The Obsession with the Growth Story

As some of you might be aware, I have been hitting the bookstore trail in Chennai over the last couple of days. There are some amazing discount sales out there and I cant help myself!
Soon I started noticing some unusual trends emerging in these shops. Indian writers seem to have finally come to the forefront! For someone who has long awaited for this day, I was really happy with this development! Even though English is a transplanted language in India, Indians have really taken to it as their own. Most people I know prefer talking in English over even their mother tongue. Despite English's rampant popularity and widespread usage, Indian writers seemed to struggle to break into the front shelves of bookstores.
All that changed with the arrival of the IIT, IIM pass-out Chetan Bhagat. Whether or not he is a good author is an altogether different question, but we must credit him for opening a million minds to Indian writing. One can hope that eventually some of them would have progressed to better writers such as Amitabh Ghosh.

But this second boom in Indian writing is coming from two fronts - mythology and the India story. Being a strongly traditional country with over 10000 years of civilization, Indian mythology is a ripe source for ideas and stories. With the younger generations losing their connections with these traditional tales, such 'myth-inspired' fictions are indeed a welcome development.

But the second trend is a little worrisome. More and more Indian authors are now obsessed with the India-growth story - 'The story of how a socialist, statist, stagnant India shed her old skins and emerged into an Information Age powerhouse'. They proceed to theorize about how India will eventually become the Super Power it once was, before a tiny island conquered us all that is.

I am starting to hate the India story. Because the truth is, there is NO INDIA STORY YET! India has not done anything that any other democratic, self-respecting country is not supposed to do. For close to 40 years, we were the on a stunted path of economic and social governance and finally in 1991, the government started acting with some common sense. And that little bit of common sense has only been yielding us dividends for over 2 decades.
But they are now grounding to a halt. Our industrial outputs are falling and IT and BPO are no longer the trailblazers they used to be. The first mover advantage that we had in these fields, is now all but over thanks to the rapid strides made by countries like Indonesia. Unless we radically open up new segments of our economy to competition, the India story will turn out to be a blinking comet rather than a burning star.

Politically we are stuck with a government that is struggling for its survival, so we cannot expect them to bring in any actual reforms. Any constructive move towards opening up the economy will undoubtedly be booed by parties such as the Left and TMC. An opposition that has smelt blood will also act by putting its senses in cold storage. Sadly, the India story, or non-story is dying in front of our eyes but we are not seeing it.
All we are seeing are the fancy books written by authors who are trying to cash in on mass euphoria.

While we have made relatively impressive strides, we cannot be compared to countries like China or Japan. They enjoyed close to 3 decades of sustained government reforms to get where they are right now. Apart from economy, massive investments were made in the spheres of primary education and public healthcare, areas where India woefully lacks in.

Let us not get side tracked with past glories, we have suffered enough because of such ill-placed nostalgia and self-congratulating.

On memory and ...errr... other things.

I just finished reading a marvelous book by Julian Barnes, the 2011 Booker Prize winning novella, The Sense of an Ending. After the rather disappointing experiences of previous Booker books such as Life of Pi, White Tiger and Wolf Hall, I did not have much expectations on this one. But wasn't I pleasantly surprised? 

Not only was this an incredibly funny and smart book but also it raised some deep questions about the nature of memory and its loopholes. 

When I was small, my grandmother used to tell me that an elephant could remember everything right from its birth. Back then, this did not seem like a great skill to have. Why would you want to remember all the mundane things that happen every day in your life? Also, I expected that I would always remember the important moments of my own life, which made my human mind far more superior than that of the elephant. Now I do not know whether the Elephant's memory hypothesis is correct or not, but I definitely know that my hypothesis about the human mind is wrong. 

The functioning of the human memory is a great frontier of science which is yet to be fully scaled. While scientists come up with numerous theories and hypotheses, each one more finer than the last, we still do not fully understand how the human memory works. 

