Encounter, in silence

Reading is an encounter, in silence, of two minds - John Updike

John Updike died yesterday. He was one of the more prolific authors in the contemporary literary world, having written nearly 60 books in his lifetime.

For the last few years, Updike's name has been at the center of simmering discontent about the Nobel committee and its long-standing disfavor of American literature. This discontent turned into outright war last year when the secretary of the Nobel prize jury for literature, Horace Engdahl slammed all American literature as "too insular". Understandably, that didn't go down very well on this side of the pond, with claims being made, like this one in Slate, that "the Swedes have no clue about American literature". As the controversy raged, two names kept coming up at the top of American claims for a literature Nobel after a 15 year drought - Philip Roth and John Updike. Roth continues to carry the flag.

Updike was not universally liked. While some admired how prolific he was, others wondered whether he was indeed "too prolific". David Foster Wallace asked the now infamous question "Has the SOB ever had one unpublished thought?". He was also exocriated by some for his narcissism and an unnatural fascination with death and sex - "just a penis with a thesaurus". (I wonder how these critics feel about Roth, if these disqualify an author). Wallace captured many of the most prominent criticisms in his article in the Observer from a while back.

Such was the reputation of Updike. He was not the kind of author you would be indifferent to. It was taken as self-evident that if any American author was to be considered for the highest honor, he would be one of the top two people you think about. And he wrote enough to give the Nobel committee something to consider every year - and then some! Which is what makes this a most shame-faced confession - I haven't read any of his books. Always meant to, but I let some of the criticisms get to me. And I am ashamed of it. So I make myself a promise today - I will read some of his works before this year is out. Maybe one of the earlier ones - Rabbit, Run or Witches of Eastwick.

Rest in peace, John Updike.

A tour de force ... I think

I have not read Drown, the much acclaimed collection of short stories which was Junot Diaz's first book. So when I started reading his (Pulitzer prize winning) first novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it is fair to say that I was not quite prepared for the assault that is Diaz's writing style.

I read somewhere once that 'language is the liquid we are all dissolved in'. Not quite pithy and poetic, but you get the point. The language someone uses in their writing is probably the best window we have into the world they inhabit (or the world they want to immerse us into). The world that Junot Diaz presents here is so different from the one I inhabit, that it might as well have been another planet. But here's the thing - I could feel in my bones that this world is much the America of today as my own sedentary suburban existence. It is a world that is completely, almost unbelievably, dark, and yet is vividly, starkly real.

On surface, Oscar Wao is the story of three generations of a family from the Dominican Republic, the youngest of whom is Oscar Wao, the tragically overweight nerd living in a New Jersey ghetto. This is the Dominican Republic during the brutal 1930-1961 reign of 'dictator-for-life' Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. In the first of many footnotes in the book - Really? Footnotes? In a novel? Just one of the many ways Diaz shows in his writing that he doesn't care about conventional writing conventions - Diaz gives us the quick bography of the dictator whose presence is going to haunt the rest of the book, though he actually appears only once. 'Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DR's political, cultural, social and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, rape, co-optation and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master. ... He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our once-and-future dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful, that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.'

The other constant presence is the book is something equally outlandishly magical - a fuku, a curse that haunts one's family 'for the seventh generation and beyond'. And the most powerful fuku is released when you cross Trujillo. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shuttles back and forth between three fuku-doomed generations of the de Leon family, between Santo Domingo and New Jersey. And through multiple narrative voices, we slowly learn of the fuku that hovers over the family, and of the tragedy that befalls everyone touched by it.

One of the great things about Oscar Wao is that it is almost impossible to categorize into any particular genre. The most I could say is that this is super-contemporary fiction, but anything more precise severely limits the soaring prose that is Oscar Wao.

Ah, the prose! America is a land of many tongues ... and here we see the high octane, shotgun tongue of the Dominican in Jersey. If you get goosebumps when you come face to face with a powerful new sub-culture revealed by an accent or a dialect, this is the book for you. Think The Clockwork Orange, only replace the Russian with Spanish. The language took me on a wild, rollercoaster ride, and when it was all said and done, I felt rattled, and gasping for air.

