Blog

Tamarind Trees and Vintage Bollywood @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 8)

Sudharsan got a translated book that reads more like a fable- Tale of a Tamarind Tree by Sundara Ramaswamy. The story is set in a town that resembles Madurai and talks about how a town evolves around a large tamarind tree. The author has tried to convey the oral storytelling tradition, something that is now lost as are the trees around which they were told. The tamarind tree oversees everything- the people there as they play, work and grow older; it gives fruit over which people squabble and is ultimately cut down so that a park can be built instead. If Tamil literature interests you and you want to know more about this story, this review is a good one, though there will be spoilers!

Carrying on with the theme of Indian literature, Sunny surmised that he preferred this time to dabble in a book from India, a Hindi book called Godan by Premchand. Anyone who knows Hindi is familiar with Premchand as he is still the most popular writer in this language even though his work is quite dated. The story is what can be described as Bollywoodesque and vintage 70s. The characters have no gray and are definitely good or bad. There is no middle class as such, only the zamindar, landlord, and his fiefdom. Hori Mahato is a farmer. He is married and has two daughters and a son. The story revolves around Hori’s desire to own a cow and the problems that ensue. Other works written by Premchand were mentioned including Mazdoor and Nirmala.

Many books in regional languages including those by the renowned Perumal Murugan focus on the social problems that exist in village communities. Abhaya mentioned an English book in this context called Nectar in the Sieve by Kamala Markandaya. The story is based on a child bride who must deal with the travesties of drought and monsoon, the realities of any agrarian tragedy. Abhaya also mentioned Neem Ka Ped, a long-ago Indian television drama-series written by famous writer Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza where feudal hierarchy was depicted in pre- and post independent India. Have you seen it?

And with that, we come to the end of the BYOB Party in July 2017. Such a long list of book recommendations! What are you reading?

Monsoon, Moses and Sleepwalking @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 7)

The story of how Piya came upon Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India is interesting. She and her friends had an informal book get-together and they organized a book box, where a book and things associated with it are shared. Since monsoon is in the air, Piya bought the book with the hope that the petrichor effect would bring on the rains.  This is a book we featured in our Monsoon related books infographic and that one of our guests at a previous book party had talked about.

Piya enjoyed Frater’s narration. As a boy, rain has been his friend. Having grown up in the Polynesian Islands, this British writer settled in Australia was coaxed by an Indian couple to witness the monsoon journey and so he left for Cochin and ended his journey in Cherrapunji. Frater speaks not just about the scientific story of low-pressure areas and storms; he talks about the way the weather affects the people who get trapped in waterlogged areas and floods. He talks about traveling in absurd weather conditions to catch a train and of almost dying in a monsoon storm in Assam. He talks about how he negotiated through red tape to get a permit to visit Cherrapunji, considered the wettest place on earth at one time. While in school, the weather is taught in a dry and factual manner; it’s the human interest angle that livens up the book and makes the book a must-read even for children.

Ashmita spoke about a not so well-known book called The Moses Legacy. She found it remarkably similar to Dan Brown’s work and while Brown’s fact and fiction merge into a delicious blur, Adam Palmer separates the fact from the fiction and takes the reader on a nail-biting journey. Daniel Klein is a protagonist that readers identify with and the Egyptian setting adds to the mystery of the story. Following the thread of writers with similar works, mention was made of Harry Potter, a manga and even Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman.

Siddharth had a unique reason for visiting the BYOB Party. “I’m intrigued by readers,” he said. His book choice was everyone’s favorite – Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a story of friendship and betrayal, with Afghanistan as the backdrop. Siddharth read out a gem from the book:

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life… you steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness… there is no act more wretched than stealing.”

Dhwani talked about The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing: A Novel by Mira Jacob. Named on the best books of 2014 with writing compared to that of Jhumpa Lahiri, this sprawling family saga is a diaspora story. As it is in many Indian families, mental health issues are swept under the carpet and Jacob writes about an unfolding of difficult truths. What Dhwani found appealing was the humor that made an otherwise difficult theme a fun read.

