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Short Book Review: The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

SBR: I picked up The Circle of Reason without knowing that I was getting into magical realism. Magical realism, for the uninitiated in simple words, is a genre that combines fantastic and real worlds and goes on as if it is all normal. There won’t be an explanation of the “magical” parts.

In the book the real part is realistic enough. The friendship of college days that lasts even through the subsequent divergence in personalities, views and lifestyle decisions, the phrenology obsessed middle-aged teacher in a quaint Bengal village constituting mostly of refugees from East Bengal, the tragic culmination of paranoid politics and individual madness and a bird-watcher police officer thrown in the chase owing to some complicated turn of office politics make for a strong story. Then the magical elements become more prominent and although I follow the rest of the story, I don’t quite get the point. Since I haven’t read the seminal works of magical realism like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez or those by Salman Rushdie, I am not sure what to compare it with. Perhaps I will return to this book after I have read some of those.

To read or not to read: If, like me, you are not into the magical realism genre yet, you probably don’t want to start with this book and instead pick up something more widely talked about. If you have read some of those, it might be worthwhile giving this book a try. If you just want to read Amitav Ghosh as an author, I would suggest The Shadow Lines. I am not too fond of his Ibis trilogy, but that has a fan following. So that can also be a good starting point.

Response to “Superstition and the inherent cruelty of rationalists” by Devdutt Pattanaik

On the heels of my review of two of his books, I thought it was a good time to post my response to one of Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik’s articles in Scroll.

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In his article Superstition and the inherent cruelty of rationalists, Dr. Pattanaik does the same disservice to the rationalists that he accuses the rationalists of doing to the superstitious and the religious. He creates a straw man out of the rationalist, makes a category for him, and attacks him ruthlessly. It isn’t clear what his definition of a rationalist exactly is (philosophical definition, for example, can be quite different from what people infer just from the English word). I assume he uses the word in a colloquial way.

So rationalist is the average person who doesn’t believe that a cat crossing the road before you is a bad omen and doesn’t keep a fast on Mondays to get a good husband. Rationalists prefer not to be bothered by other people’s religious, and what they consider irrational, beliefs, but believe it or not, most of them don’t drag you out of your house and demand you to be hanged if you keep your Thursday fasts. They aren’t the people to deny human emotions either. They don’t behave like robots themselves, nor do they expect others to behave so. They don’t do a cost-benefit analysis before talking to their spouses, visiting their relatives or buying a gift for a friend. Yes, they exist on the same continuum that the author seems to present as some ultimate weapon against them.

“Would rationalists support my “choice” of not mourning for their murder?” Dr. Pattanaik asks triumphantly. I wonder why he thinks the answer would be no. Unless it is a school and he expects to be reprimanded by the headmaster!

But even more than that, he conflates rituals with superstition and seems to claim that if we don’t mind one, we should not mind the other too. Not all rituals are equivalent to superstition. Ritual can be a shared symbol. A two-minute silence is just a way of expressing respect for the dead, a practice everyone has adopted and hence is universally understood. It will be called superstition if one starts to believe that it will help the dead pass on to the next world. And it will become harmful if people start being harassed or killed for not observing it, or if they have to forego a month’s hard-earned money to conduct some aggrandized version of a ceremony to avoid being made outcaste.

But by itself the two-minute silence mourning ritual is just like saying ‘hello’ when you meet someone. It is a shared symbol, a way of acknowledging another person’s presence with or without further conversation. A rationalist will question whether the law should demand that a person must stand when the national anthem is played or sung, although as a shared social understanding, he will for the most part follow the practice.

