patrakaar2b

The suite

2011-05-16T15:27:00.002+05:30

He switched on the hot water knob and let the warmth of the water soak his tired legs. Ah, bliss! In a few hours, he would address a press conference with the Greek Prime Minister on the bailout package that the IMF had decided for the debt-ridden country. And he would have to spend long agonising hours with the Finance Minister deliberating over the details, the intricate, mindnumbing details. Oh, it was killing. He poured some liquid soap into the water and rubbed his hands to make foam. This was the only time in the last two days that he had found for himself. Cath was going to attend Cambridge and he had had no time to congratulate her. Why is the Greek economy more important than my daughter's graduation, he asked himself, and surprisingly, did not arrive at an answer.

There was a noise outside. He started. He thought he had closed the door but maybe not. The drinks at the state dinner last night had left him groggy and he had not been up to speed since morning. He pushed himself out of the tub and peered from the door. A slim lady, not over 30, was bent over the table, accumulating stuff on a tray. She wore the sort of costume that he had observed a cosply actress wear at a members-only club in Japan, frilly skirt and satin top, something that reminded him of an air doll. Oh yes, he had tried one of those. Before meeting Anne, he had passed months without meeting any woman. Koizumi had suggested to him to try one. The Japanese, he sighed!

She was petite, this woman, who was now dusting the mantelpiece with a tiny brush. Its light brown bristles made a soft movement that made a mockery of the act. He was standing in the most exclusive suite known to man, and here was this lady, dusting and cleaning, when she could just as soon walk into his arms and allow him to show how decisive he could be in bed.

He walked towards her. Her hair was tied in a tight bun and the skin at the nape of her neck glowed with a fragrance that he could not have smelled at this distance but was sure was emanating from her. She turned around and gave him a shocked look. "Oh I am terribly sorry sir," she said, "I thought you weren't here." She looked here and there and began collecting her stuff to leave.

"Oh no please, don't leave, it's all right, " he said, and walked towards her. She looked at him with horror and a look passed in her eyes, a look that mixed recognition with utter surprise. Suddenly he realised he was naked, and thought, Thank God, now there is no going back. Now I cannot douse it in error.

She started walking towards the door really fast. He lunged for her. She gave out a cry, but he was grateful they were the only ones on the floor. He held her from behind and whispered sexily into her ears: "Listen, listen dear, I don't mean to hurt. Just calm down, ok? Please come here and sit."

He was reminded of the island he had visited with Anne on the invitation of Papadopulos, and the hotel room, just like this one--only smaller--where they had made love. That had followed a failed meeting with the leaders of the G8 in London where every one of his goddamn proposals was shot down by one party or the other. He had had to come out at the end of it looking like a tame rabbit who had to sugarcoat his words to the press. Bloody heads of state!

But she was still struggling, shouting now, asking to be let off. "I am the chief of the IMF darling," he told her, "and I will show you a good time." The sound of these words made him feel robust and vigorous, and for a moment, his mind actually believed them. If now, only this intransigent woman would agree!

He lifted her and the feeling of her writhing body and fighting legs soothed his tense nerves. He felt a certain pleasing heaviness enter his soul. Its imprint was similar to how he felt around Anne. They hadn't made love in a long time. There was also this irritant of her profession. As a journalist, she knew too much, she knew how powerless he really was in his job. Whenever they were together, and he was moving inside her, he imagined a dent in his pleasure because of her knowledge and his knowledge of her knowledge.

Ah, but this woman. Couldn't she just stop screaming? "I am not going to force myself, you silly goat, I promise," he said, but it didn't seem to matter. He took her inside the bedroom, threw her on the bed and latched the door. The fucking hi-tech latch. He could never wrap his head around using them. He and she might be stuck here forever. He giggled.

She was sobbing now. The anger had dissipated. He felt sorry for her. But he could not allow regret or guilt. He had to have something to pass the day. Anything, but now it was this. Oh, just managing, what-was-his-name, Dappiano, sapped the life out of him. The discussions and the boring, boring conference calls. She should understand that. "Why don't you understand," he said to her, but she kept sobbing. "Just spend some time with me, is all," he said, "and then we can go our own way."

She looked up at him now, and her eyes gleamed with the freshness of tears. "Ok," she mumbled. He thought he didn't hear her right. "Yes?" he asked her, and she nodded. He was very happy. As he walked towards her, he thought: Now I can do it, now I can do it. But he was not sure what he meant to do. Fuck her? Live the day? Locate meaning?

He took her in his arms and kissed her hair. She embraced him haltingly. He kissed her on the chin and took her hand to between his thighs. He saw himself all suited up, speaking to the press in that sophisticated voice of his, and the memory of this moment pressing him on. He took out his tongue and reached for her mouth. She turned away her face. He smiled. He liked this woman. Maybe he would check up on her later. She looked Oriental, but he could not place her. For all he knew, he may have signed a deal that affected her and her family. Yes, he was quite certain she had personally benefitted from his largesse. And here she was now, in the arms of her benefactor. He was satisfied she was thanking him in this special way.

He was big now and wanted her to take him in her mouth. "Go down," he said softly, and held her head to direct it. "I need a minute," she said. "Sure," he replied, a tad too formally, but the world knew he was a stickler for day-to-day decencies. She lingered, then got up, and left the room. He stretched himself and brought his arms behind his head as he rested against the too-large pillow. Dreams of the day floated before his eyes.

A minute passed, maybe two. She did not return. He decided to go call her. He came out of the room and checked the bathroom. The suds in the tub were now floating like less sticky versions of themselves. But there was no sign of her. "Oh," it occurred to him suddenly. "Oh that bitch," he muttered, and checked out the vast suite with shocked eyes. It was beautiful. A bunch of fresh tulips, their slender stalks hidden in the depths of a rotund Japanese vase, made an offering of peace. He was almost ready to accept it, but how? How could he? She was gone and he was left to face the day alone. He massaged his forehead, benign with the loss of lasciviousness. He heard hurried footsteps. There was commotion. A small crowd gathered at the door. Everyone stared at him. She was there too. She was there, pointing a finger at him, a small, culpable finger, her face devoid of emotion. Oh no, he thought. They started moving towards him and there was only so much time to absorb this. But at least, he said to himself, there would be a different texture to the day. At least he would be in the dock for pressing his imprint. He tried to mind the fracas, tried terribly to mind it, but could not bring himself to.

I have to be there...

2011-04-23T23:51:00.000+05:30

He boarded the Metro at the Rajiv Chowk Metro Station. He was retuning home after seeing a friend. He felt not himself. A cloud of expectation hung above him. It was about her. With every passing day, he felt the absence of her presence from his moments more and more keenly. He saw a bunch of young boys board the train. They were very young, about 21 or so, and looked like any other Delhi youngster. Their hair rose in the middle in a symmetrical nod to anti-gravity that paid obeisance to some obscure god of fashion. Their hands were ringed by black beads that were dying to appear goth but were merely faux-religious. The boys had beads of perspiration lining their foreheads. They smelled of energy and looked restless in an appealing way. He found himself thinking of them as his children, their future, how lovely this age is, one discovering new ways of being. He wished she was by his side. He wanted to whisper in her ears the joys of raising a child who looks for you in a crowd, and then grows up to be an adolescent who runs away from you at all times. The joys of parenting. It was both wonderful and different to be thinking this. Just a few weeks ago, he would have eyed the same bunch and reminisced about his own adolescence. People and places took him back, until some time ago. Now he imagined them partaking in his life and settling into the home that he and she would build. Now it was all about the future.

He rested his head against the glass and closed his eyes. The train whizzed past the urban sprawl of Delhi with the sophisticated lady on auto-record asking you every five minutes to "mind the gap". Such politeness, he thought to himself. Men and women of all hues entered and left this space, and he would likely not see any of them again. It was strange. One passed moments of closeness for but a few minutes and then went ahead not just on his way but with his life. And all this was all right. It was how things were. The train halted at Mayur Vihar Extension and he saw a woman enter the compartment, jostling for space. "There is no space. My God! See," she said to her husband. She looked around for what he imagined was solace and when her eyes met his, he smiled at her broadly. She took a moment to register that he was not an acquaintance and then smiled back, in a way that was both unsure and grateful. He looked away for a bit, feeling the splendour of relief he imagined he had brought her. It was very subtle. The flyover outside rose and dropped in his gleaming eyes. He looked back at her. She was talking to her husband. I will not have this moment again with her, he told himself. Should I be grateful this instance for giving me this joy, or should I seek more, something similar with others? He was bounded by a rationality he sometimes found prohibiting, and wanted to touch some chord of human interaction that was both deep and flighty, so that it could form a casket of experience that would last him for some time. He waited.

The train reached Noida Sector 15 station. The compartment grew empty. People who had been standing found seats. Nearly everyone was listening to music. Some were resting with eyes closed. People all, he thought to himself. There was a watchman who carried a notebook that looked like it contained the entries of those who had visited the premises he guarded. There was a lady in a FabIndia dress who looked like she was waiting for a call that would define her tasks for the day. There was a salesman who wore a worried brow and sent frantic messages on his mobile. All strangers. Yet all vessels of moments that he could generate with them. He found himself strange. He was not like this earlier. He was not hungry. Now he was. He felt the need to define himself not in terms of one love, or one connection. He saw himself as a bunker where people's angst could be released. He was so hungry it showed in his eyes.

His thoughts returned to her. He did not want to possess her emotionally. He felt a gap in his love when he compared it with the received wisdom on love. He could be the perfect partner, for all purposes, he could be the perfect partner, yet he had a commitment to others. A baby on the opposite bench looked at him and chuckled. I have to be there for him, he told himself, and smiled. The baby looked elsewhere. I can love her, I can be with her, but I have to be around, he told himself. He was not sure who he wanted to be around for, but just at this moment, with the train reaching Noida City Centre, he knew he had to be around for the people in this compartment, on the station, in the lift, at the food counter below, those exiting the station, and the rest of them, the vast, unnumbered rest of them. I have to be there, he told himself, as he pointed to a woman whose dupatta was grazing the floor. She set it right but ignored him.

He heaved a sigh of weightiness and left the compartment.

The possibility

2011-04-20T13:24:00.000+05:30

There were parts of him that were so used to being by himself that this new feeling could be no less than unsettling. He was very happy around her, especially in the way he portrayed a particular prototype of the relationship that he had always hoped for himself. He called her “sweetie” and “hon”, and whenever he did so, he felt a frisson that was laced with love but had edgier contours. When they exchanged messages, he felt masculine and exhibited himself in a way that played to conventional notions of chivalry. He was happy.

But he was also vulnerable. With friends, he felt the loss of a spontaneity. He attributed this to a general awareness and carefulness with everything. He could no longer be cavalier, he had a stake in things. Earlier, he saw himself as a benevolent patriarch who could dish out advice to all and sundry. The fact that he had never walked these roads provided his views a clear-eyed objectivity. Now he watched his step. He came to the realisation that people grow special in the course of things. Equations change, and so must the dynamics.

They met often. They made plans to meet out for dinner but invariably she would leave office early and he would find her waiting for him when he returned from office. It was a strange encounter. When he saw her cooped up in the watchman's chair, his first reaction would be surprise, maybe even distaste. Hadn't they spent all afternoon texting each other the elaborate plans for the evening? Hadn't he imagined to death what perfume to wear and what look to, when he met her? But there she was, awaiting him, as he walked in all tired and wilted from the day.

He would take her to his apartment and replay the act. Again, he felt the sudden onset of a gravitas that made him a little selfish for life. He could not be as giving with his friends anymore, because he had to reserve a part of himself for her. There were limits to his personality and he had to make sure he allocated enough to take care of everyone. Especially her.

He held her at the waist as she rolled her arms around his neck. They kissed. Sex was not part of today's programme. But around her, sex lost the connotations it held when he was by himself, acquiring simpler, more innocent meanings. When he softly bit her ear, it followed in the natural order of things, not something that acquires a life of its own. Their lovemaking was interspersed with moments of real tenderness, and when he kissed her forehead, he looked at her with such love she was overcome with emotion. The tears stayed in her eyes since he cupped them with his hands and kissed them.

Afterwards, they went to McDonalds, and ordered combo meals. She ate from his plate with an abandon that made him feel wanted. When he was about to put a sliver of French Fries in his mouth, she made a small noise and when he looked up, he saw her mouth open and eyes closed in the expectation of feeding her. He laughed a tiny laugh. She thought he was laughing at her childishness, and smiled. He knew he was laughing at how this person was beginning to take him out of himself in a matter of days. There is God, he told himself. Things have a logic to them that is best described as random.

With every meeting, he was growing surer of himself. He was investing more and more of himself in her. He knew he intellectualised everything to make sense of things. But within him existed a template that welcomed hurrahs of joy at the slightest instance, a template that was gravid with immense love. She made him acknowledge these with a certainty that he had lacked so far. He could shut his mind around her and believe in the randomness of things. It was possible. It was possible to live like the others.

A life-altering experience

2011-04-20T13:20:00.001+05:30

He had hoped it would be a life-altering experience. All this time, he had expected a love so wholesome it would sweep him off his feet. Every day, he eyed girls longingly and often imagined them imbued with characteristics greater than they actually possessed. He would see a woman enter the lift at office and her cool femininity would be an almost physical presence that held the stultified air inside the elevator together.

When they finally met, it had been after weeks of online interaction. He had located her on a site that offered "stable connections in an age of instant gratification". Her profile was called hafnium and she defined herself as "malleable and ductile, like the metal". He thought and hoped that she meant this in an intellectual way, and was relieved to realise, on chatting with her, that she did.

At first, she was cagey, not willing to reveal her real self and making up all manner of excuses to avoid speaking to him. She asked him for his mobile number but did not reveal hers. One time, she logged off abruptly at a point in the conversation that was serious and well-going, so that he seethed, and wrote her a scathing mail, calling her names and debunking her profile as fake.

But every time, she returned and was apologetic. And he, who had waited too long for a connection, and was no paragon of stability himself, understood her behaviour and attributed it to latent anxieties. Perhaps it was this lack of propriety, a sense that they were buddies who could give each other shit and live to give some more, that cemented their bond. Their conversations became more relaxed, and finally, they decided to meet.

She lived in a posh locality in the city's south. He worked in the suburb. They decided to meet after office hours at a CCD in Westside Park, a hip place frequented by youngsters. When he reached the place, she was already there, dressed in a red halter neck that she had indicated would be her identification mark. He looked at her. The first thing that crossed his mind was how different she looked from the photograph she had sent him. That girl was skinny with a look that betrayed not a care in the world. This one looked like she had spent a few years running after an irate boss.

They ordered coffee. Every time they did anything that involved interaction with someone beyond the two of them, he felt different, more ponderous. With her, he felt a lightness that smacked of a lack of responsibility for anything. She was sweet, talking to him with childlike enthusiasm. It seemed to him that she trusted him and that he could trust her too. It was about nothing more than how forward she was in her ability to make him feel comfortable around her.

He knew her, he felt he had known her a long time and this was merely a formality that they had decided to follow through with. He asked her to come to his house, an apartment in the city's suburb, close to his office. She agreed and in the auto, held his arm with a firmness that made him feel special and protective towards her. When they reached his house, she kissed him with a sweetness that was more tender than sexual. This made him bold and he kissed her back, and they lay in each other's arms in silence for some time on the sofa in the drawing room, with the tubelight illuminating everything in a soft white hue.

He nudged himself within the folds of her neck and she sat on his chest. They giggled in a way he had not giggled in a long time and he was surprised to rediscover this side of himself. She unbuttoned him and kissed him softly. He smiled, and his smile was a mix of pleasure and tenderness -- a sensation he could not quite place, and which was slightly unsettling. She took him in her mouth and he could not decide if this was great or some sort of a climb down from a lofty ideal in his head. He had come to love her, he suddenly realised, in the course of the evening, and was not sure if this act was cementing or diluting that. He felt he ought to be true to himself and tell her to stop but that prospect opened the gulf of some unknowable fears within himself and he decided to let her go ahead with it.

Afterwards, she was as sweet as before but he felt the collapse of something fragile. He was the same with her, but the glorious white of the room had taken on menacing undertones. He was not sure why. He had read too may stories that played to this stereotype of the male reverting to himself after sex, thus proving the worst apprehensions of women. But what he felt was not that. What had transpired was love at first and something animal-like later, and he could not quite place the two together. He was happy and relieved and spent, yet his heart felt light in a way that he was not used to with her. He felt the burden of sexual encounter clouding their subsequent meetings and an unwritten contract calling for a certain ...what was it? seriosuness? joylessness? answerability? between them because of what had happened. He questioned that. He was no chauvinist. He just preferred how things were up to now, even if that was not sustainable.

The thing was running according to script, but all along he had expected the numinosity of his expectation to meet with reality. Perhaps it was all just in his mind. But he had such notions of things that it was difficult to transact reality. He was such a romantic. He had hoped it would be a life-altering experience.

The joy and the terror

2011-04-14T09:42:00.000+05:30

He walked inside the office with trepidation. It was the first day of his internship. Though he had worked as a journalist earlier, the last year had dulled his working senses since all he had to do was wake up in the morning and dress up for the classes which were conducted a half mile from where he slept. It was one extended event, from sleep to study to lunch to back to room and there was no scope for gravitas, the kind that could easily envelop a situation such as this. He watched his movement. There was a gleaming edge to everything. Even the washroom was all five-star with self-working taps and elaborate flower arrangements. He seemed to have walked right into some Hollywood production. There was a studied silence to the place with people propped on their chairs, very serious-looking, and going about their work with what looked like calm precision but could as well be confused firefighting. He was smiling throughout. He wanted to charm but did not want to do so with his typical glibness. Better to let it spring from some deep certainty than smooth, on-the-spot delivery, he told himself. It was important to settle down. The tendency to rush -- in which he hoped that he would learn and absorb in spite of himself, not because -- would not work over the long term. Two months was sufficiently long term to try new mindsets and yet not long enough to drown in the misery of expectation. He was asked to deal with a young woman in HR and she guided him though the steps. Most of the day would pass in getting things to speed, a login id, an access card, the nick-nacks of modern office life. There was nothing special about anything yet the very sentiment that nestled at the heart of this edifice drove one to overtly practical, but also at some level meaningful, purpose. Books lined every desk since this was a publishing house. He picked up one as he walked around, waiting to be hand-held to the next step. It was “Engineering Mathematics-II” and contained lovable examples of differential equations. Those examples seemed to emanate from a more complete frame of life. When his eyes ran over the formulas of integration, they emerged from the book and settled into a sediment in his brain where the template for them was set in some joyous love for their existence. It was a joy no smaller than any he recognized. And it was there, inside him, rekindled at the sight of dy over dx. Books always made him happy, but this latest feeling was not one he had experienced in some time. Too much love for the arty, or artsy, as he liked to see it. Even this moment might get trapped in sentimentality if he was not careful. He focused on what Hardy meant when he defined his love for pure maths as something that may not be “useful”. An end in itself, it speaks, it does speak to one. But even as this was happening, he was contemplating wrapping this experience with the gift of foreknowledge that comes both before and after an event has brought its fruits. Expectation is an awesome emotion. He could sense the moment in its entirety, in its thoughtful intermingling of his desires for the day. As if to say, this stays and returns from time to time. But its return is written in its last act and each such moment, as will happen and has happened, will bring its own memory along. He turned the book’s pages. Example 1.8 prompted him to open his notebook and solve it. There was a dreamlike quality to the way his hand moved and he arrived at the answer as if by magic. There was no will or force. It was guided by what, he wondered. There was a curious coming together of the past, one’s love for it, respect, the notion that things are purer in hindsight and the rest of it. Sedimentation of knowledge, and the school building. Mrs Sood (she didn’t even teach him math) and her smiling face, the saree, and the trees, the water cooler, the staircase. Everything came together and settled on the curvy integral sign. He looked up and the room, bathed in yellow light from the lamps in the ceiling, was empty as it waited for its occupants to return from lunch. Suddenly he felt a rush of terror, a streak of white hot joy at how everything stays. Today and tomorrow. Now and for all time. Across space and time. He wanted to stop. He did not want to stop.

He and she

2011-04-08T14:36:00.002+05:30

They had been married seven years. The promise of their lives had been a mutual interest developed in business school. The love for entrepreneurship, she called it. They had both specialized in strategy in their second years and decided to launch their own startup in the IT space. For her the seven years since their marriage had been a blissful time whose memory was now an essential part of her. For him it had been a time of newness, of new challenges as one went about setting up the business and making a life for oneself. She defined herself in terms of their life together. For him, she made up one part--a very important part--but one part of their life together. She was his wife. He was her world.

And then he stopped working. He grew tired of all the running around and the hassles. He thought it better to go back to working at a regular IT company. She supported him. It made no difference to her. She saw their life as a beauteous extension of those heady initial days and nothing in their marriage had prompted her to question that. Oh, the seven years! She took more interest in the arts than he did. She read the papers with more vigour than he did. Her literary self grew in leaps and bounds and acquired a muscle she cherished knowingly. She was riding the back of a very powerful animal and the leash of that animal was in her husband’s hands.

For her life was all peaches. She was very generous. For him life could be compartmentalized. It was important to do so, he felt. It was in his nature but it was not in hers. They each had their own selves which they believed to be complementary to the other, but were really not.

So he stopped working at being an entrepreneur. She saw the reasons. They made perfect sense. He had been at it for seven years. But she felt a void suddenly. She felt the animal unleashed. She was dependent on him, his emphasis on work, his running around, to give meaning to her own varied interests. They were now orphaned. He had accepted an alternate view of the world, a world where the promise of things (entrepreneurship really, but she liked to think of it as wider and broader) could be frittered away and yet life carried on. She felt the loss of an anchor.

Suddenly she began living from day to day. She started finding reasons to be happy and acquired a glossary of words that she could throw around to sound intelligent in any conversation. She started developing her life around a mental standard that she was working on on the go. It was not as charming as earlier, not as spontaneous, but she was more stable, she felt safer. Only, she looked back with fondness for a more innocent time.

Their love grew different. It made little difference to him but for her it acquired a measuredness that she both admired and resented. She was now responsible for their happiness, she feared. She feared the complete loss of spontaneity. She wondered if she would be happier with another man, someone with whom she could go back to being her old self. But she loved him, and she also loved her new self.

Years later, she asked herself, would I revert to that original feeling? It mattered a great deal to her. She asked herself if she was selfish. But it was not that. She wanted her old life back, is all. Maybe all she wanted was the old feeling back. She was not sure, and she kept slipping between periods of painful certainty and an anodyne silence that didn’t last long because she was, she felt, in some state of shock.

She started to think of herself as separate from him but it did not work because they lived together. She thought she would be calmer if she stayed away but an experiment to do so at her mother’s filled her with life-sapping dullness and dread. She was in love with him, yet she was not. She could be perfectly happy if she rejigged her brain but it was beyond her. They still lived as a couple, doing things for one another, but she was not herself anymore. She was not herself in the way that she had come to define herself. If only she could find a way to live with the new her that she was discovering on the go, day to day.

She had her flaws. She felt she should do something constructive but always wanted spontaneity and a “love for things” to guide her decisions. That was erratic. And now she felt responsible. She resented that. She was selfish, she felt at times. But I only want “us” back, she said, and passed the blame. She liked her original self, but she also liked her new self, and wanted that the transition should have come at an opportune time and with smoothness. She cherished smoothness in all things. She wanted life to go swimmingly.

It was really about her, she thought. Her husband was only a conduit for her own persona, and he shouldn’t have to bear the burden. But she could not wrap her head around the new state of affairs. She also felt the rush to provide for them, if it came to that (she felt the need to reciprocate his efforts at running the house), would further dilute that old time, her former pristine self. She was fucked up, she told herself. But it had been wonderful.

The coffee shop

2011-04-01T22:40:00.001+05:30

He went to the Nescafe at the corner every day at six. This was the time when there was a lull in the office, with the edits yet to arrive and the other parts of the edit page formatted and subbed and more or less done. Sometimes he was accompanied by Anil, who was a friend. But some days, Anil was too busy to accompany him and he went alone.

It was a small cosy place, with a few tables and light air-conditioning. Blown-up posters saying "Relaxation sold here" with white men and women laughing their hearts out dotted the walls so that one got the feeling that there were more people in the room than there really were.

