Brick and rope

The 10 best books I read in 2011

2012-01-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

2011 ended up being a surprising year in reading for me. In the year before (2010) my reading had been dominated by fiction. Geoff Dwyer, Colum McCann, Alice Munro, Joseph O'Neill, J.M.Coetzee ... some breathtakingly good authors had books out recently, and every one of them was worthy of a place of pride on my list. Add to it, there just didn't seem to be much interesting non-fiction going around. So when I collated my list of 'Best Books of 2010', I extrapolated and made the prediction that 2011 was going to be the same. Boy, was I wrong!

2011 was a year of non-fiction - at least for me. There were very few fiction reads that held my attention enough. Some of the authors I follow most closely did not have a book come out this year, which made it all a bit dry. As I look back now at the best books I read this year, I find that 7 of the top 10 books I identified from my reading list are non-fiction.

Anyway, without more ado, here is my list of the ten best books I read in 2011:

NON-FICTION

1. The Emperor of All Maladies - by Siddharth Mukherjee
Deeply researched, movingly felt, and poignantly written. The best biography of cancer you are going to come across, from the latest in a line of wonderfully gifted Indian American doctor writers. This book took the largest killer disease of our time, and painted a rich picture of it in all its gore and glory. Must read for anyone passingly interested in cancer.

2. Phantoms in the Brain - by V.S. Ramachandran
I know this is starting to look like a trend. Another medical-ish book written by an Indian American doctor (a neuroscientist in this case). Believe me, that had little to do with my selection of this book. Ramachandran came out with a new book last year called The Tell-Tale Brain. I browsed through it in a bookshop and was spell-bound. Before I took it up though, I wanted to go back to the original book that made Ramachandran famous. And so the venture back to Phantoms in the Brain. The mind is the most mysterious of all human organs - the one we know the least about. In this book first published back in 1998, Ramachandran takes on some really bizarre sounds patients, and demonstrates how the brain of a 'normal' person behaves, by analyzing the symptoms of some of these abnormal situations. Why does one patient think his parents are imposters and not his 'real' parents? Why does another ignore everything happening in the world to her left (including ignoring to comb the left side of her hair)? Why does a third patient with a paralyzed arm claim that the arm lying next to her in bed is actually not hers at all, but belongs to her brother? Are these people just 'crazy'? Ramachandran, in the style of a Sherlock Holmes of the brain, leads us through each of these cases, diagnoses them through simple, intuitive experiments, and tells us what we can learn about how our own brain works based on these. Unputdownable!

3. Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance - by Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, and others

This is not a book for the faint hearted. It is not a book for someone interested in a high level overview of what went wrong with subprime housing in the United States in the years leading up to the crash. But. If you are a professional in finance, with an interest in understanding the structural reasons behind the crash in mortgages in the US, this is a must read book. While many books have been written about the origins of the great recession, the fall of Lehman and others, this book focuses on an oft ignored, but supremely important part of the story - the role of Government Sponsored Enterprises (Fannie and Freddie) in driving the 'race to the bottom' in mortgage underwriting, and how their fundamental design was Guaranteed to Fail. It is not often remembered that the Fannie and Freddie bailouts cost the US Government more than all the other financial bailouts they embarked on over the last few years. It cost more than ING, more than TARP, and will continue to be the largest drag on the US Government budget for a long time to come. This book helps us understand what was so terribly wrong with Fannie and Freddie.

4. Moonwalking with Einstein - by Joshua Foer

As a journalist for Discover magazine, Joshua Foer visits the US National Memory Championships, to see if there is an article there. He watches as professional 'mental athletes' memorize the order of ten packs of shuffled cards, recite thousands of digits of the number pi, stare a stack of photographs along with names and biographies and recite them right back later. Feats that seems beyond extra-ordinary - almost - dare we say it? - miraculous. He meets some of the contestants, and as one they all tell him that they have just average memories, that anyone can perform these feats if they learn the right technique and train their minds well. Foer takes on an experiment with himself - to see how much he can train his own brain. One year later, he participates in the US Memory Championships himself. And wins. Moonwalking with Einstein is the story of what happens in that one year.

5. The Blind Watchmaker - by Richard Dawkins

Readers of Brick and Rope know I am partial to Dawkins. I like everything he writes. I like his science, his passion, his narrative style, his intellectually pugnacious attitude. The Blind Watchmaker is an old book - first published in 1996, where he takes on the question the most profoundly simple question about evolution: If evolution moves in tiny, random steps, how can it ever create the infinitely complex organs and animals we see in life? How can random steps lead to the creation of an eye? How can you explain the existence of a sophisticated Swiss watch, if the watchmaker is supposed to be blind? If you marvel at the complexity of biology around you, and have ever wondered how small improvement steps led to this brilliant end point, you must read The Blind Watchmaker. There is one chapter on the navigation skills of bats that is worth the price of the book many times over. Brilliant, in the way only Dawkins can be. An all time science classic.

6. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - by Amy Chua

OK, if you don't have kids, this is not a book for you. If you do, and if you have ever found yourself torn between the strict, achievement oriented, studies-come-first Asian way of parenting, and the more liberal, freedom oriented, let-them-find-out-what-there-are-best-at Western way, Amy Chua has something to say to you. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an in-your-face, take-no-prisoners memoir of a highly successful Chinese origin woman bringing up her two daughters in America. The Tiger Mom speaks of how she ran her children's childhood with an iron fist, and how they turned out super-successful at the other end of that treatment. The book faced a barrage of criticism when it came out last year, as much of its writing flies (deliberately and provocatively) in the face of most of the current parenting convention in the West. It brings out the best aspects of an Asian upbringing style, of learning by rote, of practising and working hard till you feel your fingers are going to fall off. And, Amy claims - the children come out not just more accomplished, but also happier, and closer to their parents than Western children do. I challenge you to read this book and not have an argument with your spouse about it!

7. Half Empty - by David Rakoff

Satire taken to a fine art. David Rakoff is a journalist with an eye for what is seriously wrong in the world around him, and the language to poke it right in the eye. The cover of Half Empty shows two cute bunny rabbits playing with each other in the grass. And somewhere behind them, jutting out of a bush, you can see the barrel of a gun pointed right at them. Further behind, there is a canoeist, happily paddling away - only he can't see that he is headed right over the edge of a waterfall. "WARNING!!" screams the cover of this collection of essays - "No inspirational life lessons will be found in these pages". To quote the blurb, which for once is absolutely accurate - "In this deeply funny (and sneakily poignant) book, David Rakoff views through a dark lens our sunny, gosh-everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won't come true." Hilarious!

FICTION

8. Our Kind of Traitor - by John le Carre
Another one of my favorite authors. No one does spies better than le Carre. With the changing times, the spy novel has become more and more difficult to place. But le Carre seems to have the knack to bring out just the right notes every time. Our Kind of Traitor is a modest novel, with a modest plot and modest protagonists, as all protagonists in le Carre books tend to be. The understanding of the inside track of the spy world is deep as ever. The moral dilemmas faced by the protagonists are tricky as always. And the language is sparkling as ever. le Carre up to his usual tricks again, and getting them just right.

