Many Roads Through Paradise: Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

It’s difficult to believe that an entire nation can be contained within one book. But Many Roads to Paradise is just that: an encapsulation of the essence of Sri Lanka; with its history, its social fabric, its heart-wrenching tragedies, slow-healing wounds, rising hopes … it’s all there. This book absolutely teems with life.

This an anthology of Sri Lankan literature, compiled by Shyam Selvadurai , who has many awards in the US and Canada, his works translated in seven different languages.  When you read the introduction you get a sense of its direction and purpose: the compiler has carefully pieced together the entire broken heart of the nation. The book contains works of Sri Lankan writers in English, and others translated from Tamil and Sinhala. As Selvadurai says, “In a post-war situation, this anthology provides an opportunity to build bridges across the divided communities…of which they have remained largely ignorant due to linguistic differences.”

It’s divided into four sections, but “To promote this ethos of unity, I have not, as many previous anthologies… divided the work by the three language streams.” The sections have separate themes:  social structure and classes under The Chariot and The Moon; wounds of displacement in No State, No Dog ; passions of differing natures under Love in the Tsunami and Healing the Forest “devoted exclusively to the ethnic war from 1983 onward,” in the form of quiet yet piercing poetry.

The first section gives you a bird’s eye view of the class-divisions in Sri Lanka. The opening poem, from which the section draws its name, is the perfect introduction. The translated poems, in fact, read much better than the translated excerpts from novels. Even though this reader isn’t familiar with either Tamil or Sinhala, it isn’t too difficult to pin down the stiffness in narration to the loss of flow in moving from one language to another.

‘The Perfection of Giving’ is a poignant story about a servant girl, employed and brought up by a self-righteous spinster. It touches you deep down with its echoing refrain of ‘karma’.

‘No State No Dog’ gives you a glimpse into the lives of the poor Tamil estate workers unceremoniously packed off to India… uprooted from their soil, feeling the ground slip from beneath their feet. The image of the dog waiting tirelessly at the edge of the road is one that stays with you long after.

‘Hole-in –the-Heart’, an excerpt from ‘Love Marriage’ is a beautifully written story that describes love and conflict with equal ease. But then, conflict is a recurrent theme in Lankan literature, where the war and the Tsunami provide the background to most of the stories. But the displacement depicted in ‘The Homecoming’ certainly catches you unawares: a woman who goes to work in the Arab states for two years with dreams of creating joys for her family, upon her return finds her dream in splinters and herself looked upon as no more than a “whore”.

But the biggest punch is reserved for the last: poems—each spilling out like a once-beautiful scarred body… one whose poet disappeared in the war in 2009, another whose poet—editor of a major paper—assassinated for speaking out, a third a German Jew who lost her family in the holocaust… here a poem that speaks of dead, young bodies floating up on the rivers… there a mother who faces her son returned from war.. “His heart had turned to stone”… and wonders “Won’t he one day/Believe me to be his enemy/And bury me too?”

The book ends with the spectacularly vivid poem The Moon at Seenukgala as Epilogue, posing as balm for wounds too deep to heal…but with an extension of hope that “This, is the way home.”

Despite having so much to offer, for the non-native this is but a prelude that whets the appetite for more offerings Sri-Lankan. It makes you want to reach out to your neighbor, and share the pain captured so singularly.

It's only words... Poetry of Love

Here we are, face to face on the day of love. I’m going to play cupid this time and give you something for your valentine: Handpicked poems of love— a timeless gift never outdone.

We could begin with this stanza from Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy – an ode to the presence of love in nature, and a plea for the meeting of hearts. It speaks of the winds and waters of the earth all mingling to become one:

Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle - 
Why not I with thine?

