This time in Bangalore I spent a lot of time in bookstores (Not just time, notes my wife, but lots of money and baggage weight that could have been used to bring back foodstuff). On one such occasion when I was scanning shelves marked ‘Penquin Books’ at Gangarams, I found a title that lit my eyes up: Arundhati Roy’s In which Annie gives it those ones : The original screenplay.

I picked it from the shelf and began to read from the blurb:

In 1988, Arundhati Roy wrote the story and screenplay for In which Annie gives it those ones, a low-budget production produced and directed by Pradip Krishnen. The film had almost no big names, and was shown just once on national television in a late night slot, when few people saw it. Despite this it acquired near cult status, especially among young English-speaking urban Indians.

I had watched it that night on Doordarshan. My memory of the movie was sketchy, but I remembered enjoying it thoroughly. Next day at school – I was in 10th std then – a few of us got together and talked about the movie: we laughed recollecting the student who arrived on a chauffeur driven two-wheeler; we loved the nickname ‘Yamdoot’ and wondered why we hadn’t been so creative in naming our teachers; we talked endlessly about the “kissing scene in the elevator” and wondered how such a pretty girl (Arundhati Roy) could kiss someone so hairy and unkempt. Some of us even decided to apply to the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture; the subject of the course mattered little as long as one studied with girls who wore sleeveless tops and were willing to kiss in elevators.

The book also contained crisp black & white photos of stills from the movie. A collector’s item, I thought, as I added yet another book to the pile I was carrying.

The script was a funny, entertaining read. It also revealed that even at that time Arundhati had a fiercely political bent of mind that made its presence felt in whatever she wrote. Radha, her character in this movie, tells her examiners during her presentation of the final thesis:

“… So in the way he designs these institutions… these symbols, the architect-engineer is telling the non-citizen to ‘keep out’, ‘stay out of here’, ‘this does not belong to you’… It’s a way of establishing territory… like animals… Bears leave scratch marks on trees, tigers have a spray, a mixture of urine and scent gland which says ‘This is my territory’. In human beings this urine and scent gland is replaced by the architect, who establishes territory by manipulating the built environment…”

She clarifies this further in her foreword to the book:

It was as a student of architecture that I began to see that in India we have citizens and ‘non-citizens’, those who matter and those who don’t. Those who are visible and those who are not. Those who are included in our planners’ plans and those who are reflexively excluded from them. It was as a student of architecture that I began to ask questions of my mediocre professors about why I was being brainwashed into becoming yet another mediocre manufacturer of concrete boxes who unquestioningly served the interests of the privileged. It was there that I began to try and understand the endless conflict between power and powerlessness – the conflict that is the central preoccupation of much of my work now.

Reading this, it becomes clear that the seeds of activism were sown quite early in her life. Another aspect the script reveals (through the character of Radha) is her non-conformist, rebellious nature. For her final thesis, she comes dressed in “a bright purple cotton saree, a bright pink blouse, a trilby on her head, a bright pink bindi and spectacles.” When an examiner asks if this is “some type of a new fashion”, she replies “No… I’m just trying to stand out in the crowd.”

The final moments of the movie reveal the conflicts and uncertainties that are passing through her mind:

“Yamdoot was right about this whole guilt thing. I mean you eat and you know guys are starving. You dress and you know guys are walking around nanga. You speak a language that 90 per cent of your country doesn’t understand. Talk about it and you feel like a pseud… at least I feel like a pseud… I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to write about it, don’t want to go to seminars about it, and I definitely don’t want to build. So what the hell do I do?”

“So what the hell do I do?” She decided to write, which was fine until she wrote The God of Small Things. But after that, her writing took a different turn altogether. More on that topic some other day.

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms…”

You have probably come across these lines by Richard Feynman. Now assuming we had the luxury of sending across not one sentence but one book to the next generation of creatures, which one would you choose? My vote would fall upon John L. Casti’s Paradigms lost. Its value – in the context of this enterprise – lies in addressing important issues about which we do not have conclusive answers yet: origins of life, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, human capacity for language, and genetic basis for human behaviour. Each of these six topics merits a book in itself, but Casti does a great job of condensing these diverse and controversial subjects within a single volume while covering the different sides of each story in the form of a jury trial, before finally playing judge and pronouncing his verdict.

I first learnt about this book about a decade back, and I’ve kept coming back to it from time to time. Each chapter can be read independently, and that makes it managable in parts. Currently I’m reading the chapter on the unique ability of humans to communicate using language (and the theories surrounding this capacity, with Noam Chomsky dominating the initial pages). I hope to discuss – in the coming days or weeks – this topic in greater detail.

One of the best quotes I’ve seen so far on the art of writing is one I found quoted in John D. Barrow’s The Universe That Discovered Itself. Among the quotes at the beginning of this book is one from Mary Heaton Vorse :

The art of writing is the art of applying

the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Well, it is precisely the kind of advice a person like me needs. I should hang this up in every corner of my house.

When I entered the American library in Heidelberg this morning, I saw a stack of books on a stand that had a label stuck on it which read “Topic of the month : War & the Middle East”. This was a new practice – there had not been any ‘topics of the month’ earlier – and it was clearly welcome since it brought under one shelf books relating to a specific theme, but not necessarily pertaining to a specific category in the library. ( I wonder if library search catalogues offer methods to search the title database along such orthogonal directions ).

I recognized a few titles I had seen earlier in the library. Most others were new, and one among these was a book by Bernard Lewis, an author whose books on the Middle East I had come across before. This book was about a change, and looked into what brought about the change. The change the book talked about was the decline of the Islamic empire from the heights it had reached in the medieval ages, from the perspective of the impact western civilizations ( armies, societies and cultures ) had upon the Middle East.

