Abhinav Agarwal's Blog

The Immortals of Meluha, Amish Tripathi - My Review

2012-02-19T10:48:00.002+05:30

The Immortals of Meluha, by Amish Tripathi - my review (Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam, Landmark, user review on Amazon.com)

Fascinating premise, full of promise. That remains unfulfilled.

The legend of Siva would be fertile ground for authors to adapt from and weave magical tales of adventure from. But only for the talented and hard-working. This book reflects neither talent nor hard work. The fascinating premise remains just that.

What if the legend of Siva, the destroyer of evil, was not a legend, but something that began with an actual human; that acquired the proportions of legend and finally myth over the course of centuries and millenia, because of the astounding feats of that single person?

Unfortunately, this novel is not a fruition of that premise. There are several, several problems with this novel. The simplistic plot, over-simplistic I would call it, for one. It stumbles forward in a linear manner without any surprises or twists that you cannot pick out from a mile away. The narration. The dialog between the characters is evocative of a television soap-opera, at best. Siva is not the yogi in control of his senses; he is some post-adolescent youth in search for adventure.

'I have seen the bed, dammit!' grinned Shiva. 'Now I want to experience it. Get out!'

Yes, some sort of a grotesque cross between a Karan Johar and Ekta Kapoor movie's dialogues.

Some of the descriptions of Meluhan society (the Suryavanshis, the people inhabiting the Saraswati river basin) are terrifyingly reminiscent more of Soviet-style totalitarian regimes than a caring, humane society. Children are deposited after child-birth at some grand orphanage, called a Gurukul; mothers made to forcibly abandon their children a few weeks after childbirth, and then doled out to wanna-be parents on the basis of a lottery?! Seriously, such hair-brained and frankly inhuman concepts have never been part of Indian society and culture, ever! Why, they have not been part of any society in human history, ever, anywhere, I should think. Yet, this is presented as a stroke of genius that does away with the evils of the caste system. Without an understanding of the caste system, its utility, or lack thereof, in a society at a given point in time, whatever that may have been, the author takes it upon himself to purge society of this evil with another evil; only this time the replacement is infinitely more evil and inhuman than the system it seeks to replace.

The descriptions of the Indus Valley and Saraswati Harappan civilization dwellings are barely beyond what one would conjure up after spending 15 minutes on Wikipedia. Even here there was so much promise that remains exasperatingly unfulfilled.

Siva is yogeswar. His detachment from the physical world is the complement to the material world signified by Vishnu. Yet Siva in this book comes off as some lost, confused soul, in search of a Bollywood movie plot where he can journey to some exotic country and find himself. Which in itself the anti-thesis of Hindu Vedic philosophy, which states that what is within is also without. You are that. Not here, evidently. The other side of the Suryavanshi Meluhans, the Chandravanshis, and their capital Ayodhya, ends up being drawn with a very simple and very crude palette. It is a crude caricature of a ghetto. The author tries to portray the two societies as opposite sides of the same coin, but fails, pretty much as in every other place of the novel.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I kept persevering; 50 pages, 100 pages, waiting for the plot and pace to pick, the narrative to improve. But it didn't. To make sure I was doing justice to the author, I did read to the very last page, which ends up with a very, very contrived hook to the second book in the trilogy. I refuse to bite.

Sorry, this book does not even flatter to deceive. I can only suppose that the success of this book is perhaps more the result of smart marketing than anything substantial. I can only thank myself that the price of reading this book was a couple of hours of time, that I shall however never get back, and twenty-five rupees in rental, that I don't mind as much.

As a friend remarked, the best and the really good and intelligent part of the book is its cover.

You can read Chapter 1 (PDF) of the novel from its website, http://shivatrilogy.com/

The Alchemist by Paul Coelho - Review

2012-02-12T10:56:00.001+05:30

The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, my user review on Amazon) - my review

The journey of a shepherd from his country to Egypt and then back, in search of a treasure. Simple but moving story. The king, the merchant, the alchemist - all teach him a little bit about himself and the world we all live in.

This is a short and simple story about a young shepherd's journey from his home in Spain in search of a treasure, that is supposedly near the Pyramids in Egypt. Along the way he meets several people; it is a gypsy woman sets him off on his quest; a king offers him two stones to guide him on his way. The merchant and later the alchemist help him learn the lessons of life that the journey is meant to teach.

At the end of the book I had to admit that the story is moving enough make you think about if after you left the book. However, I could not see why it has become the international phenomenon that it has - maybe the brevity, the simplicity of the message.

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
If you are a Hindi movie fan, you will recognize this line as appearing several times in the Shahrukh Khan starrer, "Om Shanti Om" (on-demand video), directed by eminent choreographer Farah Khan. Uncredited, of course.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book that I found enlightening:

“You should pay more attention to the caravan,” the boy said to the Englishman, after the camel driver had left. “We make a lot of detours, but we’re always heading for the same destination.” “And you ought to read more about the world,” answered the Englishman. “Books are like caravans in that respect.”

“Isn’t wine prohibited here?” the boy asked “It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.”

The Alchemist (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paulo Coelho's Official Website

Kindle Excerpt:

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser - Review

2012-02-05T06:55:00.002+05:30

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, by Eli Pariser - my review (Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, my user review on Amazon.com)

My review: A City of Ghettos or Mosaic of Subcultures? Excellent book, but its at-times skim-ish coverage is a missed opportunity.

Makes us aware of the risks that the increasingly pervasive and invisible personalization of content on the Internet poses to innovation and creativity, not to mention privacy and liberty. An in-depth look at the technology of data laundering would have elevated the book from very good to truly outstanding.

The premise of the Internet was to open up worlds of information and bring them to our homes via our computers - information that had remained inaccessible to people for a variety of reasons like cost, access, and more. While this premise still exists and has been made possible to a large extent, the increasing amount of personalization of content - done by regular news websites, shopping sites, social media, and search engines - results in showing us more of what we already know or what we like, and hides what these sites think and decide we do not want to or would not like to view.

This personalization is more pervasive, and in most cases, more invasive of our privacy, than most people realize. Web sites track our clicks, our pageviews, where we come from, where we go, how much time we spend on different sites, what keywords we have searched for, details about our physical location, the types of devices we access these sites from - the type of computer, the browser, the operating system, and more. This rich trove of information allows sites and companies to build detailed dossiers on hundreds of millions of users. If done by governments this would be deemed intolerably intrusive and something done only by totalitarian regimes. However, such gathering of highly personal data when done in the commercial world of the Internet is par for the course. "...here’s what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are righthanded or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) ... the list of data points is about 1,500 items long." [location 593]
Scary? Well, here is an example of what even a short visit to a nondescript site like www.dictionary.com can do to your computer:

Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. [location 140]

...

BlueCava is compiling a database of every computer, smartphone, and online-enabled gadget in the world, which can be tied to the individual people who use them. [location 1420]

In my own experience, visiting a respectable site like LinkedIn.com resulted in 30 cookies being placed on my computer (see screenshots below). I did not count the beacons placed, but I suspect there were more than a few of those too placed on my computer.

You can run, but you can't hide from the tracking that happens on the Internet.

Say you check out a pair of running sneakers online but leave the site without springing for them. If the shoe site you were looking at uses retargeting, their ads—maybe displaying a picture of the exact sneaker you were just considering—will follow you around the Internet, showing up next to the scores from last night’s game or posts on your favorite blog. And if you finally break down and buy the sneakers? Well, the shoe site can sell that piece of information to BlueKai to auction it off to, say, an athletic apparel site. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing ads all over the Internet for sweat-wicking socks. [location 609]

Tracking by itself may not be very palatable to users and consumers. But where it has the potential to turn decidedly ominous is when you consider the uses to which such information could be put to.

In some cases, algorithmic sorting based on personal data can be even more discriminatory than people would be. [location 1645]

Banks are beginning to use social data to decide to whom to offer loans: [location 1681]
...
...LinkedIn, the social job-hunting site, offers a career trajectory prediction site; [location 1686]
...As a service to customers, it’s pretty useful. But imagine if LinkedIn provided that data to corporate clients to help them weed out people who are forecast to be losers. [location 1690]

By tracking us as we traverse the web, the web (mostly Google, Facebook, and Amazon are the examples the author uses) tracks our clicks, our pageviews, over a period of time, and then shows us a personalized version of the content, stripping out news stories that are contrary to our political views - as determined by these trackers and personalizers. We end up living in an invisible echo chamber that shows us what the chamber thinks we like seeing. This will stifle creativity and innovation. "Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop."

It seems our brains are forever balancing a cognitive tightrope "between the conflicting tendencies to learn" too much from the past" and "incorporating too much new information from the present" [location 1085].

However, "personalized filters can upset this cognitive balance" by surrounding "us with ideas with which we’re already familiar (and already agree), making us overconfident in our mental frameworks." - perpetuating a confirmation bias of sorts. "Second, it removes from our environment some of the key prompts that make us want to learn ... It can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats,” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas. [locations 1088, 1157]

Or to put it in other words, what if all you kept seeing were white swans, some system were to determine that you were not interested in seeing black swans, and when a black swan did in fact appear, it were to be hidden from your view. It would only end up reinforcing this very middle-of-the-ground view of the world being inhabited by ONLY white swans. And we know the perils of ignoring black swans.

Furthermore, innovation is sparked by curiosity. According to psychologist George Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.”

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes. [location 128]

But the filter bubble isn’t tuned for a diversity of ideas or of people. It’s not designed to introduce us to new cultures. [location 1309]

Listening to a radio station, or reading a newspaper, or watching a news channel, you are aware, to some degree at least, that there is a point of view that the newspaper, or radio, or TV channel holds. The choice to switch is yours. Not so with the web.

"On the Internet, personalized filters could promote the same kind of intense, narrow focus you get from a drug like Adderall" - which works by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which, for one, "reduces our sensitivity to new stimuli."

As Cropley points out in Creativity in Education and Learning, the physicist Niels Bohr famously demonstrated this type of creative dexterity when he was given a university exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1905. One of the questions asked students to explain how they would use a barometer (an instrument that measures atmospheric pressure) to measure the height of a building. Bohr clearly knew what the instructor was going for: Students were supposed to check the atmospheric pressure at the top and bottom of the building and do some math. Instead, he suggested a more original method: One could tie a string to the barometer, lower it, and measure the string—thinking of the instrument as a “thing with weight.” The unamused instructor gave him a failing grade—his answer, after all, didn’t show much understanding of physics. Bohr appealed, this time offering four solutions: You could throw the barometer off the building and count the seconds until it hit the ground (barometer as mass); you could measure the length of the barometer and of its shadow, then measure the building’s shadow and calculate its height (barometer as object with length); you could tie the barometer to a string and swing it at ground level and from the top of the building to determine the difference in gravity (barometer as mass again); or you could use it to calculate air pressure. [location 1282]

On the topic of fitting information to suit the user, a natural and ominous extension is the area of censorship and big brother - governmental surveillance of its citizenry. When talking of censorship the foremost country that comes to mind is China. Interestingly, the author points out that China does not need to wield a heavy hammer and censor anything and everything it deems inappropriate. Injecting sufficient distortions can also have be just as effective, and with perhaps better results. Censorship need not be absolute as in China. It can be subtle, it can be voluntary, and it can be almost completely invisible, discernible only after careful scrutiny.

