NOON TIDE TOLL: The blood flowing in the veins of Sri Lanka

What happens to a nation when a war that has raged on for thirty years comes to a full stop? What do people do with the sudden silence, the blank peace? What happens to a place that has been wiped out by a tsunami? What do people do with the ‘clean’ open spaces? Romesh Gunasekara takes you on a ride aboard a van across the north and south of Sri Lanka, picking up tales, dreams and heartache in the wake of events that make lives collapse.

Noon Tide Toll reads almost like a collection of short stories, strung together by the voice of Vasantha, the van-driver who carries people of all colours and shapes across the country to their respective destinations. The book is divided into two sections—North and South—and begins with ‘Full Tank’, ending with precision at ‘Running on Empty’. The chapters have curious, beckoning titles that echo in your mind as you finish one after another… ‘Deadhouse’, ‘Scrap’, ‘Roadkill’, ‘Ramparts’, ‘Turtle’, ‘Humbug’…

Every single story carries a wealth of meaning and an ocean of emotion. More appropriately, a mutli-hued universe of emotion. The characters are as varied as a Chinese delegation looking for ‘economic avenues’ and their young translator; a priest and an acolyte-who’s-really-a-reporter hunting down a war-criminal, a soldier who has killed his sweetheart’s brother in the war and his haunted by the act forever, a nightwatchman who is ‘lucky’ because he survived the tsunami…even as all twenty-two members of his family perished. You can’t really choose your favorite section from the book, because every one of them will linger on in your mind like a distant, unforgettable aroma.

However, I’ll be a bit partial and point to ‘Scrap’ as the one that astonishes the most, with descriptions that you’d scarcely ever read, much less ever see. It is the ‘scrap’ that the Chinese executives are interested in, which is really whole fields full of confiscated vehicles from the LTTE. “If architecture is said to be frozen music, then what was before us was frozen pandemonium. Cars, vans, lorries, cycles, scooters, every kind of vehicle jumbled up and abandoned in creeks and ditches”…. “It seemed as though the transport of a nation has been gathered here and turned to scrap.”

The chapter ends with a scene at the beach, at a wrecked ship captured by the Tigers earlier; but the most astonishing image is that of a pop-video being filmed in the foreground. That’s Gunasekara’s metaphor for you; the future being created on the rubble of the past. How the scrap of the past gets recycled into a shiny future.  But, and this is the little voice that runs through each of the chapters, asking the nagging question: can the past really be erased? As Vasantha asks himself, can there really be a clean slate? Can you really, like Dr Ponnampalam who returns to his country—after almost half a century—with his son Mahen, reconcile yourself and create life anew amid the ruins of the old?

These are questions that he leaves for you to answer. Neither despondent nor overly hopeful, Vasantha is a man who reflects and observes, and has a hundred questions he wants to ask…questions that Gunasekara waves as reflection points for his reader. His pen moves in simple, serene strokes. With a steady, silent rhythm like a van’s moving wheels, the story is like an actual roadtrip for you, steadily swaying from side to side as you take in what the road has to offer.

Gunasekara chooses to end with hope. Mr Van Man, bring me a dream….

TOMS RIVER: The small town that drank poisoned water

How would you feel if you were told that the water you’ve been drinking every day for several decades contains toxic waste from a nearby factory? And how would you feel when you’re told that this was known by the companies in question but nobody bothered? And then, how would you feel if a child in your family is born with brain cancer because his mother drank the water while she was pregnant? This, in short, is the outline of the skeleton that tumbles out of the closet in New Jersey’s small town of Toms River.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner is a book that needs no other recommendation. But even so, a book like Toms River is a treasured possession nonpareil. On the face of it, it’s the story of one town’s battle for answers—answers to why the dreaded tentacles of cancer were enveloping its children at a starkly alarming rate; a battle against toxic dumpers and apathetic state agencies. But this isn’t the story of one town. It’s the story of the world we are living in, it’s a story that is much more chilling than any supernatural horror tale or gory serial-killer saga, because it’s the kind of slow, invisible horror that could attack anyone anywhere.

