The difficulty of being good

Being good - something we all aspire to however rebellious or conformist. Varied conceptions of good, standards of goodness, expectations of others and of oneself. "Good" and "right" are among the most loaded words in any language and the rubric on which any human society has been built. Defining either of these however poses great difficulty and we all settle for meanings of the moment that apply to our restricted contexts.

Gurcharan Das in his book explores the larger ideal of being "good" and yet living in the world materialistically, comfortably and happily. He uses the Mahabharat as the text through which he explores the idea of morality, moral values and moral rules. The Mahabharat is perhaps one of the most al encompassing pieces of literature ever written. Running into over 100,000 verses and 13 books, it explores various facets of human lives and raises more questions than it answers.

Through the principal characters of the story and the choices that they make through the plot of the epic, he explores the concept of Dharma, its relativistic and ever evolving nature. He applies lessons learnt through his readings of the Mahabharat to modern day living, the idea of a democratic state, realpolitik, the corporate world and individual questions of conscience that each of us faces everyday.

What I love about the book is that he does not pronounce judgement. Gurcharan Das merely lays bare, with complete simplicity and lucidity, all the moral choices and the human emotions explored by the Mahabharat and their transcendence to the 21st Century. His personal view, he makes clear, is just that. He does not impose it on the reader. His analysis is critical, objective and logical. He takes the reader through his own mental process of questioning and counter questioning the lessons of the epic. At the same time he does not over explain or get lost in verbosity. The pace rivals that of a work of fiction and the chapters are innovatively and curiously titled.

All in all a lovely read. Something I am definitely going to go back to in greater detail bit by bit.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC by Daniel Levitin

Ever wondered about why you always get goosebumps when you hear the guitar solo on Comfortably Numb? Or why people close to the stage during Metallica concerts behave the way they do? Or why, when you play your favourite hip-hop tracks, your parents have probably asked you to turn 'that rubbish' down? And why they probably like bhajans better?

Levitin's brilliant book is about all this and more. It's about how the brain reacts to music, what exactly goes on in that little pink blob in our skulls when we close our eyes and listen to an orchestra play Vivaldi, or when we slip on our headphones and let Iron Maiden pound, or when we listen to SRK shake a leg to some lifted music during a Hindi movie at the nearest Inox.

Levitin takes pains to make the book as accessible to non-musicians as possible, and that effort does come through. However, despite this effort, I would still call it a moderately tough read because of all the terms (musical as well as biological) involved. So if you're one of those who prides yourself on your killer reading speed and are able to run through books faster than Robert Mugabe's able to collect farms in Zimbabwe, then you might have to put your ego on the backburner and take it slow here. I myself took a good two weeks to get this book over with.

To Levitin's credit, at no point in the book does the pace slack, or slow down. He keeps the book alive with real examples and a poker-faced sense of humour, as he takes you through the journey of scales and notes, the various people he's met and worked with (the gamut of people range from rock stars to Watson and Crick, the DNA dudes), and of course, the various experiments that he and his colleagues have performed. In this way, this book is probably the most interesting laboratory report you'll ever read. Some of the experiments are fascinating and are guaranteed to raise eyebrows. The last chapter of the book was my favourite - the role of music in evolution, and when you read his logic, you can't help but saying, "Shit, that's so true!"

One great thing about this book is, it gets you thinking not just on music, but a lot of other things itself. Why do you love your girlfriend and what about her attracts you? How are you able to recall exactly where you put that Led Zeppelin tee-shirt in your wardrobe? How does your mom know how to cook innumerable number of dishes? How do we all remember each other and our lives when we wake up, despite the fact that our brain has been fairly inactive for the last 8 hours? Why do we like the smell of chocolate and not hydrogen sulphide? The best part of this book is how thought-provoking it is - fields of music or otherwise.

Yes, it's a slightly serious and tough read. And no matter how simple Levitin tries to keep it, it still will be a tough read for someone who's never been involved with music training / playing before. Many of the examples are sadly songs which we may not have and you can't help but feeling that the movie / live version of this book would be so much easier to understand (to Levitin's credit, he's ensured all the music is up on the book's website).

Overall, a wonderful book, and a very different read. Levitin is a rock record producer and a neuroscientist, so there really is noone better qualified to understand the importance of the right levels of sound and at the same time, how they are understood by our brains. I highly recommend this if you're looking for something more challenging to read. You'll come out smarter and more inquisitive after it, I promise you that.