As a student and now an engineer of Computer Architecture, I fancied myself with the idea that the human memory was a really advanced version of the D-RAM in computers. A place where data could be stored and be retrieved later on when required, akin to the read and write operation of computers. The loss of memory that accompanies old age could be because the memory cells holding those datums could have gotten corrupted or the location in memory where the address book of the memory cells is located could have gotten corrupted. The latter idea appeared particularly ingenious to me as it accounted for many of my own experiences where it would have seemed like I had forgotten something, but later on when I was doing something completely irrelevant, BAM! the memory would come back to me! In this way I used to come up with some of my own ideas to further solidify this DRAM-like theory for the human mind. 

But Julian Barnes killed my theory! In a short book of 140 pages, he not only demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the human memory but also showed its uglier, manipulative self. I realized the fundamental concept that human memory = events + emotional reaction. Quite often, depending on the associated emotional reaction, the mind alters the sequence of events. When I look back at some of the highlight moments of my life, I must admit that I do not remember the environment, the sounds, the smells or the looks on people's faces. I do not remember if it was a rainy day or a hot day. All I do remember is this strong sense of triumph or happiness and upon this pole the rest of the tent is built. I imagine people cheering,  I imagine an air-conditioned auditorium and I imagine a smiling chief guest. These memories are compromised, they may even be mainly untrue, but within a small framework of what-happened and when-it-happened and using my emotional reaction as the yardstick, the human mind deconstructs the rest of the memory. Could it be a really advanced encryption-decryption algorithm? That is a question for scientists and neural doctors. 

Nonetheless, this just goes on to show how much we still do not know about something that we take for granted everyday. 

My thoughts on : Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

*Contains Spoilers*

I must first admit one thing - I am not a big fan of Ken Follett, even though I have read most of his famous works. Back in college, I had a few friends who used to dote over him and introduced me to World Without End and after which I read The Pillars of the Earth. I really liked both books. Even though each one was the size of a big pillow, I found myself finishing them in no time. Real page-turners indeed.
Fall of Giants, in true Ken Follett tradition, is a healthy 1100 page mammoth of a book. But I ended up reading it in less than 5 days (weekdays that too) I cannot recollect any other author who can make 1500 pages so palatable and yet pack so much quality content into it.

Fall of Giants is the first book of the so called 'Century Trilogy'. the second tome titled Winter of the World has just been released. In the three books, Ken Follett is attempting to capture the highlights of the 20th Century - undoubtedly the most tumultuous 100 years in the history of mankind.
Fall of Giants focuses on the decade of the First World War, starting with its build up and touching upon the October Revolution of 1917 and finally the capturing of power by the Labour Party in Britain for the very first time. The underlying theme of the book is the fall of traditional power structures in major countries after the First World War and the emergence of new forces. An impressive amount of historical content is packed into this book and anyone unfamiliar with this time-frame will emerge much wiser after reading this book.

Since he is dealing with so many POVs and events spread across many countries, Ken Follett has opted for 5 families as his POV entities. These characters include the Earl Fitzerbert family of Wales, the Peshkovs of Russia, the von Helberts of Germany, the Dewars of the USA and the Williams, mining family from Wales. A notably absent point of view would be that of the French who were so central to the First World War. Within these four families, Follett has managed to present just about every major perspective of that time frame. Through the characters of Maud Fitzerbert and Ethel Williams he has portrayed the budding feminine movement of the UK finally coming to the center-stage. Earl Fitzerbert presents the classic English aristocracy, always conscious about British pride and Gentlemanly behaviors. The von Helberts represent the starkly different POVs from within Germany. The military older generation, still beaming with pride over the subjugation of France in the war for Alsace and Lorraine  fifty years back and the younger generations who yearn for growth and prosperity. Sadly, the older generation's thought process wins in the end as we all know. The Peshkovs represent two sides to the Russian story. While the elder brother Grigory is central to the Bolshevik capture of power in 1917 and presents a grim picture of the failures of the Tsar regime, the younger brother Lev runs away to England and eventually to the USA. A classic player and a charming con man, Lev was initially my favorite character in the book, but sadly Ken Follett failed to build this character into something more than his face value. A pity indeed. The Dewars represent the Old Money of America and give a brief gist of America's involvement in the War. Lastly, the Williams represent the working class of Britain. Tired of the overbearing aristocracy and grown inure to the failures of the Conservatives and the Liberals, Williams highlight the rise of the Labour movement in Great Britain. You could say the characters of Billy and Ethel Williams are the closest to central protagonists of the book. Despite getting a lot of coverage of their POVs, I did not connect with either character and was largely let down by them.
To summarize Ken Follett has put together an impressive array of varied characters to tell a story over such a vast canvas. But the characters who showed a lot of depth and potential for growth were not focused on and the ones who got a lot of focus did not reveal any new side to the story. Coming of age is a great story on most occasions, but does not work out on this one.