This is amazingly in-depth investigative journalism by Dan Fagin, which traces almost the entire evolution of cancer research and the case-study of clusters to correlate the causes, along with the sixty year saga of polluting of a town’s river, soil, air and groundwater by callous industrial behemoths —Ciba Geigy and Union Carbide— who refused to comply with state regulations or build waste-treatment plants because those things would incur huge costs and eat into their profits. That the cost of these profits would be borne by children getting blood, brain and spinal cancers was a point that didn’t seem to matter.

Among the industrial ‘villains’ that feature, Union Carbide is a name that Indians can never forget – for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book highlights the very tragic reality that under cover of providing ‘mass employment’ and ‘economic growth’, industrial giants are allowed to get away—literally—with murder.

Fagin hits you in the gut with the tons upon tons of stomach-churning details, but never a dull page would you find. Every line is worth poring over, because Fagin’s astonishing writing prowess alternates so superbly between the emotional, the medical and the criminal. Every chapter is replete with facts and research yet has the quality of a fast-flowing page turner.

But sadly, unlike a regular thriller, there is no retribution at the end. The families battle it out, waiting for scientists to establish that the companies’ pollution did indeed lead to their children’s suffering. But statistical tools and scientific research prove inadequate and whatever little progress is made is outshouted by lobbying and business clout.

There were, of course, victories: like the clean-up operation which treated ‘343,000 cubic yards of soil’—“enough to cover twenty seven football fields with six feet of tainted dirt”, the charging of Ciba at various counts and the “the largest legal settlement in the annals of toxic dumping.” Yet, the feeling at the end is that of rage and helplessness. 

You read the book with eyes popping out and mouth contorted, wondering how much of this could be happening in the place you call your own. Particularly when time and again, the book says that dye-making operations—complete with killer gases and carcinogenic wastes—have moved to Asia on account of cheaper labour. It ends, in fact, with exactly the same happening in South China. You and I have reason to shudder, especially when the blackened Toms River reminds you of the scarred Yamuna frothing sickly at the mouth…

This is a book that simply must be read, if only to shake us out of our ‘growth-induced’ stupor.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears – Nelson Mandela

Fear is one of the strongest emotions—in both humans and animals. One of the greatest motivating factors for the decisions that we make is fear. Fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of being rejected by society, fear of losing out in the race, fear of losing your loved ones.

And then there is the fear triggered by an immediate danger, which is so overwhelming that your body secretes alarm pheromones in the sweat. Animals, of course, have long been known to have the ability to ‘smell fear’. From a purely scientific standpoint, though, what they smell are the ‘fear’ pheromones.

For a long time, it was a matter of speculation whether humans can smell fear, but a team of researchers at Stony Brook University in New York showed through experiments that people cannot just smell the pheromones secreted during fear, in fact the emotion can be ‘contagious’. The team taped absorbent pads to the armpits of 20 novice skydivers - 11 men and nine women - on their first tandem jump. The pads soaked up sweat before they leapt from the plane and as they fell. This sweat was transferred to nebulisers and volunteers for the brain scanner (who were not told about the experiment) were asked to inhale it. The results, as published in New Scientist magazine, showed that the volunteers' amygdala and hypothalamus - brain regions associated with fear - were more active in people who breathed in the "fear" sweat. 

The research was, in fact, funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency - the Pentagon's military research wing—which fuelled speculation that they were trying to isolate the fear pheromone for use in warfare; to induce terror in enemy troops. 

Even without the research, it’s not difficult to see that fear is indeed contagious. Rumours of impending doom are known to travel like wild fire: a case in point was the widespread fear of the year 2012 because the Mayan Calendar ended right there. It takes very little to spread panic— even without pheromone-tactics.

In fact, the difference between animal and human brains can make fear a potentially deadly emotion for us. Because of the greater complexity of our brains, the fight-or-flight response initiated under threat can cause the brain to misfire—causing us to be in perennial defense mode. That is, we would be imagining threats and dangers all around us, forever feeling insecure, which becomes extreme in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.  But even ‘normal’ people have a tendency to fret too much about potential threats and situations that may or may not arise.