Then there’s Keats’s Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast As Thou Art, sensual lines that weave images and lay bare the eternal desire of the heart. It alludes to a star watching over the earth, “like Nature’ sleepless Ermite,” gazing forever over oceans doing their “priestlike task” of cleansing the earth’s shores. But that’s where love is ever more steadfast; for all it wants is each breath spent in love’s embrace:

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever --or else swoon to death

Closer home, Tagore love poems are an act of complete submission; the offering of heart and soul in entirety and without restraint. There is a fragile quality to the emotion, which never asks, only gives. He often compares the offerings of love to flowers or songs— both objects that create the feeling of an act of worship. This one is taken from Lover’s Gift:

I filled my tray with whatever I had, and gave it to you. What shall I bring to your feet tomorrow, I wonder. I am like the tree that, at the end of the flowering summer, gazes at the sky with its lifted branches bare of their blossoms.

But in all my past offerings is there not a single flower made fadeless by the eternity of tears?

Will you remember it and thank me with your eyes when I stand before you with empty hands at the leave-taking of my summer days?

In contrast with the vulnerable, quiet nature of these lines, Oscar Wilde’s We Are Made One With What We Touch And See is a joyous celebration of love, with image upon image bursting forth. In the last stanza he talks of them as notes of the universe’s symphony, their love merging with Nature itself. 

And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

But none can speak on immortality like Amir Khusrau, with his lines drenched in mystic love:

Man tu shudam, tu man shudi/Man tan shudam, tu jaan shudi/

Ta kas na goya bad azan/Man deegaram too deegari

I have become you, you have become me

I have become body, you have become soul

So that no one can ever say

I am other than you, you other than me. 

This, then, is the utmost offering of love: the longing to be fanaa — to be destroyed… lose yourself within your lover…the union beyond earthly realm. At the end, isn’t that what we really seek?

Life After Life: Spinning in Confused Circles?

Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life is a book much written-about. Winner of the UK’s Costa Novel Award, it has been the focus of attention for its intriguing technique that lies somewhere between reincarnation and time travel.  A tale where there is one life after another, where the protagonist Ursula, a Briton from a comfortably wealthy family, is born again and again and again, but in the very same life, living it differently every time.

Everyone who’s talked about this book has obviously dwelt on the novelty of the entire schema. However, I was struck by much more than this. Yes, Atkinson gives her protagonist many different lives, but in doing so, doesn’t she give the others different lives, too? How about the people Ursula saves along with herself? Her sister Pamela, first, and then her brother Teddy, and their maid Bridget from the epidemic of Spanish influenza? Ursula makes numerous failed attempts, ultimately succeeding by pushing Bridget from the stairs so that she is unable to attend the festivities in London where she’d catch the flu in the first place.

But then, this poses a question, too. Is Ursula consciously saving herself? Or is it just destiny? For instance, the second time she drowns in childhood, she is saved by a stranger. That is obviously not an effort on Ursula’s part. Or, when she has started living with Crighton, the army man, why does she go back to the place where she died in a bomb raid? Why does she just not stay away? The author doesn’t seem very clear about whether her protagonist has conscious control, or is it just fate. Then again, the part where the end catches up with the beginning—her shooting of Hitler to prevent the war from taking place— since she dies again, the universe starts all over again and nothing really changes. It’s a confusing and a rather silly kind of paradox….. it’s not Ursula being born again and again, the entire universe is caught in a time warp.

However, I believe this is just a foil to what Atkinson has really written about, and that is life coupled with war. War features throughout the novel, resplendent in its horror. Atkinson shows you myriad views of misery, from every angle possible—the ground, the air, the savior, the saved and the unsaved. There is no getting away from it. In fact, one of the most brilliant parts of the narrative—and ironically, the part that most of her British readers have found “unnecessary” is the life of Ursula in Nazi Germany, after her marriage to a man who becomes a Nazi officer later. That is truly the view from the other side, and hats off to Atkins for bringing that to us. Rather than just focus on the grief of the British, she turns the focus to the other side, showing the greater tragedy, the much greater disaster that befell the ordinary German caught in the war. 

In fact, she shows you how a different route might change the place of people in your life. Such as the change in her mother’s behaviour, from loving to downright acidic, when Ursula gets pregnant as a teenager, even though it was the result of rape. And the capricious aunt Izzie, forever the ‘bad fairy’ but somehow always the one Ursula turns to in peril. It does, in the end, make you think of what would have happened if your own life had unfurled this way or the other… which suddenly destabilizes the world as you know it. I suspect that was the plan all along.

