Category Archives: Books

A Searing Portrayal of Hope amidst Angst – A Review of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

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Two pages into the book, or perhaps just a paragraph into the book, you know you are hooked – not in the way an addict is pleasurably hooked to the drug, but in the way a helpless fish is hooked by the cruel inescapable claw that hung innocuously with bait. And you know you will read it cover to cover in a day, despite all other work. Hoping that this irresponsibility of yours, this travesty of your usual route is a one-time affair and will be forgiven.

And now to the book. One of those days when mother was around, and wanted something to read. We Malayalis like to think that Arundhati Roy is from Kerala, and we all liked her-God-of-Small-Things. Let’s see if the new book was available and what it had to say. It was supposed to be good. Anyway the first one had won the Booker. “She writes well,” we told each other. Now what was the title of the new book?

Yes, the library had a copy and yes, it was available for loan. Wonder of wonders, a new book by a famous author was still not “on hold” by anyone. Great. But the library spelt trouble because the book could not be found. Why did I search for it in the shelves then? And why did it get found? Still trouble. Because the book was in fact on hold. By two others. But they agreed to let me read first if I read quickly. Like my friends let me read ‘The da Vinci Code.’ Reading fast is a useful skill.

And when the reading began, there was no ending till the author said so. Because you lived with the characters and what was more, they lived with you, in you. Starting with Anjum-who-was-Aftab, and Saddam Hussein-who-was-a-Hindu, a nameless girl who became Zainab, through Tilottama, Naga, Musa and Garson Hobart, and culminating in Udaya who became Miss Jebeen the Second. The book is an haunting story of hope and despair and the entire spectrum between the two. Delhi is where it all begins, in a warm comfortable home that can no longer contain the discordant notes in Aftab’s mind and voice. But the story is about Kashmir and the “Indo-Pak” (does this two-bit expression ever need explanation?) that’s within all of us. And about what happens to women and children in a war, even an underground war.

Roy’s narrative style is as unforgettable as her story is unforgiving. When a car has to raise its bonnet and boot for a routine bomb-check at a hotel, it seems to be a girl raising her skirts (Shamelessly? Helplessly? Could the two be the same?) When Miss Jebeen the First dies of a bullet wound it is a little rose above her left ear.

There are political references that are clearly left unclear. But who in India will not recognize the Poet-Prime Minister or the Sikh economist Prime Minister? But how does it matter? To whom does it matter? And as Roy asks, do those to whom it matters matter?

This is a book that stays with you. I have already decided to read it again a year later. Not because of its searing insights into politics and psychology but because it speaks in a voice that’s truthful but sensitive. Most importantly, it is intense but does not enjoy the narration of angst. And there is Miss Jebeen.

Seeing What You Want to See

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It was one of those lunch-time conversations that brought up the name of Saramago, and the memory lay hidden till the book called out to me as I browsed the shelves of the library that’s my haunt once every month. The back cover had a remarkable description – “José Saramago has deftly created the politician’s ultimate nightmare: disillusionment” – and the author’s history piqued me: a Nobel Prize winner who became a full-time writer in 1979 although he was born in 1922!

And so the pick found place in my reading list. And exited the queue quite fast too, because towards the middle, the slow-paced writing gets quite gripping.

It was only after finishing the book and reading up about it online that I realized that Seeing was the sequel to Blindness. But that doesn’t take away from the reading experience. And what’s the experience itself all about? The story of Seeing is set in an unnamed country, perhaps Portugal, where elections are being held at the time the narration begins. The results for the capital city reveal something extraordinary – a large majority of votes do not have the name of any party, they are blank. A repeat election makes things worse, as the share of blank votes is higher this time. The ruling government – a legitimately elected one – considers the blank votes an assault on democracy.

Indeed, the government sees what it wants – rebellion and disrespect for democracy – and uses various means to subvert the perceived subversion. In that sense, Seeing reminded me of some of George Orwell’s works where the Big Brother state controls people’s lives.

Very soon, the government puts the capital city under a state of siege, and withdraws all administration and police from within the city perimeters. The people are not too displeased and the situation remains completely peaceful. The government then resorts to finding a scapegoat for the problem, for they consider the situation to be a problem. They choose as the culprit a woman who did not go blind when four years ago the entire population of the city was afflicted by inexplicable blindness and stumbled around helplessly. What then follows is an attempt to lay the blame on her, and the story proceeds from the perspective of the police superintendent who is assigned the job.

Through the book, Saramago’s intricate sensitivity to human nature comes across clearly. Consider this paragraph, for instance:

The superintendent slowly reached out his hand and touched the dog’s head. He felt like crying and letting the tears course down his face… The doctor’s wife put her book away in her bag and said, “Let’s go… You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you?”

