Category: Favourites

  • Coromandel

    Charles Allen

    For once, I’d judge the book by its cover, because the multiple themes, the detailing and the overall quaint, charming imagery are a good representation of what the book will deliver. While the title of the book is an indication of its focus, it actually does more in terms of coverage, and provides a fantastic narrative of South India – historical, social, societal, cultural and political facets. 

    Over a period of time, history becomes stories, then legend, and finally myths. This is the journey that Charles Allen undertakes, and while he smartly calls it a “personal history” to avoid religious minefields, it is a comprehensive and erudite discussion. 

    He begins at the end of the subcontinent – Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari) and traces the tectonic shifts that created the Indian Plate, which we know as the Deccan, and its rock walls on one side – the Western Ghats, with Palakkad providing the only gap until the railways were built in the nineteenth century. The rest of the first chapter provides a good summary of the hunter-gatherer populations that resided in this part of the world in the Mesolithic era. 

    There’s then a detour – to the North and the Harappans. It also contains a clear, scientifically backed commentary of the Aryans, the location of the Saraswati and the connection to the Zoroastrians, the historical account of the Vedas, and the epics – Mahabharata and Ramayana. 

    We then return to “Agastya’s country”, early Tamil literature and the sage himself, who is credited with bringing Sanskrit to the South. The chapter clarifies and rebuts the paradox of him (also) being the person who brought Tamil to the South! This chapter is also interesting because it touches upon the origins of Vishnu and Shiva in mythology. The next few chapters were quite an eye opener for me, because it showed how both Jainism and Buddhism were dominant in the south, including Kerala. To the extent, where even Sabarimala, Ayyappa’s abode, has its origins in Buddhist shrine. Dharmashasta’s devotees chanting Swamiye Saranam Ayyappa seen side by side with Buddham saranam gacchami. Fascinating! It also captures the reasons behind the migration of Jains to the South, whose ranks include the first great emperor of India – Chandragupta Maurya. Speaking of empires, the Chola, Chera and Pandya dynasties were the result of a three way split between brothers who didn’t want to share power. 

    A following chapter throws light on one of the most under-acknowledged dynasties in India, who ruled for almost five centuries – the Satavahanas. Muziris finds a mention too, as the primary trading port for Romans. In other international voyages, we find Bodhidharma, the South Indian monk who exported Mahayana Buddhism to China – which became Chan and finally in Japan, Zen. But contrary to pop culture, Shaolin kung fu wasn’t something he introduced to China. 

    “Juggernaut” covers the origins of Vishnu (including the avatars) and Shiva in greater detail, and is made even more interesting by the suggestion that the lord of Puri was (again) originally a Buddhist shrine. Apparently ‘palli’ was the original term for ‘vihara’ and in Kerala, it became the common term for any non-Hindu place of worship. This section also covers Adi Shankara and his role in resurrecting Hinduism. Chapter 8 finally gets us to the title, which is appropriate from a historical perspective too – its first appearance was only in 16th century maps. That also brings us to Vasco Da Gama’s terrorism, and the slow but steady entry of European powers in the Deccan. The next chapter is a deep dive into Malabar and Kerala in general, and I learned a lot – the origin of the Nambudiris and Kerala’s caste order, the context of Vivekananda calling Kerala an asylum, and that Narayana Guru had a quarrel with Gandhi during the Vaikom satyagraha. The final chapter is named after Tipu, and it also covers the rise of Islam in the South. 
    The endnote is a must read, and shows how nationalist forces have been trying to reshape historical narratives for a while now. It also contains a good perspective on how the cleansing of textbooks in the early 80s and their glossing over of communal clashes actually provided ammunition to those who reverse engineer history to meet their interests. 

    What I really loved is the systematic deconstruction of mythology into its historic components, with an amazing amount of detail. As a person who loves both mythology and history, it was an absolute treat!I am quite miffed at myself for not having read Charles Allen earlier, but plan to rectify that for sure! If you’re interested in history, this is a book I cannot recommend enough.

  • The Mind is Flat

    Nick Chater

    I think the name of the book is a meta play, because the book convinces you of just that -“the mind is flat”. It is also the most convincing case I have read against AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), even while showing why we have had successes in narrow AI. Before you think it’s an AI book, it’s not, it’s about the human mind. We think of our mind having depths that we cannot fathom at this point, consisting of inner motives, beliefs and desires, many of which are unfathomable to us, and that behaviour is just a superficial aspect of it. This book argues that no such depths exist. The mind is flat.

    But what the mind is, is an excellent and immediate improvisor of actions, and beliefs and desires to explain the actions. My mental (re)action was “no way”, even though a part of this was familiar to me thanks to “How Emotions are made”. The author divides his case into two parts – the first part dismantles the perceptions created by classic psychology about beliefs, desires, hopes, and aims to prove that there is no “inner world”, and the second part provides an alternate theory – memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences. 