One major drawback of this book is that none of the major characters undergo any major character-changes over the course of the First World War. A strong, independent, rich English woman becomes a strong, independent, poor German wife. A womanizer, charming con-man remains a womanizer and charming con-man.
One would expect that an event of the magnitude of the First World War would leave some lasting scars on some of the characters and maybe even cause a twist in the story line. Sadly, there was nothing like that. After reading the first 100 pages, if you made a gist about each major character, it will mostly look the same even after reading the remaining 1000 pages. That made the book seem a little weary towards the end.

While i have been focusing a lot on the drawbacks, that does not mean that it was a bad book. Far from it, I really enjoyed reading this book. And within the 1000 odd pages were some really fascinating lines which are a testament to the ability of Follett to paint pictures with words.
One particular segment that I enjoyed a lot was this quote about Petrograd a few weeks before the Russian Revolution. It was a tense time when the masses were slowly stirring from their centuries-long slumber, but they were not arising fast enough for the Bolsheviks!

"Petrograd was like a pan of water on the fire, Grigori thought: there were wisps of steam and a few bubbles of violence, and the surface shimmered with intense heat, but the water seemed to hesitate, and the proverbial watched pot did not boil."

It takes an author of great ability to write like that.

To summarize, Fall of Giants is an impressive historical novel that packs a lot of information into a neat end product. While it is by no means a definitive account of this period, Ken Follett has done a ton of home work into this book and that clearly shows. Ken Follett fans will undoubtedly love this book as it has all his standard touches.
If you are looking to start reading a Trilogy that is voluminous but really easy on your attention span, then you should definitely check this one out.

Save the bookstore!

