic. You as a potential reader may not find each chapter relatable but there will likely be one particular chapter where you can find some relation of the situation to yourself as this book covers various aspects of the struggles and journey of women in a world built on preconceived and stubbornly held notions. Most importantly, however, this book does not claim to be a self-help book in any respect. Indeed the closest thing to a proper description would be a repository of hitherto unwritten tidbits of wisdom, passed on from mother to daughter in dealing with the world. It makes no tall tales of guaranteed self-improvement or provides a tacky listy of testimonies from those who supposedly benefited from this book, It would rather be a map of the various pitfalls in the path of the modern woman, a sort of travel guide that details on what one must avoid for a more fuller experience. But, all the same, the book doesn’t hold back on the advice, it’s rather heavy with it and while the author’s claim that the book is not self-help is debatable, the book certainly doesn’t try to sell you advice from a place of supremacy and proficiency. It’s casual and perhaps books of such nature must always be willing to take themselves less seriously if only to highlight the gravity of what they discuss.

To conclude, this is a definite recommended read. What it does for you is purely down to what you wanted from it. Its self-help if you need it or a light way to unwind your day of dealing with the unreasonableness of society if that’s what floats your boat.