Further by relegating everything to a point in a continuum, one can’t turn his back on the fact that some rituals are harmful, while others don’t put society in danger. The definition of harmful can change with time. It can even be subjective, but that discussion can’t be avoided. On a less populated planet, cremation of the dead on wood fire will not be considered harmful. So whether a rationalist believes in it or not, she can just let it be. But in an already over-polluted, over-populated city, that ritual will have to be questioned. So will murdering people because they deny your beliefs as superstitious. Actually go right ahead and deny the rationalists’ beliefs as dry and ‘cruel’– a rationalist will not call for your murder for that. He will question you though. Questioning the ideas by themselves, whether of the superstitious or of the rationalist, can’t be a crime to be killed for. Not in a rationalist’s world, assuming his definition of rationalist includes the scientifically minded people who understand that as our understanding of the world changes, the ideas of harmful and harmless, of correct and incorrect also change.

There is an important place for mythology in society. That place does not need to be secured by attacking or ridiculing rationality.

Short Book Review: Shiva to Shankara and Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell you by Devdutt Pattanaik

SBR: I am reviewing two books together because I read them not more than a month apart and they are both about Indian mythology from the same author. In both the books the collection of mythological stories are good. If you have grown up hearing Indian stories, some of them will be familiar. But Dr. Pattanaik, true to his vocation as a mythologist, collects them from many different sources; so you are likely to find stuff that’s new to you, or at least a variation on what you have heard.

What doesn’t work in both the books is the part that I expected to find scholarly. In Shiva to Shankara: Decoding the Phallic Symbol, the historical changes happening in the society and the stories being added to the Shiva canon are treated equivalent. It is good poetry and makes for a nice read, but doesn’t help in “decoding the phallic symbol” in a satisfactory fashion. The author’s philosophy is to treat mythological truths no different from other kinds of subjective truths (historical truths, for example, which can’t be always accurate, but which historians and archaeologists go to great lengths to try to prove or disprove). I appreciate the sentiment, accept the importance of mythology, I know the truth is almost always subjective, but don’t like the conflation of the two kinds of truths (if I am allowed to have different kinds that is).

Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You has to be appreciated simply for its subject matter. The author has drawn attention to the issue of queerness through the Indian mythological stories where gender and sexual identities are often fluid, without any apparent discomfort to the society. It points to a much more liberal tradition in our country than what we have today. But in the introductory chapters and in the footnotes after each story (which are sometimes longer than the stories themselves), he gives scholarly inputs and interpretation, which are often careless generalizations and simplifications. Having read about some of them from other sources, I know that I can’t trust him to even try to be objective there or to not twist perspectives to fit his pre-decided, resonant narrative.

To read or not to read: Read for the stories, but keep your judgmental antenna up on the parts that deal with history, philosophy or interpretation of the stories.

Short Book Review: Old Paths White Clouds by Nhất Hạnh Thích

SBR: The book Old Paths White Clouds is a confusing experience. With a subtitle like Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha, you would think it is some kind of travelogue through Buddhist landmarks, but it is not so. It is categorized on the cover as a Biography. What I found it really to be was a work of historical fiction based on the life of Buddha. But unlike regular historical fiction, it makes no attempts at making the story relatable and interesting. It consists of one sermon after the other, punctuated by some miracles and is full of unbelievably devout people. It is supposed to be read as the biography of Buddha by those who already believe in the current Buddhist lore or have a predisposition towards it. Not surprisingly the book bored me to the hilt. But I read it through the end because I was trying to learn more about Buddha at that point of time and it is a good collection of stories that Buddhist tradition believes about him.

To read or not to read: If you have religious or Buddhist inclinations, go ahead. If you have academic interest in Buddhism, it is a good resource. Otherwise spare yourself.

Short Book Review: The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

SBR: Reading this book is a great way to get introduced to the gamut of philosophical thoughts and tradition in the west starting from ancient Greeks to the beginning of twentieth century. What really works is that the author doesn’t feel the need to treat philosophy or philosophers with reverence just for being ancient or famous. He takes us on a journey of understanding and is ruthless in the pursuit. If that means that even the powerful people and ideas of past do not make sense to a modern mind, then they just do not. There is no need to be defensive about it.

Russell is also generous with his opinions, analysis and critique of the philosophers. Because it is clear at most places from the text when he is just narrating the philosophical thought in question and when he is offering his own opinions, it works well. For a novice, modern reader of philosophy, it is important to see those opinions in order to make sense of the ancient and obscure stuff.