More books in Part 8.

Peace and Post Offices @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 6)

Apurba indulged in poetry with the book The Country without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali. This Kashmiri American poet was the recipient of the Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, and his collection Rooms Are Never Finished was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. His poetry collection is a haunting inditement of the plight of what he remembers as home, a desolation called peace. Apurba also cited an essay by Amitav Ghosh, a touching tribute to the poet, something you must bookmark and take the time to read for the sheer beauty of the person the words pay tribute to and the words themselves.

                                            They make a desolation and call it peace.

when you left even the stones were buried:

the defenceless would have no weapons.

 

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,

who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?

O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,

who weighs the hairs on the jeweller’s balance?

They make a desolation and call it peace.

Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

 

My memory is again in the way of your history.

Army convoys all night like desert caravans:

In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all

winter- its crushed fennel.

We can’t ask them: Are you done with the world?

Other books that deal with conflict that were mentioned were Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer, Our Moon has Blood Clots and Hello Bastar by Rahul Pandita, Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island and Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Gorazde.

Conflict zones tell the same story world over.

Meaning and the Little Prince @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 5)

Bhargavi found positivity in a book that emerged from the fire of the Holocaust. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Emile Frankl, a leading psychologist of the time, is a book based on real experiences that he witnessed when he was taken prisoner. Although the first part of the book is harrowing as it deals with the harsh realities of the Nazi regime, the rest of this book breathes with a fiery optimism and gives great hope and great courage. Originally written in German, the English version is a small volume that makes for quick reading.

Bhargavi was impressed by these words: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” The book confirms that it is the search for meaning rather than meaning itself that makes even brutality bearable. Listed among the top ten influential books in the world, this one is a must-read.

Abhaya mentioned another book filled with hope but that carries a redeeming sadness — The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, again a small book with a beautiful message encapsulating lost childhood. One of the most translated books from French, the story is about a pilot whose plane has crashed in the Sahara desert where he meets the little prince.

Talking about sad books led to the inevitable discussion of death, its inevitability, and how some cultures let go of their elderly to die as compared to the fight with death today that involves methods like cryogenics to preserve the body until a cure is found. On the downside, conquering death can only be a strain on our own resources and that led to a discussion of the science fiction scenario laid out by John Wyndham in a book called Trouble with Lichen, where extended mortality is shown to lead to complete upheaval, causing fundamental changes in the way that society is organized.

More books coming up.

Loneliness and Mortality @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 4)

Sumit was in the mood for some poignant novels, the saddest one he has ever read being A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry but the book he got to the BYOB Party was the memoir Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing.

“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.” This is how Laing talks about the emotion that most of us are ashamed of. Loneliness, unlike introversion and aloneness, is a lack, a void that needs to be filled. Laing explores how life in a new city forced her into a self-imposed loneliness that technology only widened.  It was art that helped her to capture her emotion and celebrate it.

“Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.”

Since the book talks about art, Sumit enjoyed going to the internet to see the paintings that she referred to. Emotions can be rendered in words and with the palette as well.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

A discussion ensued about terribly moving books like The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and how solitude, contrary to loneliness, provides the fuel for the self-churning that results in great works of art, scientific innovation and philosophical insights.

Aravindh talked about an extremely moving book called When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. The saddest part of the book for Aravindh was that this was the only book of the lucid neurosurgeon that he would ever read. The book is memoir and relates the tale of a life of inquiry cut short by inoperable lung cancer.

“While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced and, as such, has the impact of any major life event. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability – or your mother’s – to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand’s function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”

The questions that Kalanithi asks make the reader stop for a moment and evaluate his or her own life, if only for a fleeting moment. Other books that deal with these profound questions include Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture and Christopher Hitchen’s Mortality.

More poignant books in Part 4.

Mr. Biswas @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 3)

Sourajit, a scientist working at ISRO on the moon mission talked about another Nobel Prize winner’s work. A House for Mr. Biswas is V. S. Naipaul’s masterpiece. The story is biographical — an unflattering farcical tragedy of his own father, one who fights against an unrelenting destiny.