He liked to go there by himself and order a muffin and a classic, short form for a basic, no-frills coffee. The guy at the serving counter went about serving quietly, taking orders and taking out coffees and teas and making burgers with calm precision. He really liked the serving guy, and wished they were friends.

It was on one such day, a non-descript, ordinary day really, when he went by himself, that he spotted her. She was there with a bunch of her friends, all of them whispering conspiratorially and laughing uproariously, huddled together. He always found this charming -- when girls did their girlie things and boys stood at the side watching them. It just seemed like how things ought to be.

He sat down at a table with a classic and opened the day's Indian Express. He always brought along the newspaper with him because he was wary of sitting by himself, doing nothing but observing the others. He felt he was being watched and maybe even pitied, and he hated that. He did not want people to think he was friendless, which he wasn't -- not really -- and read the paper to be occupied and also to be seen to be so.

He looked up and noticed that she was looking at him. He realised he was looking at her with that mix of curiosity and disinterest that one harbours when looking at oneself in the mirror. There was nothing penetrating in his stare, just surprise and wonder at watching someone who could be so different yet so similar to oneself. He stared at her eyes, her lips, her cheeks. Almost on cue, he tilted his head and ran his fingers on his face to remember the sensation of being himself. He imagined he was two people, both himself and herself, and seeing her comforted him. He imagined that he could live with himself, that the warmth of this new feeling would keep him in good stead. This girl, this someone who was really another him, would be his friend and help him in a crisis. These images, for no real reason he could fathom, brought him calm. She was standing there throughout, chatting up her friends and basically doing little.

It was not just this girl. People’s faces brought him to the verge of extreme emotion. He fell in irreversible expectation of how they would react when they got to know him. Would they like him? Would they love him? He wanted everybody to love him. He wondered if he didn’t have enough self-respect. But no, it was not that. If anything, he thought he possessed a very strong ego. He was also extremely sensitive and wanted lots and lots of unbridled love. A curious combination, he thought. His eyes found her again. She was leaving the coffee shop.

I can love anyone, he thought, as he saw her go away in the glass window. She was very regal, walking with a hint of a smile that carried the memory of some glorious moment. But, he wondered, as he eyed her almost-liquid frame, will my love for her, for anyone, ever match up to my love for mother? He was too attached to her -- it seemed he would not be able to survive another day if she wasn't around. She was there. Right now, she was a presence. Even though she was in another city, she was always a presence. She lived on the leaves that he touched before leaving the gates of his society in the morning. She existed in the draft of air that made its way through the grime and heat of a packed DTC bus. She sat upon the knobs that rested on the doors of the office’s washroom, and it was she who made the opening of the door an act of supreme dignity, so that at such a moment, he felt he was staring life in the face with a resolve that welcomed anything, nearly expected it. With her around, he felt the strength to live life from one moment to the next, and this knowledge imparted a bearable benevolence to the whole enterprise. The colours were brighter and the entire edifice of place and time was constructed for his exquisite pleasure. That was the knowledge that he sought in love, that was the knowledge that ma’s presence provided him.

He knew of a person who was so traumatized by his mother’s death that he had sought a medium to get in touch with her. But it had come to nothing. His thoughts turned to death. Where would Ma go when she died? He wondered if he would be reborn as her son in another life and know this love again. But he couldn't say for sure. Nobody really knew. And it scared him and also hurt him. He wished he could do something about how cruel things could be, but he did not know anyone who had outsmarted death. Perhaps he would have another mama in another life but what was the guarantee that that mama and he would share a love as powerful as this mama and he do? There was no such guarantee, and one could not but wait for one to learn. But wait for what? He had read as a child that when people died, they were reborn and when they died again, they were reborn again, and the cycle continued until one's actions had all been accounted for -- one's good deeds and sins -- and then one became a star, hanging for all time in the sky. When he had read this, he had hoped that his star should hang next to Ma’s. But all these were mere hopes and there was no way to know how things happened after one really died. He thought all this and wondered why must we be given this love, such strength of emotion, and then know it will go away. He could not imagine surviving the passing of that love, that bond.

Life is too much, he thought, as he saw a bunch of youngsters stream inside the coffee shop. He thought he ought to capture all this in a story. It was time. He had been expecting a push towards writing. When he read that people started writing at, say, 30, he felt a change must have come into their lives, a break from the past---a passing into full adulthood with not just the realisation of, but full experimentation with pain, fragility, longing… He had been waiting for some such experience himself, but in his mind it had eluded him. He expected too much from the scheme of things. It was pockets of experience he sought. But he had been denied them, he felt. He felt if he had to write, he might as well start, however haltingly, and not wait to be pushed into it by some personal earth-shattering event. Such an event may not come by.

But he feared he ought not to write. To play with characters' lives took upon a reality he was uncomfortable with. He was anyway too given to modifying his own actions to suit what he thought was appropriate. He feared that if he let go and played with his characters freely he would not be able to rein in his tendency to closely monitor his own conduct.

It was getting dark outside and it was time to return to his desk at the office and work on the letters that would be published in next day’s edition. He folded the Indian Express, crushed his coffee cup, nodded at the serving guy and broke out into the world. A world where simply the action of stepping on the pavement was an act of will that he found pleasingly definite against the now burdensome, now fleeting weight of life.

Blue Valentine

2011-03-30T04:06:00.001+05:30

In Blue Valentine, there is a scene where Cindy has invited Dean over to her house to make him meet her parents as the two are planning marriage. Cindy’s father quizzes Dean on his education. Dean hasn’t passed high school while Cindy is studying to be a doctor. When the parents bring this up, Dean says the following: “I know, she is about the smartest person I know. I would want to have a doctor like her. I would trust myself with her, my kids with her”. He says all this with the langorous pace that comes with speaking on the spot and that arises from genuine love. It is a masterful scene.

The movie is about a couple who, a few years into their marriage, are not on the same page anymore. Dean, played by Ryan Gosling, paints people’s homes for a living, while Cindy, Michelle Williams, is a nurse. Cindy expects Dean to realize his true potential, but Dean is quite happy with the life that he has. He loves his wife and daughter and does not understand why this much is not enough for them as a family. In another scene that burns on the memory, Dean wants to get intimate with Cindy who instead offers herself to him for fucking. Dean pleads: “Be good to me, I am good to you.” Cindy walks away and locks herself in the bathroom, weeping. She cannot locate the love anymore, while he is bursting to share it.

Watch it!

Long due second post on the ethics workshop

2011-03-19T11:22:00.003+05:30

Let me start by saying that the ethics workshop is nearing its end, with just one more session remaining. I attended a session yesterday with Prof Garg which focussed on Corporate Governance. It was a very useful session, we discussed corporate governance norms in India and the whole exercise never dipped into idealism. Prof was practical, calling a spade a spade and introduced us to the corporate governance closets of a number of Indian companies. Whoa, what skeletons!

Therefore I take back my reservations about the workshop. I think it has served a purpose, at least in sensitising us to certain important issues. And on that note, I put below the mail By Prof Kumar that he wrote me in reply to my mail expressing doubts about the sessions. Very decent mail, gives enough space for a healthy debate while also sends out the right signals to student to keep baser, publicity-seeking emotions in check :)

Dear Vikram:

Thanks for the email as well as the genuine concerns raised by you. I sincerely appreciate the concerns but have my own reservations about the way you are raising these. Number one, I don’t think you ought to be taking a position on behalf of the whole student community. You have the right to express your views but then each one of us has got that right. You may agree or disagree with someone’s viewpoints – that’s entirely your choice. Secondly, whether the attendance should be compulsory or not, I am no one to decide on that. You are most welcome to approach the right authorities – PGP office/ the Director - for this. However, I would certainly like you not to mark copies of your communication to your peer group.

And, you are most welcome to come to my office and we can discuss the things in detail in person rather than communicating through emails.

Thanks!

Sushil

An evening

2011-03-18T11:15:00.000+05:30

The first thing she noticed when she entered the office was him, everyday. She felt protective towards him. There was a sadness in him that she couldn't quite place. He was very intelligent, writing about books in a weekly column, that went from Roman History to Megasthenes to the other great rulers of the past. She found it terribly enlightening and also a little scary, to hold all the information inside one's head. She wondered about the thoughts in his mind when he was by himself. He sat directly opposite her and only a partition separated them. When he got up to go to the loo, she could see him from the corner of her eye and wondered if he was looking at her. She forced herself not to look up at him because then he would know that she was checking him out. So she waited to look at him as he walked away, when she was out of his sight but he was not yet out of hers.

They talked sometimes and her words seemed to spring from a part that was not her, that was more intelligent and more perceptive than she believed herself capable of. The other day, she saw him get up and arrange his things because he was getting ready to go home. He stared at his computer for a second and then, looking very serious, he switched off his computer and turned to leave. Just then, she asked him, "What do you ponder so hard, standing there, before going home every day?"

He stopped, startled, and turned: "Me?"

"Ah-huh! You stand there and look at the computer."

He laughed. He found it very funny, her observing him like that, when he was just waiting for the computer to shut down.

"Oh, I think about the untrustworthiness of womankind," he said and smiled.

"I wouldn't know about that," she said. "I have never been with a woman."

And they both laughed. And she was certain a gap had opened where none existed before.

The next day, he said hi to her and she waved back. She had taken special care to dress up that morning. Her skin was smooth and she felt light. She wished she would be held by him and their lips would meet. Sometimes she dreamt about that. Their lips meeting and he pressing down on her softly, his weight a sensation of such serene pleasure, she would wake up with a grimness she knew would last through the day.

She wondered what she should do to approach him. She felt it was for the guy to initiate the matter. But what did he feel for her, she wondered. Was he being flirtatious when he said he found women untrustworthy, challenging her to prove him wrong? She doubted he would say all that for any such reason. He was just being glib.

She told Naina, her childhood friend, about him, and Naina laughed at her shyness. "Just go and tell him, you fool," she admonished.

So, on the second Monday after she last spoke to him, she went up to him after the office had cleared and said, "I like you." All evening the weight of expectation had disoriented her and she felt she was floating above everyone else. It was an unpleasant sensation and she wondered if she should call the whole thing off. But she had pined too long and that other pain, slow and not sharp, was no less exasperating.

He looked at her, his eyes wide, and said softly: "What?"

"Well, I like you," she answered. "I have liked you for some time." She suddenly felt very brave as though she could accept anything at all. Everything that she had ever suppressed could come tumbling out, propriety be damned. If I was gay, I would accept that now too, she thought to herself and laughed at how weird that sounded.

"That's strange," he said. "I would have never guessed."

"And?"

"And nothing. I don't know what to say. I guess I like you too."

She felt suddenly deflated, as though some dynamic energy was being sapped out of her. Is that all you can manage, she wondered, and it struck her that maybe he had never looked at her like that. Yes, that's possible, she thought and felt tired, and also a little ashamed.

"I guess I will go now," she said, and he nodded, and his nod was a gesture of such lovable simplicity that she wanted to move over and kiss him. Perhaps her eyes conveyed her wish and he looked down.

She turned and walked towards the cafeteria. She filled her glass with chilled water from the cooler and sat down at one of the tables. She tried hard to feel bad for herself, but she only felt stunned. How can such a connection be one-sided, she wondered, and downed the water in one large gulp.

She watched him walk to the loo and he was looking down, as he always did while walking. Often a light smile played on his lips but today he was withdrawn. Am I really in love with him, she asked herself, or merely with his face, his smile? He was not handsome, but there was a spark to him that she attributed to his quiet masculinity.

She came out of the cafeteria and walked out of the office. Her heart felt heavy and she did not know how to deal with that. She thought life was worth living and dealing with, but this new sensation was weighing down on her in a way she thought would change her outlook. She may begin to have her doubts about life, she thought.

She walked up to her car in the parking and eyed with longing his car that was parked some distance away. She heard footsteps behind her but decided to ignore them. She didn't feel like doing much and wondered if she should go back and get herself a cigarette. Absent-mindedly, she searched for her car keys in her purse.

"Hello again," he said.

She turned around and found him beaming at her.

"I just wanted to say sorry for behaving like a jerk inside. Thank you for saying what you said inside. But I have a girlfriend."

She heard his words as though from very far, and she took her time registering them. He is not declining me, she told herself, there is someone else.

"Oh, how nice," she said. "Whats' her name?"

"Geetika," he said. "She works at India Week."

She thought she had heard that name, but wasn't sure. "Ok," she said, and didn't know what more to say.

"I am sorry," he said, "but..."

"Oh that's fine, fine," she said emphatically and surprised herself. I must defend this, she told herself.

"I guess I will see you tomorrow."

"Yes, yes and have a good ...day," she stopped herself.

He smiled that heartbreaking smile of his and turned around. And then again she found herself standing in the darkness, cold and bereft.

She got inside the car and put the keys inside the ignition.

Harrah's Entertainment

2011-03-18T11:06:00.002+05:30

Once Harrah's realised that it could not match up to the Bellagios and Mirages of the world, it decided to forgo the capital-intensive expansion plan and instead, adopt IT to increase customer loyalty. The following questions answer some of the techniques they followed. Submitted as part of a class discussion on the HBR case.

Q.1 Discuss the factors that drove Harrah’s customer relationship strategy.

Ans: When Philip Satre joined Harrah’s as CEO, he was focused on people management as his main strategy. While this helped the company initially, Stare found that a lot of cross-visits were happening in the gambling industry, that is, customers who visited Harrah’s were not repeating their visits. With rising competition and flashier properties, Satre realized the need for a new customer relationship strategy. The company, being an old player, could not replicate the kind of themed properties that were sprucing up in Las Vegas and other parts of the US. Times were changing with new capital investments happening in a crowded market to attract new customers, and a limit on the jurisdictions that allowed gambling. Harrah’s knew it had to come up with a new strategy to survive.

Satre identified that while the company was performing well on operational parameters and technological brilliance, it was not able to retain customers largely because of a poor marketing strategy. A friend advised him to tie his marketing strategy with operations, in other words, connect all Harrah’s properties with a single database and use insights gleaned from there to implement customer retention strategies.

The aim was to implement marketing tools and programs across all Harrah's properties. Company COO Gary Loveman disbanded the existing marketing function and rebuilt it with experts who preferred quantitative methods to qualitative inputs. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) at Harrah's came to consist of two elements: Database Marketing (DBM) and the Total Gold program. While DBM allowed Harrah’s to segment customers and sell them offers based on analytical inputs, the Total Gold program motivated customers to consolidate their play. The data collected through the program allowed Harrah’s to execute direct marketing strategies that increased the efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s marketing spend.

Q.2 What are the Key Performance Indicators of the gaming industry. What are the objectives of the various database marketing programs and how are they working?

Ans: The case identifies the following three metrics (KPIs) for the gaming industry:

1. Customer acquisition: The first phase, “new business”, is focused on customers new to the brand or the property. The goal was to encourage customers to take a second and third trip after making an initial visit.

2. Building customer loyalty: This was focused on customers known for at least six months or three trips. The goal here was to continuously extend the relationship.

3. Customer retention: This was focused on customers who had broken their historical visitation pattern. The goal was to reinvigorate customers who had demonstrated signs of attrition.

The objective of the database marketing programs was to improve Harrah’s performance on each of the above-mentioned KPIs. The company hired Gary Loveman from HBS to bring quantitative muscle to its marketing strategy. What Loveman and his team did was development of quantitative models to accurately predict customer worth—the theoretical amount that the company expects to generate from a customer based on his past usage of Harrah’s properties. This was a transformational move for Harrah’s. From a historical model of operational CRM that focused on the customer’s past usage patterns, Loveman proposed an analytical CRM model that was predictive and therefore, radically different from how the company viewed profitable customers. Analytical CRM was implemented through the following programs:

New Business Program:

The New Business Program was designed to improve the effectiveness at converting new Total Gold members into loyal customers. The program used predicted customer worth (theoretical wins) to make more effective investment decisions at the customer level—thus allowing the particular offer to be more competitive with what the customer was currently receiving from their existing scenario of choice.

Loyalty Program—Frequency Upside

This program was designed to identify customers that, Harrah's predicted, were only giving Harrah's a small share of their total spending in a particular market. Harrah's capabilities enabled it to develop programs that offered incentives for these customers to visit Harrah's properties more frequently—i.e., switch a trip from a competitor to Harrah's. Harrah's calculated the profitability of these programs by comparing the incremental theoretical wins to the incremental cost of the program.

Loyalty Program—Budget Upside

Harrah's also identified customers with budget upside—customers who were only giving a small share of their gaming budget to Harrah's on each trip. In most cases, a customer's allocation of budget was directly related to the order in which they visited casinos on a particular trip—the first stop received the largest share, the second received the second largest and so on. Therefore, the objective of this program was to encourage the customer to visit Harrah's first and thereby capture the majority of the single casino trips.

Retention Program

The objective of Harrah's Retention Program was to reinvigorate customers who had broken their historical visitation pattern. Harrah's tested a variety of offers with customer segments to determine how much to reinvest in retaining loyal guests. Harrah’s recognized that the full potential of these ideas would be realized only if these capabilities could be used at the local property level. Therefore, they made significant efforts in educating the local property managers and their marketing teams about the potential and effective use of these Data Base Marketing capabilities.

Q.3 Explain how the concept of customer worth/ customer lifetime value has been applied at Harrah’s casino in the Database marketing efforts to gain a competitive edge in the industry w.r.t key performance indicators.

Ans Basing customer profitability on predictive worth (customer lifetime value) rather than historical data, Harrah’s came up with a new model to improve performance on each of the KPIs: customer acquisition, building loyalty, and customer retention.

Database marketing:

As an example the case mentions one Ms Maranees, who, under the new system, became a valuable customer who ought to be targeted with offers. This decision was made using decision science tools to predict customer worth rather than relying on observed worth from her first visit to the casino. While she would be considered a lousy customer based on her short visit to Harrah's, with the help of the information generated from one visit and one visit alone, Harrah's concluded otherwise by submitting her profile to the database. She was probably a great customer, but a great customer of Harrah's competitors. It, therefore, made sense to invest in converting her to a Harrah's customer. In the past, she would not have shown up on the radar screen.

Proactive marketing:

Also known as opportunity-based customer segmentation, this process allowed Harrah's to track customers’ play preferences, betting patterns, where they liked to eat in the casino and whether they stayed the night, how often they visited, how much and how long they played. Combined with the basic information contained on the application card, which included birth date and home address, Harrah's could begin to develop a sophisticated customer profile.

Harrah's estimated that 26% of players provided 82% of revenues, with avid players spending approximately $2,000 annually. These "avid experienced players" that tended to play in multiple markets became Harrah's target customers. Using this detailed information for every customer, Harrah's predicted potential customer playing behavior at its properties. Harrah's compared observed to predicted behavior and identified opportunity segments based on a disparity between predicted and observed values. Harrah's used customized marketing to achieve specific objectives such as driving incremental frequency, budget, or both.

Marketing Experiments:

Harrah's quantitative approach also made it possible to conduct "marketing experiments" and track customers over time. This helped Harrah's discover the right marketing instrument, for the right behavior modification, for the right customer. One example in the case relates to how tracking customer behavior let Harrah’s cut down on costs by learning that certain no-frills, less attractive promotions were actually more profitable than big packages.

Another example is the eradication of "same day cash" at most Harrah’s properties—the process by which casinos returned a portion of a customer's bet each day with the hope that the customer would play more with the cash. By using sophisticated decision tools, Harrah’s learnt that it could eliminate "same day cash" without adversely affecting the business. Thus, the company was able to eradicate practices that did not contribute to incremental revenues.

Q.4 Does Harrah’s have a sustainable competitive advantage? Can other companies duplicate what Harrah’s has done? Discuss.

Ans. Harrah’s realized early on that sustained competitive advantage will only come from a rigorous customer focus and nothing else. Any other tool could only be a facilitator of the process. High operational efficiency and implementation of IT are but ways to ensure that the customer keeps returning to Harrah’s properties. Harrah’s has had a successful history of reaching the customer on a personal level by trying to learn as much as possible about them. This knowledge in turn helps the company to serve its clients better and also significantly improve its operational effectiveness. For example, if a customer lives close to the casino he/she will rarely receive an offer for a free night at the hotel since the likelihood of that person accepting the offer is slim. Conversely, if the customer is a regular in the casino’s restaurant, the chances he will accept a free steak dinner invitation are relatively high.

Attention to customers at the service level also matters. Most customers, as mentioned in the case, lose money during gambling and often feel “shitty”, and they are disgruntled. Good customer service will take care of such disgruntled customers and ensure they have a good time.

Apart from the above, Harrah’s has the option of protecting is innovative processes and knowledge through proprietary means. This will give its business the necessary edge without having to worry about competition trying to reproduce its innovative processes. Further, Harrah’s may license its intellectual property and earn revenue from its proprietary software.

Q.5 Discuss the privacy, ethical and security issues associated with what Harrah’s is doing. Are there concerns and how can Harrah’s address them?

Ans. There are a number of business practices that Harrah’s follows which may not be deemed entirely ethical:

1. Given the nature of their business, they promote gambling. People go to the casino because they want to feel “exuberantly alive”. Harrah’s works at enticing customers to feel the adrenaline rush of gambling. Most of their offers are targeted towards this. This has definite ethical issues since gambling can become an addictive practice and Harrah’s offers encourage such behavior.

2. Harrah’s IT system relies on tracking customer behavior, right from their playing strategies to their personal information including address and birth date. This raises issues of privacy, particularly when Harrah’s can track customers’ spending patterns on gambling. However, in times of social media, this looks less like a security issue than earlier. With Facebook around, concerns over Harrah’s privacy invasion sound overrated.

3. The bigger debate around data mining is the problem of sharing Harrah’s internal data with credit card companies. This sort of data cartel can have far-reaching consequences for a customer’s credit profile and ability to secure credit. So far, however, Harrah’s has not been accused of breaching this line.

4. Harrah’s also runs the risk of too much profiling through its data. Forcing behavioral/psychographic patterns on users can backfire, when all customers are looking for is a good time. Customers’ behavior in Harrah’s may only be a reflection of their less guarded selves, and an incorrect pointer to their behavior metrics and/or psychographic positioning.

Do prediction markets work?

2011-03-11T01:45:00.002+05:30

There are several advantages to prediction markets:

They introduce common sense to such basic management follies as beta testing taking more time than originally planned.

They can be used to get a general sense of any project that is devoid of hard management considerations such as financial viability, expenses etc. In other words, whether the project has enough firepower to create buzz. This can be a potentially rewarding input for new technology companies, smartphone apps, etc.

They can be used to check one’s intuition about a project: it can do wonders during those gruelling decision-making times.

Prediction markets allow top management to keep the ear to the ground and not get carried away with their management-speak.

Conditional prediction markets can be used to predict likelihood of events that are contingent on some other events. Often for financial managers, the choice is between two projects that look equally attractive from a cash flow perspective. Say, an FMCG company X wants to get into the biscuits space with choco-sandwich Y to take on entrenched rivals, or alternatively, expand its fast-growing potato chips business Z. Both projects look attractive from a purely financial perspective, and the marketing department has a mountain of data that is unable to help. In such a situation, a conditional prediction market can help with gauging the popularity of Y on purely consumer attractiveness measures contingent upon X taking up Y and giving up on Z. Or, consumers might like new variants of Z and that input will gather more traction on trades than the stock corresponding to launching Y.

Prediction markets have major advantages in the political domain. Consider the current unrest in Libya. One question before president Obama is whether or not to exercise the military option. The US administration is chary of a quick decision because of the morass it finds itself facing in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides, the issue of body bags (bodies of dead soldiers from frontline areas returning to the US) has gained an especial emotional currency in the US. If the President did not want sophisticated military models to drive his decision and wished to read the pulse of the nation, a national, real-time prediction market can help. How the prediction market can help in such cases is by nuancing the debate with several viable options.

1. Threat of return to recession in the form of an oil shock should conflict in Libya prolong.

2. Strategic rewards from establishing a no-fly zone over Libya

3. Arming the opposition rebels and defending them from aerial attack launched by Gaddafi’s forces

4. Perception of Americans on war, ranging from important (defeating communism in Vietnam, terror post-9/11) versus cautious (messy states with a history of perennial conflict)

Would managers want prediction markets?