“Are you sure?… You’re not afraid I might be tricking you?”

“Not with those tears in your eyes, no.”

Saramago is also adept at conveying the barter that happens in each dialogue between people. He also makes keen observations such as the idea that memories are selectively created, in the sense that there is a first filter of “hearing” by the senses and then a second filter of “hearing” by the mind or memory.

The narrative is free-flowing, with only a paragraph or two per page, and Saramago has a way of expressing dialogue using only commas as the punctuation. (In the passage cited above, I took the liberty of adding quotation marks and paragraph breaks.) This might put off casual readers, but for those who are ready to go with the flow, so to speak, it is fascinating to see, and not without real reason, if I may say so, how the author leads the reader on and on into the diabolical, not to say sensitive and witty, world of government insecurity, political intrigue, and just as important, institutional hierarchy, all juxtaposed, in a style not very common, into the lives of ordinary people, who are, like their counterparts across the world, simply trying to lead their lives.

If you liked the last sentence, Seeing is probably for you. And while you are at it, it might be better to go for Blindness first.

Stark Reality, Simply Narrated – a Review of ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’

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There are some books which you know are good, but you also know that they are so tangential to what you do on a day-to-day basis that unless you set apart solid time, you won’t get around to reading them. And so you avoid thinking about them, and even when you see such a book lying on a colleague’s table, the bookworm in you starves itself by ignoring the book. Such are the woes of those of us who go to work every day.

And yet, sometimes, there comes a day when the book returns to you, and you end up reading it in spite of yourself. And you realize that it was worth it. That’s how Behind the Beautiful Forevers turned out to be. <Warning: multiple plot spoilers ahead.>

Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s BTBF is the real story of a few families and street children living in Annawadi, a nondescript slum near the Mumbai airport. Among them are ragpickers and slumlord-hopefuls, animal lovers and teachers. There are children grown too old too quickly by poverty, there are friends who know that to help someone is to invite disaster upon oneself and to share is to starve, and there are opportunists who know the multiple sources of money in an impoverished slum.

When a handicapped woman attempts suicide, only to regret it immediately, and then dies in hospital, her neighbours are arrested and incarcerated for murder. The subsequent trials take their toll on the Husain family not only because of the loss of income of days spent in jails, but also because of the uncertainty of whether the father, son and daughter would ever be released from prison. The family takes an impossibly bold and apparently reckless stance of not paying anyone despite repeated offers from various quarters to “help” them be declared innocent of a crime they did not commit.

When Abdul muses that Kasab, one of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack at the Taj in South Mumbai, has at least the saving grace of being tried for a crime he did commit, it reeks of resignation at a political and judicial system so convoluted that it is effectively unable to determine innocence and guilt: the only color it recognizes is that of money, the only command it follows is that of power. When Abdul and his family are acquitted, seemingly more by chance than by design, there is no particular victory to be celebrated, only a permission to go on living that was nearly too late in coming.

BTBF also reminded me of a mildly unsettling realisation that I had been conscious of since I started travelling on work, coming into contact with staff at airports, hotels, taxis and offices: to be nice to such people is not an act of generosity on your part, it is a privilege granted to you. It is only the rich who can afford to be nice, to lavish money on tips, to pleasantly wait two more minutes as the room is readied, to smile at the housemaid. For the ragpickers who “earn to eat,” niceness is a luxury they can neither afford nor gain from. (If this sounds moralising, let me flatter myself that the years have made me wiser!)

For what is Boo’s first full-length book, BTBF is very well-written. What I liked best was the impeccable flow of the narrative that gives hardly a hint of the copious amounts of research and file-chasing behind the facts. Unlike the exclamatory tone adopted by many first time visitors to Mumbai and its slums, and unlike the patronising optimism of Slumdog Millionaire, BTBF possesses a clearheaded voice, unassuming but sympathetic, pragmatically limited in its sentimentality and hopefulness. After all, the lives of Akbar and Sunil and Asha and Manju are not going to change in a day. At the same time, this also makes the purpose of such a book unclear. Yes, it lays bare the stark reality of life in a slum next to the gleaming airport, but there is no call to action. Then again, who is to say what the right action is?