And thank you to my roomies Ajinkya and Sushil for giving me this book on my birthday :-)

Operation Shylock

Operation Shylock by Philip Roth is more than just the confession he purports it to be in his subtitle. I will not get into the details of the plot which can be accessed here and here. I am only going to talk about why I found this novel interesting. Let me begin with all that is not good about it. First, unlike my previous (and first) experience with a Philip Roth novel, it is verbose. Long sentences where I lost track of the beginning or the train of thought were a definite disappointment. Second, the beginning is slow and torturously so.

Past these stumbling blocks onto what made the novel worth a read. It explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than one (or even two dimensions). It impressed on me the fact that it is not as simple as an argument and a counter-argument. That it is a complex web of emotions, intent, conflicting selfish motives and historical legacy; a pot-pouri of thoughts that have often swirled through my head in the context of India's conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. It brings to fore, through a few conflicted characters, the tangle that a prolonged conflict can become; that it no longer remains a matter of simple logic to identify causality and assign responsibility to one group or another or both find a workable solution. It juxtaposes patriotism against humanitarianism and leaves the reader feeling that neither is as easy to praise or condemn.

Operation Shylock also explores the idea of Jewishness and how the holocaust perpetrated by Hitler may have changed that. It digs into the things that constitute ethnic identity even if one has not been a part of the experience that shaped that community. The conflicts of an American Jew vs. those of an Israeli Jew vs. those of a holocaust survivor all come together to raise questions about the basis of communal identities. It impressed upon me the need to understand why one chooses to identify oneself with a community (social, religious, economic, political or philosophical) and the need to articulate those reasons to one self.

And the final reason why Operation Shylock, despite its failings, will remain a good read to me is the manner in which it explores the curiosity of a writer.

WILT IN NOWHERE BY TOM SHARPE

Tom Sharpe was first introduced to me by a boss at my former company, who knew my well-documented love of Wodehouse, and said that this was a contemporary version. Big shoes, that. He'd handed me the interestingly named Blott on the Landscape. The first few chapters had me rolling, it was indeed quite Wodehousean, in fact, it was almost like Sharpe was trying a little too hard. Face it, Tom... A lot of people can put together big words, but noone can do it like Plum can. Still, I granted him the read because it was quite entertaining and Tom had a more sarcastic style. Unfortunately, that book got drenched and destroyed, so to replace it for my boss, I bought another interesting looking 'Wilt In Nowhere'.

And I was a little disappointed, I must say.

The sarcasm of the previous book was just not there, neither was the punch. The storyline by itself is quite interesting. Henry Wilt, an English college teacher, is nagged on by his rather voluminous wife to visit rich relatives in the USA in an attempt to suck up to them and fund their quadruplets' (you heard me right) further education. Henry detested the very thought of visiting the old hags and cooked up an excuse that he had to teach a course at college during that period. And off he goes exploring the English countryside. The word 'desultory' comes to mind, since he had no plan, he just wanted to go off exploring.

And then things get murky, as he gets inebriated and lands up at the site of an arson attack. In the meantime, on the flight to the US, a drug dealer tries to hide his batch in the quadruplets' luggage and the police trace the Wilts down, and become cognizant of some of the 'merrier' happenings of the rich uncle. This screw-up, compounded with Wilt's unfortunate presence at the earlier mentioned pyrotechnics, result in what should have been a hilarious mash-up of events. But somehow the laughs don't come as easily, though the book isn't sluggish in any way.

Mind you, there are good moments. Hilarious, even. The quads (as they're called) are a constant source of merriment, and the moment they talk back to the Reverend is probably the funniest moment of the book. Another scene features the quads sending obscene emails to all of the uncle's business associates and destroying his business (a little hyperbolic, but, what the heck).
Other parts like Wilt acting like he had amnesia were not too convincing, and felt more like a badly made Bollywood film than an English comic novel.

All in all, it's imminently readable. Sharpe is supposed to one of those satirists who pokes fun at current English society and that comes through nicely. Pick it up if you see it at the library or a friend's, and can finish 280 pages in 2 days, and want some light-hearted reading between all the Engineering handbooks and Noam Chomskys you generally read.

Had this been the first Sharpe I picked up, I probably wouldn't be tempted to pick up another. But having read the first few chapters of Blott on the Landscape, I know he's capable of better stuff, and will probably try some out again in the future.