“The problem with the book is that it is far too episodic and so if you skip a couple of chapters, you aren’t missing anything. His style, on the other hand, is terrific. There is nothing that his observant eye misses- be it the socio-political or the cultural. The other thing that I noticed is that he is very rude. He says the meanest things about communities and mines the personal tragedy of his own family. In spite of all this, you know that he is not glossing over anything either good or bad. And so you empathize. It’s almost as though he has an obligation to be honest, although I honestly don’t know if he is misguided or not in this endeavour.” Saurojit arrived at the gist of what has made a man who is undoubtedly judged and judgemental a great writer whose prose is nuanced. He read out a passage from the book that throws light on his writing style:

Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now, their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi House in Port of Spain would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten.  Occasionally a nerve of memory would be touched – a puddle reflecting the blue sky after rain, a pack of thumbed cards, the fumbling with a shoelace, the smell of a new car, the sound of a stiff wind through trees, the smells and colours of a toyshop, the taste of milk and prunes – and a fragment of forgotten experience would be dislodged, isolated, puzzling. In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a leatherbound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christmas in the Tulsi Store: the marbled patterns of old fashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.

In case the contrarian views of V. S. Naipaul put you off, you may like to know what women think of him (everyone knows what he thinks of women writers).

More books in Part 4.

Zen and Nausea @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 2)

Some not so light books were discussed at the BYOB Party in July 2017.

Vishesh has a penchant for spirituality and so he got a book called The Way of Zen by the philosopher Alan W. Watts. This lucidly written book provides a basic introduction to Zen, starting with Buddhist roots steeped in Chinese Orientalism and the Vedic religion of India. “It’s written for a western audience,” Vishesh said, “but we are Western enough now.”

The book begins with a detailed history of Zen. Then the cultural aspects of the religion are discussed and the paradoxes of the zen koans are presented. Reading Watt’s interpretation gives a different perspective on what it means to live meaningfully and he also mentions the constraints that language has in providing solutions. Sourajit added that Alan Watts was, in fact, a good friend of the myth writer Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

One more philosopher was discussed. Sartre was the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (he declined to accept it). His fiction on existentialism called Nausea is a difficult read, to put it mildly. So how did Pratyush manage to finish? “After ten pages, even if you are reading, you don’t understand. You have to read little by little and consistently and maybe then you will get an idea about what the writer is trying to say. And even that could be wrong.” Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. He journals his sensations regularly and Sartre conveys his existential philosophy through the conversations that the protagonist has with his alter-ego.

The conversation moved on to aspects of film noir in the book and this is possible as he wrote around this time. Sartre was the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (he declined to accept it). Here’s an excerpt that I found from the book, not the one that Pratush mentioned but another passage:

“I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them… there is nothing.”

To understand philosophy a little better, Apurba recommended the School of Life Youtube channel and Sourajit supplemented that by mentioning Crash Course, a useful resource for students (co-created by John Green).

Another Nobel Prize winner’s work is discussed in Part 3.

Self-Help or Not? @ BYOB Party in July 2017 (Part 1)

The BYOB Party in July kickstarted with a discussion on self-help books. We’ve worked on a self-help book infographic which you may want to look at and also published a story on self-help vs helplessness on the blog. In one of our earlier BYOB Parties, Abhaya mentioned a book called Wrong: Why experts keep failing us–and how to know when not to trust them. So we are familiar with the quandaries of self-help literature.

Nadeem is a big fan of motivational books. The book he spoke about was The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. As the title implies, the one thing is what you need to focus on and that can lead to mastery. The book has helped him to achieve his own design-related goals. He also recommends books by Robert Greene including Mastery, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War.