Despite being a work of non-fiction, BTBF also bears similarity to City of Joy, a novel by Dominique Lapierre on life in the underbelly of Kolkata in the 1970s. The book traces the lives of people as diverse as a rickshaw-puller, a Polish priest and an American doctor, all linked by their lives in Anand Nagar (the “city of joy”), a slum in Kolkata. Lapierre’s description of the rickshaw-puller Hasari Pal’s life left such an impression on the class nine student who read the book (yours truly) that she could never be at ease in the cycle-rickshaws of Gurgaon, years later. Indeed, during that stifling summer, the one-hour walk from office to home was preferable to the discomfort of seeing an invariably reed-thin man sweat for me. It tore my heart whenever he bargained to transport the three of us for an additional ten rupees on his own rickshaw, rather than let one of us take a second rickshaw. But I digress.

~*~

P.S.: I had meant this post to be only a review of BTBF, but felt that it had to do justice to how I ended up reading a book I had deliberately kept off my regrettably short reading list. Many thanks to the protagonist of the first two paragraphs.

Interesting Stuff from Around the World – Edition 1

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This time you get to read some interesting observations, picked up over the past few days from the news and from conversations. Not surprisingly, the post is littered with more links than usual.

1. To work from home or not

Marissa Mayer created ripples when she announced through an internal memo Yahoo’s decision to seriously discourage working from home. Industry bigwigs have not finished decrying the decision. However, there are some benefits to working at a central office, and these benefits are lost when working from home becomes the default. Chance encounters and conversations do have their value. Penelope Trunk’s blog has a post which provides views in support of Mayer’s stand.

Here’s my take on the idea of working from home: see what you and the team want to achieve in terms of innovative ideas, productive undisturbed work, personal time off and so on, and use working from home as one of many tools to attain a good mix of these goals. The important point to keep in mind is that in demanding jobs, especially those which are not 9 to 6 jobs, the company cannot say “you are responsible for the work, the company does not care about your personal time” because if a company draws out the best in you, it is obliged to help you find the best in yourself by helping you find space for personal life. In any case, companies must realize that the most motivated and best performing employees require flexibility simply so that they can continue performing well, as this article says.

2. The oath of the who???

The Oath of the Vayuputras. That’s what every cat and dog I know is reading these days. I’m curious but having very recently laid hands on Love in the Time of Cholera, there’s no way I’m jumping on the Amish Tripathi bandwagon now. The point here is what this book has achieved, and I don’t mean spreading the reading habit or developing English language skills.

Instead, what I’m referring to is the fact that many of my friends have pre-ordered online a book for the first time in their lives. Before The Oath, they had always carried out one of four options: bought pirated books on the roadside, bought books from Landmark and Crossword, ordered books from Flipkart, ordered ebooks online. Now for the first time, they have pre-ordered online a book, that too not an ebook. I think there is a shift in consumer behavior here.

3. Paying for email

A radical idea came along in an article by angel investor Esther Dyson in the Mint the other day – instead of free email and the consequent spam, get the sender to pay and the recipient to set the price for reading email. After all, each email requires the receiver’s attention, and I’d certainly be glad if there was a way I knew the sender was sufficiently invested in the matter to warrant my attention.

Regarding questions like how the pricing would work or the complexity of the system, I agree with the author: these are operational questions, they would get sorted out over time. When people are ready to pay for what they find valuable and/ or scarce, it makes ample sense for them to pay for someone’s attention. But then again, bring money into play and you risk bringing inequality where there was only inaccessibility.

‘A Passage to India’ and Other Books

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‘A Passage to India’ is a novel set during the later days of British rule in India, and I had expected it to be yet another, perhaps a little less clichéd, description of Indians and the Indian way of life as seen by an Englishman writing from his country or at most, writing based on his visits to India. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. E. M. Forster describes, in a nuanced and sensitive manner, how Indians and Englishmen got along with and sometimes did not get along with each other, as they inevitably came into contact.

The plot  in ‘A Passage to India’ is far from vast. It can easily fit into a short story – Aziz, a widowed Muslim doctor, offers to take Adela Quested and her future mother-in-law Mrs. Moore on a trip to visit the well-known Marabar caves in Chandrapore. Inside one of the dark caves, Adela imagines that someone tried to attack her and assumes without doubt that her invisible attacker was Aziz. He is arrested and tried in court, but before the trial is over, Adela realizes that she was mistaken and withdraws her complaint. Yet, the damage is done and many lives have been affected irrevocably.

The author leaves unsaid, but makes amply clear, that while these are important events in the lives of a few Indians and Englishmen, they illustrate merely another instance of the impossibility of true and trusting relationships between two groups widely separated by not just geographical and cultural barriers, but also the more divisive chasm that distances the ruler from the ruled.