Which brings me to the one problem I had with the book. Oscar Wao is unapologetically bilingual. And I don't mean a few Spanish words thrown into the mix of an Engligh narrative. Neither do I mean a few pieces of dialogue in Spanish that are followed by an Engligh explanation of what the characters said. I am talking full-blown bilingual here. Large parts of the narrative are in Spanish, and Diaz makes no attempt to 'make it easy' on his English-only audience. I whole-heartedly admired his ability to remain true to his characters, and his refusal to compromise on his language. But here's the thing - my Spanish sucks! For the first half of the book, I found myself reading with Google Translator open on my computer right next to me. But there is only so much reading you can do with an open laptop next to you. So that fell by the wayside somewhere along the way. So when I closed the final page of the book, I felt like I had just sat through what seemed like a historically great movie ... only it was in 3D, and someone forgot to give me the glasses!

Looking good by doing good

You know the feeling where once you become aware of something, you suddenly see that something everywhere you look? I have been having a bit of that for the last few weeks.

Some days back, I added a post on Dan Ariely's book 'Predictably Irrational'. In the post I wondered whether there were other popular (as opposed to technical) books or articles written on this subject. Since then, friends have pointed out multiple articles that talk to this subject. Reading the Economist last week, I found an article where another one of Dan Ariely's fascinating experiments is discussed.

The question Ariely is dealing with here is a question of motivation - why are people happy to do some things for free but would not do them if they were to be paid? There is a great experiment testing this, which the article walks us through. The generic point that Ariely draws is that some activities (like charity) are taken up purely for the social 'points' they earn us. Call it reputation, admiration, character, image, stature, whatever. People are happy to do these things as long as they get some visible enhancement in their reputation. They continue to operate under 'social norms'. However, try to pay these people to do the same thing, and their mindset immediately shifts to the framework of 'market norms'. They start asking themselves the question "is this worth my time?".

There are many implications of this insight. Most directly, trying to provide monetary incentives to people to do charitable work is likely to be not just ineffective, but actually counter-productive. People would end up doing less charity work. Applying a monetary fine for not completing college assignments is likely to increase the rate of incomplete assignments, rather than decrease them. Fascniating, don't you think?

A tryst with destiny

As we all get ready for Jan 20th, the big literary question around the inauguration is: What will Barack Obama say? As Jon Favreau and team write up the speech that will likely be etched into history, they will have a lot of sources for inspiration. And given their track record through the campaign, I am looking forward to a memorable speech that will put an exclamation mark on a history making event.

As speculation about the content and tone of the speech reaches fever pitch, it appears that every Western speech worth its name has been unearthed and analyzed to death. But the speech I most recognize as an emphatic historical marker is not often talked about. To me, and probably to most Indians alive, that historical landmark is the speech delivered by independent India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at midnight on the 14-15th of August 1947, on the eve of India's independence from the British.

So on the eve of another great moment of our times, here is remembering that great orator, Nehru. Here is 'A tryst with destiny' -

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell. The appointed day has come-the day appointed by destiny-and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about.

It is a fateful moment for us in India, A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materializes. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed! We rejoice in that freedom,

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action.

To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. Jai Hind.

You had me at "Hello"

I started reading something recently that I imagined would be extremely interesting. After the first few pages, I could see how it might turn out to be something great, but wasn't just yet. That got me thinking about books that have gripped me from the very first lines uttered by the author. The opening lines that have had the most impact on me.

Of course, when one talks of opening lines, there are some timeless classics that have been done to death. Take for instance -

Anna Karenina
Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

1984
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

[Go here for a list of the 100 best first lines of novels as voted by American Book Review]

These are all brilliant lines. But if I were to be really honest and think of the first lines I have personally enjoyed the most, these wouldn't make my favourites, except maybe the 1984 one. Here are three 'first lines' or 'first paragraphs' that I have found most unbelievably impactful:


#3: Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.


#2: Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Dr.Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: At night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds.

... and the opening lines I have most enjoyed over years of reading ...


#1: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Doesn't fail to bring a smile to my face the hundredth time I read it!

Your favorites, fellow ape-descendants?

Predictably Irrational: Dan Ariely

Taste of Chicago is an annual event that claims to be the world's largest annual open air food festival. When I went there in the summer of 2008, a local restaurant was giving away free slices of cheesecake to everyone attending. No surprise, the lines to get free cheesecake were excruciatingly long. When my wife and I joined the line, we couldn't see the actual stall with the cheesecake. That's how far back we were. After waiting for a little while, I asked my wife this: If I were to offer you $2 to go stand in a wait line for me for 25 minutes, would you do it? She looked at me like I was crazy to think she would be interested in a deal like that. Yet, here we were, taking exactly that deal, and feeling great about it!