The preface of the book contained the following text :

“This book was already in page proof when the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington took place on September 11 2001. It does not therefore deal with them, nor with their immediate causes and after-effects. It is however related to these attacks, examining not what happened and what followed, but what went before – the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them.”

I picked up the title “What went wrong ( Western impact and Middle Eastern response )”. It now appears on the Currently Reading list.

Some days ago I was lying in bed reading J.K.Rowling’s biography by Sean Smith, while my wife was trying to catch my attention – something that is next to impossible when I have my nose sticking between the pages of an interesting book.

After a few unsuccessful nudges, she exclaimed : “Voyeur !”

“What ?” I didn’t quite understand her.

“I said you’re a Voyeur.”

“What did I do now ?!”

“Well, you don’t pay attention to your wife, and instead involve yourself in the pursuit of knowing the details of another woman’s life.” she replied, plainly.

My initial reaction was laughter. I had never heard anyone equate the pursuit of reading a biography to voyeurism, and it seemed rather amusing to do so. My wife, however, was not amused at all. I kept the book aside, for the time being at least….

Much later, I thought about that seemingly innocuous statement again. There was an interest in knowing the personal details of another person’s life, yes, and I realized that this had always been the case with the people whom I admired. Richard Feynman, J.Krishnamurti, M.K.Gandhi, S.Ramanujam and Garry Kasparov were some people whose biographies ( or autobiographies ) that I could recollect reading. The statement struck home more in the case of J.K.Rowling, since she had resented the large amount of public attention and interest in her personal life that her phenomenal success had generated, and it resulted her in withdrawing into a shell.

It seemed to me that it was debatable whether such an interest in the personal affairs of another human being was tantamount to an intellectual type of voyeurism. One could not, as I did earlier, dismiss it lightly ( it had indirectly lead to the death of Princess Diana ), and one could not take it too seriously either ( there is a lot to be learned from the lives of others ). What was needed was a balance between curiosity and obsession. Easier said than done, clearly.

The book itself turned out to be an engrossing read ( and I could not find anything which the celebrity author would possibly object to ). It is not as authoritative and fascinating as a good biography should be, but it is still the best single source we have yet about J.K.Rowling – I would recommend it to anyone who loves Harry Potter and has some desire to get to know the person behind the creation of the world of Magic and Muggles.

Well, here’s Yet Another Blog On The Block.

Po Bronson’s next book was released recently – “What should I do with my life ?”. I got to know about Bronson when I picked up one of his earlier books “The Nudist on the late shift and other tales of the silicon valley” sometime in mid 2000. My journal entry – a personal one, not a weblog then – records some initial impressions of that book :

2nd July 2000

I picked the book because the title looked catchy, and it gave the impression that the book was more anecdotal rather than filled with analysis of how things in the silicon valley are or should be or will be in xyz years. And I was not disappointed.

As mentioned in one of the blurbs, Po Bronson does not get judgmental in the book. He puts forward facts the way he sees it, period. There are no long winding analysis and theories, so there is little one can fault him with.

Bronson is at his best when he focuses on a single person. There are a few chapters like that ( where he talks about Sabeer Bhatia the entrepreneur or Hillis the computer scientist….)…

He begins with a problem most people have with the Silicon Valley : the lack of any physical entity which one can associate with the valley. When people come to the valley after hearing so much about it, they are disappointed since there is nothing that signifies the “valley” – it is just another place with its offices and homes. To get a feel of the valley, you have do what Bronson does : meet and talk to people working in different capacities in the valley.

This is the first of Bronson’s work that I have encountered, and I find his method interesting : he arranges for meetings with people working in the valley – programmers, salesmen, entrepreneurs, writers etc – and follows the thread of that part of their lives which has got something to do with the silicon valley ( which, in most cases, is almost their entire lives : there is little else in life these people seem to do ). He meets the same people from time to time and follows up their story. Thus, in the “Newcomers” we get to meet a few newcomers to the valley – few of whom are struggling to establish themselves; in the “Programmers” we are taken into the lives of a few freelance programmers working on a game project; in the “Entrepreneur” we get to meet Sabeer Bhatia, the man behind “HotMail”……

The new book is much more ambitious in scope – Bronson is no longer confined to the Silicon Valley. His method in the new book seems to be similar to the one outlined above : he has spoken to around 900 people all over the US and chosen a few of them to spend more time with for his “case studies”. But the new book is unlikely to have that one characteristic I found pleasing about his previous book : a non-judgmental treatment of his subjects.

The topic addresses a very fundamental question, and a very important one too, for the times we live in. The timing is clearly important for such a book to be relevant – one cannot imagine such a book being of much relevance in the last century, simply because there were not enough choices available for the common man to think about what to do with one’s life. So that is a crucial – and probably unstated – assumption in the book : asking ourselves what we want to do with our lives must rely on the assumption that we do have different alternatives to choose from ( or to create ).

For the audience it addresses – educated people all over the world ? – the assumption mostly holds true today, so for all practical purposes it is not a limiting factor. What could prove to be a limiting factor – and this is only a guess, since I have not yet read the book – is the fact that Bronson’s subjects are mostly Americans. It would be interesting to see to what extent the experience of people living in the US prove to be representative of the issues confronting people asking a similar question in other societies which are very different – culturally, socially and economically – from the US.

I’ve read an extract from the book, and ordered it from Amazon. I’m looking forward to encountering the familiar brown package at my doorstep ( Amazon’s packages are too big for my small postbox ).