Author: manuscrypts

  • Happiness: The End

    A while ago, in Happiness and Compassion, I had written about what Fahadh Fasil described as the biggest lesson he learnt from failure – he said it made him decide that he would only do things that made him happy. The more I read, the more I think, and the more I live, the more I start relating to what Fahadh is doing, and what Aristotle said, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” Everything else – fame, power, money, compassion, detachment etc – is probably just the means we create.

    The thing though is, even if happiness were indeed the purpose, I can see at least a couple of challenges. In this excellent read “10 truths you will learn before you find happiness“, the first point is “It is impossible for anyone else to define YOU”. This echoed my first challenge – a difficulty in defining what happiness is to me. At the next level, I felt that the paths to happiness are confusing and have many things going against them. For instance, fame – “..other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.” (Schopenhauer) Or compassion/pity (not kindness, which I regard as a more active expression, though the following might apply to it as well) – “There is a certain indelicacy and intrusiveness in pity; ‘visiting the sick’ is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbour’s helplessness” (Nietzsche) As you can see, it isn’t difficult to bring each down.

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  • Mumbai Noir

    edited by Altaf Tyrewala

    14 stories, divided into 3 sections, edited by Altaf Tyrewala, that’s Mumbai Noir. A completely different version of the city from the usual grandiose, glamorous ones that most fictional works create, it definitely lives up to the title.

    For some reason, I saw more of Bombay in this than the current Mumbai – in terms of the city’s character and how the actions of various people across different stations in life helped create it. Altaf’s introduction sets up the overall tone and feel of the book pretty well, and sensitises us to the stories ahead.

    In the first section – Bomb-ay – Riaz Mulla’s take on how ordinary hard working people become pawns in the machinations of global terrorism is an excellent start. Paromita Vohra’s mix of internet and real life ‘romance’ and trust makes ‘The Romantic Customer’ a neat read. Devashish Makhija’s ‘By Two’ is quite surreal and tragic, and Abbas Tyrewala’s “Chachu at Dusk” has to be a contender for my favourite among the stories. It captures the transition from Bombay to Mumbai the best.

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  • Napoli Bistro

    First published in Bangalore Mirror

    After the World Cup, a bite of Italian could mean a lot of things, but in HSR Layout, there aren’t really a lot many options. That probably explains the crowd on a Saturday night at Napoli Bistro. ( Having said that, HSR continues to surprise me each time with its growth spurts!) Street parking and a flight of stairs take you to a well-lit floor with views to the busy 27th Main road. (map) The faux brick wall, the framed art and the functional, elegant furniture all add a semblance of character to the place. We got there just in time before the place filled up. The menu is all Italian and seemingly extensive.

    There is no dearth of starter options – soup, appetisers and a host of salads – though there is a clear skew towards vegetarian. On a chilly Bangalore night, a soup is a great way to begin a meal, and that’s exactly what we did. The description doesn’t offer a lot of explanation and simply states ‘Non Veg’. The risk turned out to be worth it and we got a delicious, creamy yellow soup (pumpkin was the guess, but turned out to be carrot) with chicken sausage slices. The Napoli Pesto was a tasty dish too – toasted bread with a tasteful signature pesto. The Chicken Quesadilla – standard tortillas stuffed with diced chicken – wasn’t really the best we have had. Quite savourless and a bit too greasy.

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  • Natural Law

    After a couple of years of Samsung, I bought a Moto X (2nd gen) phone, the Droid Turbo and Nexus 6 also being considerations. In the first few days of use, the automation that Moto’s Assist, Actions and Voice allows has impressed upon me the potential of such technologies and the dependency we could have on them.  As Karen Landis states in the Pew Internet Project’s Killer Apps in the Gigabit Age, “Implants and wearables will replace tools we carry or purchase…It will also redefine what a ‘thought’ is, as we won’t ‘think’ unassisted.”

    It reminded me of an article I’d read in Vanity Fair titled ‘The Human Factor“, and a particular observation in it – To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. This thought is elaborated in ‘Automation Makes Us Dumb‘, drawing the difference between two design philosophies – “technology – centred automation” and “human- centred automation”. The former is dominant now and if one were to extrapolate this , a scary thought emerges.

    I think the best articulation of that scary thought is by George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines – “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.” I had seen this in Bill Joy’s amazing 2000 Wired article “Why the Future doesn’t need us“, which itself discusses the idea that Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species. (more…)

  • The Other Side of Light

    Mishi Saran

    I completely loved Mishi Saran’s earlier work “Chasing the Monk’s Shadow”, an inner journey as much as an actual one. In some ways I could associate it a little with Asha’s journey in ‘The Other Side of Light’, a work of fiction. The blurb says she has written short stories earlier, but I have to wonder whether this contains autobiographical elements, like many first time works of fiction do. (just a thought)

    The book is written in flashback mode as we get the current status of Asha’s life in the first few pages. We follow Asha’s life right from the time she was born – with a harelip. Childhood is zoomed through but college is an important part of the story – friendships and first love and the camera that, in many ways, defines Asha’s life later. The narrative is fairly linear, with Asha’s friends, love interests, parents and teacher playing important roles. History and events pop up every once in a while in the background and it’s almost as though the protagonist and the nation are being moulded by their experiences in parallel. (more…)