The Scatter Here Is Too Great: Through The Cracked Windscreen

Every now and then comes along a book that needs to be savoured in detail, a book whose language flows like fine poetry and whose metaphors create a world unseen. Bilal Tanweer’s literary debut The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a book of this kind.  

Tanweer begins by creating an image before you, that of a bullet-smashed windscreen , where “the hole at the centre throws a sharp clean web around itself and becomes crowded with tiny crystals.” This is how he will show you his city—Karachi, “broken, beautiful and born of tremendous violence.” And when he says to you “Listen,” you do, spell-bound.

The narration is done by different voices, speaking of the experiences of different people which make the book seem like a collection of short stories, but with all of them converging at a single event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city. Tanweer keeps the poetic but combines it with the grotesque, creating a shocking mixture.

A little boy who gets teased for his teeth and who spews abuses that he cannot recall later; Comrade Sukhansaz,  an old communist poet who’s harassed on a bus; Sadeq, the man whose job is to snatch cars from people that have defaulted on their bank loans; Asma, the young girl who spins tales for her little brother to conceal her own heartbreak; Akbar, the ambulance driver who has seen two men at the blast site that nobody else noticed—men that he is sure are Gog and Magog, the two fiends mentioned in the Quran who will appear on the Judgement Day.

There are stories within stories, and they bring a certain ethereal quality to the writing. It hangs like a cloud—seemingly surreal but the keeper of promises to the earth. The promise that Tanweer upholds here is of making the reader see the violence in Karachi—indeed, the violence for which Pakistan is so in the news—from an angle that the newspapers and headlines wouldn’t ever be able to show.

“One way to give you this account is to ‘name the streets and number the dead’.  Another is to give you this scatter I have gathered… read the crystal design on the broken screen.” That’s Tanweer’s promise to you and that is what he does. He takes you beyond the blast of a bomb going off, into the silences in the crevices around it—“These stories, I realised, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city.”

Not if he has his way. This book is Tanweer’s ode to Karachi, a love letter signed in blood. It is his ode to the people, their folklore, their beliefs, their struggles, their sufferings, their loves and their joys. Stories, he says, “were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read.”

You are listening, he says. Yes, we are.

Stuck in traffic-- Mental traffic.

A recent post I saw on Facebook went thus:  “You are not stuck in traffic—you are traffic.”

There’s not a single one of us who has not experienced the phenomenon of being ‘stuck in traffic’. But how many times do we realize that we are, in fact, part of the traffic that seems to make our lives miserable? This simple statement of fact puts our place in the world into perspective. We tend to view the world from a “spotlight” angle, making ourselves the focus and centre of the universe. To each of the billions and billions of Homo sapiens roaming the earth, the spotlight is always on them. Hence the appropriateness of the traffic example—every person honking away in that jam is ‘stuck in traffic’ and every other person is the cause of the hold-up.

That’s a microcosmic representation of the entire story of our lives—there’s always something bad ‘happening to us’; pumping up our frustration levels and making us desperate for ways to get out of the situation. But when we zoom out and see the larger picture, we get an aerial view of the truth: we are an integral part of the problem. It’s not just ‘happening to us’, we are part of the reason it’s happening at all. The Facebook post was, on the face of it, a pro-environment one, and had a very simple solution to being stuck in traffic: get a bike, break free!  Applied to other facets of our life, it simply means: can we stop banging our head against the problem hoping for it to break down, and look for a way around it instead?  Can we, for once, imagine that it’s not just happening ‘to us’; it’s happening ‘because of us’—so maybe if we could change the way WE think, or the way WE behave, we might be able to change entirely what we’re going through?

Zooming out to get an aerial view shows you things you never saw before: the simple truth that what’s happening to you is happening to everyone else, too. That’s the part which is hardest to accept: every incident in your life is not about you. People with a high need for achievement—the winners and the go-getters—find this the bitterest pill to swallow. Sometimes when we fail, or even when we miss the top spot (for some people, second is worse than last!), the depression is overwhelming. But just for once, we could step back and see the larger picture. Maybe this wasn’t our moment of triumph at all. Maybe, in the vast, complex scheme of the cosmos, this was another person’s moment of truth. It wasn’t something bad happening to us; it was something good that just happened to someone else.  Of course, that doesn’t mean we must stop searching for our own moment of glory; it just means being able to accept and appreciate when that moment belongs to another.