9. Super Sad True Love Story - by Gary Shteyngart

Another satire entry on this list, in fiction this time. Gary Shteyngart's book is difficult to classify. It is part science fiction, and part social commentary. This was one of the first books I read this year. And what I remember most vividly is the language of the book. It is sparse and shocking. The setting is a future world when America has degenerated to being a third world country, the Chinese rule the world, and the hottest area of research is immortality. Stinging social commentary, ferocious comic power. At least slightly scary. A difficult book to get out of your head.

10. A Visit from the Goon Squad - by Jennifer Egan

Definitely my favorite book of fiction this year. I love books that experiment with narrative style. And Goon Squad does that with a flair that is breathtaking. The cast of characters is super interesting (a kleptomaniac, a punk rock producer, a PR executive for an African dictator - I mean, there isn't a shallow character here if you go looking for it with a fine-tooth comb). Some parts are written by an adult, some by a teenager, and a particularly amazing chapter is all in powerpoint slides. This is smart. This is the way fiction is meant to be. Read it!

So that rounds up my list of the Ten Best Books I read in 2011.

Before I close, I must also mention a couple of books that were my biggest disappointments this year:

Nouriel Roubini's Crisis Economics was a bore. Nothing that hasn't already been said before and better. I know the guy is supposed to be a savant of some sort. Maybe I am too dumb to understand the deeper points he is trying to make. But what I read, I wasn't jumping out of my seat.

The Booker prize winning The Finkler Question was tiring Philip Roth lite.

Brian Greene is one of my favorite science authors. But The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos had too far-fetched and thin a proposition. The book is certainly his worst to date.

Dan Ariely is another one of the authors I have enjoyed tremendously in the past. But I enjoyed his Upside of Irrationality much less than I had hoped. Not enough new insights to publish a new book. I hope Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow revives my interest in Behavioral Economics.

I placed my first book order of the year on Flipkart yesterday night. The books should start arriving by later this week. I am itching to start a whole new year of reading. And this time, I am making no predictions on how the year will turn out.

Ovalekar Wadi Butterfly Park

2011-12-04T04:04:00.001-08:00

If nothing else, our membership with the Bombay Natural History Society has changed this -

The wife announces "There's a trip being planned to the Butterfly Park this Sunday". I don't smirk and wise crack "Butterflies, in Bombay? Are you sure this isn't the punchline of one of those crazy smart ads the Amul guys write up?" Instead, I groan at the prospect of another weekend morning's sleep sacrifice. "How early do we have to get up this time?" I ask grumpily.

As we have been attending assorted hikes, nature walks, and garden trails arranged by BNHS over these past months, I have come to see this as a sort of pattern. Around the day of the said hike, I seem to go through each of the seven dwarf characters. The night before, I am Grumpy about the prospective sleep deprivation. On the morning, I am Sleepy - more than happy to hand the wheels of our minivan to the wife. I am Sneezy the moment I enter the park. Soon, all the greenery, the sight of other equally sleep deprived men, and an unmistakable feeling of self-congratulatory holiness makes me Happy. If our younger one allows me to listen to any of the information the volunteer is dishing out throughout the hike, I can quiz our daughter later, feeling like quite the Doc.

In this case, it turns out, the Grumpy act was not really necessary.

We get up relatively late, by hike standards. The rest of the city is still safely abed I presume because we find no traffic on our way to Thane. Apart from one brutal left turn towards the end, Google Maps does a good job of getting us there. We park in a makeshift parking lot in the middle of the two acre plot that is Ovalekar Wadi Butterfly Garden.

Passion Flower, at Ovalekar Wadi

"This is one of the best things about being a butterfly guy rather than a birder" says Isaac, the BNHS expert who is to be our guide for the day. "You don't have to wake up early." See, butterflies are cold-blooded creatures. They need the warmth of the sun to get them going in the morning. Early mornings don't do it for them. Just my type of creature, if you ask me.

Butterflies are largely tropical. For instance, there are only 700 odd species of butterflies in USA and Canada. And only some 60 odd in the UK. India, by comparison has between 1,200 and 1,400 species of butterflies. There are about 150 species just in and around Mumbai, 104 of which, by most recent count, visit this humble garden in the small village of Owla in Thane.

Rajendra Ovalekar is the owner of the plot, and he joins us soon to share the story of his creation. Turns out he was attending a BNHS program himself some years back when he heard that his village, where he owned some agricultural land, is one of the most naturally butterfly rich parts of the subcontinent. He decided to convert his land into a butterfly park, and over the years has resisted the lure of big money pumped by real estate developers all around him as Thane becomes the next victim of Mumbai's concrete march. May his breed thrive.

The Ovalekar Wadi Butterfly Garden isn't quite your regular butterfly park. For one, it is an entirely privately run affair, with no 'help' from the tourism or forest or environment department guys. For another, it isn't a confined garden. There are no glass houses, no nets anywhere. The owners have created the right ecological environment that invites the butterflies here - the right plants, the right rotting fruits, the right kind of flowers. But after that, it is all left to the butterflies. They come and thrive here entirely voluntarily. No confines that keep them here! It sounds sort of like an ashram for the winged ones.

The tour starts at the earliest stage of the butterfly life-cycle, the egg. The ones Ovalekar and Isaac show us are so small, you can barely notice them on the leaves. I wonder idly whether these guys are just jerking us around, showing us some random bead on a leaf and calling it an egg. I mean, how are you going to check, right?

Spot the Caterpillar

We walk around some more and there are caterpillars. This time there is no mistaking it. There are many kinds here - some furry and woolly, some more stark and woody. The nature photography gang is out in full force, balancing mini bazookas in their hands as they zoom in on two inches of crawling legs, intent on capturing this short burst of life for hard disk eternity, likely never to be seen again.

The chrysalis is unmistakable. Once Isaac has pointed it out, that is. Thrice. With a little stick the third time, for those especially hard of eyesight, like me. In my defense, the darn things are too well disguised. They blend so well into the background, I can't really be expected to spot them. Besides, it would be rude to spot them right away - I mean, think of the effect it would have on their ego. All that effort to conceal yourself, and suddenly - "There!".

By now, I am raring to go - hit the color section, so to speak. The butterflies live up to the billing. They are everywhere. Isaac is naming them as quickly as we can see them, but there are too many. And he seems to know too much about each of them. I sort of drift in and out of the conversation. Most of these species have military words as their common names, I gather - something to do with British officers being the first to name them. We must have spotted a couple of dozen of them over the next hour and a half. If you ask me about them though, you are likely to get no better than 'black butterfly', 'the yellow one with orange tips', and 'the blue one that was really tough to photograph'. Later in the day, my daughter asks me a trick question. "Appa, what color are a butterfly's wings?". "Well, that is sort of an unfair question", I start, "You've got to tell me what sort of butterfly." "Ha, caught you", she goes, "all butterflies have transparent wings. There are scales underneath the wings, and those are what are colorful." So much for me playing Doc.