    What really works is the accessibility of the narrative and how it is structured. It’s never a “believe me because I told you so”. Instead, we are led through a series of visual and thought exercises that question our understanding of reality. Slowly, a shallow world of improvisations are revealed to us. The mind works on “precedents, not principles”, and our emotions are creative acts made by a superb interpreter – our mind. With multiple examples, he shows our capacity to create “meaning” from nothing. Our inventiveness is brought out by the metaphors we live by, which are not always bound by “cold logic”. And that’s why we are able to create AI in areas where solutions are precisely defined. A general AI would require imaginative interpretations, something humans are very good at, but not really able to explain how!

    This does lead to my favourite “free will vs determinism” debate, and once again, the answer is that at any point, despite the determinism that has happened because nature and nurture, we have the freedom to change our mind. But then again, if it is flat, what’s there to change? Or does it contain a coda of traditions and precedents in the form of genes? While we create meaning from nothing, our quest for the depths of the mind is also perhaps a need to find “meaning”. I’ll leave it at that.

  • The Origins of Political Order

    Francis Fukuyama

    Once upon a time, humans moved around in bands. Then there were tribes, and then there were states. States and the societies that make up its population have developed a bunch of institutions (defined as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour”), some of which are uniformly present across the globe, and some not. How did this variation happen?

    Why is every country not a democracy, which is largely accepted as the best trade-off for all concerned? How did different countries reach their current form? That’s what this book is all about – how did different countries develop institutions that currently make up their current society and state?

    (more…)

  • Strange Worlds! Strange Times!

    (edited by) Vinayak Varma

    I think I’ll just gush, because this, I guess, is what the entire “kid in a candy store” feeling is like! But to begin with, I have to confess I didn’t read the first 20 pages! It was quite a coincidence that a book with this title mysteriously arrived without them. That meant that I missed the Manjula Padmanabhan story, and dove haphazardly into the Srinath Perur one. Jerry Pinto made me gaze up at the stars again with a delightfully profound take on “outer space and inner space” – a phrase that Vandana Singh uses in the last story in the book. 

    Zac O’Yeah manages to catch Bluru’s little idiosyncrasies superbly and had me cackling away for quite a while. And then Rashmi Ruth Devadasan does the same to Chennai (?) with a dose of zombies. Vinayak Varma, who needs to be thanked separately for stitching this all up together, does a neat border town story with sniper shots at saffron and creation! 

    And there’s a (translated) J.C Bose story. Oh yes, the very same, and a fascinating back story (actually stories) on how this work came to be. I have never been much into comics (though recently Kavalier & Clay did make me think deeply on the subject) but Sunando C’s few pages of work were fascinating! A walking Taj Mahal, and telekinesis – Indrapramit Das’ imagination is evident. Shalini Srinivasan gives us a dose of reality – a parallel one, that is. And to end it all, Vandana Singh writes a brilliant story involving dimensionality (I was reminded of Liu Cixin’s sophons) 

    What made me love the book was the sheer diversity of texture and context. All the stories have an equal grounding in some part/aspect of India as they do in science/speculative fiction. And it’s almost as if the writers have let themselves go at it in total abandon. Delightful and amazing indeed! 
    P.S. Loved it so much that I sent it to three unsuspecting folks! 

  • Second Hand time

    Svetlana Alexievich

    As I was reading the book, I wished it were fiction. But unfortunately, it’s contemporary history – lives lived by people, and events that impacted their life. To think that millions of lives have been spent in ways that one could not even endure for days – conditions that are not just physically gruelling, but mentally debilitating. Ordinary citizens of the former USSR and current Russia, whose belief systems, values and hopes went through upheavals as the country’s political system experienced two decades of turmoil after the fall of the USSR.

    Different generations whose worldview has been shaped by leaders from Stalin to Putin. Housewives, small traders, ordinary soldiers, students and staunch party workers, no one was really spared as the political, economic and social systems went through multiple changes upending millions of lives. Savings, livelihoods, lives, all lost, thanks to the whims and fancies of the powers that be. At an individual level, relationships with parents, siblings and friends were affected as the state created paranoia. Everyone was a potential informant, after all. 

    The author documents the atrocities of Stalin as told by folks who lived before, during, and after the era. Many acknowledge that the system could not have been this ruthless if there weren’t people to operationalise it. Was it by choice? Between making great history, and leading a banal existence. Many also believe that the Soviet became great because of him, and what he did was justified. Khrushchev opened up the system, and people even started making jokes about Communism (“A communist is someone who’s read Marx, and anti-communist is someone who’s understood him”).

    Brezhnev brought in stability, and some success in foreign policy, but corruption, inefficiency and a widening technological gap with the West was the trade-off. It was hoped that Gorbachev would bring in the “happily ever after”, but glasnost and perestroika didn’t lead to better socialism, it paved the way for capitalism. The dissatisfaction and a foiled coup led to Yeltsin, and the rise of oligarchy. And then came Putin, in whose regime, there are confrontations between different ethnic factions. And at full circle, there are now many voices who hope for a return to Stalinism. 
    In all of this, even as ordinary people suffered hardships, the pride for the purity of thought, and belief in the power of a united country persisted for many. Ideas and idealism stayed alive. But for most others, the only desire was to escape the system. 

    It is quite a brutal read, and I found it depressing, but these are stories that must be told.