Category: Books

  • Doppelganger

    Naomi Klein

    Quite eerie that I read this immediately after I read Carol Roth’s “You will own nothing”. Here’s why. Doppelganger’s starting premise is how the author (Naomi Klein) gets confused for Naomi Wolf, both being ‘white Jewish women’, increasingly helped by the overlap in the subjects they comment on. The former is a left-leaning writer and social activist while the latter is a third wave feminist who turned from centre-left to becoming a right wing conspiracist. It is fascinating how Roth’s views largely align with Klein (Davos, Big Tech) but also agree with Wolf in others (Canadian truckers, for instance)

    In her new avatar, Wolf’s argument – with a full endorsement from none other than Steven Bannon (once Trump’s chief strategist) – during Covid was that vaccines and public health measures were a conspiracy by a global cabal to sterilise, and in general, undermine the constitution. People increasingly began believing that these were Klein’s views. At one point, after it goes beyond being just a joke, Klein decides to dive into the rabbit hole of the universe that Wolf inhabits – the Mirror World is how Klein describes it.

    While this is where the book starts, and also spends pages drawing out the different worldviews, approaches etc, the narrative then expands its scope to cover the title – Doppelgangers – in general. Not just at an individual level but a societal level. For instance, today the simplistic left vs right categorisation is almost devoid of meaning. Even the horseshoe theory of left and right being similar the extremes isn’t nuanced enough. With big tech, Covid lockdowns, and a plethora of social media influencers, most people have very little trust in anything mainstream media, or what politicians say or do. The difference is only in their own perspectives of who is lying and for what. Wolf and Klein, for example, agree on Bill Gates being a force for evil. While the former goes on about tracking people, the latter is against how he sided with big drug company patents on life-saving Covid medicines.

    Klein decodes how issues remain the same but how Bannon & Co spin it to stoke common underlying tensions and use it to further their agenda. For example, blue collar workers who felt betrayed by Democrats when the latter signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures, Bannon pitched Trump as a radically different Republican who promised to make the rich pay. This modus operandi was an echo of what I had read in Peter Pomerantsev’s ‘This is not propaganda’, in which he pointed out how Trump and his ilk could create coalitions of people who agreed on some topics, while the left/liberals would argue on the tiniest of nuances. There is a name for the former – diagonalism.

    There is also an interesting section on how our personal brands are our doppelgangers – what happens to our self when we create for social media? What is real, and what is for camera? “Which of our opinions is genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? Which collaborations don’t happen that should because individual brands are pitted against one another?” What doesn’t ever get said, or shared, because it’s off-brand?” What does it do to our capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation?

    The focus on doppelgangers allows Klein to apply it to diverse contexts – wellness influencers who became anti-vaccine propagandists, parents of autistic children (and their belief that this was something that had to be cured instead of accepting the child and its unique ways), to Nazis (and the fascinating view that European colonists had been on genocide sprees long before Hitler, and that it was only the scale and more importantly, that it happened in Europe that shocked the West into retaliating; also how the Australian Aborigines League saw this coming way back in 1938 and wrote a protest letter against persecution and handed it to the German Consulate) to Israel (and how the Palestinians had become the victims’ victims).

    Towards the end of the book, the narrative switches back to personal, with lovely anecdotes on how Klein was originally inspired by Wolf, and also how today, with Wolf uttering all sorts of things in public, Klein believes she is freed from her own public self and how it’s an “unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego”.

    This is a fascinating read which prompts us to look within ourselves and at the society we inhabit, forcing us to acknowledge the doppelganger within us at both levels.

    Quotes
    “Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic” ~ Maureen Dowd

    “The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimise our selves, our bodies, and our kids” Naomi Klein

    “In the Mirror World, they… rile up anger about the Davos elites, At Big Tech and Big Pharma – but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about ant-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants and Jews.” Naomi Klein

    Doppelganger

  • You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back

    Carol Roth

    Carol Roth does a great job of using the title to shock the reader, but once you read the book, you might agree that it is justified. It was at the World Economic Forum that she first heard the prediction that in less than a decade, private ownership would be dead. The book is her research on “You will own nothing and be happy“.

    She calls this a war where three kinds of forces – government and government-related forces, elite power-grabbers and bad actors, and Big Tech are colluding to ensure that they remain on top for the new financial order that will come up. Owning wealth and power.

    She begins with how frontline forces who risked their lives during the pandemic were punished, their livelihoods taken away, for non-compliance with a vaccine mandate. Moving quickly from social acceptance to social credit. Judged by public approval than a court of law. In China, they have already gone quite deep into the Social Credit System, where you’re watched and rewarded (red list)/penalised (black list).

    She uses the history of empires to show the cycles of rise and fall, and how war is usually a catalyst for change and a new financial order. The US began its ascent after WW2, and according to Roth (and data), we are now seeing a decline in the US financial system, which is likely to lead to a shift in power, and or economic and geopolitical chaos. And if we go by GoT, “Chaos is a ladder”.