Perhaps that’s what Mandela meant when he exhorted us to base our decisions on hope, not fear. It isn’t that we must give up being rational or prudent, or not evaluate the risks of our decisions. It doesn’t mean you skip that seatbelt because you hope you’d never be in an accident. Simply put, it means envisioning the things we’d like to see transformed to reality, and consciously taking initiative towards them. It means filling our minds with positivity for the future. That way, we wouldn’t be falling prey to the constant tendency to imagine the worst. We also wouldn’t be losing out on opportunities that we missed due to fear of a bad outcome.  Coming from a man who led an entire nation towards their hopes, you have good reason to apply it. 

The Mouse Charmers: stories of the pioneers of digital enterprise in India

From snake-charmers to mouse-charmers: that’s how Anuradha Goyal sees the evolution of brand India in her digital-entrepreneurship based work The Mouse Charmers. Goyal, who earlier co-authored CII’s India Innovates Series, has produced a masterpiece on what she explores and elaborates best: business innovation. The book is essentially a case-by-case exploration of some of India’s best and most popular online businesses—and encompasses everything from their origins and modes-of-operation to their revenue models and technologies involved.  

She has clubbed the digital innovators into three distinct categories: commerce, content and connectors—based on the purpose that they serve. The commerce category stars some of India’s biggest online businesses: Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, CaratLane and BigBasket, while the content category features names like Zomato, ImagesBazaar, Games2Win and Chai with Lakshmi. The connectors mentioned are Shaadi, RangDe, CommonFloor and IndiBlogger. Enterprises such as RedBus and Edewcate receive brief descriptions, too. There’s also a separate chapter devoted to the entire ecosystem that makes it all happen at the speed of a click.

Goyal’s research is thorough and detailed. She finds out how high-end e-tailers like CaratLane sell precious stones online, how they manage the now ubiquitous Cash-on-Delivery option, and how they even provide upto 5 options to be selected for trial at home. On the other hand, she also finds out how online grocery store BigBasket fulfills orders for perishable food-stuff whose quality simply cannot be ascertained by the user online. BigBasket is particularly a very intriguing study, simply because of the nature of products that it sells. How they maintain the inventory of different types of produce with different types of shelf-life— from packaged FMCG goods to fresh fruit and vegetables, how they manage their procurement and logistics and the kind of customer service they deliver makes for engrossing reading. The author recounts an experience that perfectly illustrates the personal touch: she had to reject an order of bananas because they were too ripe for consumption. A credit note was issued to her account, but what’s more, the local service manager sent her another bunch at no cost. When she enquired, he said, “Ma’m you wanted bananas today and though I may have returned your money, your need is not fulfilled. So, I have sent you bananas.” That’s some customer service!

Technology, of course, plays a key role in the interactive user-experience that boosts these portals. The book shows how most of the online enterprises prefer to keep the technology innovations in-house. Most of them tried outsourcing, but, as is the common refrain, the pace of innovation required to keep things simple and business-attracting is possible only with an in-house team. You’d be amazed at the numerous types of customized systems developed to suit each enterprise’s unique nature.

The book hasn’t focused only on the retailers, though. The challenges faced by content sellers such as Zomato and Games2Win are well documented. You’d be interested to know how the former ensures authentic reviews for your palate, for instance, or how the latter created Indianised games, one of which features our Prime Minister and how they actually wrote to the PM’s office to try it!

Goyal picks some very interesting cases of social-impact entrepreneurship, too, such as RangDe, which picks up from Mohd Yunus of Grameen Bank fame, providing microfinance through crowdsourcing. Their amusing and extremely creative campaigns are a great feature: World Cup Fever where you could make whacky pledges on cricket outcomes and win a prize or the Mother’s Day Campaign where you lent money to mothers for their children’s education and the site send your mother a greeting card mentioning the good work that you are doing!

This is a book offering great insights into the world of online entrepreneurship, and is ideal for those wanting to study it as well as those wanting to create their own space in it. For the rest, it is an intensely satisfying experience to look ‘behind the page’ and involve ourselves more closely with it.

The Mountain of Light: Story of Kohinoor, biggest brightest diamond ever

A drawing of the original, uncut pride of India

The Kohinoor Diamond was one of the most coveted objects in Indian history, its romance and splendour unsurpassed, its form hidden in the mist of swirling tales. The Mountain Of Light by Indu Sundaresan is a history of the path traced by the 186-carat diamond all the way to the crown jewels in England. This is a true historical account, rendered fascinatingly by Sundaresan, who explains in the Afterword what parts of the book are based on real episodes and which ones are the embellishments of her imagination.