China’s objective isn’t so much to blot out unsavory information as to alter the physics around it—to create friction for problematic information [location 1760]

Rather than decentralizing power, as its early proponents predicted, in some ways the Internet is concentrating it. [location 1786]
As long as a database exists, it’s potentially accessible by the state. That’s why gun rights activists talk a lot about Alfred Flatow. [location 1823]

When Amazon booted the activist Web site WikiLeaks off its servers under political pressure in 2010, the site immediately collapsed—there was nowhere to go. [location 1842]

Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they’re so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. [location 1848]

Just as black holes can be detected only by the absence of light, similarly, sometimes censorship can be detected only by noting the absence of terms and words that are otherwise to be found in freer societies.

In December 2010, researchers at Harvard, Google, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary announced the results of a four-year joint effort. The team had built a database spanning the entire contents of over five hundred years’ worth of books—5.2 million books in total, in English, French, Chinese, German, and other languages. Now any visitor to Google’s “N-Gram viewer” page can query it and watch how phrases rise and fall in popularity over time, [location 2526]
And, they argued, the tool could provide “a powerful tool for automatically identifying censorship and propaganda” by identifying countries and languages in which there was a statistically abnormal absence of certain ideas or phrases. [location 2533, emphasis mine]

The constant, unending flow of personal data of Internet users from one server to another, from one company's database to another's, being enriched by the merging of even more personal information, is made possible because data can move with little friction over the web, and because it is so difficult to trace. Like money laundering, data laundering becomes not only possible but possible on a massive scale when done using the Internet.

Data are uniquely suited to gray-market activities, because they need not carry any trace of where they have come from or where they have been along the way. Wright calls this data laundering, and it’s already well under way: [location 2700]

The author comes down harshly on both Google and Facebook for trying to have it their way...

Too often, the executives of Facebook, Google, and other socially important companies play it coy: They’re social revolutionaries when it suits them and neutral, amoral businessmen when it doesn’t. And both approaches fall short in important ways.
...
Facebook describes itself as a “social utility,” as if it’s a twenty-first-century phone company. But when users protest Facebook’s constantly shifting and eroding privacy policy, Zuckerberg often shrugs it off with the caveat emptor posture that if you don’t want to use Facebook, you don’t have to.
...
Google’s founders also sometimes play a get-out-of-jail-free card.

In conclusion, a very common-sensical proposal, almost forty years old and yet mostly valid even today, lies unenforced and mostly forgotten, because it is not in the interests of those who profit from collecting information on their users to do so.

In 1973, the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare under Nixon recommended that regulation center on what it called Fair Information Practices:
- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it’s used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.
Nearly forty years later, the principles are still basically right, and we’re still waiting for them to be enforced.

This is a very important and very timely book on a very important topic. In that sense this book is a must-read for everyone who spends time on the Internet and has invested in creating a social identity on the net.

On the other hand, this book also falls short on at least one important area. I was expecting at least some in-depth look at how personalizations on the Internet works. This is a lost opportunity in my opinion. As in such books intended for a broad audience, the thinking tends to keep the book non-technical and technojargon-free. However, that comes at a price. The price paid is that the reader gets little in-depth understanding of the issues involved. We know that personalization exists. However, how does it actually work? Yes, there are massive data sets involved. There is data crunching at massive levels - think of Hadoop, Big Table, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc... working on clusters of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers. There are data mining algorithms at work here, finely tuned to extract the most insightful of correlations between seemingly disparate pieces of information. Yes. However, take a specific case of a user browsing or searching for a keyword, and then follow the user and the personalization that is attached to that piece of information. Show to the user that cookie, and the tags associated with it, and the path that the information takes as it follows us from a Google search page to a news page where that a contextual, personalized ad is served up.

Or to take another case. The author notes that it is "becoming more important to develop a basic level of algorithmic literacy.". Ok, no issue there; I would tend to wholeheartedly agree with the author. But then what? How? There is a suggestion that we learn basic programming - a quite radical a suggestion from a book aimed at the masses Laudable. But where does that take the average Internet user? How does knowing programming, and having a basic level of "algorithmic literacy" help me become better aware of the way cookies and persistent Flash objects work, or prevent them from tracking me? These are questions that the book could have, should have, answered. But it doesn't.

That is missing from this book. And that is a pity in my opinion. It would have elevated the book from the very good and timely to truly outstanding.

In closing, I would say that this book is an important addition to the literature that seeks to provide a counter-argument to the wholly uncritical and the absolute way in which the Internet is viewed by technophiles. There are at least two other books I would recommend to people interested in this topic:

Some other books and articles referenced in the book:

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.
Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
Conley, Dalton. Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
Solove, Daniel J. Understanding Privacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch : The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (my review, blog post)
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Teachers’ Expectancies: Determinants of Pupils’ IQ Gains,” Psychological Reports, 19 (1966)
The Filter Bubble - Books by Eli Pariser - Penguin Group (USA)
The Filter Bubble - Official book page
Filter bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
The Googlization of Everything
What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly

Kindle Excerpt:

Lothal - A Port of Harappan Civilization

2012-02-04T10:02:00.001+05:30

The Indus-Saraswati Harappa Civilization is the largest among the pre-historic civilizations that existed and flourished around 3000-2000 BCE. At its peak, this civilization boasted of more than 2000 sites spread across a massive area of 800,000 sq km. Mohejendaro in now Pakistan, and then Harappa, also in now Pakistan, were the the first sites excavated (though Kalibangan in northern Rajasthan had been discovered a few years earlier by , but it was only later that this site was tied to the Indus Saraswati Harappan culture).

The site at Lothal was discovered almost 60 years ago.

The site measures 7 hectares (1 ha = 100m x 100m = 10000 sq. m, or basically 2.4 acres), which is roughly 17 acres. The town's peripheral wall is massive, 12 to 21 m thick, and was clearly intended to offer a measure of protection against floods, whose repeated onslaughts left tell-tale marks of ravage on the town and probably brought about its end. [From The Lost River, by Michel Danino]

View Larger Map

The site of Lothal is about 7kms away from the Ahmedabad-Bhavnagar highway. For half the distance the road is not in good condition, and fairly potholed - as you can see from the photo below. After that the road improves considerably, and all told, you can get to the Lothal site from the highway in about 20 minutes.

The impetus for excavating around the Indus and Saraswati basins was the partition of India and the fact that both Mohenjedaro and Harappa, the largest and most famous sites of the Indus-Saraswati Harappa Civilization, had become part of Pakistan. India needed to unearth sites within its own borders to be able to continue this archaeological work.

"The ancient site of Lothal (place of the dead) was discovered in 1954 by S.R.Rao during the course of exploration launched by the Archaeological Survey of India to discover sites of Indus civilization (Harappan civilization) beyond the Indus valley. The excavation of the site from 1955 to 1962 established Lothal as a Harappan port town and a manufacturing center of many objects, especially beads of semi-gems, possibly for export to other Harappan and West Asian cities." [From the board outside the ASI Museum at Lothal. I have scanned and OCR-ed the photo, and then made minor edits to correct obvious errors in the OCR.]

"Phase II witnessed the planning and building of Lothal along the patterns of cities of Indus.As a first measure against floods, the houses were constructed on sun-dried brick platforms. The town was divided into two divisions-the citadel, where the ruler of Lothal lived and important manufacturing activities like ivory working took place and lower town, where other manufacturing activities were organised. The citadel had the ruler's mansion, paved baths for ceremonial purposes, well-laid and covered underground drains and a well. The lower town was divided into a main road possibly for trading activities and the other area where manufacturing of beads and copper tools were done. In fact, remains of a bead-maker's house, complete with kiln, pot-full of beads in various stages of product ion was exposed."

Signs such as the one below are placed at strategic points to guide the visitor to appropriate parts of the town. However, the place is otherwise bereft of any other explanatory signs. Small, unobtrusive pacards of sorts would have helped. Sadly, there are none. One has to rely on the services of a guide, or to go to the Archaelogical Museum, pick out a book on Lothal, and there is one written by S.R Rao, the ASI archaelogist who helped excavate and discover this site, and then head back to the site to figure out the site. The book is useful, yes, but you get the sense that a knowledgeable guide could make the place come to life.

This is another instance where I would have benefited greatly from the services of a guide, who may have been able to shed light on how this cemetery below functioned. Without the services of one I could only theorize, and that too without the help of any prior knowledge about the town.

In the photo below, you can make out the drain running in the bottom left corner. Outlets from houses ran off into drains, that then emptied into septic tanks. Clearly, the level of urban planning and civic sense displayed by the Harappans five thousand years ago surpasses the sense of planning displayed by many town administrators in the 21st century!

The most outstanding structures of lothal - the dock and warehouse - were built during this phase. The dock is a trapezoidal (218 x 37m average) tank-like structure with an inlet in the northern arm and a spillway in the south. The dock was connected to the sea through a river (now dried up) on the western margin of the town. Studies show that this was a tidal dock, size of which are comparable with modern docks. The warehouse, a massive structure with a series of platforms, was built near the dock and the ruler's mansion, all indicating the active role of the ruler in the trade of Lothal.

The excavation established two periods of continuous occupation of the site. During phase I period, the Harappans arrived at Lothal to settle among an indigenous people already knowing the use of copper and bead-making. The rich rice and cotton growing hinterland and proximity to sources of gems and semi·gems and other raw materials perhaps attracted the Harappans to Lothal. A minor flood around 2350 BCE destroyed the village and provided the Harappans to build a town in their typical plan.

This phase also witnessed the introduction of unique Indus standards in industrial products like tools, ceramics, ornaments, weights, seals with a script etc. Manufacture of various goods and the trade in them flourished adding to the material prosperity of the town. A massive flood around 2200 BCE destroyed the town. Soon it was rebuilt in phase III, The Climax.

The prospering trade brought in many foreign materials like imported ceramics, Terracotta models of mummy and gorilla, gold beads, a seal of Persian Gulf origin etc. It also induced abundant production of local artefacts like seals, weights, beads, jewelry, decorated pottery and the like. Fire worship was introduced by building fire altars in public places. The artistic endeavors were stimulated and a new style of painting the pottery with animals in their natural surroundings and depiction of age old tales were witnessed.

A flood again around 2000 BCE affected the prosperous the town in phase IV, the Decline Phase. Importantly, the ruler seems to have left the town and cobblers, dyers and bone-workers occupied the citadel area. The efficiency of the dock was reduced due to sudden shift in the direction of flow of the channel. The prosperity of the town started to decline leading to disorganized manufacturing activities.

A massive deluge around 1900 BCE triggered a large scale dispersal of Harappans to interior Gujarat, leading to springing up of many smaller settlements during Period B. Largely known as Late Harappans, these sites were de-urbanised and mainly dependent on agriculture and less on trade. Lothal was occupied by similar people with improved material remains, with no standardization, particularly in weights and seals.