Traditional economics is built on the premise that economic players act rationally. They know what something is worth to them, and will take whatever actions are necessary and rational to maximize their happiness, or 'utility'. Behavioral economics has no such illusions about us humans. As Dan Ariely says in this phenomenal book, "we are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational bejaviors are neither random nor senseles - they are systematic and predictable." Predictably Irrational is a convincing case to back up this claim.

Dan Ariely is a professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT. He is a prolific publisher of research in this field, if the bibliography is anything to go by. He is also - and this is what makes Predictably Irrational the great book that it is - a sharp, insightful and more than slightly mischievous, experimenter. Ariely picks 10-12 different ways humans make what might be called 'irrational' economic decisions. He performs tens (maybe hundreds) of carefully designed scientific experiments to test the different hypothesis around these, and describes his results and their implications in a chapter for each 'irrationality'.

There are some truly intriguing insights here into the fallibility of human decision making. Sample these -

- When a restaurant adds a really expensive wine to their wine list, their total $ sales go up, even if no one buys this expensive wine. (Ariely calls this the 'decoy effect').

- If you were to get your mom-in-law a gift for hosting a nice Thanksgiving dinner, you would be a hit. But if you were to try to pay her that same amount of money as cash, you have probably broken the relationship for ever. (Ariely calls this the conflict of 'social norms' vs 'market norms')

- FREE! is not just another price point. When a snack stand sells Hershey's Kisses for 1cent and Lindt Truffles for 15 cents, customers prefer the Lindt over the Hersheys 3:1. Now give the Kisses for FREE! and the Lindt for 14 cents, and the demand doesn't just change marginally. It flips to the Hersheys 3:1! (Forget all the stuff about demand and supply as a function of price!)

... and there are tens more where these come from. The most joyful parts of Predictably Irrational are the ones describing Ariely's experiments. They often start with testing a potential irrationality that you think "I am sure this happens ... why do you need an experiment to figure that out?" Ariely performs that experiment, proves that indeed we act in that irrational way and then (here is where he gets really interesting) designs a series of follow-up experiments to see how far that irrationality stretches.

In some cases, the best part is figuring out how one would even design an experiment to get at a hypothesis. For instance, Ariely makes the assertion that when we operate under passion (anger, frustration, sexual arousal), we often make decisions contrary to what we confidently predict in our calm state. Now, how do you create an experiment that tests this assertion? Ariely does create such an experiment, and it is fun to read about.

While the experiments are the best part of the book, I am not sure I was totally sold on Ariely's synthesis of the implications of such irrational behaviors. On some questions, his implications make sense. But in others, like the chapter on social vs market norms, I was left unconvinced that there was a clear 'so what' coming out of these insights. The sub-title of the book boldly states 'The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions'. I don't believe the book comes anywhere close to unearthing such 'Hidden Forces'.

That said, this is as good an introduction to Behavioral Economics as I could have dreamed of. To me, it made the case convincingly that inspite of the Bard's proclamations to the contrary, man is in fact 'not noble in reason, not infinite in faculty and is rather weak in apprehension'. With such whetting of the appetite, the question I have is, where are the other popular books on Behavioral Economics? Know of any?

Drop in the ocean

Every once in a while, a business book comes along with an insight so fundamental that it enters the everyday popular culture of business-speak. Think of The Tipping Point for example. Or Random Walk Down Wall Street. Or (much as I hate to admit it) The Black Swan. A recent book in this category is Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. "The future of business is selling less of more" claims the sub-title of the book. And it provides numerous mind-bending examples of how there are so many more movies, music and books that only a few people in the world are consuming, and how there is a market to serve each of those super-niche markets, using technologies that are now commonplace.

All of which is interesting, but not what I really want to talk about. The thing I really want to talk about is a statistic in The Long Tail that got stuck in my head. Anderson informs us that there are approximately 200,000 books written every year in the English language. 200,000!

I started wondering, how much can a man who is not a professional book reviewer or talent scout or publisher really read in a lifetime?

Let us say you are an active reader with a regular job, a family and some life beyond books. How much could you read every day on an average over long periods of time? 20 pages, 30? 50 (if you are a particularly fast reader)? Say on an average, books are 200-250 pages long. So you could probably read a book every 4-12 days. Of course, if you exclusively read chick-lit, or thrillers or 'page-turners', you could probably do more ... but then, why would you want to? 4-12 days a book. Or about 30-90 books a year. If one has this average for every year of one's life between the ages 20 and 65, this really active reader might end up reading 1300-4000 books. Let us say that the 'book universe' one could choose from is the universe of all books published in the 75 years surrounding their lifetime. That makes a total of 15 million books to choose from. Think about that. 15 Million!!