The little white guy is not a friend

Along the path, we find a butterfly that seems remarkably amenable to being photographed. My camera is right in its face and it doesn't seem to flinch. "Hey, this one ..." I start, pointing it out to Isaac. "Oh that one has been caught by a spider" he says immediately, "It is slowly being eaten up". I watch closely with morbid fascination - yes, there - there are those tiny white legs of the ghost spider, firmly clasped around the body of its prey. It isn't really the love of modeling that was keeping my butterfly posing for my pictures. Eek!

The life cycle complete, we are back to where we started. Hot vada pavs await us. And steaming tea, poured into those thimble sized plastic cups specially design to be so uncomfortable that you never ever ask for a second helping. We gorge ourselves on the modest fare, and are soon on our way back home.

We hit the highway, and I am already fantasizing about the afternoon nap that awaits me. The wife breaks in - "You know, they are doing a trip to Elephanta caves next Sunday. What do you say?". "Oh come on!" groans Grumpy.

Book Review - Exorbitant Privilege: Barry Eichengreen

2011-11-13T05:22:00.001-08:00

The USD / INR exchange rate crossed 50 recently (on the way up, just to be clear - though your macro economic intuition might be excused for imagining the opposite). This line was last crossed in the last quarter of 2008, when I am told something really big happened in the global economy. Certain siblings took a fall I hear ... it starts with an L, I am pretty sure of it.

Milestones like this make me curious. So I got interested in the US Dollar, its story and its future. There is a broadly prevalent sense of the decline of the US as a sole economic power in the world. How does that impact the dollar, I wondered, as the world seems perversely intent on pumping more money into dollars while everything around was collapsing under the weight of problems centered in the home of the very same currency.

Barry Eichengreen is a professor of economics at Berkeley, and one of the bigger name experts on the international monetary system. His columns also appear regularly in Mint, which is my introduction to him. Exorbitant Privilege is his delightful book on the rise and fall of the US Dollar. The book was published earlier this year, and has received some great reviews.

The dollar remains far and away the most important currency for invoicing and settling international transactions, including even imports and exports that do not touch US shores. South Korea and Thailand set the prices of more than 80 percent of their trade in dollars despite the fact that only 20 percent of their exports go to American buyers. Fully 70 percent of Australia's exports are invoiced in dollars despite the fact that fewer than 6 percent are destined for the United States. The principal commodity exchanges quote prices in dollars. Oil is priced in dollars. The dollar is used in 85 percent of all foreign exchange transactions worldwide. It accounts for nearly half of the global stock of international debt securities. It is the form in which central banks hold ore than 60 percent of their foreign currency reserves.

In short, the dollar is a pretty big deal. Actually, where foreign exchange matters are concerned, it is pretty much the only deal in town.

This gives the Americans some straight-forward benefits - no currency conversion costs for international transactions; no exchange rate risks in trade etc. But there are also some other much more serious (and controversial) benefits of the dollar's international currency status, particularly in the form of a reserve currency -

... real resources that other countries provide the United States in order to obtain our dollars. It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100 bill, but other countries have to pony up $100 of actual goods and services in order to obtain one.

Or there is the 'artificially' lower interest rates in the US because of all the inflow of foreign reserves into US Government bonds and the like.

This has long been a sore point for foreigners, who see themselves as supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals through the operation of this asymmetric financial system. Charles de Gaulle made the issue a cause celebre in a series of presidential press conferences in the 1960s. His finance minister, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, referred to it as America's "exorbitant privilege."

I quote this setup of the book so extensively because I for one found it simple and useful. As a relative outsider to the world of international finance, I have only had a vague sense of the benefits the US derives from its reserve currency status. Eichengreen does a great job of putting his financial journalist avatar to work as he lays out the argument in a very crisp and easily understandable 5 pages. And I have to say, I found the 'exorbitant privilege' phrase delectable!

This is a very short book, taking a chapter each to explain the origin, the dominance, the emerging rivalry, the crisis, and the possible future outlook on the dollar. The most interesting part of the dollar origin story in my mind was this little nugget:

Incumbency is thought to be a powerful advantage in international currency competition. IT is blithely asserted that another quarter of a century, until after World War II, had to pass before the dollar displaced sterling as the dominant international unit. But this supposed fact is not, in fact, a fact. From a standing start in 1914, the dollar had already overtaken sterling by 1925. This should be taken as a caution by those inclined to argue that incumbency gives the dollar formidable advantages today.

Food for thought, that.

Eichengreen isn't one for playing to the galleries. His views on what the future holds for the dollar can only be described as ... mainstream. A tad boring I have to say. No exciting, unorthodox views on what might be in store. In broad brush-strokes, his take that the two credible rivals for the dollar are the Euro (in spite of Europe's current problems) and the Renminbi. He discounts the currencies of UK, Switzerland and Canada for coming from countries that are presently too small on the international economic scene to be able to make any noticeable dent. Japan, while a larger economy, still stands very little chance in Eichengreen's view, due to the many decades of governmental policy there to discourage internationalization of the Yen to retain export competitiveness. He is not very bullish on non-currencies that can compete with the dollar, stuff he calls 'funny money' - like the IMF's Special Drawing Rights.

His short to medium term outlook on Renminbi:

Someday, perhaps, the renminbi will rival the dollar. For the foreseeable future, however, it is hard to see how it could match the currency of what will remain a larger economy, the United States. Regional reserve currency? Yes. Subsidiary reserve currency? Yes. But dominant reserve currency? That is harder to imagine.

The thesis that emerges from Exorbitant Privilege is that we are moving to a world where the dollar will continue to be the dominant international currency, but will have to share the spotlight with two contenders - the Euro and the Renminbi. The 'Exorbitant Privilege' might not remain any longer. This will cost the US 1.5 - 2 % of their GDP in terms of additional interest expenses and international trade costs. But things could get much worse (from the dollar's perspective) if the fiscal situation in the US doesn't get reigned in quickly. And on this last one, he declares himself pessimistic.

If you are a sophisticated Foreign Exchange markets player, and are already aware of the nuances of international trade in some detail, you might not find anything new in Exorbitant Privilege. If you are looking for polarizingly strong views of the sort that get page views and comments on politico-economic blogs, this is certainly NOT the book for you. But if you are, like me, an outsider interested in a balanced view of this fascinating story of the birth, maturity and possible decline of the world's largest currency, and you want it all under 200 pages, I have a recommendation to make.

Business lessons I learned from Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

{JS steps to the table, clicks the wireless white mouse once, lightly. The bright screen of the iMac comes alive in a second, ready to serve.}

I am no expert on Jobs. I am no rabid Apple fan. I don't own an iPad.