At first glance, any manager would be skeptical of prediction markets since leaving out the decision to a diversified marketplace is fraught with danger. There is the chance that a rival manager in another department might strategise to “play” the market. But this argument is not right since it overplays the role of the individual investor (to borrow stock market terminology) in market trades.

There is another risk to managers from prediction markets. What if a prediction market is able to accurately and consistently predict information that companies pay to get from marketing research personnel? This would jeopardize a number of jobs and lead to much bad blood on the ground.

Most managers will likely not want a prediction market to suggest negative outcomes for their products/projects. The risk to management from a prediction market comes in the form of dilution of “information asymmetry”. We know that a prediction market, much like a stock market, endeavours to reduce the information asymmetry that surrounds any product/project. Managers often play upon this asymmetry to sell their projects. A prediction market will substantially reduce the agency cost associated with running an enterprise.

There is another risk that prediction markets pose to middle management. If top management begins using them to listen directly to the employee workforce, then the best ideas, the most exciting innovations will directly reach the top management without the filter of the middle management, and this may not go down well. Such “disruptive information flow” can engender new ways of intra-organisation communication at multiple levels.

However, for obvious reasons, prediction market trades will be but one factor of consideration in the final decision. So the input should be welcomed and not feared.

New technology companies use different ways of boosting innovation, for instance, Google allows employees 20% time to work on something they like and which can later develop into a sellable product. The real learning here is the focus on incremental innovation, as against hankering after a blockbuster product. Apart from the pharma space, where revenues are typically driven by blockbuster drugs, most sectors will do well to tap the productivity of their workforce. Prediction markets can help bridge the current gap in realizing incremental innovation.

How to get employees interested in prediction markets?

Between cash awards or other soft awards, there is another system called the lottery system that makes better sense since it would promote the kind of behavior (participants should bid based on true beliefs, and not financial incentives) that is desirable.

However, cash awards in themselves are not a bad idea. There is the fear, in my opinion unfounded, that if cash awards become the basis of reward, then some employees would bet on an extremely unlikely event and win big if that event actually happened, but incur no financial loss if it did not. But this is how any efficient market, in the sense of the term coined by economist Adam Smith, functions. Traders buy and sell stocks on any number of parameters ranging from personal bias to deliberate strategizing. To expect an intranet to not ultimately follow such behavior is to miss the point of a prediction market.

Another positive of prediction markets is greater cohesion within the company, since they induce people to show their intuitive superiority in a quantifiable way. In other words, it earns them “bragging rights”. In this regard, T-shirts or other soft gifts make little sense since they would not entice someone to actually log on and start trading. They may only act as a hygiene factor for people already interested in prediction markets. However, to really scale up the technology, hard cash/lottery needs to come in.

Prediction markets can only work if there is enough liquidity in the system, in other words, if more members login and join the trades (Metcalfe’s Law). After the initial euphoria of the early traders, hard incentives will need to be brought in to increase liquidity.

(Part of a writeup submitted for a case in the Management of Information Systems course, Term III, MBA)

A democracy that's really a functional anarchy

2011-03-11T01:27:00.003+05:30

As India marked the 60th anniversary of its independence last year, a clutch of books celebrating the nation’s meteoric rise in the aftermath of the opening up of its economy in the 1990s was released. Prominent among these were former India head of Financial Times, Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods, and historian Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. The India of these books isn’t the reviled, satirized nation of V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (1964). Rather, it is a mercurial, hungry assortment of a billion-plus voices waiting to grab their moment in the sun. It is a nation, which while still being bogged down by endemic poverty, is also drawing comparisons with China for the fierce competition that these two regional powers are posing the West. India’s software prowess and English-speaking citizenry are the envy of China, the manufacturing hub of the world, which publicized its development trajectory in a spectacular extravaganza at the Beijing Olympics.

In several respects, though, India and China are as different as chalk and cheese. While China’s development model is top-down — heedless of opposing voices — India’s is too often accused of being a slow starter thanks to a democratic ethos that must accommodate varying opinions. This, combined with the formidable cultural diversity of India, makes it a somewhat unique case, and therefore, of tremendous interest to academics. In Vishnu’s Crowded Temple, Maria Misra, professor of modern history at Oxford University, tries to make sense of the wonder that is India (to adapt A. L. Basham’s famed title). Beginning with the First Great War of independence in 1857 which finished the reign of the East India Company and brought India under the direct control of the British Queen, Misra takes us through the freedom struggle, India’s independence, and the post-independence fissures the country faced, in a well-researched and lucidly argued book.

Misra’s book, while serving as a treatise on the history of the subcontinent, is especially attractive for registering the diverse impulses that have shaped and continue to shape the India story. The title draws from Periyar E. V. Ramaswami’s struggle in 1931 demanding Dalits be allowed entry to the famed Vishnu temple in Guruvayur in present day Kerala. The temple had been, until then, the sole preserve of the higher castes, who feared that the entry of a Dalit into the sanctum sanctorum would debase it. Periyar was a low-caste intellectual who had launched the Self-Respect Movement in 1925 to promote equality for Dalits and allow them to enjoy a sense of pride in their Dravidian past. Periyar’s struggle was also directed at the Congress party, which he accused was a “Brahmin-dominated claque devoted to the preservation of high-caste privilege and hierarchy”. The debate over low castes’ entry to the Guruvayur temple became a rallying point for the Self-Respect Movement, and ended in success. Misra’s “crowded temple” is a pointer to the Dalits’ political struggle to gain equality and legitimacy in public spheres.

The colonial edifice

But Misra’s temple is also the colonial edifice, which from the 1857 Great Rebellion up until the First World War, was built on a systematically divisive agenda that targeted casteist and religious affiliations. Traditional historiographies have tended to portray a rigid division of castes with the priestly Brahmins at the top, followed by the warrior caste of the Kshatriyas, the merchant Vaishyas, and at the bottom of the ladder, the Shudras, comprising farmers and artisans. Beyond this stringent four-tier structure were the Dalits, or the untouchables. Misra, deviating from this approach, proposes that before the British arrived in the nineteenth century, the divisions among the various categories of Hindus were not rigid, and often there were inter-caste struggles on supremacy. She notes:

… throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Brahman elites had been involved in disputes with ‘kingly’ warriors and land controllers about who possessed higher status. British enquiries into these matters were seized upon by Brahmin literati as an opportunity to settle these controversies to their own advantage. They duly reported that the ancient laws of Hinduism reflected a religiously authorized hierarchy...This order, they claimed, was based on a divinely ordained Hindu cosmology according to which individuals were born or re-born into the caste they merited by virtue of their dutiful action (dharma) in a previous life.

Consequently, after the Revolt of 1857, the British created special provisions in property laws and job quotas which incentivized Indians to seek a certain caste status. This resulted in the rise of a new religiosity, what Misra calls a “sacralized martial culture”. Dalit groups tended to adopt high-caste practices (a phenomenon known as ‘sanskritization’) and were welcomed into the upper caste fold by reform groups such as the Arya Samaj.

Such posturing, however, was not restricted to casteist considerations alone. There was a growing divide between Hindus and Muslims, arising out of an “intense competition for work, space and respect”. The British further stoked these latent fires. As Misra writes, “For many Hindus and Congressmen the most egregious act of colonial gerrymandering was the creation of separate electorates for Muslims.” By the late 1930s, Hindu-Muslim riots had become a commonality, with the police turning a blind eye to the violence.

It was in this backdrop of rising caste/communal tensions, accompanied by economic crises, that a steady rise in nationalist sentiment was witnessed. Mahatma Gandhi was gaining prominence as a campaigner of civil disobedience. The militant atheism of the likes of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad fired the imagination of scores of youngsters to free their motherland from the yoke of foreign rule. With drastic changes in the international scenario in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was a matter of time before the ‘colonial temple’ was demolished. Given the scope of the book perhaps, Misra’s treatment of the period immediately preceding India’s independence is rather cursory. Interested readers should visit Freedom at Midnight (1975) by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, or Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer (2007), which detail not only the political parleying that led to the demise of the Raj, but also the personal relationships of the dramatis personae.

An uneasy truce

India’s religious and cultural diversity has entailed an uneasy truce in the country’s public life. The country’s birth as an independent state was scarred by the trauma of Partition, with the subcontinent being cleaved into two distinct nation states founded on religious identity — secular India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Partition was one of the bloodiest episodes in modern history, resulting in the death of over 250,000 people. The scale of human migration and the violence it unleashed were unprecedented in the region’s history.

Having devoted nearly half the book to this phase in India’s tumultuous history, Misra moves on to chronicling independent India’s tryst with destiny. The collapse of the colonial temple called for a new approach to India’s development, one that entailed fuller representation of the many dissenting voices that had characterized the pre-independence years. As Misra says, “Modern Indian history is not merely about storming, but also about building the temple.” Her analysis, she points out, differs considerably from traditional interpretations of modern Indian history, namely, liberal, Marxist, and subaltern. Liberal commentators tend to portray a grand westernizing image of 21st century India, replete with shining malls and glitzy office spaces. Marxist theorists look upon India’s growth trajectory as one of uninhibited inequality, in which the economic elites have systematically crushed the faceless poor. Finally, the subaltern school’s interpretation is similar to the Marxists’ in that it sees a definite divide between the elites and the others, but its view is that this divide is more cultural than economic, the British influence having raised a generation “Indian in name, but alien in spirit”.

Misra discards each of these interpretations as erroneous — since they do not capture India’s “complex and halting evolution into a very peculiar kind of modern nation”. India’s inequitable growth, she argues, has been an outcome of the contravening impulses of hierarchy versus equality (as epitomized by caste struggles), rationality versus superstition, and modernity versus tradition. The starkest example of this struggle was the determination of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, to develop India as a scientific superpower. Nehru’s stance was in marked contrast to the arcadian vision of his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi. It was under Nehru that the country’s successful atomic energy program took root, and he directed considerable energy toward establishing the Indian Institutes of Technology, globally renowned today as centers of engineering excellence.

However, Nehru’s economic policies, the central theme of which was economic planning, failed to effect real change on the ground. This was particularly so in farming, where co-operative schemes to raise agricultural productivity backfired. His death in 1964 in the backdrop of India’s humiliating defeat by China left a deep crater in Indian politics, and it was to take a few years before national politics could find its feet again. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi was to emerge from the shadows as a shrewd tactician, one who would go on to personify a flagrantly partisan brand of politics.

Misra devotes sizeable attention to the excesses of the ‘Emergency’ — the period between 1975 and 1977 when Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and adopted authoritarian rule to avoid relinquishing the prime minister’s chair after an adverse decision of the Allahabad High Court challenging her election to the Indian Parliament. The Emergency proved to be a defining moment for Indian democracy. The iron hand with which Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s errant son, enforced his ramshackle decrees diluted the misgivings of anyone who had bemoaned the red tapism that seemed synonymous with democracy in India. The most dreaded of Sanjay’s many experiments was nasbandi (forced vasectomy). A means to effect family planning, nasbandi, under Sanjay’s tutelage, became a military-style operation with attractive incentives for ‘motivators’ who had to come up with a certain number of successful cases to be eligible for them. Little wonder, the program assumed draconian proportions. Misra writes:

Soon vasectomy clinics sprang up in the poorer areas of towns, and though volunteers were supposed to be of reproductive age and already to have had three children, young boys, old men, vagrants and anyone in any way dependent on the state found themselves pressed by ‘motivators’ into having vasectomies. In September 1976 mobile nasbandi vans, and armies of ‘motivators’ seeking to fill their quotas, began descending on the countryside. In Satara, police rounded up eligible men, took them to rural health centers and more or less coercively sterilized them.

Indira was at worst an active participant; at best, a silent bystander in her son’s egregious abuse of power. “Paradoxically,” Misra writes, “India’s half-baked experiment in dictatorship had the effect of entrenching democracy.” The next general elections, held in 1977 after the suspension of the Emergency, routed the Congress and resulted in the Janata Party forming the government in Delhi. Though the experiment was short-lived and Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, it was the first time that a non-Congress government had assumed power at the center.

Secessionist tendencies

The 1980s were marked by a rise in secessionist tendencies, most virulently in the western border state of Punjab. The Nirankaris, a heretical Sikh sect, demanded the creation of a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. Their leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a charismatic orator, whose call to possessing arms and reinforcing Sikh identity was taken quite literally by many young men. Matters came to a head in 1982, when Bhindranwale and his men installed themselves in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine. Throughout 1983, Indira Gandhi’s government carried out negotiations with different stakeholders, but to little effect. The threat of Punjab declaring nationhood was now very real. In June 1984, after much dithering, Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to storm the Golden Temple. Operation Blue Star, as it was called, turned into a blood-spilling three-day siege, killing nearly 600 people. The timing of the operation coincided with an important Sikh festival. The entire exercise was, therefore, viewed by Sikhs as an act of sacrilege and in the aftermath several Sikh soldiers resigned from their positions in protest.

However, the most glaring consequences of the operation were yet to unfold. In the early hours of October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards. Anti-Sikh hysteria gripped Delhi and nearly 3,000 Sikhs were butchered over the next two days. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s other son — Sanjay had been killed in a bizarre air crash in 1980 — assumed the mantle of prime ministership overnight. The rebellion in Punjab died down. A secessionist movement that had threatened the integrity of the country was subdued by a tragic series of events and at the cost of thousands of lives.

While Misra’s treatment of Sikh separatism and Rajiv Gandhi’s political capital is uniformly scholarly, she comes truly into her own in tackling the most serious political upheaval of the ’90s: the Mandir agitation. Through the 1980s, a series of events, most notably the Shah Bano case – in which Rajiv Gandhi overruled a court order granting alimony to a Muslim woman after pressure from Islamic outfits – engendered a feeling among Hindus that a policy of appeasement toward Muslims was being played out by the Congress government in violation of their own interests. Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani sensed this alienation and launched the Ram mandir (temple) movement in 1990. It was aimed at demolishing Babar’s mosque in Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Ram, and erecting a Ram temple in its place. Sections of Hindus had long held that Babar had destroyed a Ram temple at the site and built a mosque over the temple ruins in the 16^th century.

On December 6, 1992, to the cries of raucous supporters, Advani’s rath yatra (the march of the chariot) reached the site. By evening, the mosque had been demolished — an event that was to have far-reaching repercussions on Indian polity. The riots sparked by the demolition led to the death of over 2,000 people nationwide. It also placed Hindutva, the BJP’s avowed policy of keeping Hindu interests paramount, firmly in the political saddle. Misra calls this the “leveling of the temple” — the ascendancy of a “xenophobic, hierarchical, bellicose and reactionary” ideology that stormed the bastions of Congress’s electoral success.

Always interested in the insidious workings of caste in India, Misra is nearly gleeful at the contribution that the rise of a lower caste consciousness has made to the country’s political arithmetic. This includes, but is not limited to, the controversial move to reserve seats for lower castes in government jobs and educational institutes as a way to bring them on economic parity with upper castes. Misra is an unabashed admirer of Laloo Prasad Yadav, “scourge of Brahmanhood and political showman extraordinaire”. Laloo, whose initiation into politics was marred by allegations of corruption and nepotism, has emerged as a messiah for the Yadav community in the Hindi heartland. In his latest avatar as India’s railway minister, he has displayed a rare efficiency that has transformed the face of the Indian railway. So popular is Laloo’s rustic brand of management that he is now a regular invitee to top-grade management schools to deliver sermons on what makes the rural hinterland tick.

It is the paradox of a public persona like Laloo Prasad that exemplifies the larger undercurrents driving India’s much-vaunted growth. Across classes and social strata, there is a raving scramble to better oneself, a fight aided by the country’s democratic setup. Of course, the results of such a chase aren’t always desirable. In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Balram Halwai, a small-town bloke from Bihar, moves to Gurgaon, the software outsourcing hub of India, to drive the car of a rich businessman. The novel traces Balram’s disillusionment with the ‘fast life’ of the metro, a lifestyle that both repels and seduces him. Humiliated by his downtrodden status, Balram commits a brutal murder which, rather than proving his nemesis, opens the gates of opportunity and prosperity for him. Interminably bleak, The White Tiger is a scathing portrayal of the societal divisions wrought by a fast-changing economic scenario. As India finds its feet in IT and nuclear energy, and comes to be identified as the world’s back office, it must do more to make this growth all-encompassing, and ensure that the benefits of globalization percolate down to the poor.

Stephen Cohen, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, once wondered if India will one day emerge as a global power or forever stay “arriving”. Like Luce and Guha, Misra is of the cautious hope that India will surpass its status as a rising power. Returning to the temple metaphor, she concludes that Vishnu’s temple is in danger of being displaced by fidelity to Hanuman, the monkey God. Himself a disciple of Lord Ram, Hanuman is looked upon as a more approachable deity than the patriarchal Vishnu. Large temples devoted to him are sprouting across the length of the country, each competing with the other in grandeur and finesse. Much revered for his entrepreneurial skills in the Ramayana, Hanuman has come to symbolize resourcefulness and communication for the new India. To Misra, Hanuman is the harbinger of India’s fluidity, chaos and compromised continuity — an apt almighty for a democracy that’s really a functional anarchy.

Press, press, press your imprint upon the world!

2011-03-10T22:39:00.003+05:30

press, press, press your imprint on the world. do not go gently into the night, say it out loud. you have been silent enough. let the burst of energy pass through your veins and let the shattering noise emerge from your deepest self. Sing it out, worry not of the consequences. the flow of language, so precious, so charming, so magical will wrap up the process of living with beauty. it will drug you and you will be quiet no more. So, speak, speak and see the wonders spill out of your tongue and into the nether where they retain both the gravity of existence and the magic of utterance. And where thinking stops and creation begins, where analysis gives way to pure joy, the sort of childlike enthusiasm that cocooned you a long time and which you search, as you go about your days, in the helter skelter of adulthood. Live, live that time once more. Speak!

No more, no less, only now. No past, no future, only now. No demons, no angels, only now.

Links to savour, and save

2011-02-21T13:37:00.003+05:30

A brilliant piece on the tendency of Indian American authors to essentialise, generalise and extrapolate. We are not one homogeneous identity, got it? You have made it, all right, now shut up already: Anything to Declare at Immigration?

Is the frenzy over Facebook fuelling the second dotcom bubble?

Enjoy!

A mail to the prof on the new ethics workshop

2011-02-21T13:33:00.003+05:30

We had an ethics workshop begun this past Saturday. The first session was conducted by the prof who is overseeing the entire workshop. It was a nice enough lecture on sustainable development, but throughout an unease had me in grips, which I vented when I returned to my room and drafted this mail:

Dear Professor XXXXX

This is Vikram Johari. I am a student of Section B, PGP-I and attended the first ethics class conducted by you on Saturday. There are a few points I wish to raise. I hope you would consider them in the spirit in which I make them and not penalize me for raising these concerns.

There is general disinterest in ethics sessions because they seemingly don’t add “value” to the business education that we receive here. I personally feel that business is all about bending the rules and most companies that are leaders today would not have reached that position had it not been for bending the rules of the game. What we celebrate as leadership success often involves shady transactions and sordid deals. Here are a few examples:

1. 1. The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group is one of India’s biggest corporate houses. Yet, their leader was questioned by the CBI early this week in relation to the 2G spectrum scam. Would any of us miss a chance to work at an ADAG firm because of this? I don’t think so.

2. 2. Vedanta, a global steel giant, has been in the news for not considering the legitimate rights of the tribals in the Niyamgiri area of Orissa. But I am sure it would be given Day 1 status if it ever came to campus for placements.

3. 3. Land acquisition has become a major issue in industrial growth these days. We hail Gujarat for offering Sanand to Tata Nano and blame Mamta Banerjee for scuttling growth in Singur. But there are compelling reasons for the poor not wanting to part with their land. But in India’s growth story, these are brushed aside.

I can cite many such instances. My basic point is this: We can have young, enthusiastic students attend innumerable sessions on ethics and sustainable development and feel good about changing the world. But these measures will have little relevance so long we live in a world where corporate competition and greed often cross the boundaries of ethical behavior, something which is couched as the “demand of growth” and which we are supposed to follow in our zeal for realizing a new India. Most of us would end up working for a company that has had skeletons of some sort in its ethical closet. Perhaps we just live in an imperfect world. Maybe this new India has little place for textbook ethics.

A humble request therefore to discontinue these sessions, or at least, not make them mandatory.

Regards,

Vikram Johari

In which I turn anthropologist

2011-02-17T22:18:00.004+05:30

The residential life is a curious social construct. You are on your own and your worth on campus is gauged in terms that are uncannily dissimilar to the outside world. Since you are on your own, you have to count, and that counting entails being smart at all times. This could take several varied proportions: either you could be smart in the intellectual sense,which means you come up with such gems on Facebook: "One is not publicly feted but one is on people's minds." (mine) or "Vivid in English and vividh in hindi have the same root. When you think of the former, you think bright colours, lush gardens, tea sets and white dresses. When you think of the latter, you see fields, a radio station, small TV sets and old time charm. What is it about language that makes it absolutely wonderful?" (mine, again---modesty is another virtue, besides virginity, that you lose on campus).

Getting back to the matter at hand, for some others, smartness implies smartness of form, meaning a tendency to lord it over others in a I-know-what-I-know self-assurance. For guys, this could mean advising all and sundry on matters all and sundry without really knowing the pitfalls of said advice. See, if you are not in the know,you are not really living the hostel life. Lack of news is death, even if that news is garden variety--titillating at best, bogus at worst. For girls, this means a realization that they really are the fairer sex. If you want to know what kid gloves are, please visit the IIM Lucknow campus and you would be treated to a nice, fluffy pair. Condition: Be a girl.

Then, relationships. You are away, distraught, mommy's comfort food out of bounds, so you walk into the arms of the nearest, and hopefully dearest, stranger. Only, such relationships fluctuate, and with good frequency. Is it about sex, one wonders. But no, there really is the smell of forever-togetherness here but the particulars are hazy.

OK, as a man, you are supposed to define your territory. This comes in vivid shades of blue (inspired by the cricket team, no doubt) and smells of male perspiration. It's there, you can breath in the sights and sounds of superiority that descend from the heavens of quantitative aptitude. You wanna count for something? Join the fin (short for finance) gang. I-banking talk will get you the bucks, the chicks and hopefully, some peace.

As a girl, you just walk the walk and talk the talk, basking in the glory of admiration that 98% of the panting population will shower on the 2% of you. So, you participate in plays, crash parties, and show general femininity to play the game. You will pass with flying colours and HR managers of even fin forms will eye you longingly.

So you learn to survive. It's tough. You learn to be on your own, and if that entails saying sweet goodbye to most of what you hold dear, well baby, that's just too bad. At least you would have written some readably penetrating posts by the end of it.

Hey, did I mention placements? Never mind.

The ways of life at IIML

2010-11-27T23:02:00.005+05:30

I have been wanting to write on this blog since ever but haven't had any time because of the rigor of academics at IIML. Well, I am not really up there when it comes to the stakes but certainly it has taken time to get used to the work schedule here. Another thing that has nudged me to write again is the fact of my subscribing to newspapers after a gap of nearly four months. Yes, this former journalist has not had a newspaper dropped to his room for four crazy months. And now that I am getting them again, I realise how much I missed them. There was a newspaper-shaped hole in my life, yes!

That happens to be my room at IIML. This picture was taken months ago and the room is in sufficiently better condition now, both in terms of its look and hygiene. Life here passes by in one continuous strand of activity. You wake up, attend classes, have lunch, sleep a little, get together for projects, prepare for quizzes, have dinner, study some more, read the newspaper, sleep, wake up and so on. It is a rigour that one takes a while getting used to, but one that one comes to enjoy after a while. If only because it lends such structure to one's lonely days and nights.

Which reminds me, friendships need to be cultivated, yes. I realised that a little late in the day, but once I did, I learnt that happiness and friends need to be engaged actively for them to have meaning in your life. And it can be a rewarding experience, taking you out of yourself and reminding you that at 28, you are still relatively young.

For sometime after coming here, I was literally living two lives in one person. One, the life of my former self, given to gravid pondering and the other, trying to be cheery, overtly so. But now,I have set myself into more stable ways, as exemplified by my status message on Facebook a few days back: "The contemplative life and the forceful life must meet, only then can one be happy!"

Also, speaking out and working one's charm offensive on others (presuming one has it) can do wonders for one's soul. Vanity does have its advantages. Especially for someone who made a living out of words, to be suddenly deprived of a ready source of expression can mean death. And so, this!