The material of Harappans of Lothal reflects their high standards in many areas. To mention a few such objects: the numerous remains of beads of various shapes and materials, third largest collection of Indus seals next only to Mohenjodaro and Harappa, variety of shell objects, copper objects like an ingot of 99.18% pure copper, various copper and bronze objects like drill-bits, saw and fish·hooks, tools of stone, weaving tools, pottery with intricate painting, games objects, terracotta figurines, animals like gorilla, horse, and rhinoceros, series of accurate weights, ivory scale with linear divisions, shell compass for sighting a line and measuring cardinal angles etc.

This museum, established in 1976, preserves and exhibits these objects in originals as they'Were recovered from the excavation.

[From the board outside the ASI Museum at Lothal. I have scanned and OCR-ed the photo, and then made minor edits to correct obvious errors in the OCR.]

http://asi.nic.in/asi_museums_lothal.asp

The Lost River: On The Trail Of The Sarasvati, by Michel Danino (Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam)

The Westin Gurgaon, New Delhi

2012-01-29T07:53:00.000+05:30

Photographs from The Westin Hotel in Gurgaon. This is a relatively new hotel, and came up only in 2011 (or late 2010), and is strategically located just off the Delhi Gurgaon Expressway, at the Mehrauli Gurgaon Marg, popularly known as MG Road, and the site of literally dozens of malls. What used to be a sleepy road connecting Gurgaon to Mehrauli till as recently as 15 years ago is now a picture-perfect example of chaotic unplanned urbanization.

A most peculiar design decision that baffles, nay boggles, the mind is the decision to have this huge glass partition separating the bedroom from the bathroom, instead of the usual solid wall or partition. This may well appeal to the honeymoon couple out on a romantic rendezvous away from home, or to the flirtatious executive looking to bring, err... work, back to the hotel. But to the family looking for a comfortable room this poses challenges to say the least.

I shot this photo below from my hotel room at 7AM. Within the next half an hour or so this road would become completely clogged with cars trying to get on to the expressway, get off the expressway, and in general create a chaos.

And this photo below was taken at 7PM. Good luck if you work in this area and need to travel back home, or to the airport for that matter. It is therefore not surprising that prices of residential properties near this place are astronomical. I mean obscenely astronomical. More than a crore rupees of apartments is the norm. And some run as high as 5 crores - that is one million US dollars. For a 2000 sq ft apartment.

View Larger Map

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson - Review

2012-01-29T07:49:00.000+05:30

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (Amazon.com, I Am Legend (Movie), Kindle Edition) - my review

More nuanced and complex than the movie
Reviewing a book by comparing it to its movie is not the ideal thing to do, but I did watch the Will Smith movie first, which itself was not the first movie adaptation of the book - The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man both were based on the novel and came out more than 30 years ago, and only more than a year later read the novel.
Robert Neville's character in the book is more complex, more prone to weaknesses, and more fallible than the movie character.
In a post-apocalyptic world where a bacteria has killed most of the world's human population and turned the survivors into blood seeking vampires that stalk Neville's house at night, Robert Neville must live and survive, though seemingly without purpose. He frequently succumbs to bouts of drinking, frustration, and rage. He wages a lone, sometimes gruesome, and what often looks like a pointless battle against the vampires. Company comes in the form of a dog, that brings back to him a modicum of humanity he had long forgotten he had, and then in the form of a young woman who has just lost her husband to the vampires. The end is bleak and quite unlike the movie.
This book is supposed to have inspired such legends, so to say, of the field as Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Not to mention its influence on a whole genre of gore-filled zombie infested movies of the 70s and 80s.

Kindle e-book excerpt:

Boomerang by Michael Lewis - review

2012-01-20T21:56:00.001+05:30

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis

(Buy from Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam; my review on Amazon)

My review: Monkeys and posteriors do not mix. Except when governments start doing financial planning.

Money and morals also do not mix. Lewis captured this in "Liar's Poker", and he travels to Europe to find the same holds true for countries too. A morbidly funny disaster-financial tourist's travelogue.

And oh yes, who would have thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Governor of California, would turn out to be a far, far better governor than actor, not that that bar was too high to begin with. Nonetheless, who woulda thunk?

The financial meltdown of 2008 didn't just end with a massive bailout of Wall Street. Its origins had spawned similar disasters, waiting to happen elsewhere also. And a couple of years later, the disasters began to strike. One by one, across Europe, in Iceland, Ireland, Greece, and elsewhere. The stickler-for-rules, overly trusting Germans were left holding the bag. To round it all off, Lewis returns to the United States to observe that California can serve as a microcosm of things to come. Of bad things, lurking in the darkness. Whereas financial shenanigans had sunk only banks and crippled the financial system in 2008, the second apocalypse now threatens to bring down entire countries and their economies.

The origins of this book lie in the author's earlier book, "The Big Short", and the enigmatic hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, who made a fortune by betting on the venality and avarice of Wall Street. In 2011, Kyle Bass remained as optimistically bullish in his belief that the worst was still to come. He opined that "...the financial crisis wasn’t over. It was simply being smothered by the full faith and credit of rich Western governments." How so? Well, consider the numbers. "Ireland, for instance, with its large and growing annual deficits, had amassed debts of more than twenty-five times its annual tax revenues. Spain and France had accumulated debts of more than ten times their annual revenues. Historically, such levels of government indebtedness had led to government default. “Here’s the only way I think things can work out for these countries,” Bass said. “If they start running real budget surpluses. Yeah, and that will happen right after monkeys fly out of your ass.”" [bold-emphasis mine]

And so starts the author's travels around the world, observing first-hand the travails that greed has wrought upon European economies. It begins with Iceland, and ends up in California.

Iceland turned, almost overnight, from a nation of fishermen, to a nation of bankers and hedge fund managers. And they had the United States to look upto for inspiration. "An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that". ... That was the biggest American financial lesson the Icelanders took to heart: the importance of buying as many assets as possible with borrowed money", which resulted in a couple of things happening. On the one hand, "By 2007, Icelanders owned roughly fifty times more foreign assets than they had in 2002.". On the other hand, when disaster struck, you had "Iceland’s 300,000 citizens ... bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion in banking losses - which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child." When you looked at the people running the country's finances, you had to just know that a full-blown, unmitigated disaster was just round the corner. "The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet. Haarde, though, is a trained economist—just not a very good one. The economics department at the University of Iceland has him pegged as a B-minus student."

The biggest Greek tragedy, was perhaps fittingly, to be found in Greece. Reading about Greece, the average Indian may well be tempted to think that they were reading about India. Consider these snippets offered as evidence:

The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses.
...
Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other.
...
It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed.
...
Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.
...
“This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.” “What?” He smiles. “The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”
...
an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all.
...
“If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.”

In short, "the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks."

Ireland is different, but only in the palette of colors used. The painting is still a mix of the macabre and grotesque.

Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers had set some kind of record for destruction.

Germany is the country everyone has been looking up to bail these economies out of the doghouse. And Germans were obsessed with rules, and believed, incredibly enough and naively enough, that others did too.

Germans longed to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

The author finally ends in California, where there is a surreal bicycle ride with the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and an even more surreal visit to the city of Valejo. As with the economies of countries, California has perhaps itself to blame for the mess it finds itself in. Its laws, that make it almost impossible for the government to raise taxes, is further compounded by the behavior of its citizens themselves, who, when given a chance to effect some reform, stood up and said no.

In November 2005 he [Arnold] called a special election that sought votes on four reforms: limiting state spending, putting an end to the gerrymandering of legislative districts, limiting public employee union spending on elections, and lengthening the time it took for public school teachers to get tenure. All four propositions addressed, directly or indirectly, the state’s large and growing financial mess. All four were defeated;

And that was pretty much the end of any hopes of reform that California had.

Kindle Excerpt:

A King Cobra's Summer, by Janki Lenin - A Reading

2012-01-16T18:11:00.001+05:30

"A King Cobra's Summer", by Janaki Lenin - A reading
(Buy from Pratham Books, Flipkart)

Gorgeously Illustrated, educational, informative, entertaining - four books in one!

On a bright Sunday morning on Dec 18, at 9:30AM, our small apartment complex library opened up, and the kids started trooping in - seven of them. All excited by the prospect of a story-telling session and the chance to do some drawing too. At the very outset I had to remind the kids, gently, without dashing their hopes, that we would "try to draw" something from the book after the reading, and that I could not guarantee any sort of decent results. I have the equivalent of "two left-feet" when it comes to drawing. I also have two left feet when it comes to dancing, so both abilities sort of complement each other. Kids being kids, all they wanted a good story and an opportunity to spread color on canvas.

This whole episode had started a couple of weeks earlier, when I had emailed Pratham Books, asking them whether I could volunteer to be a book reader for their soon-to-be-launched book, "A King Cobra's Summer", written by Janki Lenin and illustrated by Maya Ramaswamy, and be what they call a "Pratham Books Champion", an honor to be sure, since I lay no claim to being a champion. They readily accepted. Maya from Pratham Books called back and spoke with me, and a few days later the book had arrived by mail. The first order of business was for me to read the book. Which I did. In half an hour I had gone from cover to cover. I was quite taken in by the high-quality printing, the gorgeous use of colors, and the easy-to-understand prose, and how the story weaved a rich tapestry of information about the king cobra within its pages.

On the Sunday, after the children had all gathered, over the next 45 minutes we spent a very interactive 45 minutes (see - no point in wasting even a single minute) going over the book. Rather than make it a one-way aural street, I had breaks every five minutes or so, asking the children questions about Kalaa. Of course, the kids had questions of their own that couldn't wait even those five minutes! Right on the first-page, where we are told that king cobras grow to over 15 feet in length, one way to bring this length alive for the children was to tell them that 15 feet would have meant placing four kids on top of another - give or take a few feet. Or that 15 feet would have been almost the entire length of the library room. You know that children have 'got' it when you hear the appreciative 'ooh' and 'aahs' from them!

The part where Kaala gulps down the python elicited a few 'eews', and rightly so. One should peel the skin before eating it, right? Don't we peel the skin of a banana before wolfing it down? See, right there there was a distinction to be made between humans and animals, or in this case, reptiles.

A swift 45 minutes later, it was time to start with the drawing, and to bring out the Raja Ravi Verma in all. Or so went the wistful hope.

The portraits of Kaala on pages 2 and 20 were quit similar, and in the end we selected the one on page 2 to draw. It also looked the easier of the two. Once the outline had been drawn, the children went about tracing the outline with a black sketch pen, and then started filling in the colors.

What you see on the whiteboard down is my own attempt at fleeting artistic immortality. The book lies at the foot of the whiteboard with its pages opened to the pages.

By about 11AM or so we had decided to wind up - the children had shared a very enjoyable 90 minutes listening to, participating, and then drawing from the lovely book, A King Cobra's Summer.

Kudos to Pratham Books and their amazing team for everything. Their books are informative. They are educational. And they are entertaining. And they are cheap. I kid you not. And that's not even a pun. The books are very affordable, and here's to them coming closer every single day to their aim of getting a book into every child's hands.