For my last birthday I had gotten a 1000 rupee gift voucher of Odyssey book store from my aunt. Normally I would have used the coupon and bought a couple of books within the week, but that was a brief period when I felt my time was too important to be spent on reading books. How mistaken was I?
Any how, I ended up not using the voucher for almost 11 months and managed to find it today when I was going through some old stuff in my cupboard. It was about to expire in a month.
Since I was back to my book-loving ways, I eagerly google-mapped for the nearest Odyssey bookstore and discovered one quite close by in Nungabakkam.
A share-auto ride later, I was at the exact same spot where google maps told me to expect the store, but all i could see was 'Mermaids - underwear for fancy women'.
Confused and slightly unnerved, i tried the phone number given in google maps, but it turned out to be a dud. I tried to visit the store's website, but it was down due to maintenance. with no more information online, I spent about an hour roaming around trying to run into Odyssey's once familiar red interiors and signboards.
finally i gave up and came back home, but my neurotic self just could not stop and i contacted just-dial to get the latest contact numbers for all the odyssey bookstores in Chennai. Of all the ones i got, all but one turned out to be useless. Finally i got through to a store manager of the Odyssey bookstore on ECR, which is really really far away from my home. He told me that the store in Nungambakkam, Anna Nagar and Egmore had been closed over six months back. Now only two stores were operating, one in Adyar and his own store.
i dont know why but this made me really sad. I cannot begin to count the number of hours i would have spent in bookstores such as Odyssey, Landmark, Oxford and Higginbothams. in fact, i have spent whole days just sitting in a corner of a bookstore and going over a novel. Some of my best childhood memories are from such shops. and today to see them falling, one at a time, just makes very sad for the coming generation of kids. Dont mistake me, i do not expect reading to decline, as some scientists fret about. au contraire, i think that in this age of ceaseless multimedia inputs, kids will quickly realize the slow and relaxing pleasure of a book.
the thing i worry about the most is the process of buying a book. You see, before the age of the internet, one found out about great books from the newspapers. In my case, the Literature Review section of The Hindu. I used to read the reviews of books and decide which ones i wanted to buy. the next step would be the trip to the nearby bookstore and go over the book, the author and most importantly, the price. If i had a birthday or Diwali coming up, i would note the book's price and inform all my relatives about it so that they would give me the moolah to get it.finally, once my coffers were overflowing, i would rush to the same bookstore and buy the book, only to start reading it even while waiting in the billing queue. This whole process would be spread over days or weeks, sometimes even months. During which, i would have spent many an hour, lounging in the book store, looking through new titles and authors, sneaking a peek at prohibited books or just marveling at the sheer number of books that i had not read yet. i think half the pleasure of reading the new book was in idling around in the book store.
Sadly today, the process of buying a book has been made indecently easy thanks to online portals such as Flipkart and Amazon. In all fairness, i love the convenience of these sites and now that money is not an issue for me, i have bought over a hundred books from flipkart, most of them spur of the moment purchases. After a wait of a few days, I get my book with utterly non-Indian efficiency.
But if the death of cherished bookstores is what it takes for online bookstores to succeed, then i am not too sure about that.
We cannot just let the quaint little bookstore die. I know that in a capitalistic market, it is always the survival of the fittest but when it comes to matters of the heart, such as the joy of reading, sometimes you have to stand for your beliefs, even if they dont make commercial sense.
In my opinion, bookstores are a vital fabric for a fulfilled life, but they will have to adapt to these newer times. just as online food deliveries have not killed off fine dining restaurants, book stores too will have to change. book stores must now offer things that flipkart and amazon cannot. the answer is easy, the human element. book stores need to give that human touch to the process of selecting and buying a book. maybe organize informal book meets, call in trending authors for an afternoon chat, have more informed sales personnel who can do more than just pick out the book from the top shelves.
There is much that can be done by bookstores to survive and flourish in this digital-shopping age but they can definitely use a helping hand from folks like me, who have got a lot out of them. Maybe if we made sure that every second book we buy is not from the net and from the neighborhood bookstore; maybe if we decided to reserve the net only for the difficult to find, rare editions; maybe if we can take our kids, nephews and nieces to the nearby bookstore and let them experience the joy of reading and exploring the vast stacks of books then maybe and just maybe, we can save the physical bookstores from getting gobbled up by their virtual cousins.

Mera Bharat Mahaan*

*(conditions apply)

Today's The Hindu had a great Op-Ed article about a retiree who spent a few months in the US with his son and found that country to be 'dull, lifeless and robotic'. The article proceeds to do a line by line comparison between India and the US, extolling the virtues of India and her spiritual, gregarious society. Despite the corny ending with the line 'Mera Bharat Mahaan', the article was a clear winner for the place of a lazy Sunday afternoon read.