Although condensing centuries of philosophical though in one book, even at over eight hundred pages, means that the treatment cannot be exhaustive or most scholarly, this isn’t necessarily a “for dummies” book. Most of the material of the book comes from a series of lecture the author gave, and it seems to talk to the fellow philosophers more than the lay readers.

The chapters of Bergson and Dewey didn’t work for me. They were the contemporaries of the author, and he seemed to have set the detachment of the historical chronicler aside in those chapters. The contemporary rivalries or exchanges dominate there. I needed to go elsewhere to understand what these philosophers really said.

To read or not to read: If you want to start delving into western philosophy, you should pick up this book sometime sooner than later. It might help to have read something beforehand. Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, a very accessible and readable work, worked as a good starting point for me. I picked up Russell after reading that. If you are also just starting on the subject like me, this is the sequence you can follow too. Even then keep Wikipedia, Google search and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy handy for the unfamiliar references that would invariably pop up. (It’s kind of funny that Russell is covered in Durant’s book. Historian becoming a subject of another history!)

Short Book Review: Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde

SBR: I picked up this book because I watched the movie and then wondered if the book was less sappy and contrived. The book is definitely more gritty with its characters and situations, but I am afraid it turned out to be even more sappy and contrived than the movie. Despite some inconsistencies in the movie, this is one of those cases where movie is better for the changes it has made.

To read or not to read: Watch the feel-good movie, if you are into those. Skip the book.

Book Recommendation: Waiting by Ha Jin

Winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction, Waiting by Ha Jin is an interesting book among the multitudes which are set in China of the times of Mao Zedong. The narrative itself is not dominated by politics, but there could not have been a story like that if it weren’t for the political circumstances of the time. And yet the story could not have taken the same shape as it did if it weren’t for the quirks of the characters involved. This interplay of larger sociopolitical background – where past and present, remote villages and action-packed cities interact to create curious circumstances – with the everyday idiosyncrasies of individual characters creates a story that makes you “experience another way of being” (to borrow the phrase from Sheldon Pollock). It is for this reason that despite some of the shortcomings in the writing (dialogues can feel stilted and awkward; reader’s intelligence should have been trusted to figure out what really happened to the male protagonist in the story, instead of author spelling it out – that he was always in love with what he didn’t have), I think this book is worth a read.

I must warn that some of the reviews I have read lament that the characters are not realistic. I, however, don’t think so. It’s probably the unrealistic dialogues that weigh the characters down.

While the pressures exerted by societal norms on an individual will not be unfamiliar to an Indian reader, the state, the workplace and politics making inroads into an average person’s most private feelings and decisions can still be unnerving.

Another striking feature of the novel is the character of the male protagonist Lin Kong. I don’t like him; I don’t even sympathize with him, because I demand more decisiveness from people; but I see him. I see that just like it is difficult for a woman to be a superwoman, to be everything to everyone, being strong as well as nice is a difficult demand on men. With one woman (his wife) he is strong and decisive, but not nice; with the other woman (his “lover”) he is nice, but not strong and decisive. When a woman can’t just be happy with whatever is doled out to her, when she has a mind and expectation of her own, she finds him wanting; but doesn’t feel repulsed enough to give up on him either. Because you can’t really blame him for not being everything. There is something achingly realistic there.

There is a lot more to analyze and feel in the book. But I don’t intend to spoil it for you! Go, read it.

Book Description

Below is the book description from the publisher’s website.