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

2012-01-15T11:35:00.001+05:30

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai (Kindle, Flipkart, my user review on Amazon.com)

The Journey Is In the Evocative Stories, Not the Climax As Such
After reading these three stories, I felt a bit disappointed. After thinking a little bit, I realized that I was mistaking her novellas for some crime thrillers, that needed to have some nailbiting, cliffhanger climactic end. That is not the case. These novellas satisfied my need to read good quality writing.

There are three novellas here - "The Museum of Final Journeys", "Translator Translated", and "The Artist of Disappearance" - eponymous with the title. For my money I enjoyed the second story the most - the story about a middle aged woman who faithfully and lovingly and successfully translates the work of an Oriya language writer, but for the second translation casts a more critical eye ("more professional perhaps?") - "I began to wonder if publishing such a disappointing novel would be good for Suvarna Devi's reputation, which I had worked hard to establish."

The third one is the most abstract, so to say, but not without its moments of levity - "... there was no way they could carry their equipment down there: it was unfortunate that Nakhu was only partially and not completely a donkey." The prose is also sort of reminiscent of RK Narayan's writing perhaps...

Yes - I think I enjoyed the book as a whole. Satisfying in the way that stays with you after you have finished reading the book.

The Artist Of Disappearance

Kindle Excerpt

About Me - Photography 1

2012-01-14T00:57:00.000+05:30

I got interested in photography in 1999. Till that time I had had a point-and-shoot 35 mm Canon film camera, and I would, like most people I knew, carry the camera to places I went, take a few snaps, get them developed, and stick them into an album. In case you are wondering, and this is most likely to happen if you don't 'go' back to the 90s, then this whole talk about '35mm' and 'film' cameras will seem quaint and odd. Let me clarify. The first thing to clarify is that in 1999 digital cameras were far and few in-between. A megapixel was a big deal, and most digital cameras were sub-pixel in resolution and no match for even the most basic of 35mm point-and-shoot cameras when it came to quality. And they were costly. Digital cameras. Things would change rapidly in just a few years. But in the reality of digital cameras that existed in 1999, 'affordable' was not a word you would find in its dictionaries. A digital camera was therefore not on my mind at that time. The second point follows from the first: shooting on 35mm negatives meant you had to get them processed and then printed. This usually happened at the local K-Mart of Wal-Mart. There you generally got two options: one was to use the store's in-house processing and printing capabilities, the second was to use Kodak processing. Kodak processing was about a dollar or two costlier than the in-house option for the entire 35mm roll, but gave much better results. Since I was not shooting that much anyway, it did not make much of a difference, and I would go for the Kodak processing option.

The photos that I did want to share via email, or put on my website, I would scan using a flatbed scanner, and then upload them. Even the scanning had to be done at low resolutions, and the resulting image file no larger than a 100KB in most cases. This also had its origins in the cost of storage. Email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, and others usually provided 2MB or 4MB of free storage space. You could purchase a massive amount of 25MB for something like $25 a year, but most did not. I did not. Lest you wonder, Google mail (Gmail) did not exist at that time. Google the company itself was a year old. So you could not send large images to your friends and relatives. You ran the risk of overwhelming their entire email quotas, which would make you rather unpopular with such friends and relatives. Hosting space was at a premium - especially the free one, and hard drives in those days maxed out at under 10GB or so. External hard drives were costly. Flash drives were almost unheard of - and their capacities was measured in KB and not MB. USB had just about made its appearance in consumer PCs a year or two earlier, USB2 was a few years away. External storage, for the most part, came in 3.5" floppy diskettes. You could also buy CD writers, but these ran at a few hundred dollars, and the CD-R discs were themselves about a couple of dollars each. So you see, there were limitations imposed on storage.

Till 1999 I had little idea about either film speeds or exposures - the basics of photography. You see, automatic cameras took care of all that - auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto-forward, auto-everything. All I had to care about was to make sure that the film had been properly inserted into the camera. You really did not want to shoot an entire roll of film, pop out the lid at the back, only to discover that the film leader had somehow not latched itself quite properly into the camera, and all you had been shooting were blanks, so to say. I was photographing, but I knew next to nothing about photography.

In 1999 I decided to invest a little money in a better camera than I had. The reason I came to this decision was actually quite silly. I had gone to San Francisco to visit my cousins, and there, in bright San Francisco daylight, under the open skies at the Golden Gate bridge, I had shot photos with ISO 400 speed film. The others had used Kodak ISO100 film. And when I compared the prints, I realized mine were not as saturated in color as theirs. Mine sucked, to put it simply. The short of it was, and I of course would not want to admit that even if I had known it, that I knew nothing about photography.

To remedy my less than desirable results I had to take a decision. Providing impetus to the decision was a realization that I had started taking more pictures than before. I had refused to accept that photography was becoming a hobby for me. Now I could continue to stumble on as before, take mediocre photographs with a mediocre camera, and exult at the occasional good photograph, pat myself on my back on a job well done, more the result of accident than design, and continue taking mediocre photographs. That was certainly a course of action that required little to no effort on my part. It was the status-quo. It was the path of least resistance. But what was clear was one thing: taking more photographs was not making me a better photographer.

This is the first post in this series. I am also posting this to a page I have added to my blog, About. As this year progresses I too intend to make progress in adding to this page.

Live long and prosper.

The Camel Club by David Baldacci - Review

2012-01-07T11:00:00.000+05:30

The Camel Club, by David Baldacci (Amazon.com, Kindle e-book, Flipkart, my user review on Amazon) - my review

Thrilling fast-paced page-turner. A few holes in the plot. And yes, Mahatma Gandhi could have written the ending!

After having read two disappointing Baldacci novels (The Winner and Hell's Corner) that flattered to deceive, this one is a much better read. Graded on a curve, yes, this is a five-star read.
Oliver Stone, fka John Carr, is still very much a man of mystery here. His past is decades behind him and we are not given much background there. The Camel Club has already been in existence for years. What we do get to learn is that there is a very sinister plot being, err.. plotted, to assassinate the President of the United States, and too in his hometown. Arabs, Pakistanis, Iranians, and well, basically, it looks like Islamic terrorists may be involved. That cannot be a good thing. And then there is this killing of an NIC operative that is witnessed by the Camel Club. The plot makes it way through the book in an unhurried though gripping manner. The climax is fast-paced, and the denouement takes place in a former CIA and now abandoned facility named "Murder Mountain".

Having read two of Baldacci's novels, The Winner and Hell's Corner, both promising but ultimately disappointing, The Camel Club is much better. The plot, and especially the ending, when fully revealed, is still fantastical, and I will note again, one that could have been written by Mahatma Gandhi - without saying more. Read the book to find out. Parts of the plot are still a little implausible, but that is excusable here.

In short, gripping fast-paced turner that doesn't ask for much thinking from the reader.

http://davidbaldacci.com/
http://davidbaldacci.com/writing/novels/the-camel-club
My review post of "Hell's Corner"
My review of "The Winner"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Baldacci

Kindle Excerpt:

Hudson News at Changi Singapore Airport

2012-01-02T15:34:00.000+05:30

http://www.changiairport.com/shopping-and-dining/shopping/hudson-news-and-magazines

Review of India's Culture and India's Future by Michel Danino

2012-01-01T02:08:00.001+05:30

Indian Culture and India's Future, by Michel Danino - Review
(Flipkart.com, Amazon.com, my user review on Amazon.com)

Ready reckoner for the confused Indian and the misinformed rest.
A book that attempts to put forward the vast richness of India's culture, its contribution to the world, and the crossroads the country and its culture finds itself at.

Indians have long been accused of looking at their past with rose-tinted lenses and a sort of smugness about their superiority. A lack of knowledge about their past means most Indians have no objective perspective of their present, nor are they able to cogently argue why India's contributions to the world have been so often and so grossly misrepresented. This book attempts to put together, in one short read, a guide on India's past, its achievements, its thinkers, its contributions, and also tries to identify the causes that have led to this strange sense of dissociation and lack of pride that so many Indians have for India and its culture and heritage.

The first part of the book, titled "A Thousand-Branched Tree" covers the history of India's scientific minds and scientific discoveries, the vast reach of India's culture that pervades most of the world today, its contributions to art and culture, and its deep sense of respect for nature - yes; green was cool in India a few thousand years before the rest of the world discovered that annihilating the environment was, to put it mildly, not a good idea.

The second part then treads ground close to the present, and is titled, "Indian Culture at the Crossroads". This section covers the problems facing India and its cultural identity, and its causes.

The final section is "India and the World". This section looks at the distortions, stereotypes and outright lies that have been used to malign India.

Note that there is enough material that is likely to be offend people with sensitive sensibilities. Leftists, liberals, and communists for one - the historical kind, the ones in the media, and the ones with pretensions to intellect, since they have been at the forefront of the admirably successful campaign over the past several decades to run down India and its culture. However, when arguing with the wind of facts at your back, the proper response should be introspection from those so offended, not invective. There has also been a concerted effort by some in western media - a very smartly choreographed drama - that utilizes oft-repeated lies, a selective use of distortions, and a glib overlooking of evidence and contrarian evidence. The most pernicious example is the persistent perpetration of the fiction that there was a so-called Aryan invasion of India. But more on that in a future post.

This book can be read from cover to cover in three hours or so. I recommend that people interested in and who care for India would be well advised to spend these few hours in this book. They will be amply rewarded and enriched by that time.

"Blaming India's present degradation on her ancient culture or civilization is not merely ignorant, it is dishonest." [pg 20]

India's Scientific Mind
In the space of 121 concise, sometimes cryptic verses, Aryabhta, born in 476CE, possibly the greatest mathematician ever, gave us the following advances:

. a proposed value of pi (Π) equal to 62832/20000 or 3.1.416 ... and a surprisingly perceptive explanation that this value is only 'approximate';
. an ingenious method for the extraction of square and cube roots
. a succinct and precise table of sines (or jya), in the form of just two lines of coded syllables, giving sine values of angles up to 90° (in twelve increments of 3° 45')...
. a statement that the earth is a sphere with a diameter of 1,050 yojanas, which comes fairly close to the actual figure;
. a prescient observation that the earth's rotation is what causes the fixed stars to appear to move. (... Aryabhata's system remained basically geocentric; heliocentricism appears first with Parameswara and more clearly with his disciple Nilakantha Somayaji (1444-1545), two celebrated Kerala astronomers who predate Copernicus.)
...
. a correct understanding of the basic mechanism of solar and lunar eclipses, which he attributed to the moon's disc and the earth's shadow respectively;
. a notion that the moon and planets are not self-luminous but actually reflect sunlight.

But this is not all. Aryabhata's work on yugas led him to "a contemplation of the infinite which was a hallmark of Indian savants: 'Time is without beginning or end,' said Aryabhata. From this 'contemplation' flowed insights which our rational mind can only regard as 'coincidences': the value of a 'day of Brahma', 4.32 billion years, 'happens' to be almost exactly the age of the earth.' [pg 27]

In contrast, "In the seventeenth century, Archbishop James Usher revised those calculations (not the Indian calculations) and proposed that the universe had been created in 4004 BCE, a belief that prevailed until Darwin." [pg 34].

Lest the enlightened mind think that Aryabhata was a lone flash-in-the-pan in the wilderness of Indian scientific thought, there is more.

