Laughing out loud, and other dangers

I have never really been into 'audio books'. I have tried a few in the past, with mixed results. A P.G. Woodhouse was particularly good company on a long road trip. But most other audio books have been disappointing at best, monotonous and off-putting at worst.

So I wasn't exactly holding my breath for a transformative experience when I started hearing a new book on audio CD today. I have to admit though ... it wasn't half bad! The book I started is called 'A spot of bother'. It is the second novel by Mark Haddon, after the widly entertaining debut The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The first book was one of the most imaginative debuts in recent times, and was in parts uproariously funny (for those of you who haven't read it ... highly recommended by Brick and Rope!). Which is why I took up A Spot of Bother.

I will write later about the book itself. For now, the medium is my message. An audio book is a strange and quirky thing. Sample these:

Bite-sized chapters: When I sit down to read (by which I mean the traditional, dead tree version), I am almost never going to get up in the middle of a chapter. So before I start a section, I will often look up how long it is, to make sure I have the time to sit and read it through. With an audio book, you can't do that! You don't know what you are taking on. So here I am in the office parking lot, sitting with the engine on, sheepishly looking at the car waiting for my spot, trying to convey in sign language that I just got here, though I am showing no signs of stepping out. Which is where bite-sized chapters help. If the book had any longer chapters that it has, I don't know how I would be able to start listening at all during my short drives to work.

Some books are to immerse in: Unfortunately, you just can't lose yourself in an audio book the way you can with a yellowing-over-time book. There are too many distractions. You have your eyes on the road, trying to overtake that guy who seems to be braking for no apparent reason, sanctimoniously tut-tutting the guy pulled over by a cop, looking (just curious) at the 'gentlemen's club' billboard, .... and you catch "She was standing in the kitchen ..." She? Who is she? Whose kitchen? What did I miss?

Laughing out loud: Books, even funny books, are rarely the laugh-out-loud type. Reading is a private act. Something you do all by yourself. When you find something funny, you smile, maybe chuckle, but rarely laugh out in a full throated laugh. But listening to someone read a book is altogether different. Now someone else is involved in the act ... and sometimes, especially if you are reading the dry Brit humour of Haddon, you laugh out loud. Be careful with that steering wheel there!

Jean or Jeanne?: One of the central charactes in the book is called Jean. I am not sure why, but I spent a lot of time thinking about whether her name is spelt Jean or Jeanne or something else fiendishly concocted. This bothered me. A lot. But maybe that was just me.

What is this life, if full of care ...

8:00 am.

I am getting late for work. The daughter, not quite three yet, is still lazing. I find her standing by the window. Gazing out langorously.

"We need to go", I tell her. "What are you doing?"
"I am looking" she says, and continues to.

(God! It looks like this is going to take a while! I hope I don't find traffic on my way to work.)

"Looking at what?" I ask.
She turns to me and pauses, like she is considering the question. Turns back to the window.
"I am looking".

LEISURE - By William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Vignettes of the new Ireland: The Deportees, by Roddy Doyle

In the late 1990s, immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa started pouring into Ireland, attracted by the seemingly endless opportunities opened up by the country's economic growth. As one can imagine, a sudden and large scale wave of immigration changed the social structure of the country in ways not entirely predictable. As the Nigerians came to take more and more of the jobs that others were unwilling to do, white Irishmen who had never seen a black man before suddenly found themselves face to face with their own inhibitions, prejudices and fears. The Deportees is a collection of short stories born out of this churn.

Roddy Doyle informs us that the stories were originally published in Metro Aireann, a multi-cultural magazine published out of Dublin. They were written in serialized form - short 800 word chapters released one every month. Doyle claims he enjoyed writing in this form, though sometimes - 'Characters disappear, because I forgot about them. Questions are asked, but sometimes, not quite answered. The stories have never been carefully planned.' And in my mind, that is the undoing of the book.

There are some moments here, to be clear. The father preparing himself mentally before meeting his daughter's black boyfriend - that's a moment. The black kid in school, standing with his white tormentors, awaiting the teachers punishment, suddenly, unexpectedly laughing out - that's a moment. But these I found relatively few. For the most part, the book read exactly like what it is - a series of short, somewhat interesting pieces strung together till the writer runs out of interest and ends the story.