But if you have lived in the business world at all these past decades, it is difficult not to have been influenced by the man. At conference after conference, meeting after meeting, poll the audience on any question related to innovation, quality, marketing, design, product development ... much of anything really, and it was a fair bet that the name Apple would turn up in the top 5. So what business lessons have I learned from the man in the black turtleneck? Here is a quick list:

It's about the customer. Customers care about their stuff, not your stuff. So forget how your product works, and give them what they are looking for.
Less is more. No clutter. No pop ups. No wires. Enough said.
"Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works." It is so easy to change something superficial and feel like we have enhanced customer experience. Opening up the hood and changing all the wiring underneath? That is the real deal.
'Excellence' is a big word. Strive for it. Set the bar for yourself really high.
Everyone likes drama. Remember the little flick of Jobs' finger in Macworld 2007? It flipped the page on the iPhone in his hand. 'Oooooh' went the audience collectively. And the smartphone industry was never the same again.
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give it to them." A customer might tell you the next big innovation idea in your business in a focus group, but don't bet on it.
Profits matter. Just because you are selling a product people line up for doesn't automatically mean you will make money. Price it where it will make you a profit.

I think it can be said without much exaggeration that Steve Jobs made a difference to people's lives in a way that few people in business do. Tip of the hat.

{... and with that, JS clicks the little apple icon on the top left of the iMac, hits 'Sleep'. The screen goes dark. Simple as that.}

Monsoon in Kerala

2011-09-25T05:42:00.000-07:00

It has only been an hour, and Mumbai already seems a world away.

The airplane is languorously approaching Kochi, and I am mesmerized by the sight on the other side of plexiglass. It is fresh, it is a bright spring green, it is a plush blanket of verdant forest. These are the last days of the monsoon, and we are in God's own country.

There is something truly jaw-dropping about approaching this land from above. It seems a thwarting of nature's plans, this stealing of a perspective that should be the birds' preserve. The hilltops are rolling underneath, wisps of white clouds kissing their foreheads. A newly refreshed Periyar river is flowing joyfully, a silver streak meandering through dense coconut groves. The green is everywhere. Our toddler is standing in his seat, ignoring every safety announcement, staring open eyed at a landscape overwhelmed by a color Mumbai allows but grudgingly. The other hues, where there are any, seem to pop out against the sage backdrop. There! There is a brown shingled roof, peaking out. There - a church spire, standing proud, white and tall, peering over the treetops.

Our first destination is Munnar, a good five hour drive from the Kochi airport. We settle ourselves down into the minivan the travel agency has sent out to be our companion for this week, and we set off. While we are still within town limits, the rituals of weekend morning life play out around us. There are a lot of people on the road this early in the morning, and everyone seems dressed for something. Church, our driver tells us, and it is Eid today too. A group of men in crisp white mundus walks toward us, laughing heartily at their private jokes, the women doing the same across the road. As our car reaches them, the men's group splits, one half walking into the compound of one of the hundreds of churches that dot the Kochi tourist map. The other half carries on, only to enter a chartreuse domed mosque a block ahead. There is the occasional temple too, the brightly statued gopurams standing out for their novelty. We are of course in Guruvayur country so Krishna devotees aren't likely to be far off. But right where we are, driving lazily past the pedestrians, steering clear of the boldly marked 'bicycle lane', it is all the white of churches and the mosaic green of mosques.

Out in the countryside, on our way now and on every drive over the next two days, the monsoon's presence is everywhere. Spontaneous waterfalls gush down every hillside. They aren't tiny rivulets of water either. These are bold, roaring waterfalls, thundering down tall hills, spattering vehicles passing on the narrow road below. After the first ... oh I don't know, hundred waterfalls, the daughter finally stops being excited by them.

We are on one of our daily quota of long drives when the monsoon skies burst open. We are driving precariously up a mountain slope, with barely enough room for cars on the other side to pass, and with scarcely a moment's rumbling notice, the torrent is upon us. The wipers are working extra hard as we trudge slowly up. Through the intermittently clear visibility of the windscreen, I see in front of us a David fighting the rain-god Goliaths. An auto-rickshaw, battered for wear, is struggling up the hill. It is overfull with passengers. The monsoon rain lashes at it from all sides, the blue tarpaulin curtains that drape its sides proving comically inadequate as they flutter violently in the wind. A bangled arm stretches out from inside, clutching at the curtains desperately, pulls them inside. It is fighting the strength of the wind. As we cautiously pass the auto, I see the wind winning this battle again, the shield of blue fluttering out of control. It is too loud outside so I cannot be sure, but I think I heard a squeal of laughter from in there.

Munnar is plantation country. Rubber and tea for most part, from what I can tell. As you go around, you are likely to be greeted every so often by rubber trees, neatly lined up in a plantation. Green plastic sap bags are tied around the midriff of rows upon rows of rubber trees, like a prayer assembly of extraordinarily tall schoolgirls, standing at attention in their green skirts. It is tea however, that gives the vista its distinctive look. Sloping patterned beds of tea plantations stretch all around Munnar, somewhere brown from having had their leaves harvested, but mostly at this time of the year, bright spring green. Plantation workers can be seen hard at work, even when the rain is upon them. These are mountain slopes, where no tractor can be used for harvesting. The workers (at least half of them women) carry what look like specially designed shears, with a collector box attached underneath. They keep clipping the leaves, the box filling up as the day wears on. These workers clip at least 50 kg of tea leaves a day, we are told, and the more skilled ones upto 100 kg. That is a lot of boxes.

Tea plantations are a truly unique vocation, aesthetically speaking. Hills upon hills roll out in front of our eyes. Hills where human industry has displaced nature. Yet, somehow, the landscape seems to have been rendered more beautiful than it was before we started. We visit the Kannan Devan Hills Plantation Company, where they show us pictures of these hills over the decades. Yes, I have to admit, the plantations have made the hills more picturesque. I might be going out on a limb here, but I don't think we could say the same if we dotted these hills with call centers.

Tea and Tourism seem to be the only games in town. Every car we pass seems to sport a yellow license plate. Which has an unfortunate side effect. There seem to be an acute shortage of local ethnic restaurants. Every culinary entrepreneur seems to be catering to the lowest common denominator of the tourist population. "Multi-cuisine" every restaurant board proclaims, wearing what out to be its shame with unseemly pride. Step inside, and we are ushered quickly into what are prominently marked 'Family Rooms'. We aren't allowed to linger in the 'common' part of any restaurant for any time at all. What exotica is being served in the outside world, we wonder sitting in our cosseted corner. It feels like being at the suite levels of the Titanic. If only we could step down to the sailors level, I am sure there would be loud music and bawdy partying.

After much searching, we do find an ethnic restaurant. I ask for the menu. No menu, I am told. "White or boiled?" the waiter asks me. We realize that is the only choice we have, white rice or parboiled. I vote for white. The water pre-served at the table is warm. And pink. Not sure whether to try it, I peer into the jug that has also been set helpfully at the table. No water in the jug. Rasam. A whole jug of it! As we wait to be served, I watch the middle aged couple at the other table in the 'Family Room'. The man has ordered ('boiled'). The wife however, seems to be there only to give him company. She coolly opens a large doggy bag she has got from home, unpacks her lunch, and starts eating. No one seems to mind, least of all our waiter, who finally comes out. He sets out our meal before finally starting to serve the rice. He balances a huge bowl in his left arm, and with his right, using a dinner plate as a serving spoon, he piles up heaps of rice on my plate. Using a dinner plate as a serving spoon! Boy, they like their rice in these parts, don't they?

