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.