Doyle offers a great window into the Irish mind, mostly through the language his characters speak. There is a generous dose of people saying 'grand!' and 'fuck that'. But then, I don't know whether that is enough to make the tales believable. In the story Home to Harlem, an African American professor in Harlem reacts to the central character's speech by saying 'The Irish and their famous profanity - charming'. To which he asks her whether she got her position on a sports scholarship. 'Well, you were indulging in a bit of the 'oul stereotyping there. The Irish and the profanity, like. So, I kind of thought, you being black and that, you must have got in here on a sporting scholarship. So, was it basketball or the sprinting?' A mini-moment, right there.

The Deportees is a light-hearted little book taking on a large-hearted theme. It gets into the skin of its characters and speaks in a voice not often heard. But in the ultimate analysis, I am just not sure it says very much.

On Paddy's day

Today is St. Patrick's day. As a tip of my hat to the Irish, I started reading 'The Deportees', a collection of short stories from the Booker prize winning Irish author Roddy Doyle.

The book is set in modern Ireland, post the 'economic miracle' that brought jobs, and unprecedented prosperity to the country in the 1990s. In some ways, the economic boom is the necessary backdrop without which the stories wouldn't make sense. Here is how Doyle talks about it in his prologue: 'In 1986, I wrote The Commitments. In that book, the main character, a young man called Jimmy Rabbitte, delivers a line that became quite famous - The Irish are the niggers of Europe. Twenty years on, there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland and, if I was writing that book today, I wouldn't use that line. It wouldn't actually occur to me, because Ireland has become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and the line would make no sense.'

That, of course, was then. The Deportees was published in 2007. Since then, the miracle has gone sour. As I am reading the lines quoted above, CNN is interviewing Ireland's prime minister Brian Cowen who is in Washington today. The ticker says: 'Miracle' economy collapsing.

Ireland's one time 'Celtic Tiger' economy is in deep recession today. The property bubble has burst, unemployment is at 10.4% (more than double the level last year), the two largest banks are teetering on the edge and could be nationalized at any time, and the government does not have the money to provide any meaningful stimulus.

Set in the Tiger days, The Deportees feels vaguely other-worldly now. How quickly stories change! Happy Paddy's day.

India After Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha

To say that a book is great is to implicitly compare it to others in its ilk, and pass judgment - that in ways that matter, the book in hand deals with the subject better. If you were to follow that narrow reasoning, you might be pardoned for not calling India After Gandhi a great book. Because, you see, there is nothing else quite like it.

This is one of those wonderfully rare things in the published world - a book about a tremendously significant subject that somehow no one has written much about. This is, in my mind, the first comprehensive history of modern, post-independence India. 'For Indian children', writes Guha with the refreshing clarity evident throughout the book, 'history comes to an end with independence and partition ... the past is defined as a single immovable date: 15 August, 1947. Thus, when the clock struck midnight and India became independent, history ended, and political science and sociology began.' India After Gandhi gets the grand story of India's history moving again.

The book starts around Independence, though it studiously avoids the trappings of indulging in stories of post-independence euphoria that have been talked about at length elsewhere. Don't expect to come across the Tryst with Destiny speech here for example. Instead, the reader is taken on a factual ride through the horrors of partition, the refugee camps, the parricide. And a pattern starts to develop: Guha does not stop at the regular tourist traps of the India story. Events are described sans melodrama. The killing of the Gandhis (the Mahatma, and Indira), the Chinese invasion, are all described in terms of the factual history around them. No beating of the chest, no attempt to look for conspiracy theories, or even 'reasons' why. You come out of India After Gandhi armed with the facts, but without a false sense that all of it somehow 'makes sense' and falls into a logical storyline.

I found India After Gandhi enriching in more ways than I can possibly cover here:

There were the issues I just did not know as much about as I thought, or I had never really thought about. For instance, why did India end up having states organized along linguistic lines? What were the key arguments for and against this approach?

Then there were the issues that I had a reasonable understanding of, and India After Gandhi filled out the blanks, and changed some of my existing perceptions. For instance, what truly was the series of events in Kashmir that led to the current impasse in the beautiful valley?

And then there were blasts from the past - names, places, phrases that brought back a flood of memories. Jarnail Singh Bhindaranwale and Sant Longowal, Charan Singh, Rajiv Goswami ... names that evoked so much passion at one time ... now only vague memories.

But most of all, the book left me with an appreciation of how, brick by brick, the independent nation of India was built, is being built. And for that alone, I tip my hat off to Ramchandra Guha. Thank you, sir, for writing this book.

