Category: Non fiction

  • The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

    Neha Dixit

    ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ is the kind of book that forces one to look at one’s privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.

    It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless – the people whose desperate toils to survive we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.

    (more…)

  • When we cease to understand the world

    Benjamín Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West)

    When we cease to understand the world is one of the most unique books I’ve read in a while. Though it can broadly be classified as historical fiction, that would fail to capture the essence of the book, because the subject is science, mathematics and the deep mysteries underlying reality. Almost philosophy.

    Featuring real historic figures and events, it could even be non-fiction as it explores the lives and discoveries of scientists and mathematicians who changed the way we understood the world. More interestingly, it also puts focus on the moral consequences of their work, the effect it had on themselves, and the impact it had on the world. Apparently, the scientists and their discoveries are all factual, the personal lives include some fiction.

    (more…)

  • The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It

    Will Storr

    The Status Game had been on the list for a long while before I managed to get to it. Though there were a few perspectives that I had already read about in other books, most notably Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, and to some extent Wanting by Luke Bergis, I found the overall narrative compelling and insightful.

    In The Status Game, Will Storr explores the deep-rooted human drive for status, which has existed since our hunter-gatherer days, and makes a case for how it is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour, and how status-seeking influences everything from our personal health, happiness and identities to cultural and societal structures.

    (more…)

  • Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence

    Sara Imari Walker

    A lot of the books I have read in the recent past have to do with trying to get a working definition of life and/or consciousness. I picked up ‘Life as No One Knows It’ to get more perspectives in that direction, but it gave me something else by shifting the frame. At exactly halfway through the book, there is a line that goes “what will really be alien are examples of life (biological or technological) that have traversed a completely different evolutionary trajectory than we have.” And that’s important because if we keep looking for markers based on life on earth, we may not find it anywhere else in the universe. It’s thus important to find a framework that is agnostic of life as we know it, so that we have a measurable way of recognising and classifying signs of life/intelligence when we come across it.

    (more…)

  • When The Body Says No

    Gabor Maté

    At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“

    “No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”

    (more…)