Category: Non fiction

  • Arrow of the Blue Skinned God

    Jonah Blank

    If you read the book solely for the connection to mythology, you might come away disappointed. It happened to me for most of the book until I framed it as a travelogue which happened to connect to the Ramayana and its principal characters in quite a few ways. In that frame, barring a couple of questionable occurrences, (“feni in Kerala” made me wonder whether calling Bruce Lee a cricketer was actually sarcasm) it does a wonderfully lucid job.

    The book was published in 1992 and it is always a pleasure to travel in time through books because, to quote the author, it “presents a picture of a certain place at a certain time, as seen by a certain person at a certain stage of his own life”. It is quite an interesting time to read this because 1992 was a landmark year for the powers that govern the country now. I’m referring to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. That’s where this journey starts.

    I think the problem was in my expectations. I thought this would be a linear journey – both in terms of the chronology of the events in the Ramayana, as well as in terms of covering the geography featured in the epic. It doesn’t work that way. While there are definitely quite a few interesting explorations of the geography, the book is more a study on the deep impact that the epic has even today in the life of an Indian. Not just at an individual level, but the societal, cultural, and political aspects as well.  (more…)

  • Travelling In, Travelling Out

    edited by Namita Gokhale

    I haven’t read a travel book in a while, and there couldn’t have been a better book to welcome me back into the genre. I think it was the mention of Mishi Saran, whose Chasing The Monk’s Shadow I really liked, that made me aware of this book.

    What I loved about the book is its exploration of what travel could mean. That takes the book far beyond the standard travelogue writing. Journeys can be of different kinds – the simple physical movement from one place to another, to the exploration of the self within, “thought to thought”, to seeing things in a different light and so on. This book has all that, and more.

    Devdutt Pattanaik sets the tone well with the exploration of the idea of travel seen through the lens of Hindu mythology and civilisation and brings up the concept of parikrama – returning to the point from where we started. Ashok Ferrey throws in a fantastic light touch immediately after that – fortunes changing with time. This humour finds a neat continuation in Marie Brenner’s take on holy India for the 5 star set. The tinge of cynicism is given full throttle in Mayank Austen Soofi’s time travel in Nainital, but balanced beautifully with nostalgia and wistfulness.
    Bulbul Sharma’s journey to the hills is as much a journey within, and it talks of a place that almost stands still in time. This theme resonates in the detailing of Nobgang by Bhutan’s Queen Mother. A darker turn of places where light does not enter is Ipsita Roy Chakraverti’s exploration of the haunted fort of Bhangarh, and her writing forces one to acknowledge the limited understanding of forces unseen. Both MJ Akbar and Rahul Pandita throw light on yet another nuance of places in India that have remained outside of time, and people who continue to be exploited.
    Mishi Saran’s “A House for Mr.Tata” is a poignant tale of a place changing even as its memories remain firm in the minds of those who inhabited it. The closure missing in this is exactly what happens in Urvashi Butalia’s partition based “The Persistence of Memory”. Indeed, some journeys are for exploration, and some others, for closure. (more…)

  • Blockchain : Blueprint for a new economy

    Melanie Swan

    As bitcoin and its ilk start becoming mainstream, I think the book would serve as a good primer for those who would like to learn about the underlying technology – blockchain. It also provides a catalog of existing projects across diverse domains.

    Without doing a lot of technical deep diving, it not only provides an understanding of the concepts and features of blockchain, and highlights the current uses of the technology, but also provides a broad view of the different kinds of applications that could be made possible in the near future.  (more…)

  • Who’s in charge?

    Michael S. Gazzaniga

    Our notion of the mind is a single “me” that consciously acts and reacts on/to stimuli. But a more accurate description would be several modules that work in tandem to define and dictate what we could call the mind/consciousness. A lot of this mind’s activities is dictated by factors that have been built into us by evolution and environment. I had just about been converted to biological determinism and started disbelieving the notion of free will! I think I’ll have to change my mind again!

    While the blurb might seem like a case for determinism, (and thus against ‘free will’) I thought the actual content of the book, especially towards the last third, swing more towards a “we don’t know yet”. The idea of it, though, starts earlier in the book – “Just as traffic emerges from cars, traffic does ultimately constrain cars, so doesn’t the mind constrain the brain that generated it?” (more…)

  • The Gene : An Intimate History

    Siddhartha Mukherjee

    “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” probably best describes this book for me. My understanding of the subject grew manifold after reading this book, but I also realised how little we know!

    Perhaps the one question we all seek an answer to is “Why are we here?”. There probably is no universal answer to that question, as science and religion like to approach it in different ways. Personally, I think that purpose is either just a narrative in hindsight, or a story we build to create meaning in our lives.

    Meanwhile, science has raced ahead of religion in explaining “how are we here?” In terms of the two building blocks that have existed before us – atoms and genes – as well as the influence of the one we created – byte. This book is the story of what the author describes as “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science: the gene, the fundamental unit of heredity, and the basic unit of all biological information.” Indeed, it is the history of this unit – from its presence in a human’s mind as an abstract idea to the human attempts to write and rewrite it – that makes up this book. (more…)