So in your entire lifetime, even if you are a very active reader, you are likely going to read only about 0.01-0.03% of all books you could read. So - here is a piece of Brick and Rope advice. Don't read any odd piece of trash you can lay your hands on. Be super-selective about what you read. Too many books, too little life!

In defense of 2008

Wasn't it considered bad form to speak ill of the dead? Somehow, where the defenseless year 2008 is concerned, no one seems to mind the lack of good manners. I mean, the poor year has barely taken its last breath, and a relentless chorus of 'good riddance' and 'you were the worst ever' is reverberating wherever you look. OK, so the stock market lost 40%, house prices lost 30%, and the economy lost a couple of million jobs. Makes a pretty compelling case for the 'good riddance' chorus.

However, 2008 was less terrible on some fronts. Hollywood, for instance, had some success. Two films released this year - The Dark Knight and WALL.E - achieved instant classic status and climbed into IMDB's top 50 films of all time. Compare this to 2007 with no entries to IMDB's 50 best, the highest ranked release being No Country for Old Men at 92.

And then there is the book world, the subject of this Brick and Rope post. 2008 was by all accounts a great year in books. Here then, is a partial list of books I most enjoyed in the year past. In no particular order -

1. The Post-American world: If there is a more clear-sighted global affairs journalist than Fareed Zakaria, I haven't come across him. The Post-American World is a brilliant exposition of how the world order is changing, how important new economies (particularly China and India) are arriving on the big stage, and how America should modify its policies and 'purpose' to continue its leadership role in the international arena. To all those who worry about this being yet another ideologically driven, 'America is going to the dogs' treatise, the best bottom-line is the very first sentence of the book - "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else".

2. Complications - A surgeon's notes on an imperfect science: This is a book first published in 2003. But I never came across it all these years. Early in 2008, I came across Better - A surgeon's notes on performance, which is Atul Gawande's most recent book. I started reading it and was stunned by the quality of the writing, by the sensitivity and raw honesty of the author. So I went back to his first book, which makes my top 5 best books I read this past year. Gawande is a doctor unafraid to admit that he is human. He is a doctor whose love of his job and sincerity and empathy towards his patients is transparent. He is a doctor with a phenomenal talent for writing. Complications will leave you breathless.

3. The God Delusion: Richard Dawkins is familiar hero to atheists around the world. He is also a familiar foe and lightning rod for orthodox religious (primarily Christian) establishments. As a practicing believer, it is not entirely easy for me to list The God Delusion (released in paperback in early 2008) here. But it is impossible to ignore the power of scientific and logical arguments that Dawkins proposes in this book of epic scope, in making his case for "Why there almost certainly is no God", as one of the chapters in the book is titled. Dawkins is one of the better known evolutionary biologists in the world and is a professor at Oxford. His understanding of evolutionary science, theist history and arguments, and conventional questions against atheism is all on display here. Whether you get convinced one way or the other is beside the point. Whether each individual argument that Dawkins puts forth is equally bullet-proof is beside the point. What cannot be denied is that The God Delusion is as important a contribution to The Big Question as has been made in many years, if ever.

4. Unaccustomed Earth: Eight little short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri form this delicious book. I loved The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, and had very high expectations from Unaccustomed Earth. Happily, the book easily met all those expectations, and is probably my favorite Jhumpa Lahiri book now. Lahiri is a master of tales of the immigrant experience. In her elegant, polished way, she directs here unflinching eye at the emotional lives of her central characters. As always, she has a great handle on emotional nuance and every melancholy tale in this book left me wanting to embrace the central characters and say 'I understand'.

5. Big Bang - The origin of the Universe: Again, an older book that I was introduced to this year. Simon Singh has written some extremely readable works on mathematics and science. Fermat's Theorem and The Code Book are as thrilling and entertaining as they are illuminating. I was hesitant to start Big Bang because I didn't feel like there was going to be anything that I hadn't already read in many other books before. And that is somewhat true. There isn't anything actually 'new' here that other popular science books haven't covered in recent times. What makes Big Bang truly exceptional is Simon Singh's ability to take diverse developments in science over the last few centuries and put them together in a coherent sequence. He makes the development of prevalent scientific consensus on the origins of the universe seem like a thrilling mystery. If there is only one book on modern physics you want to read, let this be the one.