Ha Jin’s novel Waiting was the winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction. This quietly poignant novel of love and repression in Communist China begins in 1966 when Lin Kong, an army doctor, falls in love with the young nurse Manna Wu during a forced military march. They would like to marry, but Lin has a wife at home, in a rural village far from his army posting. His wife, Shuyu, is an illiterate peasant with bound feet, whom he was married to by arrangement so that his parents would have a daughter-in-law to care for them in old age. Each year, Lin travels back to Goose Village to divorce Shuyu in the county court; each year he is defeated, either by the judge or by the intervention of his wife’s brother. Because adultery is forbidden by the Communist Party, the years pass slowly and Lin and Manna wait chastely for their fate to change. By the time 18 years have passed–the interim after which a man can divorce his wife even without her consent–what had begun as a sweet and passionate romance has turned into something far more complicated and more real.Written with grace, wry humor, and an uncompromising realism, Waiting gives readers a story that puts their cherished ideals of individualism and self-fulfillment in a wholly different perspective.

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Article Recommendation: India must end history wars over Tipu and other controversial Sultans by Janaki Nair

Cato the Reader
December 9, 2015
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Now that the Karnataka government’s Tipu Jayanti blunder is (at least until next year) behind us, I feel safe in recommending this sensible article, which exhorts us to look at historical people as persons of their times and not try to force-fit them into our current political classifications. Unfortunately our public debates tend to push people into more hardened, extremist stances, rather than developing a shared, nuanced understanding of history, which will not serve a convenient precursor to whatever opinions, grudges and ideologies we want to hold today. As the article points out about Tipu Sultan and all the labels that different groups apply to him:

What we would get is a richly ambiguous historical figure who is not easily amenable to a “nationalist”, “secular”, “tyrannical”, “pro Islamic” readings.

It ends with a sensible suggestion:

We must find the resources to develop a new historical temper that acknowledges and accepts the inconvenient contradictions of our past.

While you are on the subject, you can also read Tipu Sultan: Noble or Savage? by William Dalrymple. This article may have gone some extra distance to prove that the “Islamic tyrant” image of Tipu was a British propaganda and is almost ready to label him a nationalist. But you can form your own opinion after looking at the facts presented.

Read India must end history wars over… at Daily O and Tipu Sultan: Noble or Savage at Open.

Short Book Review: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa

SBR: I am happy to see this phrase “spiritual materialism” coined and acknowledged, that too by an insider. Spiritual journey isn’t about accumulating “spiritual achievements” or about basking in the glory of your efforts and sacrifices. If you are feeling smug and proud of your spiritual journey, it is time to step back. You might be feeding your ego, instead of transcending it.

The author does a very good job of ruthlessly telling us what spiritualism is not – that is most of what we see around us! When it comes to describing what it is though, things become vague. His descriptions are rich. But that doesn’t necessarily makes it graspable. This is not something I have a quarrel with. From what he says, and from what I intuitively feel, you cannot actually describe spiritual experiences in words. Why even try it is my question.

It is also disconcerting that after saying all that he did in this book, he was still a part of a big spiritual establishment and a “spiritual entrepreneur”, if I can coin a phrase too.

To read or not to read: If you are on or embarking on a formal spiritual journey, especially by joining an organization or following a guru, you should read it to keep your smugness and expectations in check.

Short Book Review: Seven Systems of Indian Philosophy by Pt. Rajmani Tigunait

SBR: Why can’t we Indians write about ourselves dispassionately and objectively? Why can’t it be about studying our history or philosophy for the sake of understanding and not for glorification? Seven Systems of Indian Philosophy was good enough in explaining the seven systems it covers in simple words. But wherever the author ventured into his opinions, justifications and (shallow, offhand, but confident and patronizing) comparisons with western philosophy, I felt like tearing my hair out. Okay – I will try to forget those parts. At least I got to know that treating rituals as ultimate duty, the way of life I have grown up with, is the outcome of one specific system of Indian philosophy – Mimansa.

To read or not to read: This book is much shorter (and simpler and less comprehensive) than the much recommended two-volumes from Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. I am yet to read that one, since I wanted something quicker before delving deeper. If you either like justifying and glorifying everything Indian, or can ignore it, then read this book for a quick and simple introduction to the seven (selected) systems of Indian philosophy. But If the glorification and justification bothers you too much, or you are prone to getting influenced by whatever is written, unable to ignore unfounded opinions, wait till I find something better on the subject.

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