Apocalyptic stories painted in 'cheery hues'

2010-02-21T13:51:00.002+05:30

My first observation on picking up this book of interconnected short stories was the David Mitchell-style tribute it pays to our world. Think Cloud Atlas, or Ron Currie Jr’s uproariously funny God is Dead. Yes, the setting is apocalyptic, the world has come to an end, or is about to — and yet our unnamed protagonist who grows from childhood to age 40 in these nine stories, worries about mundane things like relationships and the human need to be liked.

Steven Amsterdam is a debut writer who bolsters his dystopian vision with issues facing our planet, from climate change to refugees; computer bugs to medical malpractice. Each of these issues that fill our daily news consumption and contribute to heightened anxieties is, in Amsterdam’s hands, a mere backdrop to explore how humans need not become devils in the face of approaching annihilation.

Which makes Things We Didn’t See Coming (Pantheon, $24) a far more hopeful book than its subject indicates. Even in the face of cataclysm, people find the space to reinforce their humanity. “What We Know Now,” for instance, is about a man on the run from an end-of-the-century computer virus reminiscent of Y2K. “What is he so worried about?” his father asks at one point. “It’s always been the end of the world. What did we have this century? World War I, the influenza, the Depression, World War II, concentration camps, the atomic bomb. Now he’s scared about a computer glitch?”

Indeed, there is something surreal about this conversation, knowing as the reader does how Y2K turned out to be an anti-climax, and yet, the new century began with the most dastardly atrocity in history on American soil.

Amsterdam plugs this unease with felicity. In “The Forest for the Trees,” marriage as we know it has transformed into something called a “practical union,” which allows couples rights to “extra-union sex.” The story is about the break the unnamed narrator is taking from his union to Margo to live with Juliet, a senator. “The practical part,” he says, “it’s almost like marriage, except it doesn’t crumble at every whiff of infidelity.”

Changing social mores are not restricted to relationships alone. “The Profit Motive” is about a job interview that the protagonist attends, where his clothing has been impregnated with all manner of dyes and chemicals that enable the interviewing panel to measure the candidate’s truthfulness.

In “The Theft That Got Me Here”, the narrator drives his old grandparents to Rural to help them relive their past. Apparently, the world, or at least the unnamed country in this collection, has been divided into Urban vs. Rural. All other differentiating factors have evaporated. People who are “modern” have opted for Urban, others for Rural, with a few suburban lovers going for the middle. The story, another meditation on a changing world, is a deeply moving paean to family ties.

My only problem with the collection — and this is big praise for a debut — is that the author fills his characters, particularly the randomly occurring ones, with enough life and panache to merit a full-blown novel that gives them greater voice. Pity that he restricted himself to disparate stories.

All said, Things We Didn’t See Coming will appeal to readers who like their apocalyptic fiction dressed in cheery hues. If you were disappointed by the pornography of despair in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you are sure to enjoy this one.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

Narrative, flow don't quite work hand-in-hand in 'Glass Feet'

2010-02-01T15:30:00.001+05:30

The setting for Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet (Henry Holt, $24) is the fictional northern archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land, a mysterious place of bogs and swamps where people lead lives of quiet desperation. Into this desolate landscape steps Ida Maclaird, who is making a second trip to the island to find the answer to a question almost baffling in its simplicity: Why is she slowly turning to glass?

Midas Crook is a young photographer who uses his camera to negotiate the distance between him and the world around him. Scarred by his father’s suicide and his mother’s subsequent mental collapse, Midas cannot bring himself to escape the strange, insidious hold that the island has on him.

Inevitably, this being a love story, they meet and Ida’s cheery disposition (in spite of her condition) meets its match in Midas’ gravitas. Midas takes random snaps of Ida, and it is one such image that captures the truth of her feet: they are not flesh, but glass. Afraid and unwilling to get involved at first, Midas realizes he cannot bring himself to run away.

So far, so good. And Shaw shows immense promise with his deft use of language, which sings in a book that is at its heart filled with sadness. The soft light on the island plays coyly with the thick vegetation, casting glorious shadows and producing a riot of images all ably captured by Midas’ camera and Shaw’s prose.

Yet, there is just too much desperation here, too many missed chances. Henry Fuwa, a recluse who knows the secret behind Ida’s condition, loved Midas’ mother once upon a time, but their love was not to be. Ida’s caretaker on the island, Carl Maulsen, loved Ida’s mother once, but that was not to be either. And Carl and Midas’ father (also Midas), both scientists, worked together before the latter’s suicide. You see, the book is literally wallowing in pessimism.

Against this grim backdrop, the only hope is the budding affair between Ida and Midas as they go about unraveling the mystery that has its roots in the island’s strange habitat. But even this is not allowed its space, and often one gets the sense that their love is being stifled more than is called for by the merits of the case.

But Shaw has a real feel for language and his prose shines, such as when Henry recounts the night he dug out Midas Sr.’s body and the startling revelation he chanced upon. Or when the book describes the slow transformation that Ida is undergoing from her feet up, as her flesh, then the underlying soft tissue, and then the bone, turn transparent.

A magical fable, The Girl With Glass Feet showcases Shaw’s considerable talent while also pointing to this being only a debut novel and therefore prone to flaws in narrative consistency and flow. It is this reviewer’s fervent wish that the author continue along his chosen path and grow leaps and bounds with his subsequent works.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

2009-11-02T16:42:00.002+05:30

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written when the author was 19 and published in 1818, was so ponderous a departure from traditional Victorian fare that it shocked not just the nerves but also the sensibilities of staid British society. The outrageous tale of a monster sprung from inanimate matter-- and capable of quoting Milton and Goethe--who then turns against his creator, heralded a brave new voice.

From there to the 1931 cinematic adaptation by James Whale, in which a menacing, unforgettable simulacrum of our nightmares is brought to haunting life by Boris Karloff, Frankenstein has, through the ages, plumbed the familiar God-versus-science divide to argue against technology ruining our best instincts...read more>>>

How Not to Write a Dead Novel

2009-10-14T12:52:00.002+05:30

Sarah Hall’s second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and that brush of encouragement has carried her though to her fourth work now, How to Paint a Dead Man. At best an uneven book, How to Paint a Dead Man tips its hat to Hall’s well-regarded ability to craft sentences of near-perfect beauty, without really being a novel in the conventional sense.

Four chapters that recur through the book recount the lives of four artists. There are the Italians in the 1960s: Annette Tambroni, a blind florist who once harbored dreams of becoming an artist, and Signor Giorgio, a world-renowned painter of bottles who is dying of cancer. Respectively called “The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni” and “Translated from the Bottle Journals” Annette’s and Giorgio’s tales are filled not with “life”, but with wistful reminiscences of lived moments and stolen delights.

Annette’s mother, for instance, is intensely protective of her, crafting elaborate fictions to scare Annette into submission, in a bid to protect her from any harm. This lends Annette’s narration a dream-like quality, gently carrying pain within it. Every Sunday, she visits the cemetery where her father is buried and contemplates the long life, still unlived, that she must pass without a template on how to go about it.

Giorgio’s testimony is largely philosophical musings, and while reading it, I sincerely came to question its inclusion in a novel. These are the last cries of a dying artist, one who must accept his lost vitality and emergence into a sort of tragic figure for his admirers. A heavy sadness lingers over this narrative, punctuated by rather abstruse sermons on life and the meaninglessness of it:

“My visitors indulge me. They are charmed by my antiquity and my devotion to this place. Later they walk back to the station along the road, and perhaps halfway they kneel with an ear to the ground. And perhaps they hear their own blood, and then the traffic in the town, and then a deeper rhythm. They get up, and brush the dust from their knees, and they continue walking. If everything seems lost, I tell them, trust the heart.”

Such heavy sentences when the reader has been provided only the slight background of their creator dying of cancer load the book with a seriousness it has not earned. This may have something to do with the time that these two fragments are set in—perhaps Hall just imagined her characters from a pre-consumerist era to deal with pain and loneliness in subtle, gentle ways, and not indulge in unclean behavior of any sort. Whatever the reason, there is a sense of something not being whole in these narratives.

How to Paint a Dead Man comes closer to a novel in the other two strands: of a father-daughter artist duo in contemporary Britain. In “The Fool on the Hill” Peter Caldicutt (who used to write letters to Giorgio as a student) is a noted landscape painter who bases his drawings on real scenes that he harnesses from walks in the countryside. On one such excursion, his leg gets trapped inside a mountain crevice and Peter spends the night waiting for help. This launches a series of memories that carry him through the night, but thankfully, here the force of life and vigor flows through the narrative, and pain and resilience are evoked in life-affirming ways.

The most interesting and also the central fragment, “The Mirror Crisis”, concerns Sue Caldicutt, the young daughter of Peter, who is trying to find success as a photographer. Sue is grappling with the death of her twin Danny in a bicycle accident. Allowing her to grieve over a twin lets Hall develop her penchant for fine sentences with real felicity, since here, the emotion comes across as real:

“You’re not crazy. You must emphasis this point and remind yourself of it. You are not crazy. And you’re not being coy, or difficult. This isn’t about fashionable social detachment, the current trend for woe-is-me, or wanting to be the cool detached outsider. You can’t quite catch sight of yourself as you go about your life, that’s all. Your body doesn’t contain its spirit, just as the mirror has relinquished your portrait. You are elsewhere.”

Narrated in the second person, this is the most effective part of the novel, as Sue starts on a self-destructive affair with the husband of a friend to drown her grief. The writing is raw, frequently sexual, and also—in a novel that once threatened to lose itself in philosophical meanderings—satisfyingly fictional.

The life and times of Thomas Cromwell

2009-10-01T19:42:00.003+05:30

Tudor England has always made for great yarns. The mix of lustiness and unpredictability about the reign of Henry VIII has inspired countless artists to make the period their muse. Over the centuries, plays, novels and paintings have tried to evoke the ineffable spirit of the age. What is it that drives this fascination with the Tudors? Is it an instinct to capture the thirst for power that characterized the period, or is it something deeper — a search for the very roots of modern English life?

Hillary Mantel, who has tackled subjects as diverse as the French Revolution in "A Place of Greater Safety" (1995) to her own dysfunctional past in "Giving Up the Ghost" (2003), is an ideal choice for a project of such breathtaking scale. Henry VIII's was a quicksilver monarchy, underscored by the fact of his six wives in rather quick succession. Henry is routinely portrayed as the lascivious royal who, in his quest to get a male heir, went to war with the pope — a definitive break that led to the separation of the English Church from Rome.

Setting out to capture the nub of this era, Ms. Mantel has done something outstanding — she has achieved a genuine voice for the time. And that voice tells us the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who grew up to become Henry's chief minister. Born into humble and violent beginnings (in the book's first scene, a young Thomas is beaten to a pulp by his drunk father), Cromwell came to rule England by proxy, such was his power.

Ms. Mantel shifts her narration back and forth in time, so that we never learn the correct chronology of events, and this may create problems for a reader who is not in the know. Henry divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because she was unable to give him a male heir. He then married one Anne Boleyn, who was also incapable of fulfilling that particular wish. Henry would go on to marry four more times.

Irrespective of the need to know this background to appreciate "Wolf Hall," the story of Cromwell's rise shimmers in Ms. Mantel's spry, intelligent prose. By the book's second scene, for instance, Cromwell has morphed from the gangly abused youngster to the slick lawyer for Cardinal Wolsey, Henry's confidant who later fell out with him over his failure to get Henry's marriage to Catherine annulled. The relationship between Cromwell and Wolsey is that of hunter and prey. Initially a leonine figure wielding absolute power, Wolsey loses everything, including his life, to Cromwell, who uses the opportunity to endear himself to Henry.

It is in capturing such twists and turns of fate — so common to the Tudors — that Ms. Mantel shines. She leaches out the bones of the story as it is traditionally known, and presents to us a phantasmagoric extravaganza of the characters' plans and ploys, toils and tactics. There is rich dialogue here, removed from its datedness and assigned a very contemporary charge.

Beyond this, however, there is also a certain aim to Ms. Mantel's art. Regardless of the reasons behind the drift, Ms. Mantel is, and makes her reader be, appreciative of the English break from papal authority. England under Henry VIII is grateful for finally having its own church and being allowed to read the Bible in English. And by keeping Cromwell at the center of the drama, Ms. Mantel celebrates the intelligence and generosity of spirit too often denied Cromwell (most notably in Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons").

Such is the vastness of Ms. Mantel's project that there is the fear at some points that she will not be able to pull it off. The novel, after flitting from one mise en scène to the next, abruptly closes on Cromwell planning a trip to Wolf Hall to arrange an alliance between Henry and Jane Seymour, his third wife who will finally yield the dynasty a male heir — Edward VI. Is Ms. Mantel pointing us to a possible sequel?

Be that as it may, the crackling energy of her narration, the eternal spark of her subject, and her assiduous determination to rescue the reputation of Thomas Cromwell — all these make "Wolf Hall" quite perfect an enterprise by itself.

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This review appeared in Washington Times. "Wolf Hall" has been shortlisted for this year's Booker. Read more about the Booker Prize by clicking on the "Booker" tag below this post.

Reliquary of nostalgia and pain

2009-09-24T17:36:00.002+05:30

AS Byatt’s last major work was the 1990 Booker Prize-winning Possession, a tale of romance set in the highbrow London academia. She has been a major writer of our age, churning out novels, short stories and poems with commendable fecundity. Her quartet about members of a Yorkshire family, begun in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden, and completed in 2002 with A Whistling Woman, is a sprawling account of mainstream British life in mid-20th century.

Byatt’s work has tended to jump around the edges of fiction, melding commentary on the age — its culture and passions, its secrets and darkness — with the storyline. In The Children’s Book, her latest work on which she worked the last few years, her gaze turns to the Edwardian era, evoked recently in Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover and David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk.

Olive Wellwood is the writer of children’s books and mother to a large brood, not all of whom may be her own. With her Fabian husband Humphry and sister Violet, she presides over Todefright, their house in Kent. At the novel’s beginning, Tom Wellwood, Olive’s son, and Julian Cain, the son of a museum curator, discover an indigent boy, Philip Warren, hiding in the basement of the South Kensington Museum. Philip is brought home and later sent to work with Benedict Fludd, famed potter under whose tutelage Philip will find great fame.

The story revolves around the three families: the Wellwoods, the Fludds and the Cains, and is set in the period from 1895 to just after the First World War. Byatt dips in and out of their lives even as she draws an elaborate portrait of the age—that innocent pre-war period, when artists discovered new modes of thinking and being. The Fabians, including poet Rupert Brooke, tried to usher in a gentler world, where socialism would be the guiding force of life. Women campaigned for equal voting rights and for the right to earn degrees at university, and artists tried to live in new, dangerous ways.

The characters in The Children’s Book all grapple with these momentous political changes, even as they discover dark truths about their identities. Benedict Fludd may be a world-renowned potter but he is also a sullen father with an untoward attraction for his daughters. Dorothy, the daughter of Olive and Humphry, discovers that she is not Humphry’s daughter after all, but of a German puppeteer. Tom, most gifted of the Wellwood siblings, discovers that he is ill-suited to life in the real world, and spends his time in the marshes and greenery surrounding Todefright.

But really, the novel is about Olive. She writes stories for each of her children, and keeps them in a case, to be picked and read and added to at random. The stories are supposedly for the reading pleasure of the children, but the writer in Olive frequently uses them as starting points for more elaborate fictions. This ploy of a story within a story allows Byatt to showcase the wickedness of all art. The stories that Olive writes are about monsters and fairies, dark corners and sudden joys—all childhood territories. Yet, in their evocation of a perfect time, the stories are also reliquaries of nostalgia and pain.

The one for Tom, concerning a young boy who has lost his shadow, is developed by Olive into a critically and commercially acclaimed play, Tom Underground. Tom, having confined himself to his pastoral paradise, cannot bear the publicising of his most cherished story, with devastating consequences for the Wellwoods’ personal happiness.

Byatt’s writing is so well-researched that The Children’s Book could well have been a consummate history of the era. Since the characters are potters, writers and general art enthusiasts, the book brims in rich pictorial description, which includes a guided tour of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. But more than that, Byatt’s book is an astute moral lesson. Amidst the confetti of fame and glory that is liberally sprinkled on the characters—who wander in search of an anchor, one can’t help wonder what price a place in history books?

By the end, Todefright has become a ghost of its former self, and even though Byatt, given as she is to breaking stereotypes, may not like it, nostalgia for an unquantifiable past has taken over the novel. Most men have been lost to the War, and most women carry on forth, but lacking the lustre that imbued their former lives. There is something satisfying, but also tragic about the best hopes for retaining something, as it were, always ending up as just hopes. The Children’s Book, then, is about that: our failed tendency to believe that anything, anything at all, can be preserved.

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The Children's Book has been shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

Bombay blues

2009-09-19T11:18:00.004+05:30

Since Vikas Swarup’s Q&A found global success through its adaptation in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai has been in the news for its seedy underworld life and the interesting characters that populate it. James A Levine, a medical doctor by profession, hops on to the bandwagon and draws a convincing portrait of the city’s red-light districts.

Levine’s tale flows from personal observation. As an internationally renowned medical practitioner, he was invited by the UN to tour the slums of Mumbai to witness first-hand the rampant disease and illicit trafficking that mark the metropolis’ Cages Street. The street derives its name from the cage-like structures that are kept outside each house on the street and which are used to “display” underage girls to prospective clients.

Fifteen-year-old Batuk is one such girl, sold to sexual slavery by her father when she was nine. Writing her experiences as an underage prostitute in a diary, she comes to pen what will become “the blue notebook”. The trope of having an uneducated person narrate their own experience has recently been used, to successful effect, in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Levine explains this convincingly by having Batuk nursed out of tuberculosis by a caretaker who encouraged her to learn to read and write.

The novel is an often uncomfortable read, describe as it does, in spare prose, the broken dreams and the physical and mental defiling of Batuk. Levine does not preach and writes his story from Batuk’s clear-eyed perspective. There is a clear hierarchy when it comes to prostitutes, Batuk explains at one point, with girls like her from the Cages Street being at the bottom.

Yet, there are glimmers of hope that Batuk locates in her writing, a refuge from the harsh reality of her world. Filling up her notebook after servicing a customer, she says: “He may have taken my light and extinguished it, but now within me can hide an army of whispering syllables, rhythms, and sounds. All you may see is a black cavity that fills a tiny girl, but trust me, the words are there, alive and fine.”

The book scores as a prostitute’s personal testimony, but Levine goes overboard in mixing up Batuk’s story with the side plot of a carnage at a five-star hotel where she was present. While this may have been done to finish the story on a suitably climactic scale, the novel risks falling into pulp territory. No neat endings in this story as Batuk, lying in hospital and a prime suspect in the carnage, finishes off with: “There is only a little ink left.” Perhaps that is how all blue notebooks end.

Poppy terror

2009-09-10T10:33:00.002+05:30

Gretchen Peters’ interesting new book, Seeds of Terror, points the reader to America’s misguided efforts to locate the crux of terror emanating from the “Af-Pak” region. Peters, who has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan as a reporter for over a decade, stresses the importance of probing how opium trade has become a ready source of income for the al-Qaeda’s rise and continued relevance.

What gives heft to Peters’ analysis is her extensive travels through the heart of opium country, primarily the Helmand Province in southwest Afghanistan. She also visits other countries that connect the dots of the global drug network, and speaks to several US military strategists who are fighting the war against the Taliban on the ground.

The first myth that Peters busts is the hackneyed cry that the fight against Islamic terrorism should start with addressing the genuine grievances of those who are attracted by its seductive appeal. Peters elaborates the economics of the opium trade to show how dependent the Afghan economy is on poppy cultivation, and how the Taliban and al-Qaeda run their global enterprise of hate on the back of billions of dollars that drug trafficking generates.

The trouble with Afghanistan’s drug problem is accentuated by the easy conduit for drugs that countries in its neighbourhood provide. Intelligence agencies in Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and others work in cahoots to transfer drug shipments to the West in exchange for funds or even weapons. As Peters elaborates, “From the fields of Helmand to the hawala stands of Dubai, elaborate mechanisms filter drug money through the Taliban hierarchy...On the district level, each farmer will receive a handwritten receipt for 10 percent tax paid to the local Taliban subcommander...Each district commander has to kick a percentage of the taxes he collects up to his regional commander; then it goes to the provincial commander, and so on up the food chain.”

Peters delineates in shocking detail the trajectory of drug flow from the tribal regions of Afghanistan to all parts of the globe, including western Europe and the US. If there has been a singular failure on the part of the international community, it is not the unexpected outcome of the ideology-driven wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that the West has still not been able to nip the byzantine money laundering channels the traffickers plug with impunity.

Peters is not one to push ideology in her own text. While deriding the West, especially the US, for failing to contain drug trafficking, she also, reasonably, chides the US for being short-sighted in its pursuit of larger geostrategic goals. This is brought out most starkly in the US’ patronage of Afghan fighters who fought the might of the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1980s. It is the ghost of that Cold War era conflict against communism that is haunting the US is a different disguise today.

Peters shows how the US policy to “itemize and prioritize” the various issues has failed to create a holistic approach that would be conducive to victory in Afghanistan. She cites a conversation between an official of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Ambassador to Pakistan in 1986, where the Ambassador listed drugs as the third-biggest priority, after “fighting the Soviets” and nuclear proliferation.

It is a measure of the time warp that the US administration has been caught in that 20 years on, as the US faces a renewed crisis in the region, it is still too fixated, this time on the threat from radical Islam, to worry about addressing the region’s drug problem holistically.

Peters’ final assertion concerns the growing appetite among US policymakers for an aggressive aerial spraying campaign to wipe out Afghanistan’s poppy crop. This is the perfect way, the argument goes, to deny the insurgents and terrorists much-needed funding.

Peters lambasts this proposal and exposes its short-sightedness. “Wiping out poppy fields,” she says, “would actually drive up poppy prices and put more money in the pockets of drug dealers and terrorists.” Moreover, she cautions, such an approach would be economically devastating for Afghanistan, since income from poppy cultivation contributes 30 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Seeds of Terror is an eye-opening account for the lay reader, accustomed as he is to fire-and-brimstone pronouncements by administrations past of the need to “smoke ’em out”. The book cautions against the easy route of one-size-fits-all solutions. Afghanistan, an ancient society driven by strong tribal links, is a puzzle waiting to be cracked. Hubris won’t do, Peters seems to say, and a concerted strategy, separate from America’s larger middle eastern interests, will have to be employed if America is to have any hope of exiting the battleground in the foreseeable future.

Brilliance couched in criminal self-obsession

2009-08-24T16:36:00.004+05:30

A direct descendant of indentured labour who had moved to Trinidad from India, rising from humble beginnings to go on scholarship to Oxford, finding his calling in the written word, and scorching the literary scene with incisive forays into hitherto unexplored territories. That is the life historian Patrick French set out to chronicle.

It was an unexpected thing to do for a writer. V S Naipaul, narrator par excellence of the agony of the immigrant, a writer who had built a career describing the diverse ways in which identities shift in foreign lands, let his biographer Patrick French unrestricted access to his private correspondence and to the diaries of his wife, Patricia Hale (Pat), kept at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

It was to be a mixed blessing, arrived at after much introspection. For Naipaul is not an easy man, least of all, an easy husband. His hankering for truth is his fiction may have extended to an unnatural striving for a brutally honest account of his own life, a wish granted by his biographer.

Meeting Naipaul as a fellow student at Oxford, Pat disregarded her family's doubts about him to enter an alliance that would, ultimately, become the death of her. Over the course of several decades, Naipaul reduced her to a pale effigy of her former self. He forced her to become his cook and typist — so thorough was his indoctrination in hate that Pat, the silent gullible wife, felt honoured in surrendering to his genius.

Later, Naipaul began a torrid affair with Margaret Gooding, an Argentine woman from Buenos Aires. French's biography is the most damaging to Naipaul's reputation in portraying the monster that he could turn into with the women in his life. When Margaret revealed a one-night stand to him, he beat her repeatedly for two days, relishing in her acquiescence.

While Pat knew about Margaret, she was embittered by Naipaul's proud assertions that he had started visiting brothels three years into their marriage. Pat was weak with cancer, and Naipaul concedes to French that his verbal volleys may have hastened her death.