Rumi

On Cynduja's request, I decided to do a post on Rumi. Its more of a link post than anything else, but then again, there is a world out there related to Rumi.

http://www.armory.com/~thrace/sufi/poems.html

This link has a huge resource of Rumi, including the Rubaiyat of the Master.

http://www.squidoo.com/rumi-quotes

Even though I recommend Wikiquote for an exhaustive quote resource, this link has a good set of quotes too. And they are sorted by topics too. Shockingly, Brainyquote had too few quotes on Rumi. Blasphemy, methinks!!

http://www.writespirit.net/spiritual_poets/rumi/rumi_quotes_love

This site is a gold nugget! It has Dante,Blake,Rumi,Dickinson sorted out in such a neat fashion. Total dancing moment I say! It has a section devoted to Kabir too.

Nightingales are put in cages because their songs give pleasure. Whoever heard of keeping a crow? -- Rumi

Two Minutes over Baghdad by Amos Perlmutter,Michael Handel and Uri-Bar Joseph

There is a lot of small talk going around about the way Israel has attacked the Gaza Strip and the murder of innocents that followed. I call it 'small talk' because its easy to take a stand that is morally right, based on the reports of the media that are streaming in. What is difficult to notice and is usually called 'propagandist' is how easily Hamas got elected and how very conveniently did they place their defence capabilities near schools and hospitals. 

Of course the Hamas versus Israel is just one of the battles that Israel has fought with its neighbours. The most famous one is the Six Day War. The next in that category would be the destruction of the Iraqi Nuclear Plant. And post the elections in Israel, there will be heightened talk of a second attack on the Iranian nuclear reactor. 

7the June 1981 --the first time in modern history a nation conducted a preemptive strike on a nuclear facility and succeeded. It remains the only successful strike by one nation on  another , one that involved meticulous planning,impeccable secrecy and looming elections.

'Two Minutes Over Baghdad' is a definitive account of Operation Opera from the point of view of those that carried out this attack. The authors--Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel,Uri- Bar Joseph, have done a remarkable in collecting evidence and presenting it to us in a way that is easily understandable by a lay reader. Its not a full-length military novel, rather its divided into parts , the preparation and fears--as early as 1950s, the attack itself and the repercussions. What authors tell us is the detailed military preparation that went on before the attack--something that is textbook material in military schools like the Six Day War--the number of people that knew about the attack--a total of five,and Israel's fear of the holocaust.

Indeed, this book illustrates what it is like to live in a neighbourhood where countries have 'wiping out Israel' as a part of their constitution. And to think that the Iraqi nuclear program was under the control of Saddam Hussein. 

The Osirak nuclear reactor was attacked by Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, but its complete destruction took place during the bombing by the Israelis. The book also talks about how the missiles and planes were to be chosen. The planes had to be able to fly at a low range, should have enough capacity to fly 350 miles and back without refuelling and should be able to attack without detecting. All this was to happen without any collateral damage and without any pilot being in the custody of Iraq. 

When you read the book, you also realise that almost every Israeli family--including that of PM Menachem Begin-- has been through the trauma of the holocaust or that of Anti-Semitic strife. PM Begin took Saddam's Anti-Zionist threats seriously and tried to negotiate with the French Government to try and stop the transfer of nuclear technology. When that didnt work out, he developed a plan to wipe out the reactor itself. The book also talks about the brilliance of the then Minister of Agriculture, Ariel Sharon, who provided inputs for the nuclear attack and was a firm supporter of the attack. Post the attack, the world took a position against Israel,as did the US. The opposition condemned the attack because it was too close to the polls and Begin's party--the Likud party-- was trailing. However if the opposition,led by Shimon Peres, were to have been in power, there is every reason to believe that they would have carried out the attack too. The victory was hailed by Israel and Begin's party came to power again with Ariel Sharon as the Defence Minister. 

The book is a detailed non-fiction account that gets over in under two hours. The writing is not heavy and is easy to understand. Its not a biased book that aims to sway the reader towards the Israeli point of view,rather it maintains a neutral position and shows both the positives and negatives of the attack. What is a constant throughout the book is a nation and its government's need to stay alive. So much so that PM Begin had to proclaim " On no account shall we permit an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the people of Israel." This came to be known as the Begin doctrine. It is a good background read before the next Israeli elections. 

There is enough material to suggest there this time there will be an attack on the Iranian nuclear reactor. And the government that comes to power will pursue that goal doggedly. In all, after you read the book you will realise that apart from the usual media channel we have a lot of other sources of information that give us the other side of the story. The other side may or may not be right, but as a spectator, with the right to form a judgement it becomes important that we have all information.

The Amazon link for the book is here. It retails for $49.95.

