Category: Books

  • The Rules of Civility

    Amor Towles

    “For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise — that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.” That last bit, that’s how I feel about some books. This is one those, just like “A Gentleman in Moscow”. I have to admit a bias because that book is among my all-time favourites. 

    In the preface, we meet Katey Kontent (originally a Russian immigrant Katya), who, in an exhibition in 1966, sees the photograph of an old acquaintance Tinker Grey. It catches him underweight, with a visibly dirty face, ill shaven, in a threadbare coat. As Katey’s memories come flooding back, she decides to leave, but catches another photo of Tinker at the exit – clean shaven, in a custom-made shirt and a cashmere coat. The second was from year before the first, prompting Katey’s husband Val to say “riches to rags”. “Not exactly” is Katey’s response, because in the first, Tinker’s eyes were bright and he had the slightest hint of a smile on his lips. And that sets the stage for a wonderful ride that starts on the last night on 1937, one Katey met Tinker for the first time. 

    The photographs remind Katey not just of Tinker, but a mix of people who would play important roles in her life – Wallace Wolcott, Dicky Vanderwhile, Anne Grandyn, and her best friend at that time – Evelyn Ross. And then there is New York, or specifically Manhattan whose different shades also appear, as Katey’s life changes. Amidst the parties, cocktails, flings and high-heels, there are extremely well-etched characters (some really powerful women among them), all different from each other, and all with moments of deep poignancy. 

    Anything more and I think I’d take way the joy of discovering the layers of the book, and the sharp revelations too. Enjoy the ride. 

  • How will you measure your life?

    Clayton M. Christensen

    Just because the title of the book is a question doesn’t mean that you will get simplistic answers – Clay, James and Karen make that clear on the jacket. But what it does is give a bunch of perspectives on how to frame your personal and professional life and purpose, how to approach the decision-making involved, and how you could think about success and failure.

    The book has three sections and covers a lot of interrelated topics – what motivates us – hygiene and motivators – which are often interpreted wrongly (the opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction), the role of calculated directions and serendipity in the pursuit of the life and career we aspire to, the importance of matching strategy with the decisions you make on your resources – energy, money, time (relationships are a great example), the excellent framing of “job to be done” seen through the perspective of the customer/partner, equipping your children for the future, shaping culture in the family and in an organisation, and the slippery slope of “just this once” in matters of ethics and values. These are all delivered using interesting anecdotes, thus making it a very engaging read. 

    Having said that, the book was written in 2012, when social media was not the phenomenon we see now. I think it is fair to say that its all-pervading influence can be felt in all aspects of our life – from what we aspire for to measurement in terms of Likes and followers! That is not to say that some fundamentals in the book are not relevant it only means that we should (for our own purposes) add that layer when using the frameworks in the book. The other question I am thinking about is whether we should measure at all or just live. 

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CZMe91rlO0L/

  • Caste

    Isabel Wilkerson

    An artificial construction of human value, that deems one group of humans to be superior to another, based on ancestry and immutable traits, and rigidly enforced consciously, and subconsciously. Caste is not new, but surprisingly still a phenomenon in 2021. In the US, race is the visible manifestation of caste. But as the author points out, its underlying infrastructure is caste. That’s why Nazi Germany and India both serve as examples too. And that’s also why Martin Luther King, Jr., despite the initial discomfort, agreed to his introduction in a school in Trivandrum, India, as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America“. Caste is also different from class, which is a measure of one’s standing in society marked by education, income, occupation, and taste, manners etc that flow from the socioeconomic status. This can be acquired, which is not the case with caste.

     Isabel Wilkerson sets up the context – “heat rising all around” – with the 2016 US Presidential elections, and the history of caste, including the arbitrary term “Caucasian” (on the basis of German professor Blumenbach’s favourite skull) that now denotes the white population, and the millennia-old varna system in India. It is interesting to note that while the Americans were considered heroes in World War 2, they had a history of eugenics that the Nazis took a lot of inspiration from for creating their own policies. And it wasn’t just eugenics, they even had tourism based on lynching scenes! It is also interesting that many pro-slavery losers of the Civil War are still celebrated as national heroes. Exactly the opposite has happened in Germany, where there are memorials for those who had suffered most under the Nazis. 

    She then proceeds to the eight pillars of caste – from heritability and endogamy to its enforcement, the cruelty it spawns and the presumption of inherent superiority/inferiority. When caste becomes deeply embedded, its tentacles spread everywhere, and so do its consequences. Any upliftment could be perceived as a threat to the dominant caste. Unfortunately, it also causes stratification in those who are in the bottom rungs, to the extent that many of them willingly role-play to maintain the hierarchy and acceptable forms of behaviour. 