Naipaul's bad behaviour did not stop there. He fell for a third woman, Pakistani journalist Nadira, after Pat's death, and asked his agent Gillon Aitken "to sort out the mess" with Margaret. "I feel that in all of this, Margaret was very badly treated. But you know there is nothing I can do. I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady," he says.

Naipaul's corrosive gaze extended to large swathes of his life, including his writing. As a journalist, he was a scathing, original chronicler of the social pitfalls in the lands he visited: India, the home of his ancestors, in "An Area of Darkness"; and Trinidad, the land his ancestors adopted, in "The Middle Passage". Further, "Among the Believers" was the result of his excursions into the heart of radical Islam, much before such writing gained widespread readership.

A one-time friend and fellow Trinidad writer (Naipaul hates this label), Derek Walcott was also not spared the famed acerbic tongue. In "A Writer's People", Naipaul slammed the veteran's writing as being symptomatic of Trinidad's cultural barrenness. Naipaul's dismissive attitude toward friends and agents completes a portrait of brilliance couched in criminal self-obsession.

"The World Is What It Is" is an apt title for Naipaul's biography, for little that happened in this man's life played to convention. French must be congratulated for undertaking an intimidating task that involved poring over hundreds of documents and spending time in the august company of a man who must have seemed, with every passing day, less and less deserving of the attention.

Real to the touch

2009-08-24T16:08:00.002+05:30

The Sherpa and other fictions is a collection of nine short stories by first-time writer Nila Gupta. Gupta is a a second-generation Canadian. She was born in Montreal, spent a part of her childhood in Jammu, and then went back to Canada.

Each of the stories is the collection is about people who are part-Canadian and part-Indian. But the stories are not strictly about the immigrant experience. While the characters wrestle with the pull of "home", there are larger undercurrents driving their returns to India. Gupta captures these undercurrents with humanity and insight.

In the title story, the daughter of a Canadian immigrant returns to Jammu to meet her Indian relatives. The father has had no truck with India since he left, for his own reasons. The daughter though welcomes India and India welcomes her with open arms. "It seems to me that I am related to everyone by blood or marriage and my head is spinning to keep up with the complex relations and unfamiliar terms," she tells the reader at one point.

But there is a certain reason for her visit—to meet Madam Jaune, an unmarried woman who had once wished to adopt her. Is she able to accomplish her motive or does the weight of the past, her father's, make her decide against it?

Lonely ladies battling circumstances is a major theme in this collection. In "The Mouser", Mala Lalla is believed to be losing her mind, as she watches over an army of mice in her kitchen. Her son Ahmed is a gay man who stays in faraway Toronto (there is another tale about homosexuals in the collection, where gayness is a central theme). Sadia, a cousin of Ahmed's, is sent to look after her. We learn that Mala Lalla has been scarred by Partition and Sadia, meeting two young people in the neighbourhood, awakens to her own sexual blossoming. Their lives intersect (over mice), and slowly revealing the burdensome past of one and the jumpy future of the other, Gupta scripts the best story of the collection.

Miss Kamla Vati cares for children of refugees and people on the run in conflict-scarred Kashmir in "In the House of Broken Things". One of the children she educated has grown up and visits her with his wife at a time when her house has been attacked by those who believe that Miss Vati is a "sympathiser". (The Kashmir conflict provides a nostalgic and political setting to the collection.) Torn between Miss Vati's troubles and his wife's demands to move on, the man will decide if he must let go of the past for the future or vice-versa.

Nila Gupta's debut collection flits between India and Canada and crosses boundaries at every instance: boundaries of religion, gender, sexuality and nation. Which is why her characters and stories are so real to the touch.

Crying for deconstruction

2009-08-14T16:28:00.004+05:30

At a time when Barack Obama is the US President, it may take some effort to remember a time when blacks were not allowed to share the same seats as whites in buses or live in the same neighbourhoods. However, the rights that blacks enjoy have come after much struggle. Kathryn Stockett's The Help showcases one such struggle—of black women who worked as maids in white households, who raised white babies and who, once those babies grew up and the poison of racism made it impossible to tend to the grown-up children, left to tend to new families.

Stockett assumes the voices of three narrators, who tell their stories in alternating chapters. The setting is 1960s' Jackson, Mississippi, when the old walls of segregation are being weakened little by little by news from the outside world. There's Aibileen Clark, a maternal black maid who works at Miss Leefolt and looks after Mae Mobley, Miss Leefolt's daughter. Minny Jackson is Aibileen's friend, with a reputation, apart from being the best cook in the town, of having a mouth loud enough to get her kicked out of her jobs. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who dreams of finding a job in the New York publishing world. (Her story closely resembles Stockett's own, who also moved from Mississippi to New York to work for a magazine.)

Their stories come together when Skeeter is advised by a stern New York publisher that she ought to write not about lazy subjects but "about what disturbs you." Having grown up in a town where racism swings from the outright "activism" of her childhood friend Hilly Holbrooke to the insidious hate of her own mother, Skeeter decides to undertake a secret project chronicling the experiences of black maids, that is, the details of spending their lives working for white families.

The Help is the story of how Aibileen, Minny and several other maids come to share their stories of love and bitterness with Skeeter over coffee in Aibileen's house, a project of such secrecy that Skeeter has to tell her mother she is working on a life of Jesus Christ. Mississippi in the 1960s is the zenith of segregation, made all the more apparent for the voices raised against it. At a crucial point in the book, an NAACP member is shot in the head in front of his family. Libraries don't allow blacks to enter and a black man's tongue is taken out for speaking to an "outsider" about the "situation".

In such a scenario, Skeeter drives up to Aibileen's every other day and— after a false start— begins taking diligent notes on her typewriter. The women talk about everything, from being made to pay for the silver they never stole to being helped unexpectedly in a moment of sudden misfortune. Stockett makes the stories the central theme of the book (even though, unsatisfyingly, we never hear most of them) but she also allows minor distractions in the form of Skeeter's on-now-off-now alliance with a handsome young man, or the sidelined story of Minny's abusive husband.

The villain of the piece is Hilly, a stock racist who, at the novel's beginning, is championing the building of separate toilets for black maids. From here to her final humiliation (an exciting sub-plot relating to the eccentric but golden-hearted Minny), The Help moves through several nerve-wracking twists before coming to a — what can only be called — rather hastily-arrived finale.

The Help has its heart at the right place, and in its imagining of the black women's voice, it lends an authenticity which only a personal experience could have supplied. In a moving afterword, Stockett reveals how she never understood the silent suffering of her own black maid until long after her death which happened when Stockett was only 16.

However, the book must be accused of borrowed characterisation. Consider Aibileen who matches every stereotype that one may harbour about black people, not seeing the irony of her own observation on meeting one of her white kids, now grown up:

"And how I told him don’t drink coffee or he gone turn colored. He say he still ain’t drunk a cup of coffee and he twenty-one years old. It’s always nice seeing the kids grown up fine."

This description, and many such, made me a little uncomfortable, because they played into the long-suffering image of black people that has been mythologised by popular culture—the gentle sacrifice, the immense capacity for self-denial. Why are black characters so devoid of ill will in novels about racism? How do they stand being good to the children they raise, knowing fully well that they will grow up to become dyed-in-the-wool racists? It completely boggles the mind. It actually reminds me of how prostitutes are mostly shown to have hearts of gold, like the reader would be uncomfortable with any other description, lest it accentuates the reader's imagined discomfort with her morally compromised position.

The Help is a well-written, imaginatively peopled (in fact, too imaginatively) novel. But in a post-racial world, I would like to read about characters that are real and don't fit such easy patterns as the long-suffering black maid, the evil white woman who meets her comeuppance, and so on.

All you who toil tonight

2009-08-11T17:31:00.004+05:30

When Alain de Botton received a rather uncomplimentary review for this book in the New York Times, he went ballistic: “Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value... I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

Leave aside the qualities of the review itself, de Botton’s outburst suggests that in spite of the huge amounts of research he poured into this book — which purports to divulge the pleasures and sorrows we derive from the monotony that defines one-third of our lives — he clearly hasn’t understood the rules of his own work. You shout at the reviewer and you expose yourself to be the self-centred crybaby that you are.

Be that as it may, the book is, strictly speaking, undeserving of the viciousness that characterised the NYT review. De Botton, pop-philosopher extraordinaire, travels far and wide in his quest to offer “a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.”

He covers ten professions broadly, as diverse as aviation and biscuit manufacture, and accompanies his analyses with photographs straight out of a coffee table book. In each case where it’s possible, he travels from source to sea, making this a book of reportage the likes of which one encounters in New Yorker and Granta—10,000-word pieces offering a personal take on an issue of importance.

De Botton’s smooth flow, which he demonstrated in such wide-ranging books as How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006), stands him in good stead here too. Chapters on staid subjects like “Logistics” gently hum with the glow of his language. Writing about warehouses that dot the English landscape, he says: “One looks up at their cathedral-like ceilings and finds, instead of angels, workaday, economical spans of steel punctuated by fluorescent strips, which guide the onlooker’s eyes back to rows of symmetrical shelving and the hurried motions of forklift trucks.”

He finds teeming ocean life—all dead, of course—in one section of the warehouse and this prompts him to find out how a tuna fished in Maldives makes it to a Northamptonshire warehouse in a matter of hours. As he journeys, this time from sea to source, he begins to realise that his leisurely project may not be so easy after all. Sea food exporters are reluctant to speak to an outsider, least of all a writer sneaking around for trouble. De Botton visits Male, the capital of Maldives, where he encounters silence until the country’s minister of fish makes a few phone calls and launches him on his trail. Really, the book is as much about pleasures and sorrows as the pulls and pressures of work.

One thing de Botton is especially attuned to is bursting bubbles. The chapter on “Rocket Science”, which term we associate with IQ scores of 140-plus, is a subtle exploration of the disillusionment of bright young minds who enter this field to make a lasting contribution to humanity’s body of knowledge. Yet, in de Botton’s chapter, we come across the painstaking work on a satellite which will merely beam signals for a children’s TV station in Japan. Routine, humdrum work—much too removed from intimations of glory.

De Botton tackles such brick-and-mortar topics in other chapters, notably “Transmission Engineering” and “Aviation”. But the real thrust of the book comes with “Career Counselling” which goes to the heart of de Botton’s Holy Grail: Is work meaningful?

The spotlight shifts to Robert Symons, a fifty-five-year-old psychotherapist who is less counsellor and more motivational speaker. The irony of Symons’ job is not lost on de Botton: to help, with an archaeologist’s precision, people to decide which job would suit them the best, only for them to subsequently realise that the world of work does not ease into such unguarded cheeriness. It is no picnic that can be chosen, altered and left at will.

In a roundabout way, this applies to de Botton’s project as well. Having set out to discover the details of work life as a detached outsider, he discovers that his posh accent and head-in-the-clouds ideas about real work are often at odds with the vast majority of toiling humanity. Hailing from an affluent background that allows him the luxury to go on such wild goose chases, de Botton’s rich language and slight concerns sit uncomfortably in a book about drudgery and endless hopelessness.

And yes, there is also the little matter of his reaction to unkind reviews.

Stories imbued with a master's touch

2009-08-09T17:36:00.003+05:30

The title of Maile Meloy's new collection of stories comes from a poem by A R Ammons: "One can't have it both ways, and both ways is the only way I want it." Serving both as epigraph for the book and a certain moral revelation in one of the stories, this artless line runs like blood through most stories in this collection. Meloy's characters are stuck in a world of choices — moral, psychological et al — and they can't seem to decide which one to go for.

The first story in the book is called "Travis B", about a loner ranch head in rural Montana, who walks with a limp due to a bout of childhood polio. A Native American, Chet tends horses for a living when, on a boring evening, he chances upon a class on school law. The teacher there is Beth Travis, a white lawyer who drives nine hours to take the class. There is such a wide chasm between Chet and Beth that when Meloy introduces longing, first in the air and then in Chet, it gives the story a raw frisson, reminiscent of Annie Proulx Of course, love in such a case must be unrequited, weighted down as it is by gender and class and race, yet the menacing silence of Chet is a thing unto itself—a self-contained, restrained sparseness of the soul.

The trauma of lost love is also the theme of "Augustin", in which an ageing Argentine widower discovers meaning in his staid life when he finds that his paramour of long ago has returned to town due to straitened circumstances. His daughter informs him that she is now working as a maid in one of the houses he has rented out. When things don't work out as planned, and the lady refuses to accept his help, Augustin "cursed his daughter for bringing the world and its attractions back to his door."

In an interview, Meloy has quoted Ann Patchett on how a short story collection "was like a mall: it needed a few big stories with broad horizons, like the big anchor stores, to make a space in which the smaller, quirkier stories could survive." Indeed, there is wide variety in the collection and Meloy places stories in quite their proper places.

So, in "The Girlfriend", a father meets the girlfriend of his daughter's killer to find out the exact turn of events. The killer has already been prosecuted and there is nothing to be had from this conversation, yet Leo cannot bring himself to let go. The girl, a bundle of contradictions who threatens charges of rape, ultimately reveals a truth about the killing that will leave Leo worse off than when he started.

This story — threatening to drown the entire collection in a gale of grief — is thankfully followed by "Liliana", a light-hearted story about a former Nazi era actress, presumed dead, returning to her grandson's house. The grandson, passing through a protracted spot of financial bother, hopes that her substantial financial assets, now open to redistribution, will land his way, if only he is able to discover a connection he never had with her. But, the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft awry.

Each of the eleven stories in the collection chooses a moment in its characters' lives when the lines between what one wants and what one can have blur. Steven loses his best mate in a factory accident in "Lovely Rita" and finds his friend's girlfriend seeking his help to stage a raffle for providing sexual services. When Steven refuses, the girl threatens to anyway go ahead with it, with or without his help. Caught in a bind, Steven cannot sort his own feelings, a whirlwind of desire and guilt—and decides to help her. Sex is an ever-present hook in Meloy's stories, working its insidious way into luring characters who show tremendous restraint and come out clean, though ridden with loss and emptiness. The story ends on an anti-climactic note, yet in its evocation of Steven's discombobulated self, it shines.

In "The Children", a man prepares the ground for disclosing to his wife that he has been cheating on her, but when the moment arrives, he is so completely caught up in it — its innocent, regular bliss — that he cannot believe that he, this same person, can feel this way at home and another, bordering on thrill and danger, when with his mistress. And so, "both ways..."

Raised in Montana, Meloy's stories reflect the quietude of her childhood landscape, and a self-assurance that living in the country bestows. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is her second short story collection, after her 2002 debut, Half in Love. Having written two novels in the mean time, Meloy gifts us conflicted characters in short, bite-sized stories that are imbued with a master's touch.

A gentle, firm attack on national mythologizing

2009-08-04T08:04:00.003+05:30

When President Obama reached out to the global Muslim population in Cairo in June, his speech was littered with references to non-Christian Gods and stressed that "the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam."

But the real subtext of the speech, as subsequently shown by members of both the American left and right -- to different aims, of course -- was to denounce the notion that America is a Christian nation chosen by God to spread the message of goodness and attack evil in its various guises.

It is this national mythologizing of a "chosen people" that Richard T. Hughes, distinguished professor of religion at Messiah College in Grantham, Penn., sets out to attack in his serious inquiry, Christian America and the Kingdom of God (University of Illinois Press, 232 pages, $29.95).

Hughes busts the myth of America as a Christian nation by quoting widely from the Bible and showing how American actions since the founding of the republic have often contradicted the central scriptural teaching of peace on earth and goodwill to man.

From the earliest westward expansion that subjugated the Native Americans to the most recent "Axis of Evil" rhetoric of George W. Bush, Hughes shows that the seductive charm of the term "Kingdom of God" has mostly been misused to carry out actions that are against the Bible's spirit.

As a professor of religion, Hughes is ideally placed to bolster his claims with passages from the Bible. Nearly every page in the book has extensive quotes from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Hughes lays special importance on demonstrating how the Bible references "Kingdom of God" to mean an Arcadian paradise filled with love and justice, and not, as history as shown, a divinely ordained tool to justify the militaristic ambitions of those in power.

Such us-against-them rhetoric, Hughes laments, has gotten more strident in the aftermath of 9/11, even as American society becomes evermore culturally diverse. A proud Christian himself, Hughes is emphatic that true Christianity is removed from hubris and Jesus is best served by acceptance of, rather than discrimination against, the other.

A genuinely thought-provoking read, Christian America and the Kingdom of God makes one wonder if those who wage wars and bloodshed in the name of God do really know the holy canon.

===

This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

MJS' Geeta Sharma-Jensen says goodbye

2009-08-03T08:58:00.003+05:30

Geeta Sharma-Jensen, the book editor at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is accepting a buyout offer from the newspaper to pursue other forms of writing and spend "time with neglected gardens."

In a moving farewell piece on the MJS website, Geeta recounts her 35-year journey at the paper, the changes that have come about in the newspaper business and what she will most miss about her job.

It has been a journey of sorts for me too. Geeta was the first book editor outside Philadelphia Inquirer to give me work, with Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire. That initial encouragement was vital for someone from New Delhi trying to make a foothold in the American newspaper book sections. When I was unreasonable and got upset about her cutting a well-loved review of mine (The Indian Clerk), she was patient with me, allowing me to see my mistake, and when I apologised, she accepted it without issue and continued to give me work. I remember she said she used to be like that at my age, and so understood. Geeta, thank you for your kindness and maturity.

I wish Geeta all success in whatever she decides to pursue now on. I hope the free time allows her to indulge her interests in other forms of writing. And yes, I will be looking out for her freelance work every now and then—that particular muscular way of putting things she possesses that brings the page alive.

Innocence and intrigue in a bygone age

2009-08-02T19:30:00.006+05:30

Saadat Hasan Manto is most well known for his Partition-era magnum opus, “Toba Tek Singh”. However, like many other writers albratrossed by just one of their several outstanding works, Manto's other short stories have been confined to relative obscurity. This is a travesty since all of them combine his atypical wit with a stark tendency to unveil double standards.

Aatish Taseer brings forth several of Manto’s little-known gems in a fine new translation. Since Manto, before moving to Lahore, was a film journalist in Bombay, not a few of the stories in this collection are based in the city of dreams, especially what can be called an early prototype of today's Bollywood. While technical finesse may be a distant destination, scandal is very much the order of the day. In "My Name is Radha", a wildly popular superstar, known in the industry as the epitome of high morals (he even addresses his co-stars as "sisters") is shown by Manto's acerbic narrator to have feet of clay.

Manto's world is a curious mix of innocence and intrigue, so that Hindus and Muslims in his stories are friends and well-wishers, still untouched by the poison of Partition. In such a politically fecund setting, Manto yet manages to throw the human element in sharp relief, showcasing the warts-and-all mortal lurking inside the seemingly divine. "For Freedom" is about a Muslim freedom fighter who, in the thrill of the moment at the historic Jallianwalan Bagh, forswears sex and pledges at his wedding to not have "slave children" unless India gains independence. The story is clearly a dig at Mahatma Gandhi, who appears as a high-minded Babaji here. Narrated over many years by a friend of the freedom fighter, it a scathing attack on the pulls of self-righteousness and the havoc it can unleash.

For a writer of his time, there is a strong feminist streak running through these works. Manto’s women are sharply etched characters who persevere with their choices, at times to tragic consequences. In “Licence”, a woman must resort to selling her body because it is easier to get a licence for that than one for driving her dead husband’s horse carriage.

Manto's brilliant touch is visible in all these stories, hop as they do from a moment of child-like, unadulterated joy to the sudden onset of tragedy. Rooted in a certain setting, these stories nevertheless whisper to us across time and space.

Hare and hounds

2009-07-31T11:12:00.003+05:30

Nicholas Schmidle arrived in Pakistan in 2006 as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. He was first spotted on the Pakistani intelligence's radar when he wrote a piece on the Pakistani Taliban for the New York Times Magazine. To Live or to Perish Forever is an account of his two years in a country where another foreign journalist, Daniel Pearl, met with a bitter end.

Hillary Clinton told reporters during her recent India visit that while she agreed that America faced challenges on Af-Pak, there was no doubt that the Pakistani authorities were working to root out terror. Schmidle's book reminds us how hollow that claim is and how self-destructive America's optimism on this score.

As he roams the streets of Karachi, Gwadar and Quetta, Schmidle meets locals and elites who personify the stark contradictions of Pakistani society. So, while "ninety-nine point ninety-nine" per cent of Pakistanis rub their hands in glee at America's troubles in Afghanistan, as quoted by one local, a full one hundred per cent don't want to have anything to do with the Taliban on Pakistani soil.

To India, the chapter on Pakistan's repression of Balochistan is the most revealing, as also the most relevant. As the Manmohan Singh government frantically douses all-round fire at the wording of the joint statement signed at Sharm el-Sheikh, Schmidle exonerates India of any involvement, laying the blame squarely on Pakistan and China for co-operating to smother the genuine Baloch demand for autonomy.

Timely and provocative, Schmidle's book perfectly captures the schizophrenic nature of a society where policymakers are always buying time to diffuse crises and run a little more with the hare even as they hunt with the hounds.

Still searching for God’s dice

2009-07-30T16:24:00.003+05:30

The battle between quantum theory and relativity to be the most definitive discovery of the 20th century seemed to have ended with the Time magazine naming Albert Einstein the man of the century. Yet, doubts persist. In the real world, the quantum continues to have greater applicability than relativity. Most modern appliances employ quantum principles. Some, such as the electron microscope, operate at a scale where quantum effects score over classical phenomena.

Such was the extraordinariness of its precepts that when quantum theory first gained prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, Niels Bohr, one of its chief architects, proclaimed: “Those who are not shocked when they come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

Manjit Kumar’s Quantum revisits an era where cutting-edge research (at the time) yielded new ideas about the nature of reality. 1905, Einstein’s annus mirabilis, brought forth the first stirrings of what would become his Special Theory of Relativity, forever changing man’s views on space and time.

However, around the same time, an arguably more earth-shaking theory was about to take root, and it busied itself not with the motion of large objects but with the spin of the tiniest particle known to man—the humble electron. Experiments at the sub-atomic level conducted by the holy trinity of Bohr, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg showed that electrons do not follow the same rules of behaviour that had come to be gospel truth since Newton first propounded his laws in the seventeenth century. Rather, they seemed to show dual characteristics of wave and particle, depending on the mode of observation.

The need for quantum theory stemmed from black body radiation. A black body is a hypothetical object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls on it. According to Wikipedia, “No electromagnetic radiation passes through it and none is reflected. Because no light (visible electromagnetic radiation) is reflected or transmitted, the object appears black when it is cold. However, a black body emits a temperature-dependent spectrum of light. This thermal radiation from a black body is termed black-body radiation.”

In 1862, Gustav Kirchhoff, while studying the spectrum of a laboratory black body emitting radiation, observed the presence of discrete spectral lines that could not be accounted for. The question remained unanswered until 1900, when Planck postulated that electromagnetic radiation was not a uniform wave but a collection of discrete energy particles called quanta. In 1905, Einstein appropriated Planck’s theory to explain the photoelectric effect — the emission of electrons from metals when electromagnetic radiation falls on their surface. Einstein attributed this to the presence of discrete energy particles called photons in light.

But the real strangeness of the quantum theory, which at its basic postulates a wave-particle duality to all matter, was the discovery made by the young Heisenberg in 1927: “It is impossible to measure simultaneously both the position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty.” That is, the measurement of one quantity plays havoc with the measurement of another and vice-versa. What this essentially entailed was a realisation, too shocking to be readily grasped, that reality is not a fixed entity but dependent on its observation.

The discovery of uncertainty caused an uproar in the scientific community, since it shook to the core the deterministic principles on which the entire edifice of physics—and by extension, the patterns of thinking—was based. Einstein famously quipped, “God does not play dice with the universe” and hoped that a still-undiscovered quantity would arrive in due course to resolve the inherent contradictions of the quantum. Bohr and Heisenberg, on the other hand, fashioned the Copenhagen Interpretation that gave credence to the central improbability of quantum mechanics. In their view, quantum mechanics was the best approximation of all motion, since for larger bodies, it approximated the laws of classical physics.