At Landmark(Mumbai), with the current conversion rates, it will retail for around Rs.250. It will have to be ordered.

Words, Afterwords & All The Books In Between

I love books. Not text books, but books in general. I never liked studying but I love reading. And they have been some of the best companions to me. Books bring various things with them. They can hold stories, knowledge, ideas and memories. They also hold in them the keys to unlocking the imagination, and the gateways to fantastic worlds.

Books also hold tactile experiences like weight, size, feel of the paper, texture and so on. I hate reading books online-I want to HOLD the book. (I do read many things online, but I prefer not to.) I also love the smells that attach themselves to books. I love the smell of old books. You close your eyes and it is like a whole life passes by in your mind’s eye. The smell of new books always holds that promise of something new and exciting. Old ones have that dusty, musty scent. I love old bookshops and libraries. New ones are so crisp and fresh. Different papers have different scents, too. Sometimes I smell a book that has

lived near a lake or sea and can smell that in it. Or a book that survived a fire -- there's a unique charred aroma. I love scents, and, books are a very tactile experience, very sensual, if I may say so.

And I try and get my hands on old books whenever I can. There are quite a few places in and around where I live that cater to this fetish; mostly second hand stores and bargain basement types that I trawl through and invariably always get a valuable gem that I would quite honestly pay much more to get my hands on.

For example, through some of my treasure hunting, I now have a first edition copy of The Godfather. And 2 James Bond novels autographed by Ian Fleming himself :) both of course also first editions.

But more than even the monetary value of these books, there are some books I pick up either intentionally or accidentally, that offer me an insight into the lives of the previous owners. Most of these books are used right? So the previous owners sometimes leave things lying in the books as bookmarks or keepsakes and forget about them. These little things survive the years and end up in a complete stranger’s hands. It’s like finding a message in a bottle washed up by the ocean. At once strange and familiar and exciting! For it is full of possibilities. These are my time-capsules. 

There is something incredibly romantic about it all, if you actually sit and think about it. These knick-knacks come in various forms. I have found items ranging from simple grocery lists, to photographs, to visiting cards and greeting cards, to letters to stamps and sometimes even currency notes. And not all of them were Indian. The everyday items are the most interesting ones. It reminds us of the days gone by and something like a grocery list or a shopping list or a laundry list(yes, those too make it to the books) can take me on a trip down memory lane, if its within my memory, or offer me a glimpse into the times existing then.

Most of us am sure would have had some experience with this. 

Those of us with elder siblings in the same school get hand me down textbooks.

Or some of us might have borrowed seniors’ books. Sometimes these have priceless scribbling, sketches in them that keep you entertained in an otherwise boring class and perhaps beyond. Maybe you have even contributed to some yourself!

Do you ever feel like leaving things in library books or books you are getting rid of, just so that some future person can wonder where this weird Polaroid, note, sketch etc came from? Or have you ever found something like I have?

-Arjun

Stuck in our own wallowing pit

I must confess... I am disappointed with Indian writing in English. I recently finished reading Aravind Adiga's "White Tiger" and now I wonder whether the booker is only given to those Indians who write expressly with the foreigner in mind. Now, I am not xenophobic and I don't have a problem if authors want to explain a particular culture to alien audiences. However, the whole manner in which a majority of Indian authors seem to do it puts me off mildly.

Let me approach the topic from another angle. I also recently read two delightful books - The Purple Hibiscus and Girls of Riyadh. The former is set in the Nigerian civil war and the latter in Saudi Arabia. Third world societies both, parochial, patriarchal and anything but modern. But the authors wrote about their countries with a rare sensitivity. Describing culture but never judging it; introducing me to people and situations different from my own but never assuming that I did not have the sensibility to identify with human emotion without their having to dissect it threadbare.

In this sense, I think we still suffer from a colonial hangover. I see authors addressing Non-Indians, taking it upon themselves to educate others about Indian culture. And I find that demeaning to say the least. They could describe and leave the labelling of the culture to those of us who read; they could talk about an individual's like or dislike for the society and leave the reader to chose his/her side.

Why are Indian authors, or should I say the majority that I have read so cynical, so bereft of hope, so full of criticism? Why can they not look at the contradictions that characterise this society as a sign of its diversity, its acceptability and its resilience? I see a million things that make me smile and I think it is a pity that I hardly see them reflected in the stories I read about India.

Before I sign off, I am sure there are Indian authors who differ from the afore mentioned ones and I have been suggested a few. So shall get down to reading them in a while and hope that I am pleasantly contradicted.