The single greatest mathematical concept of all time has to be the decimal place value notational system, and it was developed in India.

The 594 CE incscription from Sankheda (near Baroda) is the oldest dated Indian document containing a number written in the place-value form. ... [pg 62]

Sayana and the Speed of Light

As far as we know, it was measured for the first time by the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer in 1675, with an error of 25 percent, and more precisely in the nineteenth century. But there is a curious comment by the fourteenth-century Vedic commentator Sayana on a hymn of the Rig Veda addressed to Surya, the sun-god. Sayana records a tradition associated with Surya:
Thus it is remembered:
[O Surya] you who traverse 2,202 yojanas in half a minute.
In much of ancient literature, the yojana is equated to 8,000 human lengths, or 13.6 km taking an average height of 1.70 m. ... And the nimesha's value is generally 16/75th of a second. With these values, Sayana's statement yields a speed of 280,755 km/s, remarkably close to the known velocity of light (299,792 km/s, thus some 6 percent too small). [pg 35]

Quantum physicist Edwin Schrodinger counted the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads among his favourite readings (and named his dog 'Atman'!):

This life of yours which you are living is not entirely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in this sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: tat tvam asi, this is you.... [pg 70]

Speaking of medicine, the notion of "invisible creatures" finds mention in Indian texts:

Thus the Ashtangahridayasamhita refers to blood corpuscles that are 'circular, legless, invisible, and coppery in colour' - strangely reminiscent of red blood cells... [pg 39]

India's contributions were not limited to contemplations on the universe and the world. They extended to outside India too, in the form of commerce for instance.

... cowrie shells originating form India or the Maldives were used as currency in Kenya and Egypt in the third millenium BCE
... Recent excavations at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike have confirmed that an extensive sea trade existed between India and the Middle East from the third century BCE onward... [pg 52]

From about 500 BCE, the celebrated 'wootz' steel produced in south India was exported to the Middle East and Europe; it was called 'Damascus steel' as it was there that it was made into sharp swords
...
The ancient Iranian port city of Siraf (modern Taheri) was entirely built with Indian teakwood.
[pg 67-68]

One firm evidence for the spread of Hinduism comes to us from Armenia in the second century BCE. This region then included a part of Turkey and a part of Iran, and two Indian princes had travelled there from Kannauj, bringing with them a cult of Krishna and founding a city called Veeshap. They were killed in some quarrel, but their descendants built two temples... The temples, which contained two brass statues about five and seven meters high of a god called 'Kissaneh' (Krishna, obviously), were destroyed about 301 CE by 'Saint' Gregory the Illuminator, amid the slaughter of over 1000 resisting Hindus, including the temple priests; the survivors were forcibly baptized. [pgs 53, 54]

In the eighteenth century, for instance, Voltaire pointed out that the Christian use of holy water had its origin in the sanctity attached to Ganga water. [pg 54]

On The Bhagvad Gita
Chapter 7 is titled, "The Gita and the Problem of Action". This holy song of the Lord has inspired Indians to action and has acted as a guiding light for millions over the millenia. The Independence movement was no different.

Indeed, the revolutionaries in Bengal and Maharashtra drew such inspiration from the Gita that the colonial authorities came to regard it as a 'gospel of terrorism', and it became one of the most sought-after pieces of evidence in police raids. It is also one of the chief influences cited in the 1918 Rowlatt Sedition Committee Report, side by side with Swami Vivekananda's works. [page 146]

It is then little surprise to read what so-called Indologists like Wendy Doniger have to say about the Gita.

Witness this statement made in 2000 by Wendy Doniger ... : 'The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think,' she informed her audience. 'Throughout the Mahabharata ... Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors as war ... The Gita is a dishonest book; it justifies war.'

Genuine philosophers like Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, and countless others, on the other hand, saw in the Gita much enlightenment.

The Gita had a profound impact on the US philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy... It [Vedic thought] is sublime as night and a breathless ocean.

As an aside, J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called "the father of the atomic bomb", remarked that the first atomic bomb test "brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.""

Emerson's disciple, Henry David Thoreau, spoke no less highly of Hindu thought:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmological philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny. [pg 59]

India and the World
In the third section, the author points out several incongruities that arise if you compare Indian literature and the doctrine of hatred and division sowed by English colonialists, missionaries, and more recently by communist historians.

Nowhere in the Sangam literature (the most ancient in Tamil) do we find a hint of a cultural clash with the North or with Vedic culture. Quite the contrary, we find the Vedas and the recitation of Vedic mantras praised from the earliest layers of this literature. [page 170]

It is perhaps so often overlooked that "distinctiveness is not separateness."

Again, the terrible lies that "India's numerous tribes never had anything to do with Hinduism until it was 'imposed' upon them by Brahman 'missionaries'" is not borne by facts.

Not only is there no trace of any such 'imposition', Hinduism is in reality the result of a long and fruitful interaction between Vedic culture and tribal cults, with many tribal deities enrichening the Hindu pantheon and tribal practices, rituals, and art forms getting absorbed - a wholly organic process controlled by no authority or clergy. [page 171]

It perhaps does not require repetition that the problem is not with the religion, but with those who have misused and misrepresented religion and the name of religion for their own selfish ends.

"Francis Xavier had this to write in a letter to his fellow Jesuits at Rome's Society of Jesus in 1543:
When all are baptized I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken in pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done, witnessing the destruction of the idols by the very people who but lately adored them." [page 172]

The author also laments the ubiquitous practice of self-censorship followed by historians in India. This is supposedly done "for fear of offending today's Muslim Indians. Yet the latter are no more responsible for them than today's Germans are responsible for Nazi atrocities."

Yet another blow against India's struggle for truth is wielded by Marxist historiographers like Bipin Chandra, who in his textbook on Modern India "used the words "terrorism" and "terrorists" seven times in just two pages to describe revolutionaries in India's freedom struggle, no doubt aware of how the word's connotation has shifted in recent decades. ... there is no excuse for using it in a modern textbook without a suitable explanation: India's freedom fighters did not explode bombs in public places with a view to causing as many deaths as possible, nor did they take hostages or use suicide bombers..." [page 181]

In the words of the author, "Marxist historiography is in many ways the inheritor and continuer of the colonial, Eurocentric view of India, although in a new garb. ... it finds no intrinsic or endearing value in Indian civilization or in its contributions to humanity."

This book, as I said at the beginning, is a short read. The writing style is engaging and simple. The organization of the chapters is logical and each chapter is focused on a theme or single topic, and therefore easy to follow. There is a rich list of references at the end of the book. This book should help educate Indians about the unsurpassed richness of their culture and heritage, its scientific spirit that has fostered innovations for thousands of years, and also of the challenges facing Indian society, which is under stress from several quarters. The need of the hour is to raise awareness among the youth to these issues.

Some links on Michel Danino:

Related books from Flipkart.com

NewsLink, Sydney Airport, Australia

2011-12-17T10:30:00.000+05:30

The NewsLink books and convenience store at the Sydney International Airport. Michael Connelly's latest, The Drop, and Isaac Walterson's Steve Jobs were among the prominently placed tomes.

NewsLink Pty Ltd (or LS travel retail Asia Pacific - formerly known as Lagardère Services Asia Pacific) is an Australian company responsible for providing convenience items and travel products in airports and train stations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Fiji. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsLink]

http://www.lsaspac.com/ls_home.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsLink

Sydney Opera House, Australia

2011-12-11T00:41:00.000+05:30

This is a photo of the Sydney Opera House - also a World Heritage Site, as seen from my hotel room at the Sydney Harbour Marriott at Circular Quay.

The views from the other side of the bay, the Admiralty House, are spectacular, as can be seen from so many other photos of the building. As seen from the hotel, the photo can only hint at the marvelous beauty of this structure.

And this is the room from where I took the photo of the Opera House. The room's not bad at all, but then, it's like any other good hotel room.

I shot this photo below, again from the hotel room, at about 6AM local time. As you can see, while it was supposed to be summer (middle of November) - because in the southern hemisphere November is summer, but the skies were overcast, there was nary a trace of the sun, and there was a strong hint of rain in the evening. Which is just as well. I did not have any time to even step out of the hotel and do sightseeing, so this suited me just fine. It would have been awful to have been inside an office while the weather outside was warm, sunny, and inviting.

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Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell

2011-12-11T00:25:00.001+05:30

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, by Ellen Ruppel Shell
(Amazon.com, Kindle, Flipkart, my review on Amazon.com)

Excellent and inexpensive (not cheap!) except for the isolated broadsides against capitalism and globalization

A very engaging journey through the history of cheap, from shops to malls to outlets to sales to IKEA to shrimps to globalization. Ignore the brief denunciations of capitalism and globalization and this is a five-star book. Thankfully much of the globalization phillipic is isolated at the beginning and end.

This book argues that cheap is different from a bargain. Cheap implies lack of longevity, lack of craftsmanship, and hidden costs that are sometimes not apparent till several years or decades after the purchase. Globalization is an imperative and inevitable but its costs are heavy. The book covers territory that is expected - the beginnings of the discount retail culture, but which requires a journey into the years following American independence to understand the underpinnings of cheap - standardization and industrialization. The insidious strategy behind outlet malls is an eye-opener. The psychology of sales, rebates, and coupons is also discussed by looking at how the mind works and responds to sales (answer: when confronted with sales we don't think much, and the little thinking that we do do is muddled and confused). When you talk about cheap you have to talk about superstores, food, IKEA, and China. India too gets a mention, but it is China that is today the manufacturing outsourcer to the world. The book does not cover "cheap" in the context of software, else India would have received its share of, err, attention. The industrialization of food has been covered in the definitive classic of our times, "Fast Food Nation", but there is new and relevant information to be found here - shrimp farming in Thailand and the havoc it has wreaked on the economies and the environment in those countries for one. The author also argues that it is the expansion of the global and interconnected labor force that has actually done the American worker more harm than good. By flattening the world, and making outsourcing feasible and economical, the American worker has been shorn of bargaining power.

So what about my crib with the author's anti-globalization rant? Well, in the chapters (mostly the first and last) where the author opines and philosophizes, the narrative is hyper-critical of capitalism and globalization. To paraphrase the author, globalization is inevitable, but free trade has not been all that great. Worker wages in India and China are instrumental in enabling the exploitation of workers in the United States. Low wages may be better than nothing at all for those workers but it is an insidiously cheap bargain that we agree to. Thomas Friedman gets it wrong in The World Is Flat, the conservative economist and Harvard professor Greg Mankiw is wrong, Adam Smith is wrong because lived in a world that was different and his observations don't really hold true in today's hyper-globalized world, Schumpeter's Creative Destruction is more about destruction than creation today, and so on... You get the picture. The litany of criticisms however stops just as it about to tires. The author's points are well-taken, but the solutions are not that apparent, or practical. Better enforcement of regulations and laws in developing countries, perhaps.