Suprith followed in the self-help trail with a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. Cal was a grad student at MIT doing his Ph.D. in computer science when the economic crises hit. This compelled him to research on how to make a great career. His research led him to address a fundamental question. Is passion really the bedrock of a great professional life? He mentions Steve Job’s Stanford lecture where passion is mentioned as an essential requirement and this led to a tangential conversation about Steve Job’s own passions from calligraphy to entrepreneurship and Zen. Newport spoke to experts in their fields from organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers to musicians and went on to discover that passion was rare and not a prerequisite for success. The book is not just about debunking the passion hypothesis; it also talks about the craftsman mindset which usually involves a more output-centered approach, which jargon aside simply means that a skilled craftsman keeps working on the craft. It’s not pure passion but lots of hard work that gets you from point A to B. So where did the title come from? Turns out it’s a Steve Martin quote.

Pratibha spoke about the captivating book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. She mused on the problem that the middle-class people face; they are continuously in the rat race and remain middle class. Kiyosaki addresses problems like these by focusing on the importance of tax management and not getting into debt. On the flip side, Jaya warns that as compelling as this bestseller may be, the book is not reliable when it comes to setting your own finances in order. Some of the readers in the group were also concerned about the author himself having had to declare bankruptcy.

Another book that provides unconventional solutions is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris where he writes about how one can leave a 9-5 job and earn the same amount of money and then there is the book Secret by Rhonda Byrne that talks about how we can use the law of attraction to attract good things into our lives.

While there was a hum of assent for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, considering how you could go back to the book at varying points in your life and dig out fresh meaning, many readers spoke against the merits of self-help literature in general. After all,  was there any book after reading which you become rich? You may want to listen to the comedian George Carlin making a dig at self-help books. This is a debate that has no clear-cut answers.

Abhaya added that a self-help book that would be useful to readers was How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Some readers in the group were skeptical about whether a book could teach you how to read, but Abhaya went on to describe how this book offers a practical approach to reading difficulties that could crop up depending on genre, length and level of difficulty. For instance, gaining from reading history would require the reading of two or more history books based in the same place. In case of a play, unless it is a closet play that is meant to be read silently, the best way to read it would be aloud.

You may want to go through these book reviews at our Review and a Half segment where we featured this book:

How to Read a Book- Part 1

How to Read a Book- Part 2

More books in Part 2.

Short Book Review: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving StoneSBR: The Agony and the Ecstasy – a novel based on Michelangelo’s life-  was another novel that was picked up in the anticipation of our Italy trip, although I read it only after coming back. The timing wasn’t bad though. After having seen the sights, the streets and the cities it is based in, it was easier to appreciate what was going on. This long book didn’t work for me, however. The charm of historical fiction comes from the history as well as from the fiction. This is one of those that perhaps got the history right, but not the fiction. Although one can appreciate the thoughts the author put in Michelangelo’s head before he started on each of his historic creations, he didn’t make the character come alive to me. The dialogs had no distinction and events around our protagonist often unrealistic as well as dull. The book is also criticized for dismissing Michelangelo’s homosexuality, which is now apparently well-accepted. But I won’t judge the book if the author felt compelled to take that stance. The book is as much a creation of its own times (published in 1961) as Michelangelo was of his own.
To read or not to read: If you are specifically interested in Michelangelo, then yes. But I would not recommend it for the delight of reading.

Short Book Review: History Of The Italian People by Giuliano Procacci

History Of The Italian People by Giuliano ProcacciSBR: I picked up this book in anticipation of our Italy trip. Apparently, among all the book recommendations Abhaya could find for an introduction to Italy’s history, this was a rare one written by an Italian (and available in English translation). Hence I picked it up over the others. History of Italian People by Giuliano Procacci is pretty good, written without excessive national fervor or an extreme aversion to it. But unless you have some familiarity with European or Italian history, I would not recommend it as a first book. Because it seems to address a familiar audience with a good analysis. Unfamiliar ones will have to turn to Wikipedia too often. It also starts only from AD 1000. So ancient history including the Romans and their predecessors is missing.
To read or not to read: Not as a first read on the topic. But a good addition to your reading list for analysis and perspective.