Each one of us is the hero/heroine of his/her own life’s story. And that’s the way it ought to be too. (How could you go around playing a supporting role in your own story? Definitely not acceptable.) But sometimes, without knowing it, we become a part of someone else’s life story, and at that point we are no longer the leading man or lady. Playing a supporting role can be frustrating to our spotlight sense of existence. But that’s the secret to living life gracefully: knowing which moment is yours, and which is just yours to applaud.

Pain is a proof of love

Pain. The countless hues that make up the universe and all that is within it are encapsulated in this singular, all-encompassing emotion. Despite the fact that above all human desires is the wish to be free of it, pain is an inseparable part of our existence. The very act of giving birth is one of unspeakable pain. Not just for the mother, but also for the baby—hence the use of the phrase ‘birth trauma’—even without any actual damage or injury. We can trace our very origins to this least desirable of all feelings. The truth is: there is no life without pain.

Most people identify the idea of pain with mostly that which is physical: a gunshot wound, an accident injury, a malfunctioning of any of the body’s constituents, and the most dreaded among the ordinary ones: a visit to the dentist. But pain, like any other feeling, is all in the mind. It is not the intensity of the assault but our capacity to tolerate it that defines the pain we experience. That’s why different people have different ‘pain thresholds’—the point where you begin to feel pain. And that is also the reason why our mind—and therefore our body—can be trained to expand its ability to absorb pain. Soldiers are the perfect embodiment of this. And so are stoics—unflinching in the face of whatever life brings their way.

Acceptance of pain is considered to be a step towards higher spiritual elevation. And it does not merely refer to pains of the physical variety. The pain of loss is a bigger, more enduring injury than anything that can be inflicted upon the body: loss of love, loss of a home, loss of dreams, loss of a vision and sometimes even the loss of an illusion. The stoic philosophy teaches the mind and heart to take loss with calmness.

However, perfect acceptance of pain is perhaps possible only in ascetics that have renounced the world along with the joys it extends. Just as we need to be acquainted with darkness to appreciate the radiance of light, it is when we expose ourselves to extreme pain that we can truly experience the burning ecstasy of extreme joy, extreme delight. Agony of the heart has been known to produce some of the finest poetry, literature and music compositions in the world.  In fact, pain itself can be a cherished emotion sometimes; as Julian Barnes says in Levels of Life, there is a point when you just wouldn’t let go of the throbbing in your heart: “If the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavor of memory; pain is a proof of love.”

But then, there is something beyond a person’s individual pain—reaching a state where we feel the pain of another. When we can feel that which we have not experienced, when we can work for those we have neither known nor loved, when we can move out of the shell of our own misery and expose ourselves to the agony of the universe; that is the moment of the spirit’s triumph. People who are remembered for treating humanity as their own—and people who could not be remembered for they let no one know about what they did—became one with the universe because they shared the pain.

Yes, the pursuit of happiness is, and forever will be, the crux of all human desires. But, as Kahlil Gibran says, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”.

Self Actualisation: not just better than others

What’s new about this? How is it unique? What makes it different?

These questions float around in our ether, sizing up, cutting down and sealing the fate of ideas, concepts, things and people. The world is driven by the desire to stand out and to excel. From the very beginning of life, we feel the pressure to be faster, stronger, sharper—better in some way than the rest.

Ah, there’s the key phrase—‘the rest’. The need to be something special seldom stems out of an aspiration to rise to our fullest potential. In a world that thrives on looking down upon others, most often it is just a desire to remain a rung higher than others on the ladder. It is not about what makes you shine best; it’s just about shining better than others. To move or even to imagine beyond those borders is to risk leaving the security of the herd.