For instance, open-minded Englishmen such as Mr. Fielding (whom Aziz gradually starts to think of as simply Fielding) might become friendly with Indians, but their English wives can never really mentally get past the distance. For all their determination to see the “real India” and their friendly disposition towards Aziz, Adela and Mrs. Moore are never truly at home in India.

Indians in the book are not blameless either, for they hold stereotyped views of the Englishmen and English women. With the caveat that what comes out in the book is perhaps the English stereotype of what the Indian stereotype of the English is. (The book is nowhere as convoluted as the sentence you just read, so do not let my analysis dissuade you from reading it.) In short, ‘A Passage to India’ is an eminently readable story, one of the rare books that make me wish I had read them earlier.

What I like best about ‘A Passage to India’ is the way Forster narrates and implies, but never brings himself into the story. In comparison to the two other books that I happened to read recently, ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ (a historical thriller based on the death of Pakistani President General Zia ul-Haq) and ‘The House of Blue Mangoes’ (a mostly lifeless account of the lives of three generations of a family based in South India), ‘A Passage to India’ is a refreshing piece of work. It is as a novel should be – the characters are so important to you that at least for the period you are with them, you fancy that you care for what happens in their lives, you want to know how things turn out for them. In this respect, the book reminded me of ‘The Mandelbaum Gate’ by Muriel Spark.

The book that I am currently reading is just as powerful. ‘The Finkler Question’ (Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize winner that is witty and sympathetic in equal measure) brings up severe issues with a gravity that is as unbelievable as it is real. Because that’s often how life is, a curious mix of the comical and serious. Julian Treslove is just another guy next door till he is mugged one night on the way home, and a phrase uttered by his assailant (a phrase which he isn’t even sure he heard right) changes his outlook to life. From the outside, there is no break in the flow of his life, but mentally he is a changed man. Not impossible, I suppose.

-~-

P.S.: With all this mention of books, it is very natural to wonder whether this consultant (yours truly) has been “on the beach” far too long. But the more pertinent question is whether this consultant has been on far too many flights…

Favourite lines from ‘Atlas Shrugged’

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The spirit of Atlas Shrugged is evident even in Ayn Rand’s comments on the book. My list of favourite lines starts with an excerpt from the author’s notes. “To all the readers who discovered The Fountainhead and asked me many questions about the wider application of its ideas, I want to say I am answering these questions in the present novel and that The Fountainhead was only an overture to Atlas Shrugged.” Terming a not-so-small book an “overture” powerfully conveys the hubris innate in Rand’s objectivism. And yet, there is no offence meant to anyone in her celebration of humanity. This could be why Rand has die-hard fans; and also why she has staunch naysayers.

Here go the quotes:

——-

“Dagny, how many years is it going to take you to learn to be yourself?”

“If any part of your uncertainty,” said Galt, “is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.”

“Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we’ve made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.”

The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid.
“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.”
——-
Clearly the list is not exhaustive.

Rand’s philosophy is perhaps possible only in an ‘Atlantis’, far removed from the real world inhabited by imperfect beings who probably don’t even understand objectivism. That said, it is to Rand’s credit no other philosopher would dare to use a turn of phrase such as “radiant selfishness”!

On ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’

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“At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting…” – from the back cover of Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’.

These lines make so much more sense after reading the book, because words like “bearded” and “stranger”, and even “fateful” are key elements in the narrative. The story is a monologue by a Pakistani who embraces the US and its ways after coming to America as an undergraduate student, and holds these bindings closer as he starts working in a coveted position at a valuation firm.

A turning point in the story is the terror attacks of September 2001. (A short aside: The attacks seem to have happened just yesterday or ages ago depending on how you look at it. Many people, including yours truly, can still recall what exactly they were doing when the shocking news came upon them. And yet, now when it figures in the news because certain photographs have been released, it seems like an event that took place in some long-lost and misplaced memory.)

Sometimes the writing gets intensely personal, and strikes a chord with the reader’s sensibilities. For instance: “… [Jim] continued to look at me in his steady, penetrating manner until eventually he said, “You’re a watchful guy. You know where that comes from?” I shook my head. “It comes from feeling out of place,” he said.” Now, this happens long before 9/11, before the protagonist Changez senses alienation in his adopted country. It makes the reader wonder whether Changez felt at home in the first place. Does any immigrant ever feel at home? What is it that ties a person to his roots – what makes Changez happy after he returns to Lahore? But he is not ungrateful, for he realises that the US is perhaps one of the rare places where he can hope to achieve so much without the backing of connections.