On our way to Kumarakom, our last destination, the scenery changes. No more tea plantations. It is open field time now. Fields that extend farther than I am used to seeing anywhere else in India. Along much of the road, there is no cell phone coverage. The whole population seems caught up in an older era of communication. Until, of course, I notice the billboards advertising assorted local websites. "Where Malayalees Marry", claims the tagline of a matrimony site. m4marry.com the site is called, which sounds hilariously Malayalee if you pronounce the number in its original form.

Kumarakom is Kerala as I had imagined it while we planned this trip. With birds. There are birds everywhere here. Exotic ones. At one point during the day, our daughter starts crying when I tell her she missed a kingfisher just flew past. "Why are you crying?" asks the wife dismissively, "you've already seen four kingfishers since morning." Well, there's the tagline for a great vacation day right there.

We have planned on a day-long houseboat ride through the backwaters. Grandeur, our baby is called. It is a pretty grand affair all right, with two well fitted (air conditioned) bedrooms, a large living and dining hall, inexplicably ornate furniture, a captain, a full time cook, and a helper boy on board. It is late morning by the time we set sail. The waters are about 90 ft wide here. They are lined by paddy fields on either side, with little hutments housing the caretakers. Housewives are out in force. Across the waters, they are beating clothes on washing stone. And all the while, they are bantering with each other, shouting jokes across the 90 ft of water.

After a day of lazy drifting along the backwaters (including lunch at anchor across a paddy field, alongside a tiny shack that shouts 'crabs for sale!'), we drop anchor for the night. The helper jumps ashore before we come to a complete halt. He is pulling in some long cables from land. Before we know it, he has rigged up a full power line and - what? - cable TV. Well, we can hardly be expected to eat dinner without cable, can we? Hey, we are houseboat people, not animals.

I had feared mosquitoes at night, but it doesn't turn out to be bad as I had feared. Before we know it, the stillness of the night lulls us to sleep.

It is our last day here. I wake up to a cock-a-doodle-do for the first time in memory. I step out to the deck. Life is starting up. The boats are already out and about. A houseboat passes our spot slowly. It has music on loud. "Hawa hawa aye hawa" croons Hassan Jehangir (or whoever it was ... what happened to him after this song anyway?) ... "Yaar mila de, dildaar mila de".

"Appa, you know what?" asks my daughter on our way back home. "When we went on the elephant ride, the elephant's ears kept flapping against my feet. Isn't that crazy?"

Our car isn't here when we get out of the Mumbai airport. The driver is caught in traffic. "Bas sir paanch minat me pahunch raha hoon" he says.

The politics of the clothesline

2011-08-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

Never thought I would witness this. I mean, India is a land of contradictory realities and all that, but somehow, witnessing such an exchange never struck me as a possibility.

The centrally located, relatively new and decidedly yuppie residential complex in Mumbai that houses me, has a residents' Google list. (And, I am certain, a Facebook page, some twitter ID, and whatever else is the yuppie thing to do nowadays) On this Google list, there is a constant stream of emails from people listing their views on the community, issues of common interest, 'help wanted' ads for maids and drivers, and what have you. All nice and neighbourly. A recent email caught my attention. Judging by the immediate burst of hubbub it created, I wasn't alone.

"I think it shouldn't be allowed," declared the writer, "for residents to dry their laundry on an external clothesline."

Now, if you have seen, passed by, lived in, any residential community anywhere in India, you know this much for a fact. The clothesline is a birth-right. We are the people the have hung our dirty laundry in public for all recorded history. We are the people that crane their necks out of freshly rented apartments, trying to look for the tell-tale nails and hooks the previous occupant might have left behind. We have a special kind of nylon rope that was invented for the sole purpose of becoming a clothesline. I am pretty sure we invented that weird 'three poles triangulating' sort of arrangement that supports clotheslines in open areas. We are, in short, clothesline people. "I think it shouldn't be allowed for residents to dry their laundry on an external clothesline"?? Gasp!

"I agree", started the next email. Wait a minute. What? You agree?

Turns out a lot of people agreed.

I am not the most observant of people, so maybe I had missed something all these days. The next morning, I took a walk around, and looked up at all the balconies in our complex. Sure enough, no clotheslines. Except for the offending few that had so aggrieved our emailer. I can see a blue towel fluttering away from the fifth floor. A few ... let's say 'delicates' whose colors are indeterminate high up on the eighth floor. Oh, and one of the offenders, blithely oblivious to the heated chatter about them and their ilk, has a brown bed-sheet hanging out there, in all its yellow floral glory. Sweet! But strip those out, and there isn't any other line in sight. Hmm ...

There are two primary arguments for the 'No Clothesline' movement. One is purely aesthetic. 'When I sit out on my balcony, I don't want to be staring at your well worn socks' so to speak. Fair enough. And the other argument, derived from the same, but one step removed, is economic. Properties in clothesline strewn buildings lose value, goes this argument. Clotheslines are for the tacky, the middle class, the old. Add them anywhere near my apartment, and you are reducing my sale price. I tried searching for some research that might establish this causal relationship, but no luck.

Electric clothes dryers have been around in the developed world since the 1940s. By the late 50s and the 60s, they started to be really popular. It started off, if I understand it right, as a symbol of affluence. 'I am successful, you can't see my underwear any more', in a manner of speaking. Slowly, like with most household gadgets in the west, they became ubiquitous, and communities could scarcely recall a time when things had been different. There were still the pesky few who might put their laundry out to dry. But by now, every community had their own regulations barring such behaviour.

In India, needless to say, communities have had much bigger problems than the impact of sun-drying clothes on real estate prices. Dryers were practically unknown and largely unavailable. Electricity was expensive. There wasn't much of a sense of personal space anyway, so the neighbour's clothesline blended right in to your life. So the dear clothesline lived on. Until now, it appears.

The average electric clothes dryer consumes energy at the rate of 4,000 Watts. Yes, there is no decimal error here. You read it right the first time. It is probably the most energy guzzling domestic appliance invented by man, with the possible exception of central air-conditioning. How much is 4,000 Watts? Well, let us say you hang the clothes you want to dry on one of those standing clothes racks, place the rack in a room, and turn on a ceiling fan to dry things out ... You can come back three days later, pick up your clothes and walk out of the room feeling all green, because you still saved some energy by not putting the clothes into a dryer.

"Why would I use the dryer?" my wife asks me, when the email debate comes up. "It over-dries my clothes, fades out the colours, and is too expensive. And all the while, I have this bright sun burning its energy out on my balcony, begging to be put to some use. What a waste!" That's true, I grant her, but there is something to the idea of not having to look at other people's laundry. Call me a snob.

"I think everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves", someone bravely pipes in on the Google list finally. "After all, this is India." Attaboy!