But I felt that the article was lacking on two key fronts. Firstly, it bracketed the most raging problems of India within half a sentence; concerns such as overflowing filth, slums, lack of sanitation, congested roads, poverty and so on. I understand that the point of the article was to focus on India's open and vibrant society, but still I cannot fathom how we can compensate for lack of basic human rights with a vibrant festival calender. It is ironic that in the next few pages, there was an article on how Indian festivals put a deathly strain on the poor to overspend and keep up their image in tightly-linked societies.
Secondly, I think that the point of view of the article is a severely biased one. It was from the POV of a septuagenarian living in the conservative, traditional city of Chennai. Being no stranger to Chennaite septuagenarians myself, I can frankly say that that demographic do not adapt well. They come from very orthodox backgrounds and their comfort space is heavily defined by their surroundings. They are yet to come to grips with even basic technologies, so expecting them to be unbiased commentators on the American lifestyle is unfair and flawed.
Lastly i would like to make it clear that I love India for its vibrancy. I have gone abroad on a few occasions and have spent a significant amount of time abroad but i am sure that i will never be able to live abroad for long stretches. I am hard wired Indian. (Chennaite in particular) But even then i recognize that India needs to change. it needs to embrace the best of western cities and societies if it is to proceed on this track of growth. Issues such as open sewers must become the center of attention and not remain by the bys. Clapping ourselves on our backs for having vibrant society and disregarding the chronic ills of our country is myopic and potentially disastrous. While it is good to see the glass as half full, sometimes we must look at the empty half for the sake of future generations.

Western societies have, on occasions, given up traditions for the sake of modernization. But having endured for 10000 years, Indian traditions will put up a harder fight. The challenge, the unique challenge in fact, that India faces is rapidly embracing modernity while holding on to its vibrant traditionalism. That is not a bad challenge to face, if you ask me. 

It's raining, time to shut down.

Bangalore is going through a pretty wet patch of weather right now, thanks to Cyclone Nilam. Having grown up in Calcutta, I am no stranger to all day rains, water-clogged roads and overflowing gutters, but I have to admit Bangalore rains are quite different. It is not like Chennai rains, which always seem to be in a hurry. As if it were ashamed to be there, pouring over a town which is almost a desert. It starts and gets over before you know it. Whereas Calcutta rains are more like a seasoned wrestler. It takes its time. Having come punctually for hundreds of years, it knows the terrain. It splits its workload and systematically floods every part of the city. And you can actually feel it savoring every bit of it.

Bangalore over the last two days has been neither this nor that. It has rained continuously but not a downpour, it was rather like a steady fast drizzle. Accompanied by rib-stirring winds, the rains painted the city in a layer of mist and grey. Having devoured many English authors, i wonder if this is how London appears on most days of the year?
Some might find rainy weather to be quite depressing, but not me. I find the rains to be a very spiritual and personal experience. When your outside world is cloaked in water, you have little choice but to look inside.

Today we live in an age of consumerism. Information overload is no longer a possibility but rather the norm. With so much commotion outside, we dont get much time or energy to look within and explore the inner tracts of our own mind. As a kid, i remember watching the Calcutta rains. They would always be preceded by chronic power cuts. So without any power, there was no TV, radio or computer. so i would just look out at the window and watch the birds flying home or leaves floating on the rain water. its funny that after so many years, my memories of Calcutta are not about the grand Durga Puja Pandals i visited or the great tourist sites i saw a million times, but rather about these tiny rain-induced excursions into the mundane. I think the rains do that to you. They block out the noise and let you contemplate on the simplest of things with amazing clarity. I dont know if my time spent watching the rains led to any great ideas but i would like to think that they did.

In 2012, rains in India no longer mean chronic power-cuts in most places (thankfully, claim school kids studying hard for mid terms) so even when its pouring outside, we still have every gadget alive and kicking, ergo no stop to the rain of information. But i urge everybody to switch them off. Consider the rains to be the alarm from above to stop looking outside and to start looking inside. God knows, it does not rain often nowadays, so you wont have to do this e-exile very often. switch off everything, sit in the balcony and watch the rains pour. Relax with a cup of coffee and a good book, preferably a classic. Take in the smell of the water and the mud. In a city, we dont get many chances of experiencing nature, so consider the rains to be your tour guide to a more simpler time!