Kumar’s Quantum builds on the many discoveries that launched the world of the quantum and the fraught relationships among the dramatis personae, many of who moved in a rarified circle where talk of force fields and particle physics was common over tea and biscuits. Indeed, Kumar’s real achievement is not in throwing light on quantum mechanics per se, which descriptions are often mired in thick scientific jargon, but on a time when the thrill of discovery was so palpable it could slice through butter like a hot knife.

As for the quantum, the debate continues and Kumar ends his book on the hope that a “Theory of Everything” to resolve the deterministic outlook of Einstein with the thrilling uncertainty of Bohr, will come around in our lifetimes. Except, every new discovery is fraught with opening new vistas and shifting the ever-changing contours of not just science, but epistemology.

Gritty portrait marred by lack of coherence

2009-07-29T10:45:00.002+05:30

Nami Mun's debut novel is an interesting patchwork quilt of set pieces that stand well on their own. This story of Joon, the daughter of Korean immigrants to New York (much like Mun), has several strengths to its credit. In spite of them, however, it fails to form a complete whole.

At the beginning, Joon has left the house that she and her mother share, because her mother has decided to stop speaking (she is mentally unstable). Before this, the father had abandoned the family, and started living with another woman. Joon's guilt at abandoning her mother is sublimated by her indecision over who really screwed the family.

On the streets, Joon tries a variety of odd jobs, from hustling to becoming an escort. She is befriended by oddball characters, Knowledge and Wink. As the three hop from one place to another, and from one calamity to the next, Joon comes to form real friendships for the first time in her life.

This, however, does not diminish her tiresome view on life. The narrative is peppered with Joon's cynical ditties on the fragility of relationships, the seduction of substance abuse, the possibilities of sexual deviancy, and so on. It does get to you at some point.

Redemption is promised towards the end with the fig leaf of Joon's decision to set her life in order and return to live with her mother. Given her know-it-all bluster, this sudden about-turn comes across as jaded and contrived.

Miles From Nowhere is not a bad book. Mun does possess a distinctive voice and a talent for characterization. However, the budding author needs to work on dovetailing disparate parts into a satisfying whole.

'The handsomest young man in England'

2009-07-11T12:20:00.006+05:30

Jill Dawson's latest, The Great Lover, is a fictionalised account of the latter years of Rupert Brooke's life, the English poet who died tragically of septicemia during the First World War. He is most well-known for his poem "The Soldier", which has the lines:

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England."

The following is a brief biography of Brooke from a website:

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at Rugby School. In his childhood Brooke immersed himself in English poetry and twice won the school poetry prize. In 1906 he went to King's college, Cambridge, and became friends with G.E. Moore, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Leonard Fry, members of the future Bloomsbury Group. In 1910 Brooke's father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy housemaster. Thereafter Brooke lived on an allowance from his mother. In 1911 he worked on a thesis on the playwright John Webster and the Elizabethan drama, and travelled in Germany and Italy. In England he was a leader of a group of young 'Neo-pagans', who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and swam naked - among others Virginia Woolf joined the swimmers in Grantchester. However, sex was something that was not part of the fun - "We don't copulate without marriage, but we do meet in cafes, talk on buses, go on unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage," Brooke once told to his friend.

It is this fertile period of Brooke's life that Dawson fictionalises in The Great Lover. Nell Golightly is a maid at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester. The house is famous for hosting artistic types and one summer, it plays guest to Brooke. To Nell, the upright daughter of a bee-keeper, Brooke and his circle represent the waywardness of artists — a fundamental difference from her staid maidishness — which, while she resents, Nell is also drawn to.

The book pays hearty tribute to Brooke's politics, his many left-leaning causes that ended with a whimper, and yet, which also made him overlook class divides and appreciate the repressed intelligence of Nell. Their romance, never spoken of, is that drip-drip pattter of subdued tension that ends in a night of emotionally charged lovemaking.

But more than anything else, the novel is a tribute to a way of life, a freedom that encompasses magnanimous love yet refuses to be tied town, sometimes to shocking effects. The long line of Brooke's conquests—men and women—are ever-present in the background, hurtling in and out of Brooke's racing conscious. Dawson has exonerated Brooke of any scheming though. As Nell tells him tenderly at one point, yes, there are two kinds of people: those who marry and those who can't.

For, there could have been no scheming. Not from one whose pen emitted these lines:

...Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers... But the best I've known
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say "He loved".

(From "The Great Lover" by Rupert Brooke)

Dawson's book has the pallor of tragedy hanging over it, as the reader accompanies Brooke through his nervous breakdown and his visit to Tahiti where he will find succour in Taatamata, a local woman he will eternalise in his poetry—and his subsequent return to England. But all this is known before-hand and when the book ends with a haunting letter Brooke wrote to a friend a few days before his death, it is all a bit too much to bear.

A playful, highly affecting novel!

A brief history of man

2009-07-09T16:39:00.003+05:30

The narrative of human evolution, in spite of Darwin and his Origin of Species, is a discontinuous mishmash that gives us only a broad outline of who we are and where we come from. The evidence for the study of human evolution is derived primarily from fossils, which can give insights into the existence of in-between species — the ones that provide the missing links in the evolution of man.

Hamburg in Germany is the site of an annual fossil fair where scientists, private collectors, dealers and locals converge in December every year to peddle their pre-historic wares. Jorn Hurum, associate professor of paleontology at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, is a regular at the fair, visiting every year in the hope of adding to the museum’s substantial collection.

In 2006, Hurum and a museum colleague were milling around the table of Thomas Perner, a prominent dealer. Hurum had had a long association with Perner, and so, when the latter asked him to meet up for a drink later that day, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Hurum acceded readily.

Over drinks, Perner explained to Hurum that a private collector seeking anonymity had given him six months to sell a rare find. Perner opened an envelope and showed Hurum a high-resolution colour photograph of a complete fossil skeleton. The photograph was of Ida (so named by Hurum later), fossilised after her death.

Ida is the world-renowned 47-million-year-old primate ancestor whose perfectly fossilised remains were shown to Hurum on that fateful December day. Her discovery is massively important to science because she could provide the crucial missing link in the evolution of primates. It was during the Eocene (56 million years to 34 million years ago) that a spilt in two distinct primate groups had occurred, leading to the existence of humankind.

Because of gaps in fossil records, paleontologists have had to hypothesise about what happened after the primitive primate. Their best guess so far had been that by 40 million years ago there were two distinct primate groups: those with wet noses—lemurs and lorises; and those with dry noses—tarsiers, apes, monkeys and humans. It was Ida that could explain the split in primate evolution.

Barely a year old at the time of her death, Ida died while drinking from a lake in what was then a tropical rain forest. A volcanic eruption engulfed the area surrounding the lake and the dense gas it released rendered Ida unconscious. Her limp body fell into the lake, settling in the sediment at the bottom, which over time, congealed into oily shale. A perfect accident had created the conditions for long-term preservation.

The site where this occurred is located near the village of Messel in Germany. Called the Messel Pit, it is a rich source of fossils from the Middle Eocene period. Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, the Messel Pit was chiefly a quarry, mined by coal prospectors looking to convert the shale into raw petroleum.

However, beginning 1966, formal excavations were undertaken by paleontologists and archaeologists in the Messel Pit. “Fossils of horses, fish, bats and crocodiles perfectly frozen in time were unearthed and preserved. In many cases, complete skeletons were preserved, along with bacterial imprints of hair, feathers, scales and even internal organs,” writes Tudge.

By 1971, mining had ceased in the area and it became open hunting ground for scientists and private collectors alike. Sometime in 1982, a private collector from Frankfurt, while splitting the layers of shale, “stumbled on a fossil of what looked like an exotic monkey crushed to the thickness of a silver dollar.” He took it home and preserved it, away from the eyes of science and the public, until twenty-five years later, when advancing age made him approach Perner.

The Link is the gripping account of how Hurum set about meeting the $1 million price tag on Ida—seeking the assistance of the Oslo museum whose director remarked, “We’re not a museum known around the world like the Louvre, but this could be our Mona Lisa”; authenticating the fossil by means of X-rays and CT scans; and clearing legal hurdles to enable the specimen to leave Germany.

Fans of Bill Bryson and Stephen Jay Gould may find the book lacking in flamboyance, but Tudge’s subject matter makes up for any deficit in flair. There are brilliant illustrations in the book, including three-dimensional images of Ida’s skeleton and close shots of her last meal. Tudge builds on the massiveness of the findings to argue about the need for humans to preserve the environment—there is an amusing, yet gravid, comparison of time lines to drive home the magnitude of destruction that human beings have wreaked in their rather minuscule time on earth.

Web-crazed zombies all?

2009-07-02T15:25:00.003+05:30

Which is the single largest recruiting ground that terrorists use to lure gullible people into their nefarious dens? Mosques, I hear you say. Only that is wrong. It's websites, hundreds of thousands of them, says James Harkin, Director of Talks at the ICA in London, in this stimulating new book.

Even as we cheer on young Iranian students using Twitter and other Web 2.0 technologies for raising their collective voice against Iran's botched electoral outcome, Harkin cautions us to keep in mind the many dangerous side-effects that this openness has entailed.

He does so by pointing us to the visual, albeit very real, domain of Cyburbia — "the place we go when we spend too much time hooked up to other people via a continuous loop of electronic information."

Harkin begins by introducing the concept of cybernetics whose founder was the redoubtable Norbert Wiener of MIT, who famously declined to join the Manhattan Project. Derived from control theory, cybernetics is the study of closed systems, where the feedback from the system is fed into a loop, resulting in the system modifying itself based on the feedback input.

During the Second World War, Wiener was distressed at the failure of British anti-aircraft gunners to shoot down German aircraft hovering the British sky. The problem was the circuitous routes that the German aircraft took to dodge detection. The British tracking system was just not up to the task of factoring in the bomber's zigzag motion in its calculation.

Wiener, working with complex mathematical models, came to the conclusion that the information feedback loop between the Luftwaffe bomber and the anti-aircraft gunner was not fast enough, resulting in rising failures. If only the bomber's movement was suitably estimated, Wiener calculated, the accuracy of the gunner's aim would improve dramatically.

While Wiener's work would have little bearing on the British war effort, his ideas came to be rapidly accepted in the broader social sciences, especially among the countercultural idealists of the 1960s. These pioneers imagined the establishment of a global "electronic village of authentic information and perfect understanding" based on cybernetics.

One such pioneer was Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the memorable phrase: "The medium is the message." McLuhan, Harkin reminds us, was the progenitor of the idea of the internet, predicting the setting up of a giant electronic loop which will connect things and people in a smorgasbord of anytime connectivity.

Harkin dovetails the rise of the internet to cybernetics by exploring the way Google searches — the search results on the website’s first few pages drive our knowledge/views on any given topic. The more popular a site, the higher its chance of being shown on the first page of search results, resulting in an endless loop where a few, highly-visited sites govern our consumption of ideas.

It is in this vein that Harkin builds his central argument. The internet has engendered a herd-like instinct which dresses up McLuhan's original dictum in a less glamorous interpretation. The content, never much important, is less so today—so long as one feels connected to a wider community. Which is why, Harkin seems to chide, seemingly normal adults can waste hours playing childish games and scoring themselves against one another on Facebook.

Welcome to Cyburbia, where youngsters share music and movies illegally on peer-to-peer networks, even as governments struggle to contain newer, more blatant forms of piracy. "The peer-to-peer architecture started out as a hippie cri de coeur at the conformism of post-war American life, but the layout of Cyburbia encourages us to conform to the opinion of our electronic peers," Harkin laments.

The rise of Cyburbia has entailed the easy availability of porn, much of it free and user-generated. The other tragic manifestation of the internet, in Harkin's view, is the global rise of opinion-making, with sundry blogs bloviating on serious topics with no editorial control.

However, in Harkin's view, none of this compares with the curious case of so-called medieval terrorists using the latest technologies to spread their message of hate, or down-and-out lonely souls exploiting the internet's seductive anonymity to enter suicide pacts.

But is this the whole picture? Clearly not. The rise of the internet has brought about several positive transformations, and the abuse of any technology cannot be reason enough to decry it. If the internet allows terrorists to group, it also lets ordinary citizens in non-democratic societies to get their views across. Why else does China set such great store by banning websites?

Perhaps then, it is enough to take Harkin at his word, and support him on how the ubiquitous use of the internet is playing havoc with not just our attention spans and social lives, but also our freedom to know and choose. Indeed, a new question is already upon us: What next?

Removing old veneers

2009-06-27T12:28:00.002+05:30

Is it merely a coincidence that just as Pakistan re-emerges on America’s security map as a nation to watch, its writers are churning out consistently good fiction at a surprisingly fast rate?

The past few months have seen the launch of Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam, besides several other notable books by Pakistani writers in the recent past.

To this list can now be added The Wish Maker, the debut work of 24-year-old Ali Sethi. Sethi is the son of renowned Pakistani journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the couple who have run afoul of Pakistani authorities at several times in the past for running The Friday Times, an independent newsweekly published out of Lahore.

It is the nature of the household that Ali grew up in, perhaps, that provides a ready template for his novel. The story revolves around Zaki Shirazi, a young, free-spirited Pakistani boy who grows up amidst a cast of strong female characters.

There is Zakia, his mother, a crusading journalist who also happens to be the editor of Women’s Journal, a publication which, by its very name, must invite trouble sooner or later in a conservative society. This is especially so when Zakia refuses to “behave” at all like a widow, her husband dead in an air crash when she was pregnant with Zaki.

Contrasted with Zakia’s character is Daadi, Zaki’s grandmother, who only bears Zakia’s many “digressions” because she has given her a grandson. Strong-willed women both, Daadi and Zakia are locked in a permanent battle of wits.

And there is Samar Api, Zaki’s cousin, a girl ill-suited to the conventions imposed by society on how proper Muslim girls must conduct themselves. Zaki and Samar have been inseparable from childhood, but as adolescence approaches, the personal and the political must collide in a society that will not allow the two to remain together.

Sethi writes with real feeling for a Lahore that was cosmopolitan and welcoming. The reader can sense the disquiet that liberal, Western-educated Pakistanis like him must feel at the downward spiral that their country has fallen into. The Wish Maker is a product of love, both for the craft of fiction and for what it lets us remember and keep forever.

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This review is slated to appear in Chicago Sun Times.

Pictures of a mundane Pakistan

2009-06-20T14:56:00.003+05:30

Given its volatile leadership and questionable contribution to the global war on terror, Pakistan is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Yet a new breed of writers from that country have quietly but firmly begun to make their presence felt in the English-speaking world. Mohsin Hamid and Nadeem Aslam, authors of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Wasted Vigil, respectively, immediately spring to mind.

To this list can now be added Daniyal Mueenuddin. Raised in Pakistan and educated in the United States, he has long regaled readers with short stories in the New Yorker, Zoetrope and other literary magazines. Now they are in this fascinating collection chronicling the everyday ironies and cruelties of a place too used to being in the news for earth-shifting events.

The world of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is as much the feudal hinterland of Pakistan as the cosmopolitan cityscape of Karachi and Lahore. The eight stories revolve, in one way or the other, around K.K. Harouni, landowner of a vast estate in the southern Punjab province. The title story follows Harouni's illicit affair with an impoverished distant relative, in a world where joys transmogrify suddenly into catastrophes. When Harouni dies, the poor woman is thrown out of the estate by his daughters. She, after all, has no locus standi.

In "Saleema", another story that points to the grim state of women in rural Pakistan, a young woman escapes a childhood of deprivation to move into the servants' quarters of the Harouni estate with her husband. But her state in her new home is no better. Reduced to looking after her drug addict spouse and passing her days in menial drudgery, Saleema's life has moved from one calamity to the next.

In the collection's latter half, Mueenuddin moves to the city-bred relatives of Harouni, people who "knew everyone of a certain class in Karachi, went to dinners and to the polo and to all the fashionable weddings, flew often to Lahore and Islamabad, and summered in London." Yet, traditionalism rears its head when matters of life and death — and love — are involved. In Our Lady of Paris, an American in love with a Pakistani man (they met at Yale) must contend with the latter's domineering mother who disapproves of the alliance.

Mueenuddin's prose aptly captures South Asian nuances, not just in dialect and cultural habits, but also in modes of thinking and relating. That is reason enough to pick up this collection from a writer destined to win greater laurels.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

The changing nature of threats

2009-06-14T16:49:00.003+05:30

Would a sane person abide any commonality in the mindsets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the strategists of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist outfit? Well, that is the jaw-dropping case that Joshua Cooper Ramo, a former journalist-turned-Managing Director at Kissinger Associates, makes in his new book—and he makes it well.

The Age of the Unthinkable follows the tried and tested Gladwellian territory: set out a grand theory and bolster it with crisp, real-life examples. But it avoids the latter’s worst excesses. While Gladwell is less successful with his attempts at pop-science, Ramo, painting a broader canvas, is a decidedly more muscular writer.

Gladwell tends to base his theories on hunches and wayward analogising, for instance, faulting the higher number of Korean air crashes in the 1990s to a culture of subservience, in Outliers. Consequently, he arrives at conclusions that would not withstand scientific scrutiny. Ramo, on the other hand, relies on chaos theory and disruptive innovation to write a book that’s more Black Swan than Outliers—tipping his hat to the unpredictability of ground-shifting events in geopolitics, economics, sociology and science.

The central idea of the book is the sand pile effect: if you piled sand, grain by grain, into the shape of an inverted cone, sooner or later, the tiny pyramid would give way. The question is when? How does one know at what precise moment the precarious balance that keeps sand grains together in perfect harmony will yield a minor avalanche?

Ramo uses this example to drive home the point that small events (the putting together of sand grains) can lead to momentous consequences (the entire pile destroying)—and if this can be true for a tiny sand pile, imagine the scope of its applicability to real-life phenomena of much greater complexity (Ramo quotes the breakup of the Soviet Union and the pack-of-cards collapse of US financial giants in 2008).

Ramo furthers his case by pointing out the fallacy of the adage: “Democracies do not fight among themselves,” first propounded by American sociologist Dean Babst. Inherent to this statement is the understanding that the idea of democracy is for the greater, common good and its widespread dissemination would usher in everlasting peace.

But this is not always true, says Ramo. Apart from America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan being obvious irritants, he also states: “Without a basis of economic development, without a culture of politics that fits democratic discourse, becoming democratic was often a guarantee of instability. Democratising Arab countries, for instance, might not make them less militant—particularly given cultures that tended to thrive on violent conflict.”

The scales can tip any moment, says Ramo, as on 9/11 when one gigantic, mind-numbing event went on to have protracted consequences. The notion of a “quick fix war”, Ramo asserts, has as little relevance today as at any point in history — violent insurgencies and quixotic hopes of seeding democracy can play havoc with the most fool-proof military strategies.

It is left to global policymakers and heads of government, then, to not fall into the familiar trap of “looking for answers”, when such crises require a complete remapping of how they are approached. For Ramo, China is the only nation that comes close to displaying the mindset that a new-age nation must adopt to survive. Perhaps it’s the split nature of the country’s raison d’être — an undemocratic, yet strong growth driver — that has kept the Middle Kingdom on its toes and kept it prepared for all eventualities. Ramo lavishes encomiums on China’s unstoppable juggernaut.

It is this—the quality to adapt—that makes Ramo liken the Silicon Valley startups to Hezbollah. If Google does not rest on its laurels and constantly innovates to give the world fascinating, new products, Hezbollah too has tapped the inverted glamour of suicide bombing to reinvent itself in its battle with Israel.

Having spent time in a Hezbollah outpost in Lebanon, Ramo returns impressed. “Spend time with Hezbollah, and you see it’s possible to run the most sophisticated cellular network and be willing to blow yourself up. We have to accept that and not think that if we make people modern, we make them Western. That’s not the case at all,” he says in an interview.

A few false notes, however, mar this smooth inquiry. While he is engagingly articulate at enumerating the dangers of our complex new world, Ramo’s remedies read more like nostrums. For a book that directs the reader to appreciate the many pitfalls of falling for stereotypes, Ramo’s prescriptions follow old terrain. Somewhere in there, though, there is an interesting study of how Eastern thought—of addressing problems in context without confrontation—is the way forward.

The Age of the Unthinkable is a stimulating read in the tradition of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which backs up its pessimism with solid facts and, only much later, gossamer stirrings of hope.

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This review will appear in the June 15 edition of Business Standard.

Crime and atonement

2009-06-08T15:17:00.004+05:30

Serious Things is one of the most acutely observed psychological thrillers I have come across. It concerns itself with the life of Bruno Jackson, a 30-something gay civil servant who spends his days in a lonely simulacrum of a real life. Initially, Bruno's dissatisfaction with the general scheme of things seems tedious but as the novel progresses, Norminton unravels, with enticing precision, the reasons behind Bruno's apathy.

The novel is divided in "Then" and "Now", alternating chapters/sections meant to give us insights into the two profound elements of Bruno's life—an incident from the past and the present, the all-consuming present, permanently affected by the past.

"Then" deals with the early '90s, when Bruno arrives at a posh school on the South Downs. There he is befriended by Anthony Blunden, a rakish young boy with an interest in poetry. Bruno falls inconceivably in love with Anthony, and Norminton uses the familiar literary trope of the nostalgic English school setting to drip the one-sided affair in intensity.

The two artistically inclined boys are welcomed into the house of Mr Bridge, their English teacher, who serves them poetry and biscuits. The trio has much in common—the boys, their enthusiasm; the teacher, his infectious knowledge. The meetings turn into elongated sessions of merrymaking and laughter, and such a setting must inevitably tip into an embarrassed situation, so critical for a novel of this type.

Anthony writes a novel caricaturising members of the school—its staff, students, wardens, dean. Expecting lavish praise for what he thinks is a work of great precocity, Anthony is aghast to learn Mr Bridge’s uncomplimentary views on his work.

The relationship between the boys and the teacher deteriorates, and with time, the bitterness that Anthony, and adventitiously, Bruno feel for Mr Bridge assumes a character that will only be satiated by something drastic. And so it is.

On to "Now", and the ghost of those school days, meant to be an unforgettable halcyon period, haunts Bruno, even as a chance encounter with Anthony at a common friend's party brings home to him the utter normalcy that envelopes Anthony's life, much against his own. A beautiful wife, a successful career, the works—is it merely a matter of a restless conscience, or does Anthony's return spark in Bruno his unrequited love, besides a smattering of jealousy?

Norminton gradually develops the plot, and his treatment of Bruno as both stalker and victim is careful. The novel builds up to a promising climax, much appreciated under the circumstances, and very definite in its resolution of Bruno's so-far muddled morality.

Cooking up a tasty tale

2009-06-07T10:18:00.002+05:30

British-Bangladeshi writer Monica Ali achieved international fame with the 2003 publication of "Brick Lane," her Booker-shortlisted novel about the lives of immigrant Bangladeshis in London's East End.

She followed it up with "Alentejo Blue" in 2006, a much quieter book than her first, set among a multi-ethnic community in a Polish small town. A significant departure from her first, widely appreciated book, "Alentejo Blue" received at best lukewarm reviews.

Now Ali returns to original form with "In the Kitchen," her meditation on the goings-on at the fictional Imperial Hotel in London's Piccadilly. Her pet themes - migration, multiculturalism, racism, settling in - are in full display, and the prose crackles with verve and vivacity.

The story revolves around Gabriel "Gabe" Lightfoot, the executive chef at the Imperial, who oversees operations at a place run by the U.N. of cooks: nearly every nationality is represented in his kitchen, legally or otherwise. When at the book's beginning, the body of a porter, Yuri, is discovered in the basement, the investigating officer's first instruction to the staff is clear: "I'm not interested in your papers. I'm not here for that."

Ali is a "straddler" in the clearest sense of the term. Born in Dhaka, she grew up in Bolton, a north English textile town, and finally attended Oxford University. She therefore has firsthand knowledge of the devastation wrought on textile towns across England and how immigration only deepens already existing social fissures.

Her character, Gabe, too, is a straddler. Working in the metropolitan heart of London, he is nevertheless aware of the racism that runs like dark blood through Blantwistle, his hometown in north England.

When he learns from his sister that his father is dying of cancer, Gabe travels north to visit. In touching sequences, Ali builds upon the changed landscape of Gabe's boyhood against his real worries at work in London.