It is early in the morning, and I am walking my daughter to her school bus. We are walking past the building that started off the fiery debate. I look up. An old lady, sari all crumpled from a night's sleep is out on the balcony. She is moving slowly, her hands are full, and she is straining with the effort. Slowly, she is pulling off her clothesline the brown bedsheet, with its yellow floral print. She pulls it all the way off, and concentrating hard, flips it over, hangs it back out. She fastens it in place with a couple of clips, straightens her back slowly, takes in the view outside, turns, and trudges slowly back inside, ready to start the rest of her day.

For a moment there, she looked like my mother.

What am I reading?

2011-07-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I posted about the makeup of my current bookshelf. It hasn't been for lack of reading. For all its consuming madness, my newly acquired India darshan lifestyle has at least two redeeming features - I eat great regional cuisine every week; and I have a lot of time to read.

So the reading has continued on at brisk pace. As I have written before (see A Terrible Place to Browse), I am yet to find a satisfying browsing experience in India. Crazily, some of the airport bookstores are the best experiences I have had. The WH Smith in T-3 at Delhi and the Odyssey in Hyderabad (I think it is Hyd ... ) are among the best of the lot. But for most part, all my book buying has migrated to flipkart. Great collection, superb service, no hassles. No browsing pleasure, sadly.

Anyway, as I was saying, the reading has been going along just fine.

It has been a year dominated by non-fiction for me so far. Since I reviewed The Finkler Question in late April, I have read just over half a dozen books. Here is a quick summary.

Let me start with the two books of fiction -

Super Sad True Love Story was one of the most highly acclaimed books of last year. [Brick and Rope Best Books of 2010]

There is a certain kind of book that only Americans can appreciate. Updike and Roth and Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are authors considered 'greats' by Americans, but too parochial by most of the rest of the English speaking world (though Wallace is probably more universal than the rest). Gary Shteyngart seems headed for a similar destiny. Super Sad True Love Story is a striking book. Part science fiction, part love story, part social commentary on the social trends of the day, it is a book that lingers in your mind long after you are done with it. It imagines a 'very near future' when the Chinese rule the world; America is largely a third world country, made up of the ridiculously rich and maddeningly poor; where people share every minute detail of their lives reflexively on new social media; the young have stopped 'verballing' with each other, because it is so old, preferring instead to type semi-literately into Globalteens accounts with messages like 'What's up twat? Missing your 'tard? Wanna dump a little sugar on me? JBF. Sometimes life is suck.' The book is so shocking that it is difficult to ignore it. Some of the social commentary stings with ferocious comedy. As satires go, Super Sad True Love Story is a very good one, if that kind of thing is for you.

Here is Where We Meet, by John Berger is another highly acclaimed book. Berger is the authors' author, perfect with technique, subtle yet moving. If someone you are trying to impress asks you which authors you like, John Berger is a name that should safely do the trick. The Elegant Variation recommends This is Where We Meet in their permanent recommendations, which is high praise indeed, far as I am concerned. This is a collection of short stories set in Portugal, or an imaginary country that is a lot like it. Lisboa, the first (and best) story in the collection is about someone - whom you are invited to assume is the author himself - meets his long dead mother. The interplay of the living and the dead discovers Lisbon (Lisboa) anew. There are great moments in the story, but honestly, Berger is too subtle for me. I can't with a straight face offer his name as one of my favorite authors. I wonder whether people will be impressed if I just said J.K.Rowling?

On the non-fiction side, let me start with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. When I had compiled the Top 10 best books of 2010 list last year, I had put this one on top of the non-fiction list. Every source of book info that I respect had this book at or near the top of their list. And the verdict? It is well worth it. Henrietta Lacks was a woman who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Her doctor in Johns Hopkins hospital took samples of her cancerous cells without her permission. As it happened, these cells turned out to be remarkably prolific, each cell creating new copies of itself once every 24 hours. As the genetic research industry started taking off, someone developed an industrial process for freezing, thawing, feeding and shipping these cells to labs all across the world. Soon, there were trillions of HeLa cells floating around all across the globe. They drove research that created hundreds of new drugs. The HeLa cells continue to live on, even today. The people who created the HeLa industry became fabulously rich. Meanwhile, the grandchildren of Henrietta Lacks are struggling to get through life without enough money to afford adequate health insurance. Henrietta Lacks was black. Her doctor was white. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is this story. And it is amazing.

Half Empty, by David Rakoff is a book about negative thinking. We live in a world where that phrase has likely already put you off the book. Negativity and pessimism have a pretty bad rep in our times. Rakoff has an extremely witty take on why that is all wrong. Back in my college days, I had a little book that listed a thousand little variants of Murphy's Law ('If it can go wrong, it will'). In those days of youthful rebellion, I would guffaw at gems such as 'Smile - tomorrow will be worse'. Now of course, on the other side of a few grey hair, I find myself past such 'silliness'. But I couldn't pass when the cover of this book promised the following - "Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny gosh everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won't come true." Admit it, that is a pretty good sell. The essays are hilarious - I particularly liked the one where Rakoff takes off on the multi-award-winning musical Rent. Thrown randomly through the essays are Bush-bashing notes, which are a bit of a distraction - though to be fair, Rakoff is a gay, Jewish, media professional - that is three good reasons to hate republicans without even trying.

The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark was also published last year. I have thoroughly enjoyed some books about English language and usage in the past (think Eats, Shoots and Leaves), so the very title of this book was inviting. The book itself, unfortunately, was a bit of a let down. It reads somewhat like a series of mini lectures about the language - the teacher is clearly very good and very interesting, but the format doesn't work for me. Oh and by the way, the book is more for writers than necessarily for readers.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: I read In Defense of Food a year and a bit back, and fell in love with Michael Pollan. So I have always been meaning to read his original great book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Finally got around to it this last month, and ... how do I say this ... it is the greatest book on food you will probably ever read. There isn't a way for me to do justice to this truly great book in a short paragraph, so I am not going to try. But I will guarantee you this - once you read the book, you will change something about what (and how) you eat.

I read Super Freakonomics, finally. I like micro-economic popular books a lot. Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist, Tipping Point ... I have enjoyed all of them. But somehow Super Freakonomics felt like a bit too cutesy. I had no intention of buying the book. As fate would have it though, a friend gifted the book to me. A hardcover, illustrated edition no less. So I had to read it after avoiding it all these months. I have to say, it wasn't half bad. Some of the ideas were extremely interesting. The global warming bit right at the end was my favorite part of the book. If you liked Freakonomics, and it has been long enough since you read it and fatigue isn't going to take over, read this one. But if you are looking for some cool, new, insightful economic paradigm, move on.

So this has been my little journey in books these past couple of months. I am back with another non-fiction book now, V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain. I am only 50 pages into the book, but let me tell you this - you are going to hear a lot more about neuroscience on Brick and Rope in the months to come. Ramachandran is a genius.