The beginnings of the "cheap" revolution can be traced, it seems, to the years after the US revolutionary war, when, "In 1794, fretting over the possibility of yet another war with England, now President George Washington proposed a bill to create public facilities to manufacture and supply the military with reliable weapons." [location 258] There were two successful bidders, Eli Whitney and Simeon North. "North broke down the gun-building process into a series of basic tasks and distributed the work among a group of semiskilled laborers. This radical departure from traditional gun making led to a cheaper and more consistently reliable product." (p. 9) "The first contract known to stipulate interchangeable parts, it was a resounding step in the inexorable march toward low price" [location 277] As for Eli Whitney, his cotton engine (gin for short, hence the name cotton gin) separated cotton fibers from their seeds. "Once the gin made cleaning cotton fiber so cheap, the expectation grew that cotton itself would be cheap. The cotton gin reduced the labor required to extract and remove seeds, but planting and picking remained a distinctly human chore. To meet the expectation of low price, the farming and picking of cotton had to be cheap as well, and this meant cheap labor. There is no cheaper labor than the slave variety, and it makes sense that the cotton gin led to an emphatic boost to the slave trade." (p. 10)

When discount stores, or nickel-and-dime stores began to appear, they were derided and looked down upon by retailers. Derided as “low-priced trash . . . ugly, short-lived . . . abominations.”, and not without reason, these goods were after all cheaper and of lower quality. The stores also did not offer the kind of personalized service that traditional retailers offered. This was a sort of double-edged sword for the traditional retailers, because "By cutting back on customer service and most other frills, discounters not only saved money but created the impression that their merchandise was cheap due not to low quality but to low overhead. This was partially true." [location 714] "Discount customers liked not having to cope with a daunting array of high-end merchandise and stuck-up salesclerks. And there was comfort in the idea that shopping no longer required a wardrobe. Those who can remember the sixties may recall getting dressed up to go downtown; some older women even wore hats and gloves." [location 781]

To keep costs low discounters were open to importing goods. Thus began the outsourcing of manufacturing, the rise of imports, facilitated by containerized shipping. "In 1965 the United States ran its first postwar trade deficit with Japan. The deficit was small, only $334 million, and largely traceable to the importation of cheap goods, primarily low-quality steel targeted at the bottom tier of the American steel market." As outsourcing caught on, the power of unions also began to decline, since jobs could now be dispensed with - by outsourcing more and more elements of manufacturing. The author argues that the power of unions is what kept the wages of workers in pace with inflation, allowing workers to not only earn living wages but also maintain a standard of living that allowed the middle class in America to have the best decades they had the past century. The American dream of home ownership was perhaps best realized in the city that was most unionized - Detroit. "As the car unions won successively larger concessions for their membership in the mid-1930s, Detroit ranked first in the nation in private home ownership." [location 514] Thereafter, as the pressure to keep prices low and to compete with the

The rise of discounters started the push of the American nation down the path of cheap. The offshoring of jobs to Asian countries was next. The introduction of what most people have at some time must have called the most wretched piece of plastic - the credit card - paid put to notions of savings. "Third-party universal credit cards, introduced in 1949, would in ten years’ time enable the conversion of frugal America to a nation in debt. Despite growing prosperity, the new middle class found it increasingly difficult to keep up, and, as many of us today, started to “trade down” to “trade up.” Middle-class consumers who wanted a showy car or a boat or a trip to Paris saved for these luxuries by cutting corners where they could on commodities such as children’s clothes, toiletries, hardware, and even food. As more and more respectable people sought low price, discount shopping lost its stigma. It would gradually become the norm." [location 593]

Outsourcing also meant that goods had to be mass-produced ahead of time. This meant that "consumers, although treated to what seemed like an ever-expanding variety of merchandise, were in fact being offered less variety and more variations on a theme."

The price-tag, now considered as integral a part of any item sold in any store as the good being sold itself, was the invention of Philadelphia haberdasher John Wanamaker, who is also credited with the first January White sale.

Then there is the bar code - the Uniform Product Code (UPC), that became ubiquitous once "Kmart adopted bar codes in the early 1980s ... pressuring suppliers to tag all their products with the little black bars before delivering them to stores or warehouses." Bar codes basically made it possible to record and analyze customer preferences in real-time, or near real-time.

Chapter Four, "The Outlet Gambit" was an eye-opener. At least for me. Outlets are where the smart shopper goes to get a great bargain on premium goods. Bargain prices for luxury goods. And outlet malls are typically located 50 miles or sohi from towns, where "shadows, where real estate is cheap and the tax incentives sweet." Or so goes the marketing. Ok, so let's pop the bubble. First, the location of outlets is very, very strategic, and the location meant to convey bargains. "In the public mind, convenience is a trade-off for price, and price is traded off for convenience. Inconvenience connotes cheap, while convenience connotes pricey." Second, in addition to premium outlets you have discounters at outlet malls, like "Crescent succeed by offering the perception of value using two signals: one, being situated in an outlet mall associated with so-called premium brands, and two, setting very high reference prices". Third, luxury brands sometimes derive most of their revenues from outlet stores! Coach for example, a $2 billion company, is said to earn most of its profits from its factory outlet stores. So, while some brands sell slightly imperfect or damaged goods at steeply discounted prices at outlets - at least that was the original thinking behind outlets: to sell slightly defective or out-of-fashion goods at factory outlet stores so as to not dilute the brand of the store's marquee stores, some other brands "add to their mix items made explicitly for the outlets. Generally these items are cheaper to produce, have fewer details, and are of lesser quality. Still, they carry the brand name, and therefore seem to be worth if not the reference price, then certainly more than the asking price. Lichtenstein put it this way: “Outlet malls today are the absolute epitome of the reference pricing scam.”"

Chapter Five, "Markdown Madness" looks at the madness of radical price cuts. Once you have a sale, you can't stop. You can't stop shopping at sales, and retailers cannot stop offering sales. Symbiotic relationship. Or a desperate slide to the bottom, that feeds upon itself, ad infinitum. "In 1955 the dollar value of total markdowns as a percentage of department store sales was a paltry 5.2 percent. ... in 2001 the dollar percentage of marked-down goods across all sectors—toys, electronics, clothing—had grown to an astonishing 33 percent."
One way to have a sale is to have a sale but not offer discounts. You do that by offering rebates. Not instant rebates, but the kind that need to be filled out and mailed. The best rebate is the one that is never redeemed. "But, as a rule, rebate redemption rates are very low, hovering in the 5 to 10 percent range for many items. ... Promotions that generate redemption rates greater than 35 percent are considered marginal by manufacturers and retailers; and a 50 percent redemption rate is considered an abject failure."

The chapter also looks at the madness, or the psychology of the human mind, that drives us to make purchases of things we probably do not need. "When setting discounts, marketers aim to activate the primary process in the brain, the emotional, impulsive side. In technical terms, their goal is to “spike the affective response to block the cognitive assessment.” In layperson’s terms, their goal is to distract customers from thinking hard about a purchase or, for that matter, thinking hard about anything at all."

Damasio argued that both logic and emotion are required for decision making, and that systems that control these functions, while separate, communicate with one another to jointly affect our behavior. That said, the emotional system—the older of the two in evolutionary terms—typically exerts the first and more powerful force on our thinking and behavior. If we sense we are getting the short end of the stick, we balk, even if not grabbing the short end makes us tumble back into the lake.

The inexorable drive towards cheap food and fast-food has driven down prices of food to ridiculously low levels. However, as Michael Pollan points out, it is not really food but food-like edible substances that we eat nowadays. The cheap food we eat today also means that "scientists writing in the New England Journal of Medicine linked cheap food to a startling prediction: that the next generation of Americans will be the first in human history to die younger than their parents." And this is not just because the byproduct of fast-food, mostly meat, is excrement. "Two feedlots outside Greeley, Colorado, together produce more excrement than the cities of Atlanta, Boston, Denver, and St. Louis combined. combined. Trucking the stuff off is impractical. One alternative popular among big companies is to spray liquefied manure into the air and let it fall where it may, coating trees and anything else that happens to be in its path." As for the animals that are bred to be slaughtered at these feedlots, the less said the better. For them as well as for the people who consume that meat. "Factory pigs are bred to be lean, so lean that producers sometimes inject their flesh with saline marinades to make it palatable. Stressful lives tend to make factory-grown pork acidic, bleaching it pale and breaking the tissue down to something flaccid, watery, and limp..."

This book is an inexpensive, not cheap, way to get familiarized with the complex world of cheap. Excellent book.

Kindle Excerpt:

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

2011-12-03T00:18:00.001+05:30

The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly (Kindle e-book, Flipkart, my user review on Amazon.com)
Gripping page-turner

Rich guy of dubious innocence, a double-murder, and Michael Haller again in the middle of it. This book is also a page-turner, though, reading it very soon after "The Lincoln Lawyer", the pace and narrative felt familiar. Life for Haller, our competent but flawed lawyer, is trying to pick his practice up, when a lucky break, in the form of a murder of a former colleague of his, lands an entire practice in his hands. With that practice comes the case of Walter Elliot. Elliot is accused of murdering his wife and her lover. Forensic tests confirm gun powder residue on Elliot's hands. But is he really guilty? The murder weapon has not been found. Furthermore, there is the question of a possibly tainted juror, an FBI interest in the case, and a detective, Harry Bosch, who may be using Haller as bait. Bosch and Haller share a tense relationship through the novel, trying to figure out how much to reveal and to what extent to keep their cards close to their chests.
There is, expectedly, ample ink devoted to the courtroom in the form of jury selection, how and when to exercise the right to strike a juror, expert witnesses, and more. The setting is the city of angels, Los Angeles, and the author evidently likes, if not loves, the city enough to bring the reader into the city.

A satisfying read.

Kindle Excerpt:

Barnes and Noble, Redwood City

2011-12-03T00:09:00.000+05:30

The Barnes and Noble bookstore in Redwood City, California (store link). As opposed to earlier visits to different Barnes and Noble bookstores, the store this time felt a bit sparse, and a little less lively. Maybe it is a sign of the times, what with traditional booksellers fighting an increasingly losing battle first against online vendors, and now against e-books themselves.

Their non-fiction bestsellers rack had a lot of familiar titles, including the latest by Michael Lewis, "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World", "That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back" by Thomas Friedman, "Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever" by Bill O'Reilly.

The bargain priced shelves are always fun to browse. You can also sometimes find really good bargains that you like, like a Calvin and Hobbes collection, or a "Far Side" book, or jigsaw puzzles.

The Barnes and Noble book store entrance faces the North-West in the building at the bottom.

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Bangalore Book Festival 2011

2011-11-27T00:12:00.005+05:30

I had visited the Bangalore Book Festival last year (see blog post and post with photos). This year also the festival is running at the Bangalore Palace Grounds.
From the Deccan Herald article, Bangalore book fair begins today, we can learn that this festival has more than 300 stalls, of which 94 stalls have been set up exclusively for Kannada books. The festival closes Nov 27 (Sunday), and entry fees for adults is Rs 20.

The arrangements, for purchasing tickets as well as for parking, are much better this year compared to last year. Metal rails were used for four different ticketing windows to keep the queues in order. There were several people in the parking lot to help people park their cars into different rows.