Gabe's romantic life is as complicated. While he has a healthy relationship with Charlie, a nightclub singer, he begins an obsessive affair with Lena, one of his employees, after he discovers that she has nowhere to live after Yuri's death. Originally from Belarus, Lena had become tangled in a prostitution ring and had sought refuge with Yuri to escape her assailants.

Ali writes with wit and sympathy about the many twists and turns that define our lives. Gabe's increasing sympathy for his employees after he hears Lena's story allows Ali to chart harrowing accounts of what less privileged people in other parts of the world undergo before they have a chance at migrating to a developed country and improving their lot. As a follow-up to "Brick Lane", "In the Kitchen" is a far more mature work.

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This review appeared in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The vanishing of Mona Lisa

2009-06-03T18:22:00.002+05:30

She has mystified and captivated generations of onlookers, yet nothing seems to diminish the enigma of Mona Lisa. What exactly does she feel, is a question artists and scientists have explored for centuries. Is she sad, reflective, happy, disgusted…what? Leonardo da Vinci’s epic creation invites any number of interpretations depending on the state of mind of the observer. Whatever you may be thinking, Mona Lisa seems to empathise. It’s not just that the contours of the painting are brilliant; it is also the mischief, the “I-know-what-you-don’t-want-me-to-know” look in the eyes that confounds.

Such is the cult surrounding her that in 2005, Dutch researchers tried dwelling into the mind, rather face, of history’s perennial treasure trove by using a software that recognises a person’s emotions by examining the face. They concluded that Mona Lisa is 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful, and 2 per cent angry. Well...

In Vanished Smile, RA Scotti deftly uncovers the mysterious theft of the art world’s prima donna, close to a century ago to this day. Thanks to Scotti’s meticulous research and atmospheric writing, a crime that had all the trappings of insanity, national prestige and obsession is brought to light marvellously.

The book begins in 1911, with Argentine con man Eduardo de Valfierno luring gullible American millionaires with the bucks to buy—but not the eye to discern—the original Mona Lisa. This, when all de Valfierno had were six fakes. How did this tie with the theft of the real Mona Lisa from the Louvre in France? Scotti keeps the mystery crackling for a good 200 more pages.

Later that year, on a languorous Sunday — August 20 to be precise — the Mona Lisa vanished. Her loss was not discovered upto 48 hours later, since the museum was closed on Mondays. The crime was beyond comprehension in its cheek and neatness, launching a pan-global hunt for Leonardo da Vinci’s timeless creation.

Scotti brilliantly captures the farcical aftermath of the theft, with the French government pinning the blame on the Louvre’s authorities, newspapers having a field day with the scandal, and a clueless public trying to make sense of the Byzantine ways of the art world.

With no certainty on the criminal’s identity in sight, suspicion fell on writer Guillaume Apollinaire, enfant terrible of the Belle Époque, who had published inflammatory literature demanding the Louvre be burned down. Matters came to a head when Apollinaire was betrayed by his friend, the painter Pablo Picasso, resulting in a ludicrous court trial, allowing Scotti to show them both as wretched, though innocent, victims of an extremely sophisticated fraud.

Vincenzo Peruggia it was, an Italian employee at the Louvre, who was finally discovered to be the Mona Lisa’s thief—more than two years after the lady’s disappearance. On that fateful Sunday night, Vincenzo completed his shift and hid in a room inside the museum. At some point in the early hours of Monday, he snuck out, walked up to where the Mona Lisa hung, took her down with the precision of an expert, hid her under his coat, and walked out.

When caught (he tried selling the painting to the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence), Vincenzo attributed his crime to his obsessive love for the painting and to the restoration of Italian pride by returning it to its roots (da Vinci was Italian).

However, the ghost of the Argentine conman hung over Vincenzo’s head, as the latter’s jingoistic lamentations were alleged to have distinctly commercial origins. It was speculated that Vincenzo stole the Mona Lisa at the insistence of de Valfierno, who only wanted the painting to disappear from the Louvre so as to convince his buyers that each of their individual Mona Lisas was an original.

De Valfierno is believed to have commissioned French art forger Yves Chaudron to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original, and leave Vincenzo stranded with the real Mona Lisa since he had no use for it anymore. Which is why, it was said, Vincenzo tried selling it and got caught in the process.

But was any of this true? Had Vincenzo and de Valfierno indeed collaborated, making the theft a blindingly well-executed crime? Nothing was ever established, Vincenzo was hailed as a hero in Italy and let off after serving a mild sentence.

All’s well that ends well. The Mona Lisa returned to her place in the Louvre—with a completely revamped security apparatus. A theft that shook the art world to its foundations had been overturned, even though its contours were still not entirely clear—and remain so to this day. RA Scotti has given us an account that captures this uncertainty with remarkable precision — an apt tribute to Leonardo da Vinci’s mysterious muse.
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This review will appear in the June 4, 2009 edition of Business Standard.

Dripping with psychological suspense

2009-06-01T19:44:00.002+05:30

Sarah Waters made her name as the writer of erotic "lesbo-Victorian romps" that effortlessly straddle the worlds of literary and genre fiction. Set in rural Warwickshire just after the Second World War, The Little Stranger is her fifth novel, the first with a male narrator, Dr. Faraday. We meet the doctor at Hundreds Hall, a former grand structure now wasting away, and home to the Ayreses for close to two centuries. Members of the landed gentry now fallen to ruin, the Ayreses -- Mrs. Ayres and her two grown children, Caroline and Roderick -- seem steeped in a bygone, gentler age. ...Read more>>>

Also read Teasing the velvet.

The journey from selfish to self-aware

2009-05-23T22:47:00.003+05:30

Geoff Dyer is a writing chameleon. He has tackled subjects as diverse as jazz, travelogue, D.H. Lawrence and photography in his perceptive writings. His intent gaze has settled for a more meditative subject in his latest book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.

The book, as its title indicates, is divided into two parts, each devoted to one of the great riverside cities of the world. It opens with an account of Jeff Atman, a smart, but bored, arts journalist, in Venice to cover the Biennale arts exhibit.

We see the city through Jeff's eyes as he troops from one event to the next, always on the verge of an epiphany. The writing is rock solid as you feel Dyer's perspicacity (he has covered the Biennale twice) in Jeff's ways of seeing and being.

Jeff meets Laura, a journalist from Los Angeles, and begins a sort of anonymous affair. They meet at various events and end up swilling bellinis, snorting coke and having sex. Through Jeff, Dyer captures the very occidental habit of trying to locate tiny moments of pleasure in a life essentially devoid of meaning.

It is in contrast to Venice's Jeff that we meet the unnamed narrator of the second half. In all respects, this man is Jeff, except we are never sure because Dyer doesn't tell us so. A journalist sent to write a travel piece on Varanasi, he ends up staying in the city.

There is something magical about his attraction for it, a magnetism devoid of possessiveness, a love so magnanimous it threatens to strip existence of its banalities and discover its life-denying, yet life-affirming, center. Toward the end, the narrator has gone completely native, with a dhoti and bald head, losing all desire for worldly objects, even sex partners.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is an interesting juxtaposition of two world views, refracted through the eyes of arguably the same person. It makes no judgments, yet in its evocation of a metaphorical death, the book pays heartier tributes to the East than it does to the West.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

A life bound by despair

2009-04-30T09:38:00.002+05:30

The Grasmere Journals are a set of four diaries that William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy kept during her time in Grasmere. They span the period from 1800 to 1803 and are a ravishing portrait of sylvan English life. In the Grasmere Journals, Dorothy, the talented, poetically inclined sister of the master of Romanticism, notes everything from the changes in the weather to the siblings’ shared admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a friend.

But the Grasmere Journals are most well-known for the cryptic, though not less passionate for that, references of Dorothy’s love for William. Countless scholars down the ages have tried to define this peculiar intimacy, always stopping short of calling the relationship between the siblings incestuous. Now Frances Wilson launches a biographical panorama that finally does justice to Dorothy’s long and eventful life.

Born in 1771, Dorothy spent her childhood away from William (the siblings were separated after their mother’s death), and this may have permanently defined — or, more appropriately, defiled — her vision of happiness. Her intense love for William is said to have originated in the lack of familial love she experienced as a child. When she and William spent a blissful six weeks together in Forncett in 1790, Dorothy wrote of how “his attentions to me were such as the most insensible mortals must have been touched with.”

The peaks of her life and love occurred at Dove Cottage in Grasmere—coterminous with the time described in the Journals. Curiously, the thought of starting a journal appeared to Dorothy at the time William was away visiting Mary Hutchinson, who he was to later marry. Her first entry morosely evokes the passage of her brothers William and John to Yorkshire: “I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, & after a flood of tears my heart was easier.”

This sombre tone returns throughout the Journals, accompanied by headaches that Dorothy diligently records. The Journals themselves are bookended by the relationship between William and Mary. If William’s visit to Yorkshire was Dorothy’s reason to start writing, his marriage to Mary finally drags a dagger through the Journals’ heart — and hers. As Wilson writes, “[Dorothy] can stand it no longer. When she looks from her window at the two men running up the avenue to tell her that the wedding is over, she throws herself down on the bed, where she lies in a trance, neither hearing nor seeing.”

The Ballad takes the form of such imaginings, astute and immediate, and supplements them with actual notes from the Journals. Not that Wilson does not go beyond the time spent at Dove Cottage. Wilson’s book traces the remainder of Dorothy’s life, first at Dove Cottage and later at Rydal Mount in nearby Windermere, but throughout the stress is on those bygone halcyon days at Grasmere.

In an interesting aside, Wilson compares the relationship of William and Dorothy to that between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She even suggests that Brontë may have based her iconic characters on the brother-sister duo. Certainly, Brontë’s story owes fantastically to intense sibling love, as Wilson explains:

“Catherine and Heathcliff, raised as brother and sister in the same family, evolve from childhood inseparability into a hybrid of such inward-looking self-consumption that the disappearance of one means the nonexistence of the other...The two of them shift between dread of separation and fear of engulfment.”

Further, she explains how the romantic ideal of Catherine and Heathcliff—and indeed, of William and Dorothy—is sexless:

“Like Dorothy and William, they [Catherine and Heathcliff] have sexual desires but not for each other. Sexual desire feeds on distance and separation, and what Catherine and Dorothy describe is proximity and sameness.”

Dorothy Wordsworth drifted from the wildness of her youth to endure the death of her beloved and later, towards the end of her life, was gradually consumed by mental illness. Dipping tantalisingly into the personal and the provocative, this fascinating, never dull book thumpingly reclaims a life consigned to the shadows by posterity.

Epic tale told through innocent eyes

2009-04-26T17:11:00.002+05:30

Kamila Shamsie's book is the latest addition to a fertile crop of fiction emerging from one of South Asia's most fragile nations. She is in august company. Over the past few years, a slew of writers, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammad Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin among them, have staked claim to a daring new voice that more than matches the fiction emerging from Pakistan's bete noire, India.

Burnt Shadows (Picador, 384 pages, $14) is Shamsie's fifth novel, and her most ambitious. We follow the life of a Japanese woman Hiroko, as she undergoes a series of life-altering events, each leaving grave personal imprints on her, but also pointing toward the momentous shifts taking place in global geopolitics.

So from losing her German paramour, Konrad, in the Nagasaki nuclear bombing in 1945 to finding herself falling in love with Sajjad -- a Man Friday at the household of Konrad's half-sister Elizabeth Burton in India -- Hiroko, and Burnt Shadows, flit lightly from one event to the next. The India of 1947 is a dangerous place with the British departure from the subcontinent leaving in its wake a bloody splitting up of the subcontinent -- the Hindu-dominant India and Muslim-dominant Pakistan.

Throughout, we see the world, and its unsettling ways, through Hiroko's innocent eyes, as fate takes her and Sajjad to Pakistan, where they build a home. Really, it boggles one's imagination to consider a Japanese woman adapting herself to strict Islamic traditions, but Shamsie's deft touch makes the story believable.

Time passes and the next generation -- Raza, the son of Hiroko and Sajjad -- makes an appearance. It is the 1980s and a new conflict has reared its head in the neighbourhood -- the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Shamsie delicately builds the momentums of everyday life against the insidiously political situation of the time, to arrive at surprising, though plausible, plot twists.

Burnt Shadows is not as bulky a book as this review would suggest, given that it also finds space to tackle 9/11 in the scene-stealing denouement. This is, more than anything else, a tribute to Shamsie's skills as a writer of sharp, compact narratives.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

The diaspora as adventurous pilgrims

2009-04-24T10:29:00.003+05:30

It’s a happy coincidence that a recent, highly lauded work of fiction with an Indian setting shares its backdrop with Minal Hajratwala’s multi-generational saga of her globetrotting family. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, set in the early 19th century, delves into the lives of sea-faring “coolies” or indentured labour who were transported to islands as far as Fiji and Mauritius to work on British plantations. This followed the outlawing of slavery across the British Empire in 1834.

Hajratwala’s book is not fiction, yet her tale begins with just such an intrepid journey that her paternal great-grandfather, Motiram, made to Fiji in 1909. Having recently read the excellent Sea of Poppies, I was delighted with the promise of spending time with its non-fiction counterpart—the tale of a real Gujarati family that spread its wings across the globe.

Hajratwala splendidly keeps that promise. A graduate of Stanford University now based in San Francisco, she bravely summoned the passion and diligence to undertake this mammoth project. It entailed crisscrossing the globe and uncovering family secrets that were at best indistinct. The resultant book is a fascinating study of a few of the emigrants whose tentative steps eventually resulted in today’s Indian diaspora of as many as 30 million people living outside the country.

Hajratwala begins by drawing an elaborate portrait of her paternal clan, the Solankis. According to the varna system that designates social standing, Hindus descended from four distinct groups: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (artisans), and Shudras (labourers). The Solankis are Kshatriyas, and Hajratwala builds on this seemingly inconsequential fact to narrate an account, based on community lore, of how her ancestors turned from warriors to weavers, and how that dovetails with Motiram’s journey in 1909 to seek his fortune in Fiji. There he worked as a tailor—a first step on the way to building one of the South Pacific’s largest department stores.

Another path brought Hajratwala’s maternal side to Fiji. Her maternal grandfather, Narotam, walked with Gandhi during the famous march to Dandi in 1930 to protest the colonial salt tax. A year later, to support his young family, Narotam joined the Gujarati community in Fiji and began sewing women’s clothes. Eventually, he and his brother opened a ready-made clothing store. Narotam’s last child, Bhanu (Minal’s mother), was born a year before India gained independence from Britain in 1947—an event he had made his own little contribution toward.

It is a tribute to Hajratwala’s writing that she is able to coalesce the disparate factions of her family into a satisfying whole. Her training as a journalist ensures that the narration has no loose ends. And we are not even halfway there. It’s 1963 and a young man is about to make use of the recently relaxed US rules for foreigners wishing to study in America. Bhupendra, the author’s father, enrolled in a manufacturing programme at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was among the first generation of Asian immigrants to come to the United States for skills training, and in the process, permanently change the composition of the country.

The families arranged an alliance between Bhupendra and Bhanu, who was still in Fiji at the time. The two had nothing in common except the “Gujarati from Fiji” tag. He was stern and no-nonsense; she was sweet and artistic. The wedding was hastened so that Bhupendra could return to the United States in time for the start of the new school year.

The newly-weds haltingly made their lives in America, which required numerous adjustments, large and small. When she first arrived, Bhanu, not a vegetarian, was nevertheless aghast at the bloody look of all meat on offer—especially beef, which she had never tasted—and for a whole day ate nothing but chevdo, a traditional mix.

The day Hajratwala was born in 1971, her father sent out three telegrams, one each to Fiji, Toronto and London. He also received a telegram offering him an academic position in New Zealand. And so this peripatetic family was again propelled to new shores. “Gain and loss, give and take: these are the fundamental tropes of migration, the ebbs and flows that are as certain as travel itself,” Hajratwala writes.

Perhaps the most prominent symbol of change in her family was the cultural openness in America that allowed Hajratwala to come out as a lesbian to her parents. It may be the limited scope of the book that prevents Hajratwala from fully exploring how immigrant communities handle this explosive subject. Yet, in its spirited and kind representation of the rapidly enlarging Indian diaspora, Leaving India is testimony to the truth of the adage: “What Destiny writes, neither human nor god may put asunder.”

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This review appeared in Wilson Quarterly and Business Standard.

Also read 'Poppies' set before Opium Wars

A dark, roiling mystery to the end

2009-04-18T16:16:00.003+05:30

At first glance, The Glister defies all stereotypes. One is never sure if it is a crime thriller or a spooky horror story, albeit with an angelic bent. It is to John Burnside's credit that it could be both, and without its falling for any stock rituals of either genre.

Innertown is a postindustrial township in terminal decline since the closing of the chemical plant that ran its economy. The plant is a raging monument to disaster, seeping poisonous waste into the residents' consciousness and bodies.

Against this apocalyptic backdrop, a series of disappearances grip the town — teenage boys who, one after the other, simple vanish without a trace. Have they run away? Are they dead? Burnside keeps the mystery crackling until the end.

The tale runs around Leonard, a bookish teen who befriends quirky characters like Moth Man, a mysterious stranger who seemingly visits Innertown to collect data on moths. The boy's mother has left the household, leaving Leonard to look after his father, a victim of the town's infectious moroseness. In spite of his frequent forays into misogynistic bile, Leonard is an adorable guy — articulate, conflicted, determined. The action unfolds through his eyes, even as — like in the best fiction — he is no distant narrator, but a churner of integral events.

Then there is Morrison, the local police officer, mired in guilt because he knows something about the first disappearance, yet is forced to shut up by Brian Smith, an influential local businessman who has a stake in keeping the wrongdoings under wraps.

Burnside builds on the immorality of actions in Innertown to craft a tale with no neat endings. In the story's hallucinatory culmination, redemption is assured, even if in the garb of another shocking crime. The Glister is no run-of-the-mill story; it's a deeply philosophical tale that goes right to the heart of existence and what one must to do, despite circumstances, to retain humanity.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

Also read Idle hands have nothing on 'Devil's Footprints'

The tenderness of beasts

2009-04-13T13:20:00.002+05:30

In part a sequel to Joseph Boyden's first book, Three Day Road, this novel concerns itself with Will Bird, the grandson of Xavier Bird from the earlier book. Will is a bush pilot who has a history of wild plane crashes, each of which he has miraculously survived. Currently, however, he lies in coma in a hospital in Mosoonee, 12 miles south of James Bay, the "home of the Cree." Boyden divides the novel into chapters alternatively narrated by Will (from his comatose mind), and his niece Annie, who sits by his bedside and recounts to him her adventures in Toronto, Montreal, and New York City....Read more>>>

India analysed

2009-04-12T09:33:00.002+05:30

Ramin Jahanbegloo, well-known Iranian scholar and a faculty at the University of Toronto, regales the reader with engrossing conversations with famed psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. The dialogue form allows Jahanbegloo to tease out not just personal details about Kakar’s life (“When I came back to India the first time in 1964, after an absence of five years, I was very unhappy”), but also the richly layered development of his interest in psychoanalysis (“My psychoanalysis was ...influenced by Erikson’s relativistic stance, so it was not kosher Freudian in any case”). Those already familiar with Kakar’s work can extract from this book pearls of remembered wisdom. For others, it is a learned primer on, and a deserving introduction to, Kakar’s views on a range of topics, from the trauma of Partition to the conflict between modernity and tradition in present-day India.

Truth and reconciliation

2009-03-17T09:11:00.002+05:30

Harsh Mander, uncommonly, quit the IAS in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002. In this consistently shocking book, he elicits the reasons behind his disenchantment with the civil services and the stories of hope that continue to dot the land.

Mander’s gravelly voice matters, since the events that have unfolded in the wake of the riots — including the contradictory findings of two commissions set up to look into the causes of the fire that broke out in coach S6 of the Sabarmati Express — have brought us no closer to the truth about the incidents of that dark time.

As Gujarat makes great strides in progress and investment, Fear and Forgiveness is a timely reminder of the need to shun fear and seek forgiveness for past injustices.

FEAR AND FORGIVENESS
THE AFTERMATH OF MASSACRE

Harsh Mander
Penguin
Rs 299; 219 pages

The Price of Everything

2009-03-12T02:23:00.003+05:30

After a series of books that explain the mysteries of free-market capitalism (if only someone had foreseen the credit crisis), here comes a novel — a novel, yes — that brings home, yet again, its virtues.

It revolves around two people — Ruth Lieber, an economics professor at Stanford, and Ramon Fernandez, a tennis champ who was brought from Cuba to the US as a child. By way of an interesting plot, Roberts drives home his viewpoints on everything from the “chaotic order” at the heart of the global trade to the beneficial social effects of free market economy.

As a novel, The Price of Everything is no great shakes. But as a vehicle to convey ideas that need renewed currency in today’s troubled times, it is a promising attempt.

Dreams and disappointments in multiracial London

2009-03-09T21:33:00.002+05:30

The title refers to the shop run by Zaki Khalil in London -- a place that embodies both the dreams and disappointments of a man who left his native country in his youth, but now, staring old age squarely in the face, finds himself doing the same things and being the same person he tried to run away from. It is this sense of a missed life that draws Zaki to an illicit affair -- with his bored, midlife crisis-battling daughter-in-law Delphine. Set in the heart of multiracial London, a territory made immensely recognizable by such writers as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, Corner Shop tackles familiar themes of exile and the grip of the past in a new and invigorating fashion...Read more>>>

'Little Bee' straddles poverty, globalization, guilt

2009-03-08T17:01:00.003+05:30

Chris Cleave is destiny's child, granted not the favorite. Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, about an al-Qaeda attack on a London football stadium, arrived in bookstores on the morning of July 7, 2005, the day terrorists stormed the London Tube and killed more than 50 people and injured close to 700. The book, unsurprisingly, did not set the cash registers jingling.

While such an experience may daunt a less brave writer — or worse, affect the quality of his subsequent work — Cleave is not that writer. His second outing, Little Bee, is a thought-provoking examination of the collision of two diverse cultures. The Western gaze on the Dark Continent has launched a stable of Conradian books, but seldom does one come across a work that so freely straddles poverty, globalization and the workings of post-colonial guilt.

The pivot around which Little Bee turns is the chance encounter on a Nigerian beach between a 16-year-old local and an English couple on holiday.

Andrew O'Rourke is a celebrated journalist battling a private crisis that his wife, Sarah, a magazine editor, cannot be bothered with. Safe in her private world that comprises a rollicking extra-marital affair and her Batman-obsessed son Charlie, Sarah's life is set to turn topsy-turvy by the arrival of young Nigerian Little Bee at her doorstep.

The book begins with Little Bee's harrowing account of an immigration center in Essex where, chiefly, she must keep herself safe from the advances of men. But there is something darker behind her sadness that, Cleave hints, has some relation to the O'Rourkes — the couple from that long-ago encounter on the beach.

Cleave's ability to keep the book's compass pointed to that incident — a brilliant set piece of effortless violence — is reminiscent of John Banville. But his leanings are expressly political. When in alternate chapters, we hear the tragic voice of Sarah, the great divide between Africa and the West is immediately apparent.

Yet Cleave is too nuanced a writer to convey that life in the English suburbs is "easier" than the blood and toil on African streets. Apart from the writing, this is brought out in the strange neuroses that the O'Rourkes inhabit. In due course, Andrew commits suicide, while Charlie falls deeper into the abyss of his strange imagination.

By now, the book is on course to a startling finish. Cleave, unsatisfyingly, falters a little, dipping into contrived plot devices and the too-easy pull of melodrama. But the end is justifiably happy in a book that would not do without redemption. To that extent, and given the overall tenor of this work, Little Bee is a loud shout of talent.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun Times.

Voluntary Madness

2009-02-23T18:16:00.001+05:30

Norah Vincent first achieved fame for dressing and living as a man for 18-odd months and writing about her exploits in Self-Made Man. The writing of that book, and the double life that preceded it, were so taxing they drove Vincent to depression. Her first trip to a mental institution gave Vincent, being who she is, the idea for another book that would chronicle the state of mental health institutions in America...Read more>>>

Citizen Hearst gets a rewrite

2009-02-21T15:06:00.002+05:30

William Randolph Hearst is the much-maligned inspiration behind the lead character in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane — a megalomaniac publishing tycoon who left no stone unturned to bring his readers the latest news. It is fitting then that nearly 60 years after Welles' film, Kenneth Whyte, a leading Canadian journalist, redeems this enigmatic personality and his reputation in the absorbing The Uncrowned King.