I hope the tide on fiction turns, because I am really keen to read some exciting and fresh fiction. The palate is all cleansed. Quite unlike my prediction at the end of 2010, I haven't really been taken by anything in the fiction world this year ... but of course half the year stretches ahead of us ... there is time ...

So what about you then? What have you been reading lately?

What do I miss about America? A review

2011-06-18T23:45:00.000-07:00

The monsoon arrived in Mumbai a few days early this year. One day it was all hot and sultry, and the next the gods had finally had enough and let the thunderous clouds loose. As lively pellets pelted the thirsty earth, I realized with a sudden sensory jolt - it has been a full year since I returned to India.

I had expected to get here right alongside the monsoon last year. Sitting in my basement in suburban Northern Virginia, I looked to this season of seasons with equal parts dread and fascination. [See my blog post from the time: The Monsoon] As I watch the thundering rains this time around the very best way you can (i.e. from indoors), my mind goes back to how much things have changed over this year. Back then, I was - yes it needs to be said - scared. I certainly had the faith that coming back to India at that time was the right decision for us, but hey, there were a hundred different ways things could go wrong. We were leaving a country where everything worked, and moving to one where everything needed work. If others have made this move and have truly had no doubts, they are bigger men than I am.

More to soothe my nerves than anything else, I had then made a list on Brick and Rope of Top 10 Things I Will Miss Most about Life in America. In that post, among other things, I wrote -

There is so much about the US I will miss back in India. Or I expect I will miss, is probably more accurate. I don't know for sure, do I? I might think I will miss something, but in reality I might actually not even remember it, and something much more mundane might tug at the heartstrings. Only one way to find out.

Let me put my stake in the ground. Let me put out in the public domain what I think I will miss most about life in the US. Maybe a few months after I move to India, I can look back upon this list and see whether reality at all resembled my predictions.

One year on, sitting on the right side of clear French windows watching the grey downpour falling 18 floors down, with a wet Mumbai spread out below me, and a steaming cup of coffee in my hands, I think it is time I looked at that list again. What are truly the things I miss most about life in the US now? Did I actually miss the things I thought I would? Here is a review of my predicted Top 10 and how they turned out:

#10: Things: Turns out I don't miss the material things about the US much at all. Practically everything is available in India now (yes dear JS of one year back, even 60" HDTVs and TiVo). No, this prediction was a 'miss'.

#9: Suburbia: Life in the city is a world removed from the suburban bliss of America. But it has its own special addictions. I wouldn't say I miss suburbia terribly, but I haven't quite become the comfortable city dweller yet either. Let us chalk this prediction down under the 'mixed' column.

#8: Saying Hello to Strangers: Common courtesy is as lacking in the India of today as I remembered it to be. There are little pockets of civility in an otherwise 'too busy running and too scared of strangers to care to say hello' world. Yes, I certainly do miss the comfort of everyone being polite and courteous with each other.

#7: Football: Well, it took me three years to learn to love football. It took about three months for cricket to regain its place in my heart. Notwithstanding my desperate surfing at 3 in the morning to catch live streaming of Super Bowl XLV, I have to say that I don't really miss football that much.

#6: Flowers: Flowers blooming everywhere were one of the great pleasures of living in America. There is no shortage of flowers in India, only the relationship with them is different. Where flowers in the US are about adding color to the surroundings, in India they are about pretty-ing people (or gods) up. Indians tend to have a much more 'up close' relationship with flowers than their western counterparts. It is a difference I have gotten used to.

#5: Driving: Long drives and road trips were a source of great pleasure to the wife and I for years. I never expected to gather enough courage to start driving in the crazy jungle of Indian traffic, and that hurt. It took me close to six months, but I did start driving again. I feel confident enough to give the driver a two day weekend. With the parents in Pune, the (extremely beautiful) 100 mile drive there every month or so is the closest we have had to a road trip, but the confidence is building ... maybe something more ambitious soon?

#4: Doing business on the Internet: India is getting there but isn't quite there yet. Google maps works quite well. Buying books (and other essentials) on the net is a breeze. There is a Reliance version of Netflix. But if you want reviews on schools or doctors or plumbers; find the best furniture shop in your area; get your passport / driving licence renewed, you are out of luck. What is available is well short of useful. The slightly crazy thing is - one doesn't miss it that much. Like the H&R Block ads used to say 'we have people'.

#3: Two day weekends: As its #3 position shows, this was something I was really worried about. Once you get used to 2 day weekends, it is difficult to go back. As it happens, I needn't have fretted. I work strictly 5 day weeks and practically never work on weekends (and no one from work ever calls me either). So on this one, I am happy to note that the fears were truly unfounded. I must mention however that this is very company specific. My employer in the US was very respectful of my personal time and I am grateful that the same has turned out to be true of my present employer. Let me not jinx it by talking more.

#2: Public libraries: Hell yes! I miss them like hell. There are no libraries worth the name in Mumbai. No bookshops inviting enough to encourage me to go there on weekends simply to browse. I find bookshops here too transactional, too interested in getting you to buy something and get the hell out. I miss my Sunday morning trips to Barnes & Noble with the daughter, my occasional nocturnal visits at 9 in the night, to read something till 11 when they finally close down with a "we would be happy to welcome you again tomorrow morning at 9". Personally, this is probably what I miss the most.

#1: National Parks: A close second. Yes, I miss them a lot. With the grace of Bombay Natural History Society, I have started discovering the bountiful gifts of nature in India in recent months. (We went for an immensely satisfying hike in Borivili National Park yesterday - the one year old in a kid carrier and the 'I am almost five' daughter treading the rocks gamely.) But I haven't yet been to any other national park in India. I haven't necessarily pushed myself hard enough, so no excuses, but the sheer accessibility of natural beauty in the US is missing here in India.

Before I conclude the review of this list, I have to mention one additional item that wasn't on my original list, but is something we sorely miss now - reliable child care. The many professionally run day care centers everywhere in America are what make two working parents possible. There is nothing comparable in India. The social infrastructure almost forces one parent to be at home, unless you are extraordinarily lucky with domestic help or local availability of grandparents. If you ask my wife her list of things she misses about the US, this is, without any hesitation, her #1.

So then, how did my original list do in terms of predicting what we were going to miss most about life in America? It was a mixed bag, I think. There were a few items that were spot on, a few that were way off.

Overall though, one year later, what surprises me the most is this - I don't miss my previous life nearly as much as I thought I would. To be honest, I don't believe I miss it much at all. Life takes over, I guess.

Five hundred Sundays later

2011-05-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

It is like a little camp, a mini carnival. At first sight, all I can see is yellow tarpaulin. Tens of tawny tarp tops tenting the terrain.

"When was the last time you have been to an actual subzi bazaar?", my brother had challenged me earlier in the day. Does the produce section at Hypercity count, I had wondered sheepishly. His look was pure disdain.

Our first stop was the ATM. No sir, your Visa is not welcome here at the bazaar. For everything else, there isn't Mastercard. In fact, our local subzi bazaar is exclusively for things only cash can buy. So you can leave your plastics home, thank you very much. And do not forgot to get your own bags. Environmentally minded laws banning thin plastic bags seems to have really changed the shopping experience that I remember. 'Bag?' asks every seller, with thin stocks of thick polythene.