Parallel to this thread of political disillusionment runs the story of Erica – Changez’s girlfriend – who loses herself to depression. The book does try to portray the emotional fallout of 9/11 on the minds of Americans, but even the loss of Erica is not so much about her as about him. And while it may seem that Changez loses his quality of being a “shark” that never stops swimming, never stops competing, that notion could be mistaken. For it is this nature of his that urges him to lead protests and demonstrations in Lahore. And ultimately results in the ending that manages to be unexpected enough to stop your thoughts and yet expected enough to be believable. And this, in spite of flaws such as a glossed-over description of Changez’s Lahore days, makes the book worth reading.

A question: why do many books end up giving the feeling that the penultimate parts have been hurried through? Also, since the book made it to the Booker shortlist, the question arises: isn’t it too short for a Booker? But then, if ‘The White Tiger’ could get shortlisted, and win, why not this? Perhaps there is a real shortage of books with more substance, or perhaps authors and publishers believe the Twenty20 generation cannot handle anything more complicated.

From ‘Buddenbrooks’

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“There she goes, Betsy.”

“Yes, Jean, the first to leave us. Do you think she is happy?”

“Oh, Betsy, she is satisfied with herself, which is better; it is the most solid happiness we can have on this earth.”

On P. G. Wodehouse

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This is a writer I discovered late in my reading life, and I have rued that not a little.

Wodehouse’s style is simple and elegant. Especially in the Jeeves series, what seems most interesting is Jeeves’s eloquence which is admired and accepted by his employer Bertie Wooster. And Wooster himself, makes any reader envious at times. He is a bachelor with not a single worry on his mind, and enjoys the simple pleasures of life. And in the event of a problem, Jeeves is there to help him solve it.

Currently I am reading ‘Frozen Assets’. It is a somewhat different cup of tea compared to ‘Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves’, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ and ‘The Inimitable Jeeves’ or even ‘Uncle Dynamite’. It is almost as if the writer is still not confident enough on whether he will have takers for his style and this hesitation shows in the way the witty lines are put forth – not with the debonair panache of Wooster in first person but with words from half-confident characters in third person (and the latter very clearly comes through, sadly, as the author’s voice itself).

And yet, despite some deficiencies, P. G. Wodehouse’s writings still continue to amaze and enthrall me!

Experiencing ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’

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Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’ looks like any typical paperback when you see just the spine as the book is placed on a rack in the library. But how misleading that first impression is! (Remember, never judge a book by its cover?) Pick it up and the weight of the book does make itself known. Ok, so it is not your off-the-shelf paperback. That much is clear. But the title generates enough curiosity to not put the book back after the initial cursory glance. What is the deal? Where did this un-ordinary title come from?

And so you turn the cover. The font is inviting and the acknowledgement page is a pleasure to read. That decides it and the book is in, no longer a hesitant guest but a well-recognised member of my reading-list. And what a personality it has! So there was something to hearsay. More than anything, what struck me as I went through this collection of strongly-worded essays was the voice that rang out in each sentence, in each incisive adjective, in each chiselled turn of phrase. There was no way this book could be read without listening to its voice.

And yet, equally striking was the fact that the voice did not impose itself upon the reader; instead it made me question my attitude towards society and its problems. It made me ask myself whether my attitude was apathy or resignation, whether there was something I could and should do with regard to social issues, whether there was any point in trying to make a difference. In that sense, the book hardly gave any conclusions. That is the reader’s job. Only mature books can do this.

Whether the essay is on India’s nuclear tests in Pokhran in 1998 or on the US attack on Afghanistan post-9/11 or on the Godhra carnage, the voice speaks loudly and clearly against injustice meted out to the poor and the unprivileged. Even as the book talks about the urgent need to stop the arms race, it speaks about the poignant ‘alms race’ that takes place as the US drops miserably-few food packets on Afghanistan soil. In a land littered with mines, even the race for food can be fatal.

The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada is dissected to reveal the vested interests that populate its grisly innards, so that the promise of water for drinking and irrigation rings hollow in the face of the devastation and displacement that the project has led to. When the points of injustice are laid out one after the other, it makes you wonder whether any form of development is worth it. Is any form of development truly sustainable?

The title is derived from the planned name of the US ‘operation’ in Afghanistan. The offensive against the Taliban aimed at finding the perpetrators of 9/11 was initially proposed to be termed ‘Infinite Justice’ and only the qualms of hurting the sentiments of a section of the population led to a change of name to ‘Enduring Freedom’, says the book. And what a name! Even today the people of Afghanistan are enduring the so-called freedom brought by bombs on a land which had nothing worth bombing to start with. (The book, of course, states this in a much more powerful voice.)

All in all, not a book that you can read slouching on the bed with a cup of coffee in your other hand. It simply makes you sit up. But it’s worth it.