William was the son of millionaire senator George Hearst, who in the late 1880s was struggling with the San Francisco Examiner, a bleeding newspaper. Still an undergrad at Harvard, William sent his father a detailed proposal to rescue the paper, and, against the wishes of his mother (who thought a career in mining offered better prospects), persuaded George to make him proprietor and later editor of the Examiner.

In Whyte's view, William ran "a smart and well-written paper. Its crusades were often courageous and marked by an unmistakable sense of public service." At a time when it was unheard of, the Examiner routinely carried specials on photographically striking news events such as arson and drowning. Further, it frequently plied its readers with special offers and freebies.

The Examiner's circulation grew by leaps and bounds, and by 1895, Hearst had his eye on New York. Most of the book concerns the bitter circulation wars that ensued between Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Both newspapermen had a touch of the obsessive about them, and the saga of their rivalry is brought out in racy detail by Whyte.

The author overturns a few commonly held assumptions about William Hearst. Quashing charges of yellow journalism leveled against Hearst, Whyte emphatically points out that rigorous scholarship has borne out the veracity of the reports carried in his papers. The Uncrowned King is a sympathetic doff of the hat from one newspaperman to another.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

West is east in this history reimagined

2009-02-07T17:37:00.002+05:30

Rewriting history in fiction has been a favorite pastime of countless authors. There have been several outings by authors in which the ascendancy of Hitler or a nuclear conflict between the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union have provided rich pickings. Bernardine Evaristo's sparkling new novel undertakes this project on a decidedly epic scale.

In the beginning, Blonde Roots is just another story of a girl abducted from the forest near her house and brought to the New World to work as a slave. All the usual accoutrements of the slave trade are present here, including rapacious masters, scheming mistresses and the mind-numbing pathos of the slaves' deprivation. Doris, the slave girl brought into this shocking world, is just another cog in the wheel that drives the New World's prosperity.

Except that Doris is white (or whyte, as Evaristo calls the race in a slice of pop revisionism), and her tormentors are blacks from "Aphrika." Off the coast of Aphrika sits the island of the United Kingdom of Ambossa. There is also a map at the book's beginning, in which the outlines of the world are jumbled to build an elaborate fiction in which migration of this sort — in the direction opposite to what history has laid out — could have happened.

The real triumph of Evaristo's craft is her reimagining of the conventionalities of the slave trade — with the attendant stereotypes of race. Doris, who works at the house of the local chief, Bwana, dislikes her pale skin and blond curls, and envies the rich "choco-colored" beauty of her mistress. This is taken to a more serious level when Bwana tries to justify the slave trade under the guise of the racial superiority of blacks.

Owing to the poetically surreal quality of its prose, Evaristo's deeply political writing is never far from endearing. Blonde Roots jolts the reader into looking at, and in turn learning from, history with new eyes.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

Uphill task for the Obama administration

2009-01-25T16:22:00.002+05:30

At a time when a new administration is taking power, it is widely hoped that Barack Obama will be able to undo some of the damage that eight years of George W. Bush's presidency wreaked on the Middle East. Enlightened observers have termed the region one of the most pressing problems facing the Obama administration, among others, namely the economy and climate change.

Patrick Tyler, who has covered the region for the Washington Post and the New York Times, summarizes 50 years of America's involvement with the Middle East in this new, absorbing read. It starts in October 1956 — with Dwight D. Eisenhower's relationship with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the anti-Communist agenda that drove the former to underestimate the power that Nasser wielded in the region.

From here, to the hits and misses of every subsequent administration, Tyler draws out a detailed, journalistic discourse of the strategies that came to occupy the heart of America's foreign policy interests. Tyler is a writer of anecdotes, and gently melds the larger historical narrative with the play of power that drove personal ambition. He is particularly scathing in his criticism of Henry Kissinger's role during the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict. Tyler paints a picture of a wily man exploiting his position with the Israelis to isolate President Richard M. Nixon, who was being battered back home by Watergate.

If Kissinger was the ace foreign policy hawk on the American side, there was also Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the quiet arsenal in the House of Saud's weaponry. Bandar hovers above the book as a birdlike presence, dealing with one administration after the other, alert to the possibility of breakthroughs. Bill Clinton famously, and hilariously, averted a major blunder in etiquette by getting Bandar to stop Yasser Arafat from planting a peck on Clinton's cheeks during the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Tyler reserves the title "A World of Trouble" for Bush Jr.'s years in the White House. The botched path leading up to the war in Iraq is revealed in cringe-inducing detail. The trumped-up weapons of mass destruction dossier, the war itself and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse vanquished any goodwill left in the region for post-9/11 America.

Iran continues to blight the Middle East party, and its nuclear ambitions are threatening to spiral out of control, Tyler asserts. He further argues that if America wants stability and peace in the region, it will have to address the aspirations of the millions of people still battling tyranny, most notably, in the kingdom where America has consistently propped up despots — Saudi Arabia.

Granted, George Bush's "freedom agenda" backfired when democracy propelled distinctly Islamist parties to center stage in country after country (read Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq). But only a long-term commitment to fostering democracy, separate from America's oil interests and militarism, will bring about real change on the ground. More importantly, Tyler writes, America will have to engage with regimes in the region and move away from Bush's "Axis of evil" rhetoric.

Tyler's book is a crucial reminder of the uphill task that lies in store for Obama.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

Story of success that isn't

2009-01-09T00:11:00.002+05:30

I can’t remember reading a more underwhelming book recently. Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, sets out to prove that success is not the outcome of one’s talent or intelligence, but circumstance and luck. Well, one can debate the existence of that rara avis—the self-made man, but surely, to write a book that explicitly discounts its possibility is outlandish, to say the least.

Gladwell begins by citing the example of Canadian hockey champs, most of who, he discovers, are born in January, February and March. And how does he account for this? The Canadian system of hockey recruitment has a cutoff date of January 1, as a result of which little kids born in the first few months have a natural advantage over those born in autumn. This gets compounded as the kids grow and are exposed to the best coaching. This is the first of many Gladwellian anecdotes that the writer will wish his gullible reader to endorse.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Sun Microsystems’ Bill Joy both achieved software superstardom because, in Gladwell’s view, they happened to be born to affluent parents at a time when computers were just about taking over the American academic landscape. Well yes, but Gates and Joy’s fate was shared by hundreds of thousands of other white Americans. Surely the duo must have had something in them to break free of the clutter of mediocrity.

There’s more. Gladwell credits the success of the Beatles to 10,000 hours of intensive training in their younger days. (Irritatingly, he calls it his generic 10,000-hour rule.) I doubt that Kavya Vishwanathan, the Harvard student whose How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was plagiarized from several sources, could become a half-decent writer if she struggled with the pen for 10,000 long hours. She just does not have what it takes to be a writer, and no amount of hard work is going to change her tendency to lift.

The second part of Outliers explores how cultural affiliations propel or hinder success. The examples Gladwell cites are so vague they can only be compared to the tendency of economists/business journalists to pontificate in the dark. He attributes the superior mathematical skills of Asians to, hold your breath, rice cultivation. Apparently (please bear with Gladwell—I did), growing rice entails such a complex array of mental permutations that mathematical ability has entered into the genome of the Asian races. Phew! If only Gladwell had met the hundreds of Indians I know who dread the ‘M’ word.

After poring over this book three times over in an attempt to glean any saving graces in Gladwell’s thesis, I came to the sad conclusion—none. He is too drawn to the big picture and too involved in coining fancy theories to devote attention to the individual behind the story. Consider his analysis of Korea’s frequent plane crashes in the 1990s. Gladwell credits this to a culture of deference. Co-pilots, rather than chide their seniors, preferred having the planes crash, in Gladwell’s view. He even quotes cockpit conversations to bolster his claim. Another dragging piece of absurd theorizing that extrapolates the individuals’ traits to their cultures.

For someone in my line, doomed to spending a third of his life with wretched look-how-smart-I-am types, Gladwell’s writing is frequently smug, often mocking, and always grating. Other reviews of Outliers have wrongly drawn attention to the “uplifting” example of KIPP (Knowledge is Power Programme), a chain of publicly-funded schools in the US, which have generated heartening results with Afro-American and Hispanic children from single-parent households. While the example is inspiring, its inclusion in Outliers defies logic. This is hardly the case of luck outshining talent; rather a well-devised strategy to attack illiteracy and deprivation in a target population.

Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was a similar exercise in grand theorizing—using popular science to explain such meaningless events as the soaring popularity of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s. In spite of global events this year, the love of devising smart-alecky models to ascertain the future continues unabated among the left-liberal set. Gladwell is, famously, its worst manifestation.

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This review appeared in Business Standard.

A family drama that's ultimately empty

2009-01-03T15:03:00.003+05:30

The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Aravind Adiga's White Tiger. Author Philip Hensher has been a judge in the past, so the defeat must have been especially disheartening, and Hensher has made no secret of this fact. But on strict merit, his defeat was well-deserved.

The Northern Clemency is the story of two families, the Glovers and the Sellerses. It is 1974, and the Sellers family has moved into the house opposite the Glovers' in Sheffield, England. The novel will track the families' relationships with one another, and those between their individual members. With the '70s as backdrop in the beginning, Hensher has space to gradually chart the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

But really, it's about the families. Katherine Glover has decided to start work at a florist's, and her husband, Malcolm, suspects she is having an affair with the shop's proprietor. On the day the Sellerses are moving in, Malcolm has left the family briefly, so there is considerable tension in the Glover household.

Tim, the youngest Glover kid, keeps a pet snake, unknown to his family. Alice Sellers spots the boy in the opposite window while she is shifting furniture. She informs Katherine, naturally, when the latter comes to visit, resulting in a dramatic scene in which the poor snake is killed by Tim's mother.

This act of cruelty is one of many set pieces Hensher builds that will resonate later. Tim is of considerable importance to this novel. He will become a radical who hankers after writing furious letters to the Guardian. In many ways, he is the protagonist, which is a pity, since the other kids, Glover and Sellers, are no less interesting.

And that is the problem with The Northern Clemency. Striving to locate the tiny joys and cruelties of family life, Hensher seems unable to see the wood for the trees. There are well-written scenes in a novel that fails to convey anything substantial.

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This review appeared in St Petersburg Times.

Once prominent in Tehran

2008-12-31T16:26:00.002+05:30

Azar Nafisi's first book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," is a scathing reprobation of the Iranian regime that came into place after the revolution of 1979. As a teacher at the University of Tehran, Miss Nafisi had to undergo several humiliations for refusing to follow the diktats of the mullahs. When the situation threatened to go out of control, she decided to emigrate to the United States. She is now a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, and resides in Washington with her family.

Her second outing, the book under review, is a more autobiographical work than her first, since it charts the Nafisis' family life, right from Azar's childhood, to the point where she lost both her parents.

Born into a prominent Tehran family, Azar was the apple of her father's eye. But her relationship with her mother was fraught. Nezhat was an opinionated woman whose marriage to Ahmad Khan, Azar's father, was not her first. All her life, she pined for the love of her first husband, Saifi, who had passed away.

Miss Nafisi's portrait of her mother is mixed, intermingling the matriarch's sense of responsibility towards her children with bitterness about her missed opportunities. She comes across as a powerful character who could mold things in her image and get her way with people and circumstances.

Ahmad Khan was an upright civil servant who rose to become the mayor of Tehran. He enjoyed the trust of the shah, but that was insufficient to protect him from political intrigues. He was sent to jail when Azar was an adolescent, an experience that changed his life, and his family's too.

After returning from prison, Khan, having lost all will to serve the government, also had to battle the ghosts at home. His wife had by now become a member of Parliament, and this shifted the dynamics on the home turf. Gradually, he slipped away from her and into the arms of another woman.

The author's own journey is closely intertwined with her family's. Always craving the affection of her mother, Miss Nafisi portrays herself as a precocious child who from very early on sensed the growing discord between her parents. She is particularly disturbed by the elaborate fictions her mother wrought to gain sympathy.

However, there were fleeting moments of real affection between mother and daughter. As a teenager, Azar was sent to school in England, and her mother accompanied her to settle her in. This trip is burnt in Azar's memory, for her mother went to great pains to ensure her comfort. Miss Nafisi includes a photograph of the two standing at a railway platform before her mother returned to Tehran. It is a wonderfully intimate portrait.

Later, when her father was in jail, Miss Nafisi entered into a brief marriage with a man she met at the University of Oklahoma. It was an unfit alliance from the start: a controlling man versus an independent-minded woman. After a brief affair with an American ("When Ted and I broke up I had fully matured into believing that relationships do not, perhaps should not, last"), Miss Nafisi did discover commitment with Bijan, an open-minded student leader.

This was the late 1970s, a time of unfettered freedom for the young woman. She discovered the joys of scholarship, which had been denied her in the repressive Iranian society. She writes fondly of youthful transgressions, discovering the seductive beauty of poetry, and the call of love. In 1979, the year the revolution occurred in Iran, Azar and Bijan married in Washington.

The book then retraces the territory of Miss Nafisi's first book, discussing her return to Tehran to teach and her growing disenchantment with the way the mullahs overtook every aspect of the common man's life. To the author, this is shocking especially because the mullahs successfully reversed the painfully won battles of equality for women in public spaces (as her mother's ascension to Parliament had testified).

However, the real beauty of this book lies not in the political but the personal. Toward the book's end, Miss Nafisi captures with poignant clarity her worries about her parents, who were now living separately in Tehran, while she was exiled in the United States. As old age started to take its toll, first on her mother, and later on her father, the author, racked by guilt, was left to consider her parents' pain from a distance.

Written in clear prose, "Things I've Been Silent About" is an endearing chronicle of a family that was in several ways, both part of, and distant from, Iran's tumultuous history.

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This review appeared in Washington Times.

2008's best books

2008-12-28T17:37:00.001+05:30

Chicago Sun Times has an eclectic collection of this year's best reads, including my choice. Scroll down on this page...

Read the book's review here.

Corporate Blogging in India

2008-12-23T17:20:00.003+05:30

While corporate blogging has been gaining momentum in the West for some time now, it is a fairly recent phenomenon in India. The book under review is, therefore, a timely chronicle of the nascent stage of development of this rising communication tool.

Early on in the book, the authors clarify that they do not promote corporate blogging solely for its own sake: "[W]e don't think organizations should be blogging for the sake of blogging. No one should. But then if blogging furthers your organization's strategic or operational objectives, it should be gone ahead with."

Corporate blogging, the authors say, is an efficient tool for organizations to narrow the gap between themselves and their target population, be it employees, customers or the media. They cite the example of Daimler Chrysler which (in its pre-meltdown days) ran a successful by-invitation-only blog for journalists, "where a couple of senior executives share the inside story about the company and the auto industry with reporters."

The real benefit of corporate blogging, or for that matter any form of blogging, lies in its ability to build trust by providing a readily accessible, direct form of communication. This has several advantages, not the least of which is what the authors call the "X Factor" of executive blogs. Not only is a CEO blog a "potent leadership tool," it can also turn out to be a massive source of collective intelligence and idea generation.

Looking at the India story on this front, the book lists a veritable who's who of the corporate world, people who have taken up blogging with relish. There is Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff, Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Naukri and Vineet Nayar of HCL. One factor that distinguishes blogging from other aspects of communication is the ready availability of instant feedback, both good and the not-so-good. Sample a comment left on the very first post of Think Flat, the blog run by Nilekani:

"What a terrible waste of time and storage space! Is that the best thing you can write on your blog? You have bah-blah'd about your company and the tripe you serve your minions. That's not what we want to read. It's a blog. Don't you know what a blog is?"

To readers wondering if the comment was from a disgruntled former employee, it ends with the identity of the writer spelt out: The owner of a small design firm in Sharjah. Be as it may, the authors warn companies against falling for repression on their corporate blogs. It is essential to let readers let the bile out — as long as it is not unparliamentary, of course. "Blogs have a very dynamic internal equilibrium which offers self-correction if their inherent transparency is not interfered with."

The most interesting chapter in the book is the one on SME internet start-ups, such as MakeMyTrip.com and the MouthShut community. These and many other e-commerce-driven sites have capitalized on blogging to provide a complete user interface, including special offers, discounts and subject-specific blog posts.

Because of their ability to enable consumers to join the conversation, corporate blogs can also serve as brand-building agents. Consider the corporate blog of FritoLay India, managed by the company's HR Director. It contains everything from the river rafting expeditions of the employees to the new ad campaign for Kurkure, and serves as a one-point port of call for anything brand-related.

The authors concede that blogging, as new-age as it may seem, is only the most basic Web 2.0 application that companies can count on. They need to diversify and target the Facebook generation. Imagine the brand recall that a successful campaign on a social networking site might bring. Blogging then is only the first in a long list of possible new media interventions. As they say, "The answer is YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, Flickr and Consumer Generated Content. Now what's the question?"

America's DNA laid out in 13 volumes

2008-12-21T15:45:00.002+05:30

Writer and academic Jay Parini's latest effort is a delightful assortment of books that, he believes, capture the essence of American society and history. Some of Parini's choices may seem eccentric, but none of the 13 books in this collection can be called a lightweight against the rather tough standards the author measures them.

The title, referring to Mary Antin's The Promised Land, harks to the immigrant's experience in America, a society where "except for native Americans, everyone is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants." Continuing in this vein, Parini also includes William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, a founding text about the original Pilgrims, "one of those primal stories that have shaped our sense of who we are."

The other major American issue that Parini sees fit to tackle is race. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Souls of Black Folk find mention. While Parini is not entirely enthusiastic about the talents of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he nevertheless pays hearty tribute to the seminal contribution that Uncle Tom's Cabin made on race relations in America.

Part of the charm of this well-written collection is Parini's inclusion of such non-literary works as the global bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Parini's reason to include the latter is as much cultural as it is sociological. Dr Spock's treatise on baby care, he says, "became the sourcebook of choice for parents in the postwar years; as such, it helped to shape the baby-boom generation, and its effects still reverberate."

Parini's well-rounded collection also includes Walden, Thoreau's vivid account of the pleasures of nature, Betty Friedan's anti-patriarchy polemic, The Feminine Mystique, and yes, an immediately recognizable literary title as well, On the Road.

Parini has a special gift to somehow locate common strands in the disparate works that make this collection. "Reading these books," he says, "I have felt our visibly personal connection to the traditions of spirituality." He goes on to express his delight at discovering the mystical quality in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, whose "independent, even rebellious, spirit" resonates in the writings of Mary Antin, Benjamin Spock, Jack Kerouac, and even in the defiance of Betty Friedan.

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This review appeared in Chicago Sun-Times.

Making 'foreign' one's own

2008-12-18T00:20:00.001+05:30

Sadia Shepard came to India in 2001 on a Fulbright grant to study the history of the Bene Israel community. Her trip was driven not so much by scholarship as by her need to pluck a very personal strand of history. Sadia’s grandmother had been a Jew until she married into a Muslim family. As a child growing up in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, Sadia often heard her grandmother recount her past: “A very long time ago, your ancestors left Israel in a ship—a big, wide wooden ship—and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck, they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion.”

As Sadia will come to learn, her grandmother, affectionately called Nana, did not quite forget her religion. When she discovers a pin inside a tiny wooden box, on which the words “Rachel Jacobs” are inscribed, Sadia finds herself in a nebulous territory of shifting religious allegiances and multiple identities, all belonging to one enigmatic person, her Nana.

The daughter of a white Protestant man and a brown-skinned Muslim woman, Sadia grew up first in Denver and later in Chestnut Hill, under the watchful care of Nana. Hers was a privileged childhood—her parents ran a successful architecture firm, and her mother belonged to one of Pakistan’s most prosperous families. It was in this genteel backdrop that Sadia learnt new, and initially frightening, things about Nana.

Nana narrates to Sadia, in a curious mélange of memory and fiction, the story of the Bene Israel community, who set out from Israel over 2,000 years ago, and came to settle on the Konkan coast. This communal history soon gives way to the personal, including the taboo topic of Nana’s marriage to a Muslim man, the shift from Bombay to Karachi after marriage, and what that entailed for the families. To Sadia, herself the product of mixed parentage, Nana’s stories are both immediate and distant, and she cannot bring herself to accept Nana’s incomplete splaying of the past.

When Nana dies, Sadia decides to make a trip to India and Pakistan and explore the tenuous links that connect her to the subcontinent. Armed with a Fulbright grant, she lands in Pune, at the Film and Television Institute of India, and begins her journey of discovery.

In Bombay, this “girl from foreign” comes across the familiar sights and sounds of the metropolis, and her account vacillates between the fatuous and the hilarious. When she is groped by a bunch of scoundrels in the second-class compartment of a local train, she starts cursing loudly in English, to the general amusement of all. Horrified, she recollects being told what to do in a situation like this, and she shouts, “Don’t you have a sister?” One by one, the hands drop.

The real delight of this book, however, comes from the little-known facets of the Jewish community in India, a community even more in need of preservation than the Parsis, whose travails are regularly chronicled in the media. How many of us knew about the Chabad House in Bombay until terrorists attacked it on 26/11? Sadia takes us into the Magen David Synagogue in Byculla, and explains how the Baghdadi Jewish community that built it, did not associate themselves with the Bene Israel for a good part of their history. Only in recent decades, due to the dwindling population of both communities, they have come closer and now share synagogues.

At Nana’s old flat in Karachi, Sadia chances upon a cache of letters that reveal a different side of Nana’s to the one she has known. These papers capture, in sweet clumsiness, the long courtship between Nana and her husband, and the marital troubles they faced later. Delving into them accustoms Sadia to a new aspect of Nana’s life, a fuller picture of which begins taking shape. To the reader, besides, the letters bring a much-needed relief from the fact-laden history that goes before.

Ultimately, The Girl From Foreign scores because of the happy matrimony of the anthropological and the personal. Sadia’s consummate writing contains ample pointers to her profession (she is a filmmaker). Given her multiracial background, the book is a well-deserved ode to the reality of hyphenated identities.

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This review appeared in Business Standard.

The inner man

2008-12-14T10:25:00.003+05:30

Graham Greene was a deeply Catholic writer who may have battled bipolar disorder all his life. His Catholic trilogy, "The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter" and "The End of the Affair" — serious books that made him proud — is the expression of a writer in full command of his talent. But his private life was less sanguine, as brought out in this excellent collection of his letters from the time he was 17 (in 1921) to his death in 1991.

Few people know that before he found success, Graham worked as a sub-editor at The Times in London. It was around this time that he began corresponding with Vivienne Dayrell-Browning (later Vivien Greene), a deeply religious woman who had taken offense at what she thought were blasphemous remarks Graham had made against the Virgin Mary. Graham wrote back a letter of apology to her, and so began a courtship that would end in Graham's conversion to Catholicism and later marriage to Vivien.

But this alliance was not meant to be. Graham had serial affairs with a number of women and all his life battled the guilt that accompanied his liaisons. After his death, Vivien said in an interview that his lifestyle took a heavy toll on him because his deeply ingrained religiosity equated infidelity with sin. Richard Greene, the author of this collection (no relation to Graham), includes here a cache of letters that Graham wrote to Catherine Walston. Ironically, their affair started after Graham's books inspired her to convert to Catholicism.

There are other aspects to Graham's multifarious personality that these letters reveal. He could be a generous fellow writer, for instance. The assistance he rendered to R.K. Narayan, who had been unable to get a single novel published until Graham intervened, is legendary. The collection includes correspondence with a host of other writers as well, including warm letters to Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh.

An inveterate traveler, Graham sent home dispatches from his journeys in Mexico, Vietnam and Sierra Leone. Much of what he saw in these places became the template for new work, such as "The Lawless Roads" and "The Power and the Glory" (Mexico). He encountered death and destruction, and the very near possibility of annihilation, but he journeyed on, firm in the belief that only through travel, "you get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances."

Graham Greene was a prolific writer of letters (he is said to have once guessed that he wrote about 2,000 every year), some of which have been revealed only recently. As Richard Greene says in the introduction, every new letter of Graham's takes him further from the set notions that we hold of him. In assembling a complicated, tasteful, diverse portrait of Graham Greene's life, Richard Greene has paid a most sincere tribute to his subject.

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This review appeared in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.