Tagged "bookreview"

I learnt long ago that throwing data at people doesn’t change their opinions. After reading this book, I’m inclined to think that I might have been wrong. I wish I could carry around several hardbound editions of this book and throw them at anyone who says or does anything sexist. A well-aimed hardback to the bridge of the nose could work magic.

And it would count as throwing data, too. Of the 400 pages of this book, 70 are just the endnotes. Every other chapter has almost a hundred references. It’s an insanely well researched book about the pervasive gender data gap (not the gender gap).

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My company uses an e-HRM system. The system is why my colleagues and I never forget to wish each other on birthdays and anniversaries. Systems like these save us from the embarrassment of appearing indifferent. Other systems like smartphones ensure that the most halfhearted birthday greeting appears sincere and colourful. All you have to do is type “Happy” and the autocomplete does the rest - it composes the shortest message needed to show how much you care. It will even recommend the right emojis - because whole words need too much reading, we can surely be more efficient. We’ve got a “Happy Birthday” greeting down to about three taps on a touchscreen. One system precipitates this behaviour with automated emails, and other systems propagate it. The greatest gift of social media is avoiding social interaction without looking like a misanthrope - it is no wonder that social media has swallowed whole an entire generation. If we’ve built and nurtured systems that make automatons out of humans, and others that reduce social interaction to taps and clicks and swipes, we probably deserve it.

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This book invokes two very different reactions in me. The primary reaction is jubilant, almost romantic. The second is gloomy. Imagine you’re watching Oppenheimer: spirits rising until the point the bombs actually drop, after which you feel guilty about having felt good in the first place.

The Great Trigonometric Survey was completed over the duration of a better part of a century, across three generations of mathematicians, physicists and surveyors (they were called compasswallahs - I finally see where Rohit Gupta gets his pseudonym), and at the cost of thousands of lives. They managed to complete an accurate-to-the-inch survey of much of the subcontinent. The Great Trigonometric Survey afforded to the Raj a much welcome administrative and military efficiency over the whole subcontinent. It is perhaps only a coincidence that the events of 1857 happened only a few years after the conclusion of the survey. But it’s very likely that the Survey was among the many things that irritated Indians. And the results of the Survey certainly played no small part in quelling of the Rebellion.

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I went into this essay expecting Virginia Woolf had written about what the eponymous room is like - its design and contents. But she deals with a more fundamental issue - that one needs a room of one’s own.

The essays are a fine piece of scholarship. I’d never have thought that Woolf’s characteristic device, the “stream of consciousness” could be used to not only as a writing technique, but also as a powerful pedagogical technique.

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This book is a good refresher on Cal Newport’s central thesis which shows up in both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but with email as the central device. The same essential theorem, but a lot of new stories to go with it as corollaries. Of course, it’s not email technology that the book contests, but the hyperactive hive-mind that are enabled by people’s email habits.

But here’s the only thing I want to leave a note of: I was mildly annoyed by Newport’s invocation (or perhaps, misappropriation) of Claude Shannon’s information theory. He gives four “principles” for a world without email, the third of which he calls The Protocol Principle, which is as follows:

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It’s the end of 2020, and when you’ve been stuck at home for a year, with only your dog as your constant companion, Travels with Charley is a good book to read.

But this book is a lot more about Steinbeck’s road trip than about the dog.

Steinbeck romanticises everything. If so much as a tree sheds a leaf in front of him, he bursts forth with pages of ideas, thoughts and memories. Scholars have mentioned that Travels with Charley is clearly not non-fiction. And Steinbeck himself doesn’t pretend that it is non-fiction. They say he knew he was dying, and was hit with an irresistible wanderlust. With almost everything he encounters - places, people and politics alike - he stresses that these were memories that were uniquely his. And he admits that any of his opinions could be cancelled out by a single counterpoint - and of those, as many could be found as there are travellers. He never took any notes. He let mulled his memories of the road trip over well before he wrote the book.

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The original Marathi edition of Baluta has captivating cover art. It shows a sketch of a crow perched on the rim of an earthen pot, dropping pebbles in the pot, but completely oblivious to the glaring crack running down the pot. I remember that image from a copy lying in one corner of a bookshelf, but I was too young then to be interested. To me, this was just a sign of the artist trying to convey a sense of irony.

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I was first introduced to William Dalrymple in Michael Wood’s documentary, The Story of India. I watched it nearly eight years ago. The scene was shot in a Kali temple where devotees had gathered on the eve of Holi. Dalrymple is explaining what Holi means to Hindus, looking at a spot slightly off-camera. The timing of his narration is such that as soon as he finishes talking, the nearly hundred devotees in the temple throw up their hands and started dancing to chants of “Jai Mata Di” and “Holi hai”. Dalrymple then proceeds to tie a handkerchief around his head and disappears into the crowd, walking towards the shrine of Kali, just as the screen bursts with gulal. This, he does with a dexterity that a seasoned Indian, even one accustomed to crowded temples, would find hard to match.

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In Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, Steinbeck wrote that reading books is like driving a wedge in your life. The larger the wedge, the harder it is for parts to come together once the wedge is removed. The longer the book, the harder it is to close the mental gap around it. Steinbeck wrote this for East of Eden - his magnum opus. Surprisingly, this happens even with Steinbeck’s much shorter books.

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There are stories you know well but you never really read well. Captain Flint (the man and the parrot), Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver and Billy Bones, the Old Sea Dog are immortal characters, without a touch of age upon them or their story. Treasure Island was perhaps the first classic I actually skimmed through many times in my childhood. I didn’t read it in earnest until now, and I did that because the final season of Black Sails is about to end.

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I have a pretty good Steinbeck collection, but this wasn’t a book I was going to read anytime soon. But I recently came across the movie adaptation and decided that other Steinbeck titles could wait. James Franco and John Steinbeck is a very attractive combination.

First of all, this book is not about communism. The eponymous battle is not a battle of the classes. It’s more of a battle men fight with themselves. The Communist Party is just a minor device in the plot. A much bigger and apparent device is collectivism. After all, in East of Eden, Steinbeck has defended passionately the creative spirit of the individual mind, so a collectivist is perhaps the last thing he’d be.

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I can’t think of a single fantasy character that would be Neil Gaiman. I’m tempted to think that he’s like Santa Claus, but he’s not the sort who’d care if someone was being naughty. He’s not Dumbledore or Gandalf either - he’d rather be your friend than your mentor. He’s not even the Dream of the Endless, since he’s not aware of how powerful he is.

Reading Gaiman’s nonfiction is like meditation that clears and even expands your mind. It’s like a cool refreshing drink after a long day of rigour (I read The View From the Cheap Seats after the underwheling chore of reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). This book is satisfying and disquieting at the same time. You will discover a lot more to read, and at the same time, reading Gaiman has a normalizing effect on whatever you have read. I think Gaiman has unwittingly achieved a standardization of literature that ought to be widely adopted. The book is scattered with dreamy encounters with giants like Stephen King and Terry Pratchett (among many more), punctuated with brutal shocks that he felt about the Syrain refugee crisis or Charlie Hedbo, grounded by his account of the bauble of the Oscars. What he doesn’t deal in is mediocrity and trivia.

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