They also had a large billboard put up displaying a list of all the exhibitors at the sale, and their stall locations. If you were interested in a particular publisher's stall, you could use this to go directly to that aisle. They were also selling a small booklet with a list and advertisements from all the publishers, in case one was interested.

Sahitya Akademi had stall in the first aisle. In fact they had stall number 1.

Apart from the CBT stall one other stall I was looking very much to visit was Pratham Books (book site). I had recently ordered their books and was very impressed by the quality of the printing, the illustrations, and the writing. And the prices are absolutely stunningly low. I mean, think Rs 15 and up. Fifteen rupees, and even 30 and Rs 40 for most books is a deal. It's a steal. When so many of the Barbie and Disney books sell for a hundred, two hundred, and even more, with dubious educational values, the Pratham Books are simply amazing.
They had books in English, Hindi, and Kannada at the stall - they publish in 11 Indian languages. We picked up a set (numbered Set 18) for Rs 110, which is a collection of five books, priced between Rs 15 and Rs 35. With their already amazingly low prices it was unsurprising that the books were not being sold at a discount, unlike other stalls where a 10% discount was pretty much the norm.

The Ramakrishna Math had a stall too. You could see a large poster of Swami Vivekananda. Most books are very reasonably priced. I picked one up - a collection of short stories for children written by Sister Nivedita.

How could I not snap a pic of this stall - Abhinava publishers!

The Kannada University Hampi stall.

Amar Chitra Katha publishers (ACK Media) had a stall, with a surfeit of Amar Chitra Katha comics.

Navneet Publishers had some nice books where you could cut out pre-marked sections and construct different models. They had also put up some of those models for people to see before buying.

Interestingly enough, and I didn't know this before, but a publisher named Leftword Books had a stall. Now, the word is a dead giveaway, isn't it? Leftword Books! And in case you still don't get it, take a look at the books on display: "A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto" - penned by, among others, Irfan Habib, a stalwart among communist hagiographers (sorry, "Marxist historiographer" or "eminent historian" (book) would be better words), and edited by Prakash Karat, a leading luminary of the Communist Party of India. Or "The Agrarian Question in Marx and his Successors", or "Imperialism" by Lenin. I imagine there are still people who hold romantically flawed notions of communism, but it is a settled question that communism killed more people in the twentieth century than all famines and wars combined.

Well, for what it's worth, I think it is good that such freedom of expression lives on in India - the space and freedom to hold differing opinions and contrarian views, a tradition that has existed and thrived for literally thousands of years in this country - where intellectual differences are settled through civilized discourse and debate. It is sad therefore to see both right-wing extremists and liberals in India today not believe in honest debate (see Sagarika Ghose for instance (this, this), a staunch liberal whose stock-in-trade tricks consist of a bag of misrepresentations, outright biases, hidden agendas masquerading as honest opinions, and sometimes outright deceit - see especially this).

The CBT (Children's Book Trust), founded in 1957 by "by one of the India’s most celebrated cartoonist Keshav Shankar Pillai"# was a good place to get some pretty good bargains. They have published excellent and very reasonably priced books for chilren in India for decades now, and their contributions in this field deserve to be told to better publicized. The books are of high quality - i.e. the content, and are very reasonably priced. Two prominently placed books were on India's former Prime Ministers from the Nehru dynasty - Srimati Indira Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Penguin stall had a large collection of classics, among other bestsellers.

I counted at least two stalls devoted to books on Islam. The "Discover Islam Education Trust" stall had a friendly and courteous gentleman handing free copies of a book on Islam.

Higginbothams used to be a very recognizable and popular fixture on Indian Railway stations, when travel on trains was much safer and cleaner. Reading paperbacks on a day or two-day long journey has been an inextricable part of so many millions of lives that a part of me feels somewhat sad and nostalgic that this is slowly going to remembered mostly through movies and songs.

One of India's oldest publishing houses, Motilal Banarsidass (Wikipedia) was also present.

The ISKCON Bangalore book stall.

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

2011-11-26T09:51:00.002+05:30

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook (Flipkart, Amazon.com, my user review on Amazon.com)

A dismal and scary picture of the tomato notwithstanding, there are some green shoots to be seen.

The Fast Food Nation for the alluring Tomato. Despite a flagging and longer than needed second section, this book is an outstanding look at the tomato and at how modern agriculture has ruined the fruit, err.. no vegetable.

The tomato we eat has undergone several changes. It is larger. It is rounder. It is redder. It is longer lasting. It doesn't taste like a tomato. It is less nutritious than the tomato. It is grown in places where a tomato should not be grown. Compared to the tomato from fifty years ago, "According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium."

This then is a book about the tomato, and how it has changed over the last hundred years or so. The change includes changes to the tomato itself, and everything that touches or is touched by the tomato - the places where it is grown, the people who grow it, the chemicals and toxins that bathe the tomato, the stores that sell it, the scientists who are hard at work to revive the tomato, and where we may go from here.

This book can be seen as divided into three parts. The first is a look at the history of the tomato, and how modern industrial farming has reduced it to a round, tasty looking, long lasting, pesticide-laced tasteless industrial product. The second part is a look at the industrial farms of Florida where, shockingly, modern-day slavery thrives, and where farm workers live in worse than dilapidated conditions. In the third part the author goes in search of optimism - from researchers trying to undo fifty years of damage to the tomato and trying to breed a tastier tomato that can still be grown profitably, to small, independent farmers trying to grow the good old tomato the good old way, organically, profitably, and equitably - where farm workers are paid decent wages and sometimes even health benefits.

The history of the modern tomato goes back half a millennium or more.

"Botanists think that the modern tomato’s immediate predecessor is a species called S. pimpinellifolium that still grows wild in the coastal deserts and Andean foothills of Ecuador and northern Peru. ... S. pimpinellifolium fruits are the size of large garden peas. They are red when ripe and taste like tomatoes [location 217]
...
Selecting plants that produced larger fruits, or fruits with differing shapes and colors, pre-Columbian farmers created tomatoes that resembled most of the varieties available today. When Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1521, tomatoes had become an important part of the indigenous diet

Most of the tomatoes in the United States are grown in the sunshine state of Florida. The state least expected to grow tomatoes. "...the majority of the state’s tomatoes are raised in sand. Not sandy loam, not sandy soil, but pure sand, no more nutrient rich than the stuff vacationers like to wiggle their toes into on the beaches of Daytona and St. Pete."

If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow. Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology.
...
And although Florida’s sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida growers may as well be raising their plants in a sterile hydroponic medium. To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal. [location 122]

So you have Florida as the tomato state of the union. Where the vine is green and as are the tomatoes, till they are gassed with ethylene. Where the soil needs to be fumigated with methyl bromide ("one of the most toxic chemicals in conventional agriculture’s arsenal") - a substance that depletes the ozone layer, where the crop then needs to be protected from "at least twenty-seven insect species and twenty-nine diseases", where the "... conventional Florida farmer has a fearsome array of more than one hundred chemicals at his disposal" to combat these pests, and where "thirty-one different fungicides" are used to keep the leaves green and spotless. All of this adds up to more than eight million pounds of "insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides" applied to tomato fields in the state of Florida in one single year - 2006.

So is methyl bromide harmful? And what about other cocktail of pesticides and chemicals? Like "endosulfan, azoxystrobin, chlorothalonil, methamidophos, permethrin trans, permethrin cis, fenpropathrin, trifloxystrobin, o-phenylphenol, pieronyl butoxide, acetamprid, pyrimethanil, boscalid, bifenthrin, dicofol p., thiamethoxam, chlorpyrifos, dicloran, flonicamid, pyriproxyfen, omethoate, pyraclostrobin, famoxadone, clothianidin, cypermethrin, clothianidin, cypermethrin, fenhexamid, oxamyl, diazinon, buprofezin, cyazofamid, deltamethrin, acephate, and folpet." you mean? Well... methyl bromide can "... kill humans after brief exposure in small concentrations. Sublethal doses cause disruptions in estrogen production, sterility, birth defects, and other reproductive problems".

That is pretty nasty. What kind of birth defects are we looking at? These are the babies born to women who worked on Florida tomato farms:

Carlitos, as they called him, was born with a rare condition called tetra-amelia syndrome, which left him with neither arms nor legs. About six weeks later, a few cabins away, Jesus Navarrete was born to Sostenes Maceda. Jesus had Pierre Robin Sequence, a deformity of the lower jaw. As a result, his tongue was in constant danger of falling back into his throat, putting him at risk of choking to death. [location 716]
...
Two days after Jesus was born, Maria Meza gave birth to Jorge. He had one ear, no nose, a cleft palate, one kidney, no anus, and no visible sexual organs. A couple hours later, following a detailed examination, the doctors determined that Jorge was in fact a girl. Her parents renamed her Violeta. Her birth defects were so severe that she survived for only three days. [location 720]

Is that severe enough? One would think so. These are ghastly birth defects that are the result of exposure to chemicals used in tomato farms in Florida. So why would such dangerous working conditions be allowed to persist for the workers who toil in these tomato fields? Surely law and regulations would step in. Here's where the story takes a decidedly depressing turn. "In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Molloy is not talking about virtual slavery, or near slavery, or slaverylike conditions, but real slavery." [location 153]. "Florida officials take a what-we-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-us approach to enforcing pesticide application laws and recording instances of farmworkers being exposed to chemicals while on the job." But using slave labor on tomato farm workers is not new. "By 1860, just before the start of the Civil War, 44 percent of Florida’s 140,000 residents were slaves. When that system abruptly ended in 1865, cooperative local sheriffs obligingly arrested gangs of African American men, typically on bogus vagrancy charges, and rented them out to landowners in “convict lease programs,” a good deal for both the municipality collecting the fees and the farmers. [location 1470]

Slaves have been replaced by immigrant and migrant, itinerant workers. Workers who have little knowledge of the law, are mostly in debt, and are commonly illegal immigrants and therefore very susceptible to abuse by their employers. Their living conditions are appalling, to say the least. Sample this:

Dominguez swept his hand in a gesture of invitation into a bedroom. It housed five twin-bed mattresses. Three were flat on the floor with no space between them. Two rested on four-by-eight-feet plywood sheets suspended from the ceiling on chains. The room was covered in T-shirts, jeans, ball caps, running shoes, and a collection of cheap backpacks and luggage. The bathroom was at the end of a short hallway. Barely bigger than an airplane lavatory with a curtainless metal shower stall, it served ten men who came home each day hot, dirty, and anxious to bathe. The sink was stained black. The toilet lacked a seat. The kitchen consisted of a Formica-topped table and four mismatched plastic-upholstered chairs with grayish stuffing protruding from slashes. A saucepan containing something brown and hard rested on one of the burners of an apartment-size stove. A stainless steel sink was set into a counter that no longer had drawers or cupboard doors. A steady dribble of water ran from the faucet, and the door to the badly rusted refrigerator would not close. A single bulb dangled from a cord attached to an open electrical box in the ceiling, and two fans waged a noisy but futile battle against the heat and humidity. [location 1768]

This - a look at the plight of the tomato farm worker - forms the middle and the most substantial section of the books. It takes a detailed and long look at their conditions and efforts by groups to provide better and safer working conditions for these workers. This however is also the section that goes on and on and on. While interesting in its own right and probably deserving of a separate book in itself, I started to wonder if the labor employed on tomato farms was the main focus of the book. But just as I started to despair, the book moved on to other aspects of tomatoland.