    The election of Obama was a change in the order of things, and while it did give a few years of hope, the backlash has been strong ever since. It not only played a big role in Trump’s win, but also led to even more rigid mindsets and actions by the dominant caste. An interesting point that the author brings up is 2042, when for the first time, the white population in the US will be a minority. What will happen then if the current narrative of caste persists? A world without caste is better for all, even for the dominant caste, as various examples in the book show. The answer is conversations, and creating bonds through common interests. But one has to wonder how that is going to happen in this charged atmosphere that only seems to foster hatred and intolerance. 

  • The Cyberiad

    Stanislaw Lem

    I discovered the book thanks to an online post that extolled Lem at the cost of my favourites like Asimov. The book was written in Polish in 1965 and translated in 1974. The introduction provides great context to the author, his work, and his relationship with his peers, especially the Americans. He was rebuffed by them, and apparently Philip K. Dick even contacted the FBI claiming Lem was a Communist agent. 

    The book is a collection of Lem’s stories most of them involving two constructors – Trurl and Klapaucius, who come up with things like “a machine that can create anything in the world, provided it starts with the latter ‘n’”. Now what happens if you tell it to create nothing? It’s definitely not by doing “nothing”. But I’ll let you read the story and find out. 

    One of my other favourites was a story within a story. In Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines – there is a character called Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph. One of his essays is The Evolution of Reason as a Two-cycle Phenomenon – a fascinating theory of how Automata and Albuminids create each other back and forth across eternity. 

    The stories, characters and expressions all actually sound quite silly (might remind you HGTG), though I enjoyed the play of words, which point to the intelligence beyond. But it’s when you scratch the surface and think about the underlying ideas and philosophy that you discover the genius of the author. They are deep and profound – sometimes a commentary on the society and politics of the time, and sometimes on the nature of the universe itself. A completely different take on science fiction from anything else I have read in the domain. Fascinating stuff. 

    P.S. A special note of appreciation for the translator, and you’ll know why after you read the verses and use of the English language. It cannot have been an easy job to reconstruct the ideas and their renditions in a new language.

  • Station Eleven

    Emily St. John Mandel

    Disclaimer: I have not really seen/read a lot of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic content, so pardon the n00b reactions. Contains some spoilers.

    When a famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage while performing King Lear, the world does not realise that it is the last celebrity news that it will hear. Because Arthur Leander is only a side note in the larger drama playing out – unknown to those watching the play and many outside, the Georgia Flu is on its way to wiping out 99% of the world’s population. 

    The reason I liked this book that its narrative captures the impact at three levels, at least to some degree – individual, community, and civilisation. The pandemic systematically takes out the infrastructure of civilisation, and we see it play out through the experiences of different characters – predictably, the super markets get raided first, and people try to escape the city (though no one knows where to) even as traffic pileups extend for miles. The book is self aware – “Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies.” The world might have systems, but systems are after all, manned by people. The television networks go silent, internet access goes, and then the era of electricity is over. Days become weeks become years. 

    In Year 20, Kirsten, a child actor who was in Leander’s King Lear, is a performer in the Travelling Symphony, a band of actors and musicians who roam the land entertaining the communities that have sprung up in the post-apocalyptic world. Their motto – “Survival is insufficient,” borrowed from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Kirsten owns a few comics from a limited-edition hand-drawn series called Station Eleven. The creator is Miranda, who in turn is linked to Jeevan, a paparazzo turned paramedic. 

    And then there’s the airport. This made me stop and reflect. Imagine, you’re on/coming back from a vacation/business trip, your flight gets rerouted, and you land at an unfamiliar airport. First, you treat it as an inconvenience, then a temporary aberration, a story that you can tell friends, and then, after a few days, you realise you are permanently grounded, there is no going back. And finally, a community begins to form. And in that community is a curator who begins to collect the vestiges of a lost era – mobile phones, gaming consoles, credit cards. The very things that make up the mundaneness of our current life. This was almost visceral, and after 2020, an absolute possibility. 

    The narrative switches back and forth, in time, and among characters, zooming in on details that bring out characters and their varied experiences before and after the pandemic. In the flashbacks, we see the span of Arthur’s life – from obscurity to fame to the realisation of a life slipping away. We also see Clark’s view of Arthur’s life, as his closest friend, how it changed over time, and how Clark finds purpose after the pandemic. Clark was my favourite character, I could relate a lot. Kirsten has vague memories of a different world, and specific memories of her own past – she is part of a bridge generation between those who knew a life before the pandemic and those who didn’t. In all of these, there is nostalgia, memory, a yearning for the past, and the grief over its loss. It affects different generations differently – “The more you remember, the more you’ve lost“, because the longing for something you have experienced already hurts more. We go from Sartre’s “Hell is other people” to Mandel’s “Hell is the absence of the people you long for“. 

    I found it a poignant read, probably because of a life stage, and the specific time we are living through. 

    Station Eleven Emily St.John Mandel