    She also discusses Peter Thiel’s framework of how good ideas cause bad outcomes through a believers (idea)- racketeers (ROI) – Useful Idiots (ROE, e for ego). Think of climate change and read it as genuine activists – ESG sellers – regular people pandering to their desire for validation and ego by sharing posts/emojis/slogans without really understanding the discourse.

    The next chapters expand on the debasing of the dollar (some insightful charts on its decreasing purchasing power) and the huge concerns on turning it digital – CBDC (central bank digital currency) and how it can be used against the common person’s rights and freedoms. This allows a neat segue into Big Tech and how they have made us dependent, and infringed on our basic rights. Think of getting locked out of mail, social media, payments etc with no easy means of recourse. Most of us don’t really own anything digitally, it’s all on a company’s servers. They would serve as great allies of the government, possibly even overshadowing them with their technical superiority. Wars are almost more cyber than real, after all.

    She then does a deep dive on the various power and money grab mechanisms already underway. ESG, (thanks BlackRock!) for instance, played a crucial role in tanking Sri Lanka’s economy. The increasingly unattainable home ownership in US thanks to corporations, who are helped by cheap capital enabled by the Fed, competing against the common man for real estate. And city administrations who are happy to go along with AirBnB because they pay taxes. Add to this billionaires like Gates and institutions like Harvard (enabled by endowments) buying up farmland, including things like water rights. Now think about it, why wouldn’t private investors start moving water to say, nearest cities, because they think it’s the most efficient use of water?

    Another example is the crazy cost of education and the increasing lack of ROI, thereby creating a population that is always in debt. And guess who’s the one providing these loans – the government! And despite their ‘loan forgiveness’, ultimately it’s the taxpayer footing the bill! A transfer of money from the working class to the college-educated class.

    The final chapter is on how the common man (in the US context) can fight back against all this. While the context is the US, the ideology of capitalism and the alliance of government-corporations-BigTech is a global phenomenon, soon coming to a country near you.

    What was super insightful to me is the nuance of arguments. I had broadly supported the vaccine mandate, Biden, and was not fond of Joe Rogan, but I was forced to think deeply on all this. This is a fantastic read, and I absolutely recommend it.

    Quotes
    “When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves”
    ‘We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office’ ~ Aesop

    You Will Own Nothing

  • The Lost Pianos of Siberia

    Sophy Roberts

    In the epilogue of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophy Roberts quotes Fyodor Tyutchev – “You cannot fathom Russia with the mind… You can only believe in it.” Once you really pay attention to the map and figure that it has Finland and Ukraine on its western borders and China and Japan in the south/east, it is easy to nod in agreement. For a lark, I tried to calculate the distance/time taken from Moscow to Vladivostok, and gave up on any dreams – 7 days, 7 time zones, 30 cities and almost 10000km!

    Sophy Roberts’ Siberian journey is the hunt for a piano for her friend Odgerel in Mongolia, but for a reader if offers far more – a fantastic trip through time and space in one of the remotest parts of the world. The book is divided into three portions – 1762-1917 (from Catherine’s the Great’s ascension to the February revolution when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was taken to Siberia with his family), 1917-1991 (when the Soviet became the Russian federation) and 1991 – present. We see the region not just through the political changes, but primarily through the lens of music and culture. In fact, the music remains the constant.

    Siberia is 1/11th of the world’s landmass, with the Urals, the Pacific, the Arctic Circle and Mongolia serving as its borders. The Tsars made it a penal colony early on, and it played host to a variety of famous folks – politicians to writers to artists. But it was also home to pianos, starting from the nineteenth century, thanks to Catherine the Great’s penchant for collecting new technologies. Chasing these lost pianos, we go across Siberia from Tobolsk and Irkutsk and Tomsk to Sakhalin, Harbin (now in China, but with a very Russian past), the Dead Road (one of Stalin’s crazy projects where the track was being built in temperatures 50 degrees below zero and where people’s hair froze on to their neighbour’s skin when they slept close for warmth), Kolyma, Akademgorodok and Kamchatka, Kurils and Khabarovsk. Names on a map, but now rich in my mind with character.

    But what makes this all come to life are the people and their poignant stories. A family that retreated into the Siberian taiga in 1945 , living in total isolation in the Sayan Mountains, until someone discovered them in the 70s. They only possessed a spinning wheel and a bible and refused to believe the moon landing. Dmitri Girev, who had accompanied Robert Scott to the South Pole. The ordinary yet moving story of Lidiya in Duė Post, where the infamous coal mines used to be. Anatoly Lunacharsky whose efforts made sure pianos weren’t completely lost during the Revolution, the last days of the Romanov dynasty, the 2500 year old Ukok princess’ mummy in the Atlai mountains.