Buffett-isms 2008

Warren Buffett's annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway was released a couple of weeks back. I finally got around to reading it earlier today. When you do that, the thing you cannot escape is the folksy (some say cheesy) Buffett-isms that are such a big part of the man's persona. A discussion on Berkshire's financial performance might be a little bit out of Brick and Rope's fairway, but surely there is a place here to talk about Buffett's turns of phrase?

So here are my favorite Buffett-isms from Berkshire's 2008 annual report:

Talking about the financial markets in 2008 -
By year-end, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game.

Talking about government intervention to keep key financial participants alive -
At the moment, it is much better to be a financial cripple with a government guarantee than a Gibraltar without one.

On the complicated world-side network of derivative contracts and corresponding counter-party risks -
Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.

On banks that are 'too big to fail' -
The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won’t do; it’s mindboggling screw-ups that are required.

... And finally, on the booming auto insurance business at a Berkshire subsidiary -
As we view GEICO’s current opportunities, Tony [Nicely, GEICO's CEO] and I feel like two hungry mosquitoes in a nudist camp. Juicy targets are everywhere.

Priceless!

I don't want to fly out of Dulles again!

I don't know whether you have ever travelled out of Washington Dulles International Airport. I happen to live practically in spitting distance of the place, and so I am a semi-regular customer of the place.

I have always wondered a little bit about this Dulles guy whom the airport is named after. Guessed he must be a politico of some sort (this is Washington DC after all). But didn't know very much about him, and though mildly curious, I was too lazy to look him up.

Then the name turned up in Ramchandra Guha's India After Gandhi. Turns out, John Foster Dulles was the new secretary of state right after India's independence, and can be pointed to as one of the architects of the cold, distrustful, passive-aggressive relationship between India and the United States for many decades thereafter.

Dulles was first and foremost a communist hating, cold war warrior. True to his ilk, he called India's attempts at neutrality in the cold war 'obsolete, immoral and short-sighted'. To which Nehru is supposed to have remarked with some irony that India was going through 'a gargantuan effort towards parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, freedom and equality for all religions, and social and economic reforms, while among the countries which Dulles praises and subsidizes because they were "willing to stand up and be counted" as anti-communist, are effete or persecuting tyrannies, oligarchies and theocracies, sometimes corrupt as well as retrograde.'

Dulles also became a thorn in India's side by starting the process of large arms sales to Pakistan as a potential strategic deterrant against the Russians in Afghanistan. And as we all know, that turned out really well.

Finally, Dulles was all in support of Portugal keeping the colony of Goa, right in the middle of an Indian nation. A 'light of the West in the lands of the Orient' so to speak. As he was known to say "if he is a bastard, at least he is our bastard."

So where was I? Ah yes, I was talking about Dulles international airport. The place has the longest security lines in aviation history. And the slowest staff. Then there is this bus that takes you from the plane to the terminal, which you've got to see to believe. And the shopping is better in the strip mall next to my house.

On top of all that, now I hate the name of the darned place! Thanks for nothing Mr. Guha!

Why is India a democracy?

Over the weekend, I started reading Ramchandra Guha's mammoth and magnificent history of post-independence India, 'India After Gandhi'. I have barely scratched the surface of the book and already I find myself picking up pieces of my brain scattered all around, because (holy cow!) it's blown away!

Here is the first question that stopped me in my tracks: How come India is a democracy at all?

Guha writes in his Prologue (evocatively titled 'Unnatural Nation') - "A recent statistical analysis of the relationship between democracy and development in 135 countries found that 'the odds against democracy in India were extremely high'. Given its low level of income and literacy, and its high levels of social conflict, India was 'predicted as a dictatorship during the entire period' of the study. Since it was a democracy through that entire period (barring two years), there was only one way to characterise India: as 'a major outlier'."

Mukul Kesavan, writing for BBC News, puts this more bluntly. "Considering that when India set out to be democratic, successful democracies tended to be white, rich, Christian and with a single dominant language, its success over 60 years is significant".

I could readily find tens of research papers around the underlying factors that are conducive to the emergence of a democracy. This summary from NYU for instance, shows some interesting charts illustrating the relationship of wealth of countries and their probability of being democratic (wealthier countries are much more likely to be democracies). It asks the interesting question of whether countries are more likely to become democratic as they become rich, or whether countries that become democratic are more likely to stay democratic if they are rich.

And there are many others where these came from. I read all this, and shake my head in wonder of the impoverishedly, diversely, noisily, garishly, and defiantly democratic spectacle that is India. Mukul Kesavan, again, says it best for me - "If India didn't exist, no one would have the imagination to invent it."