Humans probably picked up from animals the assuring safety of being in the herd. Because the world is an unpredictable place, there is security in large numbers and in belonging to a group. Belonging, of course, is an indispensable need of the human heart—to have some place and someone to call your own, because nothing comforts us like the familiar. However, beyond the intimate circle of belonging, there are larger concentric circles that do not so much invite us to belong as they squeeze us to fit in. Beginning from the peer group at school to colleagues at work, or members of the religious/cultural group we belong to, everyone is constantly pulling to remould us to the structure of the herd. Even the choices we make—our goals, our loves, our destinations—are shaped by the forces of fitting in.

And then comes the pull to stand out. Because we possess the need for achievement as much as we possess the need to belong, the human heart—and the human will—is forever torn between fitting in and striking out. Bestselling author Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally popular creation—the benign, brooding, intense ‘vampire’ Edward, observes, in a moment of reflection, the irony of humans’ deep, clawing desire to outshine others, even as they scuttle desperately to blend in.

The true meaning of the human longing to be unique, however, is what Abraham Maslow defines in his Pyramid of Needs as ‘self-actualisation’.  It is to realise the true purpose of yourself and to explore the horizon of your capabilities. It is when we stop taking the success of others as a parameter, and try to chart an unexplored path, a path that is not merely ‘different from others’ but one that is our very own.

It is to break through the boundaries of our own fear; the fear that keeps us within the protection of the herd. Todd Skinner, the mountaineer, said it well: “If you are not afraid, you have probably chosen too easy a mountain. To be worth the expedition, it had better be intimidating.”

Can we stand out without succumbing to the pressure of fitting in? Can we move our goals beyond being shinier, bulkier, speedier than the rest of the herd? The point is not to say: I will do this better than it’s been done before—no matter how great the ‘doer’ was. The point of Self-actualisation, of being truly unique is: If it’s the true fulfilment of my potential, I’ll do what’s never been done before.

This, then, is the answer to those questions floating on the ether—I’m not just different, I am who I was meant to be.

The Sense of An Ending: An old column I wrote and forgot

Memory is a strange thing. It’s perhaps the only basis for your construction of life as you’ve lived it. Apart from the actual physical records — the diaries, the letters or photographs, now also emails, blog posts and Facebook updates, most of the sense that you make of your life is based on your memory — and that of others who shared bits of it with you.
So when Julian Barnes talks about memory being like “the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash”, you can’t help but smile in agreement. “If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear."
That’s where every person can, in some measure, relate to The Sense of an Ending — we all know that the ‘crash’ parts of life are often much clearer in our heads than the safe landings. Of course, being more human and less machine, our brain might decide to go into defence mode and erase the crash part altogether. But that’s a completely different scenario.
Barnes’s Booker prize winning book essentially explores memory and the chinks in it, and how, when old episodes resurface, you might have to change the way you looked at your life. The book begins with intriguing, unexplained images from the memory of Tony Webster, the narrator and protagonist, followed by his more intriguing observation that “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”. The story, though, begins with Tony’s description of his school days and his troika of friends to which is added the serious and scholarly Adrian Finn. Part one of the book follows the ups and downs of Tony’s life and loves, with reflections on history and its making and, among other things, on the philosophy of suicide. Most importantly, it introduces us to Veronica, Tony’s first girlfriend, the woman that he could never ‘figure out’ till the very end.
But it’s part two of the book that holds the real surprises; part one is just the stage being set. The twist in Tony’s life occurs when he gets a letter containing a message from Veronica’s mother. That episode sparks off a series of events that lead Tony back into his past, making him rewrite some pages of his life’s history, as constructed from his memory.
When you come to the end of the story, one of the things you’ll wonder about is the title. There can, in my opinion, be two ways to look at it. One — that it’s the endeavour of an ordinary man to create a satisfactory ‘ending’ to his life fast approaching conclusion, a man whose final sense of the ending of life is very different from what he had imagined.
The other way is in what you feel at the end of the story. There is, actually, no real ‘sense of ending’. It leaves you with a feeling of unquenched thirst, unanswered questions, of things you still want to know. But that’s how life is — you might never get the answers, even at the end.

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.