The first recorded account of the diamond comes from Mughal Emperor Babur, who received the stone from an Indian Raja. From there it moved to Persia and Afghanistan, where the name Koh-i-noor was bestowed upon it by Nadir Shah. Our story begins with Shah Shuja, deposed King of Persia, in a wrestling match with his companion Ibrahim, in the Shalimar Gardens, where they are living as “guests” of Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab. Ranjit Singh has been promised the Kohinoor by Wafa Begam, wife of Shah Shuja, in return for the Shah’s freedom from imprisonment in Kashmir. How Ranjit Singh extracts the diamond from this woman of supreme intelligence is a tale that immediately charms the reader into the story. Ranjit Singh is the man who breaks the curse of the Kohinoor—that only a woman could safely possess it; no man could hold it and keep his kingdom. This man kept the Kohinoor for thirty years, and kept the British at bay, too. With his death came the annexation and the slow movement of the Mountain across the seas to another woman: the Queen of England.

The Kohinoor, after being recut in Amsterdam

From the first page, Sundaresan transports you far back in time, to fountains in pools with the base strewn with jasper, agate and carnelian “which created a glitter of colours under the water”, a minister with a set of false teeth made from ivory after he lost his own teeth in an attack, tent poles studded with rubies and emeralds and the Koh-i-noor itself—the stone that could feed the entire world for a day.

Sundaresan’s writing gives you the feel of watching an epic movie, so visual is its quality. From the British encampment fashioned in the style of Ain-e-Akbari to the scene of the Governor General and his sister stuck on an elephant that refuses to budge from the river even as it sprays them with water, every line flows fluidly. The emotions are refined with the same elegant hand, every chapter carrying a different set of characters and a different tug at the heart. In the latter half, the book changes scene and moves to England, with Dalip Singh, Ranjit’s son—who is in the care of the Logins and has accepted Christianity, being showered with a multitude of titles and favours by the Queen. In the end, though, rejected as a suitor for an English girl, he bitterly realizes that even though he’s Indian royalty, he’s “not good enough for a young British woman of little fortune and no pretensions to nobility.”

In the crown of the Queen of England

Although Sundaresan does not pepper the book with patriotism, objectively showing both sides, the darkness of colonialism and its deceitfulness is on full display. The Kohinoor, which is the connecting thread of the various fragments, reflects the fortunes of India’s royalty. At the very end, the Queen has the diamond recut and when Dalip holds it again, it’s been reduced to 106 carats from 186. “It is weightless upon my hand, its heft cut away…this is not a mountain anymore but a mere bump in the horizon…it isn’t the Kohinoor diamond…” So too, of course, the grand royals of India faded into oblivion, devoured by the British empire.

This book is a splendid work of art, a grave tale told with much romance and subtle meaning. You would take a long time to come back to reality.

An Aerial Perspective

When you are up above the rest of the world, flying in the sky in a plane, the world always appears to be a riot of colours on canvas…. Miniatures painted with a free hand. No matter how many times you’ve done it, you never cease to marvel at how gigantic you seem and how tiny everything else becomes—even the tallest, highest, largest landmarks. The perspective lent by height is worth musing about.  

People who attain great heights in life—personal heights of success attained by great effort ; spiritual heights attained by great reflection and resulting action; or mental heights attained by great intellectual observation and exercise—also attain a perspective that sets them apart. They see the world from a birds’ eye view: where everything falls into the larger scheme of things yet every little detail is important and never escapes their eye. They can focus on the entire picture without missing the details, so to speak.

The essence of it lies in being able to enjoy the little things, without losing grasp of the larger reality; of being able to see problems from the perspective of height: at the level they may seem gigantic but with distance, everything will be turned insignificant. Every setback that seems insurmountable will appear temporary on hindsight; at the very least it will be remembered as a lesson learnt.

With time and distance, the perspective shifts; the problems that appear truly challenging to a child are things that you would laugh at, as a grown up. The heartaches and heartbreaks of teenage appear trivial as you mature. However, to dismiss these as trivial is again a partial perspective: it means you’re missing out on the details and only looking at the big picture.

