In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living

A celebrated dancer, actor and public intellectual writes a memorable account – by turns inspiring, hilarious and provocative – about how she stumbled her way to health, fitness and sanity.

What does it take to survive on an orange and a glass of Complan for each meal? Dance the Flamenco till midnight the day your baby is due? Not to come undone in the face of personal loss? Or try multiple treatments from faith healing to mantras to cure a tumour that turns out not to be a tumour?

It takes someone as feisty and fearless as Mallika Sarabhai to do all this and more. In this frank portrayal of her extraordinary life, Mallika doesn’t hold back in talking about her ‘thirty-year obsession with being thin’; her addictions like smoking and how she ‘hypnotised’ her way out of it; her fascination with alternate therapies like Pranik healing, Ayurveda and colour therapy, and the beauty treatments she uses for ‘future-proofing’ her body so that she can continue to dance and perform for years to come.