My Brief History by Stephen Hawking: Inside the mind of a genius

Becoming acquainted with the mind of a genius is a fascinating experience. The life stories of people that dazzled the world with their achievements always make for inspiring reads—especially if you get them straight from the horse’s mouth. Having given A Brief History of Time to the world and describing The Universe in a Nutshell, the world’s best known cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, now describes his own self in My Brief History—right from the time of his birth to the present moment.

Aside from the fact that it was Hawking who took the bold step of trying to take the universe to the masses—letting common people have a glimpse into how the universe operates—what is most well known about him are his wheel-chair-bound, speech-synthesizer-operating persona and the motor-neurone disease that led to it. What this book further reveals about the “most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein” is his sparkling sense of humour and the surprisingly heartwarming tendency to take everything positively; to see that single light ray in the darkest of situations.

The book is a rather slim one with 13 chapters that talk as much about his personal life as the work that has driven him. With parents that were both educated at Oxford despite coming from families that were not well off, Hawking talks with great candour and wit about the fact that he was born “ exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo,” but that there would be about two hundred thousand other babies born on that day and “I don’t know if any of them were later interested in astronomy.”

Describing his childhood through early memories, Hawking speaks of his fascination with trains and his great desire to get an electric train, and inventing a “series of very complicated games” during his teens—a manufacturing game complete with factories, roads and railways and even a stock market; a war game and even a feudal game in which each player was a whole dynasty! The following sentence sums up the direction his mind was taking from the beginning –“I think these games…came from an urge to know how systems worked and how to control them….this need has been met by my research into cosmology. If you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way.”

From his days at Oxford and Cambridge, to his theories about the Universe and his work on black holes and time travel, everything is narrated with a touch of humour and every chapter ends with an anecdote to make you smile. Though you have to get through the concepts of theoretical physics to be able to get the joke, the effort is entirely worth it!

If you’ve already gone through his previous works you might not need so much concentration and focus in the chapters that speak of his work as a scientist, but even if you haven’t, this book will make you want to explore the universe even more.

Sprinkled all over the book are such candid offhand statements as “My practical abilities never matched up to my theoretical inquiries.” Or “It was lucky I didn’t become a civil servant. I wouldn’t have managed with my disability,” revealing a disarming air that charms its way into your heart. Particularly when he talks about how his disability has been an “asset”: “I haven’t had to lecture or teach undergraduates, and I haven’t had to sit o tedious and time-consuming committees. So I have been able to devote myself completely to research.”

The last few passages talk of the “full and satisfying” life he has led, with the very sound advice: “Disabled people should concentrate on things that heir handicap doesn’t prevent them from doing and not regret those they can’t do.” The advice holds true for every one of us sitting out here with some “disability” in life—not necessarily physical, though.

This book just needs to be read to believe how far the human spirit outweighs the body that holds it.

Make a new world for yourself: Orbit-shifting innovation

Innovation is the buzzword of the 21^st century, as not just corporations and governments but every individual is seeking that one great life-transforming idea that would set apart his/her life from the rest of the world and rocket him/her to the top. Quite naturally ‘innovation-advice’ is literally flooding the market. So why would you want to read more of the same? Because, in the simplest of terms, this is probably the most meticulously written, most lucidly explained and most insightful book on changing the orbit of your universe that you would have come across.

Orbit Shifting Innovation by Rajiv Narang and Devika Devaiah breaks down the process as well as the mindset of creating an orbit-shift into the tiniest bits, so that you can observe and explore each one with perfect clarity. The book is divided into four sections, beginning with a record of the most extraordinary life-changing ideas in different industries, countries and areas of life. While you would certainly expect companies’ innovative products or services to be there for sure, what sets this list apart is the inclusion of public-welfare initiatives by social enterprises and government employees. Whether it is the life-straw water purifier, which purifies water even as you drink it, developed by Swiss firm Vestergaard Frandsen , the community policing model applied in Tiruchirapally by JK Tripathi, the transformation of Surat from a plague-ridden city into India’s second cleanest city by SR Rao, or the construction of the Qinghai Tibet railway, the examples set the tone, driving home the point that a transformative change can originate in any section of society or any part of the globe. The stories themselves unfold bit by bit over the course of the book, engrossing you with the sheer miraculous power of human will.