The problems were very real and pressing at that point of time.  The truth is, at that age and that juncture in life, you were not as well-equipped (mentally, physically, or spiritually) as you would be later. For a child the proportionate size of those problems compared to her/his coping abilities was huge. For a teenager, her/his problems are too large compared to the emotional strength. As an adult, your coping abilities and strengths have multiplied manifold. So in truth, the problems really are not insignificant, they just appear to be so later. Like I said before, now you have a different perspective— you are viewing things from a height.  

I will reiterate: there are two things that lie at the heart if this matter: the big picture as well as the details.  When you truly attain height and can see the big picture, you will know that all your present troubles will, over the course of time, be reduced to miniatures. That life in aerial view is truly beautiful… you just need to attain the right altitude.

The second and equally important part is the details. Understanding the fact that little things will always be important in life, no matter how high you reach. The picture is more than the sum of its parts, yes, but it’s the tiny strokes that bring a touch of perfection to the masterpiece.

When you are paying attention to the details, you will not be unsympathetic to, or mocking of, the problems of another person: because you know that on the ground that huge skyscraper really is huge—and just because you, at a height, can see it reduced to a miniature doesn’t mean the other person is weak or incapable. He or she is still on the ground, still in the process of attaining that height.

The Shadow of The Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto

In the remote corners of a nation lies grief so profound and betrayal so abysmal it threatens to wrench your heart out. You, who are sitting beneath the azure of a peaceful sky, sipping comfort from a steaming cup, reading of the tempests that toss mercilessly the people in a land so far removed. You would feel the uprooting of their lives like a blow to your gut…and yet, you could never experience the true force of the impact.

These are the lives that Fatima Bhutto speaks about in her debut novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon. Author of the famous Songs of Blood and Sword, this is her first work of fiction and, like her memoir, reflects what she has seen from close quarters—politics , blood and betrayal—all inextricable from her lineage.

The story is set in Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan, and takes place during a span of four hours on a Friday that coincides with Eid. Three brothers are going to separate mosques for their prayers, because “it is too dangerous, too risky, to place all the family together in one mosque that could easily be hit.” That is the essence of life in Mir Ali: teetering on the edge.The brothers represent three different ways of life in the town, torn apart by military excesses and a desire for freedom, handed down generation after generation.

Hayat, the youngest, embeds the tales of suffering and takes upon himself to fulfil the dream. The eldest, Aman Erum, desires a way out, dreaming of doing business in a place that isn’t strangulated by this tussle of the past and present. Sikandar, the second, adopts what he believes is a middle ground—neither fleeing nor fighting; staying and serving by becoming a doctor. None of their choices, however, will protect them from the tragedy that is their destiny.

There are no heroes in this story, except the ones mentioned in passing. As Hayat says, “They killed our heroes so we stopped making them.” They are not incorruptible, they have to make choices while living in hell and the choices are those of a prisoner sentenced to death—one who would choose life at all costs, even by bartering the soul.

Bhutto’s female characters—Sikandar’s wife Mina and Samarra who loved Aman Erum— are more multi-layered. Mina, the lecturer of psychology, is a woman turned deranged by loss—barging in on the funerals of strangers, seeking solace in grief. Yet it is she who, in a fit of rage against injustice, causes the murderous Taliban to back down. Samarra is a woman betrayed by life many times over. What remains of her is a hardened shell. And yet, the final blow to that shell is so devastating, so repetitive in its cruelty that your heart bleeds for Samarra.

Political comment is strong in the novel, with references to the stamp of US control on everything Pakistan owns—from oil and airspace, to souls and futures. The bitterness against military dominance is obvious, too—“They were no one’s oppressors. They were everyone’s oppressors.”

But from a human angle, these could be the frayed edges of any nation—the militant areas of India’s north-east; the vales of Kashmir; or the Maoist-ridden heartland. Injustice, violence and strife belong to the same clan, feeding off each other.

Bhutto’s book is a universal—if deeply disturbing—story, set in the place she knows best. And even as you put it down with your breath knocked out, you can’t shake the feeling that somehow, through the unbroken seams of humanity, it connects you, too.