    Leonid Kalsohin, an Aeroflot navigator who gave up that life to settle in a remote village called Ust-Koksa, where he is trying to build a concert hall. “The world is very remote. We are at the centre“, he says with a twinkle in his eye. The stunning concert during the Leningrad siege, when people braved the cold and the enemy fire just for the music. The Lomatchenko family in Novosibirisk, whose room in the basement of the Opera House contained musical treasures (‘It’s not much“, said Igor, ‘but it is my life.’) Mary, the 80-year-old birder, whom Sophy meets on a cruise to Commander Islands (‘neither of us had come for the certainties, but for the outside possibility that a little marvel might appear‘).

    You don’t need to enjoy music to love The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Because this is about places and people, who even in this hyperconnected world are outside the radar of most of us. Sophy Roberts’ prose is vivid and deeply moving, and takes us on a fantastic tour of a unique part of the world.

    The Lost Pianos of Siberia

  • #Bibliofiles : 2024 favourites

    Bibliofiles 2024

    In 2024, the mind seemed to be obsessed with the mind and the reality it perceives, and that’s a good thing because I was able to take a shot at some synthesis on why I am the way I am. When you see the books, you’ll know why/how. And so, as per tradition – from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 – we have this year’s list of ten (plus a few extras 🙈). From the 63 books I read in 2024…

    (more…)

  • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

    Paul Millerd

    I have to admit a little bias here – I started my own journey only a few months ago, and a bunch of things that Paul Millerd has written about in The Pathless Path resonates very well and mimics the thoughts and paths that I have experienced recently. I also share some of his influences in terms of thinkers – Erich Fromm, David Graeber – both of who have had a lot to say about the human condition in the context of work.

    The book is divided into two very broad sections. The first, with six chapters, focuses on the default path. The default is what most of the world does – predictable incomes, predictable lives, “life’s existential fears are traded for certainty”. Paul also quotes Keynes – “it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” And it provides prestige, which as Paul Graham says, is “a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.” However the story is cracking. “You work hard, but get laid off anyway. You have the perfect life on paper, but no time to enjoy it. You retire with millions in the bank, but no idea what to do with your time.”

    He introduces us to his own journey from the default to the pathless across his academic and professional lives, how he figured out the hacks to grow fast, his health crisis, and how he then started thinking about his life and work differently.

    At this point, he goes back in history to understand where our current beliefs and structure about work came from, how work took the space religion vacated, and how the larger narrative of defining and judging people by their profession became a part of culture. He then continues to take us through his own struggles in the default path as values clashed and the lure subsided, but the pressure of making a living continued. He stresses how moving to the pathless path is not a simple story of sudden glory, but rather a series of experiments, deliberate changes, and iterative learning towards a journey that fulfils the self.

    In the second section – the pathless path, the focus is on how one can reimagine one’s life, and address the many barriers that a part of our self comes up with to discourage us – narratives around (lack of) money, creativity, to name the most common ones. He also notes the importance of finding one’s tribe, and designing work in such a way that you love it. His perspective is that ultimately what we want is to be useful to others. In the final chapter, he writes about a couple of things I have spent a lot of time thinking about – the abundance mindset, and playing the long game. Both have the potential to radically change the way one interacts with the world at large.

    From what I understand, Paul went off the default in his 30s, so this is not a midlife crisis-management book. Rather, it’s for anyone who has that little ‘pebble in the shoe’ which tells them that there is a better way of living, and working. The pathless path is exactly that – it is deeply personal, a blueprint doesn’t really exist – you have to arrive at your version yourself. It’s uncomfortable, uncertain, and a movement away from conformity. But you’ll know when the shift happens, and when it does, it’s quite liberating. As per Andrew Taggart, crisis moments lead to “existential openings” which forces us to deal with existential questions. These could be of two kinds – a “way of loss” (loved ones, health job) or a “way of wonderment” (moments of undeniable awe and inspiration). But you don’t necessarily need to wait. It’s never too early, or late.

    Notes
    1. People who face crises often experience ‘post-traumatic’ growth and this manifests as “an appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life”
    2. “But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness.” ~ Pema Chödrön
    3. Uncertain discomfort < certain discomfort + coping mechanism. Given sufficient coping strategies, people will be willing to tolerate consistent levels of misery for long stretches of time.
    4. Tim Ferriss “fear setting” reflection – what is the change, what are the worst possible outcomes, how can you mitigate them, possible steps/actions to get back to where you are now, what are the benefits, what are the costs of inaction 3/12/months few years
    5. “Misery tax” – the spending an unhappy worker allocates to things that “keep you going and keep you functioning in the job”. e.g. alcohol, expensive food and vacations (Thomas J. Bevan)
    6.”Belief clings, but faith lets go” ~ Alan Watts
    7. There is a kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits or skills. In some domains like sports, this works. In the business world, talent is harder to assess, and we tend to use proxies like credentials to determine quality and prestige.
    8. “The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability” ~ Seth Godin
    9. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté” ~ Krista Tippett

    The Pathless Path