Devaiah and Narang, the latter the founder and the former the Director of Erehwon, a 20-year old pioneering Innovation firm, discuss some very interesting concepts, such as the idea of identifying and moving beyond mental-model boundaries—the lens from which we view the world. To be able to transcend these, you may have to literally invert your world-view—as they show you with a map that portrays the Southern Hemisphere on the top! Then there is confronting ‘gravity’—the force that pulls people down—which can be in the form of organisation, industry, culture or country gravity, but is most powerful in the form of mindsets that are averse to change, thought processes that say ‘it can only be done if it’s been done before.’

The last section sums up very neatly the difference between ‘orbit-shifters’ and ‘settlers’: both exhibit romanticism as well as realism; the difference lying in where they apply each. The orbit-shifters are dreamers in their vision: they imagine something hitherto unheard of, but are rooted in reality about the obstacles in implementation. The settler, on the other hand, choses a ‘doable’ target while rom

anticising the execution—and fails to complete even the doable.

The book’s format is more of a corporate guidebook, sprinkled with special tips for CEOs to foster innovation in their enterprise. From advice to idea-generators on handling top management, to guidelines for the top brass on how not  to promote ideas that are merely ‘more of the same’ , this book is a must read for people dreaming of making it big in the corporate world.  However, its appeal is far greater than that: the pages speak to every individual who nurtures a dream—be it changing his own life, or changing the course of the universe.

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: By far the best book addressing the needs of independent, ambitious women

If ever there was a book on changing the gender equation that simply must be read by both women and men, here’s the one. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is a gem of a book that can show you some concrete ways to change your life and change the world. With real-life instances from her own and her colleagues’ lives, Sandberg tries to illustrate how it’s not just external but also internal barriers that keep women from reaching the summit. 

With a foreword by HSBC director Naina Lal Kidwai, the book asks the important question that despite there being numerous women in the workplace at the entry level, why are there so few women in positions of authority? And in the process of asking this question, she discusses how social, cultural, psychological as well as biological hurdles keep pushing women backwards at every step.

Sandberg shows how internally, women hold themselves back by keeping their ambitions low—because that’s what social and cultural norms condition them to do. And in the classic catch-22 scenario, women who do set their sights higher end up being penalised for it: because people consider them too pushy, or selfish. So ironically, the same qualities and achievements would be lauded in a man while a woman would be all the less liked for it.  There is the very interesting Heidi/Howard case, where two groups of students assigned same ‘competency’ but different ‘likeability’ levels to an individual whose achievements were described to them—merely because one of the groups was told this person was ‘Heidi’ and the other was told it was ‘Howard’! So ‘Heidi’ –a real life entrepreneur whose case was being studied—was rated a more appealing colleague by the group who were told she was ‘Howard.’ That, in short, sums up pretty much how the gender scales are tipped.

However, Sandberg reasons, when there would be a great number of women at the top, how many would you be able to hate? (Can’t argue with that!) But more than that, she talks about building a feeling of the “common good”, where women help other women to the top. And the men who would like to see the world better balanced could lend a hand, too. Not tagging affirmative action as “asking for special treatment” is surely a good way to start.

Arguably the best part of the book is the very down-to-earth advice for achieving that “work-life balance”. “Done is better than perfect”,  which simply means that striving for perfection in both your workplace and your home will only end up making you feel like a failure. Prioritising what needs to be done 100 per cent perfect and what can be tolerated at 90 per cent makes up an essential part of this ideology.

The chapter ‘Make Your Partner a Real Partner’ busts one great myth: women who have no family responsibilities have a better shot at getting to the top. Sample this statistic: “Of the 28 women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced and only one had never married.”  The secret of their success, obviously, was a partner who understood that not only must women be more empowered at work but “men must be more empowered at home”, sharing their half of the home-and-child-care.

Sandberg acknowledges that this is a slow-moving process and requires both internal as well as external barriers to break down. But meanwhile, you’d do good to lay your hands at this book. And keep it by your bedside— forever. Or at least as long as it takes!