So why is the tomato in so much trouble? The single biggest reason, the blame, has to be the tomato itself! It is a difficult fruit to please. Or more correctly, it is a difficult fruit to grow. It is difficult to balance the twin needs of taste and toughness. The tomato's skin has to be tough enough to withstand being plucked, packed, transported, and then placed on shelves in supermarkets - sometimes thousands of miles away. "The structure of a tomato also makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act. The gooey part of a tomato, called locular jelly, has most of the all-important acidity. The pericarp tissue, the walls of a tomato, give it strength and some sweetness, but no acidity. The harder a tomato is, the more bland it is likely to taste." [location 2385]. Longevity is prolonged by keeping it cold. Chilling the tomato below 50F also destroys its taste - "reduces the fragrant volatile chemicals that are all-important in giving the fruit its distinctive flavor". If you pick a tomato when it is ripe it will spoil long before it makes it way to the grocery store in far away lands. If you pick it when still unripe it looks green and unappealing. So scientists conjured up a way to give the tomato a red appearance even as the tomato was unripe - by gassing it with ethylene, a "gas that plants produce naturally as a final step in maturing their fruits"

In summary, I think this book is a sort of Fast Food Nation for the tomato. While Fast Food Nation is a tour-de-force, Tomatoland still engages, educates, and shocks - it is a must-read. Highly recommended.

Kindle Excerpt:

Idiots On Roads - 12

2011-11-25T11:17:00.000+05:30

I present to you an idiot on a pavement. The motorcyclist at the left of the photo, sir, is an idiot.
For several reasons.
Let's examine those reasons.
Firstly, he is on the wrong side of the road. Actually he is more than just on the wrong side of the road, but let's at least establish that he is on the wrong side of the road, to begin with.

Secondly, there is not much traffic on either side of the road, is there? Not that traffic congestion should be a reason to break traffic rules, but at least you could that out as a mitigating factor in those conditions. Understandable, if still not acceptable.

Thirdly, because he has chosen to use the pavement for driving. Not the road. Not even the wrong side of the road. He is driving on the pavement, on the wrong side of the road.

Fourthly, because he is on the pavement, the lady in the yellow sari has to walk on the road. It is a testament to the infinite patience and fortitude of the forlorn pavement trodder who has to keep his or her eyes on not only the pavement to watch out for uncovered manholes and potholes and gaps in the pavement, but also on vehicles on the pavement. All in a day's work. Inconsiderate idiot.

Why is he on the pavement? Well, he did not want to go to the other side of the road, drive up, then take a U-turn to come back on to this road. So much easier to simply take a turn on to the wrong side of the road, and the ride up the pavement for convenience.

Fifthly, he is driving without a helmet. It should not matter, since the helmet would be on a head that has long since stopped working to figure out what is right and what is wrong.

It only makes you wonder in what else walks of life he has internalized the philosophy of such shortcuts. At his job? In his friendships? In his relationships?

To say it using the words from the greatest movie of all time - Sholay: "khota sikka to dono taraf se hi khota hota hai." (खोटा सिक्का तो दोनो तरफ़ से ही खोटा होता है )

Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur (Tanjore)

2011-11-21T00:29:00.000+05:30

The Big Temple at Tanjore - correctly and properly known as the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur, is one of the most famous of all temples devoted to Lord Siva - the great Lord (brihad = great; eeswara = lord). It is also recognized as a World Heritage site by the United Nations. It therefore tends to attract a fair number of foreign tourists from around the world.

This temple completed 1000 years of completion. Yes, that is 1 followed by three zeroes. The temple was completed in 1010 CE - imagine the fanfare with which people would have tweeted the symmetry of the year, and there would have been polls on Facebook to debate whether the temple should be inaugurated by the King on the 10th of October, so that the date would read 10.10.1010.

Sometimes temple history is clouded in confusion and doubt. Not so in the case of the Thanjavur Big Temple. Thanks to extant inscriptions carved on the walls, we know the temple was completed exactly 25 years and 275 days after Raja Raja's ascension in 985 CE. [Temples Of South India by Ambujam Anantharaman]

From the UNESCO site, the following is listed as the justification for the inclusion of the temple in the World Heritage List:

Justification for Inscription
Criterion (i): The three Chola temples of Southern India represent an outstanding creative achievement in the architectural conception of the pure form of the dravida type of temple.
Criterion (ii): The Brihadisvara Temple at Thanjavur became the first great example of the Chola temples, followed by a development of which the other two properties also bear witness.
Criterion (iii): The three Great Chola Temples are an exceptional and the most outstanding testimony to the development of the architecture of the Chola Empire and the Tamil civilisation in Southern India.
Criterion (iv): The Great Chola temples at Thanjavur, at Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram are outstanding examples of the architecture and the representation of the Chola ideology.

The placque at the temple entrance in available in English, Hindi, and Tamil.

Temples tend to have the obligatory elephant and throng of devotees waiting to get blessed by the elephant's trunk. All for a nominal payment of a rupee or two to the mahout. Or deposited to the elephant's trunk, which then makes it way to the mahout.

The vimanam marks out this temple as unique from the architectural point of view. In most temples in south India, for that matter in India, the temple gopuram (pyramidal tower at the entrance to the temple) is bigger than the vimanam. At the Srirangam Ranganatha temple and the Srivillputhur Vatapatrasayee temples, for instance, the gopuram is magnifient, while at Thanjavur and in three other temples built by Chola kings, the vimanam dominates.
The dimensions of the vimaanam in Thanjavur clearly indicate the ingenuity and skill of Chola architects. Its 13 tiers are totally 58 m tall. The square base of 29 supports the octagon-shaped shikara (cupolic dome). This dome that weighs 81 tonnes rests on a single block of granite, which is a square of 7.8m. [Temples Of South India by Ambujam Anantharaman]

The best time to visit the temple is in the early hours of the morning or after 4PM, when the sun is shining a little less intensely, the light is softer, and the ground walkable with your bare feet.

What is fascinating, among so many other aspects of this temple, is that the Chola dynasty, that built this temple, ruled over South India and large parts of India and South East Asia, and held sway for over a thousand years, making it surely one of the longest lasting dynasties in the world. Even the vaunted Mughals could not hold on to power for more than a few hundred years. By the time the eighteenth century dawned, the empire was a pale shadow of itself.

Chola dynasty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Chola dynasty (Tamil: சோழர் [ˈt͡ʃoːɻə]) was a Tamil dynasty which was one of the longest-ruling in some parts of southern India. The earliest datable references to this Tamil dynasty are in inscriptions from the 3rd century BC left by Asoka, of Maurya Empire; the dynasty continued to govern over varying territory until the 13th century AD.
...
During the period 1010–1200, the Chola territories stretched from the islands of the Maldives in the south to as far north as the banks of the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh.^[6] Rajaraja Chola conquered peninsular South India, annexed parts of what is now Sri Lanka and occupied the islands of the Maldives.^[4] Rajendra Chola sent a victorious expedition to North India that touched the river Ganges and defeated the Pala ruler of Pataliputra, Mahipala. He also successfully invaded kingdoms of the Malay Archipelago.^[7]^[8] The Chola dynasty went into decline at the beginning of the 13th century with the rise of the Pandyas, who ultimately caused their downfall.^[9]^[10]^[11]

You will find a fair number of foreign tourists at this temple. This is not surprising, considering its World Heritage Site tag. However, despite this, the infrastructure for tourists - domestic as well as foreign - is not upto the mark. The hotels are mostly old and of the three-star variety. The staff is courteous and helpful, and the rooms themselves were clean - in the hotel we stayed at - but not where you would want to stay back for a day and lounge in the hotel. No. These hotels are strictly utilitarian. Not luxury.

The second is the pretty dismal state of parking facilities at the temple itself. There is but one small parking lot opposite the temple's entrance, which has one entry that also serves as the exit. It is not asphalted, and no parking slots are marked, leading to cars and other vehicles parking in a fairly haphazard manner. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that someone will not park their vehicle in a manner that makes it impossible for you to get your car out. That can happen - take a look at the parking lot to decide for yourself. These are small amenities that would make it a lot less stressful to the visitor and make it easier to take in and enjoy the magnificence of this edifice itself.

On the other hand, the road from Trichy to Tanjore - NH 67 - is now a dream to drive on (also see this post). It is four-laned, and makes the drive from Trichy a short 45 minute breeze.

RK Laxman on Interviews

2011-11-12T23:50:00.000+05:30

This is one of the funniest RK Laxman cartoons I have read. Truly timeless. Isn't this the way, though not exactly so, that several companies still prefer to conduct interviews?
I don't know which collection this is available in however.

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

2011-11-12T23:46:00.002+05:30

The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly (Amazon.com, my review on Amazon.com, Streaming, DVD, BluRay, Kindle, Flipkart.com)

This is a first-rate legal thriller. The courtroom drama is high quality. All the threads weave into a thrilling finish.
Michael (Mickey) Haller is a street-smart lawyer who runs most of his business out of his Lincoln Town Car (hence the title), with a driver who uses an iPod and its earphones to not hear conversations he is not supposed to hear (privileged conversations and all that). Haller has been a lawyer long enough to know it is not so much about the guilt or innocence as much about representing the other side of justice. He does however worry about coming across an innocent client and not recognizing that. The prosecution sees him as lower than scum, and there is a running joke about fish and lawyers that is funny, especially as it travels from one person to the other in the book. Haller is a likable cynic, who is on good terms with his two ex-wives. Imagine. Only a lawyer could manage that you would think.

The plot starts to form, and almost immediately thicken, when Haller is picked to defend Louis Roulet, a rich real estate agent accused of assault and worse. Haller is looking at this as a "franchise case" - "A franchise client is a defendant who wants to go to trial and has the money to pay his lawyer's schedule A rates. From first appearance to arraignment to preliminary hearing and on to trial and then appeal, the franchise client demands hundreds if not thousands of billable hours. ... From where I hunt, they are the rarest and most highly sought beast in the jungle." The case seems to crack wide open early on, and then starts to cracks back shut, trapping Haller in a life-and-death pincer grip as it does so. After that, there are a series of turns that leave Haller desperately trying to save his own life, his family's, defend Roulet, who has a darker past than he led on initially, and save himself from being disbarred.

There are several other threads that run through the book, all of which are handled very well by the author. The trial itself covers a lot of ink in the book and is basically forms the climax of the novel, and is paced excellently.

Haller may or may not have a franchise case on his hands in the novel, but Connelly, the author, certainly penned a franchise novel. There have been three more Haller novels since, the latest one being The Fifth Witness.

An outstanding thriller.

The Michael Haller series:

Kindle Excerpt

GS Books, Incheon Airport, South Korea

2011-11-06T12:24:00.001+05:30

This is a lone photo of GS Books, a bookseller in the international terminal at Incheon International Airport in South Korea (Republic of Korea).
The person manning the bookstore did not want any photos taken, so I stopped after the first.

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