Stocked with cash, armed with bags, wearing our warm weather clothes and old chappals, we set off.

In my childhood, the Sunday vegetable bazaar was an established ritual. Our weekly tryst with local villagers selling their imperfect looking but undeniably fresh vegetables. A large open area where the vendors would squat on the ground, vegetables spread out in front of them, the sun beating down from above. Our dad would stride confidently through the stalls, weighing this vegetable here, pinching that one there, enquiring prices, arguing about the quality, but for the first 30 minutes, not buying anything at all. We would be tired and ready to go home by the time he would start. We would stare at the felicity with which he handled the cauliflower, the way he would toss the cabbage up to get a feel for its density, the way the ends of okra would be casually snapped. Veggies in the bag, we would reach home tired and hot, but there would always be a reward. Hot samosas, jalebis, and pakodas from the local halwai! Another Sunday ritual.

So how are things nowadays, I wonder, walking to one of these bazaars after some five hundred Sundays.

Under the tents, it is a golden yellow, sunlight filtering through the tarp. It is an assault of colors, of smells, shouts. It is early enough in the morning that the vendors are still stacking their 'maal', but already, there are buyers eagerly eyeing everything, flitting restlessly from one stall to the other, looking for the best tomatoes, the freshest drumstick. Unlike the Sunday bazaar of my childhood, no one seems to be squatting on the ground. There are benches and chairs where the sellers are perched, with their pushcarts in front looking like a painter's palette - stacked with yellows, greens and reds.

Everyone has his own style of attracting the buyer. Each has his own little ad jingle. 'Barah ka aadha kilo, barah ka aadha kilo' someone is shouting. I look around but cannot make out the source, or see what is being sold twenty-four rupees to the kg. We stop at a cabbage cart. The seller is the quick tongued variety. 'Kitna sahab? Ek kilo? Ded kar doon? Yeh wala lo. Mast hai sab. Mast. Arey eh!", this last exclamation aimed at a boy who seems to be a helper of sorts, 'woh bag khol.' He is also quick with the hands, weighing this, bagging that, doing the math, handing the cash. And all the while, his commentary goes on. Dad has a happy, tickled smile, playing along with the game. He is doing his tossing-the-cabbage thing.

We are in the red section now, ten different tomato vendors, all shouting for our attention. A woman in a bright green sari is haggling with one of them. 'Woh nikalo!', she is yelling right back at him, taking away a couple of suspect tomatoes from the weighing scale and replacing them with others that look just the same, if you ask me. She is staring at his hands suspiciously, making sure he isn't getting too frisky with them, biasing the tarazu in some way. 'Arey aunty, bag sambhalo!' shouts a vendor from across the aisle, laughing. Her bag has given way, spilling potatoes everywhere.

The greens section is all wet and fresh. Every cart has greens liberally sprinkled with water. 'Rasta, rasta!', a well toned young man is chanting as he makes his way. He is wearing ragged jeans and a sleeveless vest of black net, from what I can make out. His upper body is slick with sweat, and on his back is a sackful of cucumbers. He dumps it near a stall, where a boy, where looks barely twelve, is in charge, slicing the bag open effortlessly, digging the cucumbers out and stacking them neatly on his cart.

My dad is at the lemon cart now, bargaining with a tiny woman who is playing the 'poor woman' card, but can't stop herself from breaking out into a grin every now and then, which reduces the impact somewhat. 'What? Such small lemons and 4 for 10 rupees?' my dad is asking in a tone that is intended to convey equal parts disbelief and dismay I presume. Kalyug is here, I tell you, he seems to suggest with a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head. 'C'mon dad', I tug him gently, cringing at this smidgen of a negotiation where the result is equally unimportant to both parties. No, I am going to be no good at this myself. 'Oh its part of the game!', my exasperated wife often says, 'you can't just give them whatever price they ask!' Well, my dad sure isn't giving that woman what she is asking. And we are going to be richer. By a full two rupees. Yay.

There seems to be a little corner dominated by the herbs and spices group. For some reason, there seems to be something of a religious overtone to this section. There is an old muslim man, cap firmly on his head, green jacket with golden embroidery, grey beard somehow indicating both age and religion, selling garlic cloves and ginger root. Across the aisle, selling dhaniya and kadi patta is an even older man, with a little tape recorder next to him. The tape recorder is set to a low chant. 'ohhhhhhmmmmmm', it goes, slowly, sonorously, continuously, 'oohhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmm!'. What is it about spices and herbs that seems to attract the old, seriously religious types? Religion is the spice of life, anyone?

'Ratnagiri saat rupaye!'

Ah, the sweet smell! The saving grace of a relentless Indian summer; the desire long suppressed during my American years; ratnagiri, langda, hapus, kesar, banganapalli. The king of fruits. Oh yes dad, let's pile in the mangoes, shall we?

The bags have been getting progressively heavier as the time has worn on. The handles are biting into my palm now. Boy, I should have gone with the shoulder jhola variety, shouldn't I? I can see the red welts of temporary discomfort lining my palm when I finally put the bags down. 'So, what do you think?" asks my brother, obviously enjoying the spectacle of showing off to an R2I. (Yes people, that's a term. There are enough of us Return To India folks around.) Well ... I start.

'Arey, I almost forgot', interrupts dad. 'Let's take a short detour, shall we? Let's buy some samosas and jalebis from chandu halwai.'

The surprising charms of Mumbai

2011-05-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

Mumbai is one of the most crowded cities in the world. It is also, though I am not aware of any statistics, likely among the noisiest cities in the world. If the number of cranes I can see on its horizon are any indication, it is fast getting to be among the most concretized cities in the world. Nature, I have often surmised, has been beaten into submission by the megapolis. Pushed into a corner, brushed rudely away by the swarming masses. So when a friend mentioned that he was a member of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), I couldn't quite contain the snigger. And what does the Society do, I wise-cracked, water the four trees in Dadar?

Well, turns out, there's a lot about this city I don't quite know. Many charms Mumbai has been keeping from me.

It is a weekend evening and we are driving with our bird-watcher friend towards the Eastern shore of Mumbai, to pay a visit to the Sewri mudflats. These are mangrove swamps, declared a protected ecology by the government some years back. Every years, between the months of October and March, the area is the destination of a particular migratory bird species. We are headed, not to put too a fine point on it, towards Flamingo Bay.

The Sewri mudflats have marshes that are extremely nutrient rich. So every winter for the last few decades, thousands of Lesser Flamingos descend here to peck at the mud, hang out with friends, enjoy the Bombay skyline, and generally have a good time. For the last few years, this has started to become something of a tourist event. We head there on a day BNHS has declared the Flamingo Festival. I am still half disbelieving - Flamingos in the wild? In their thousands? In the middle of traffic snarled, over-crowded, cramped for elbow room Mumbai? Puh-leese. About two kilometers from the mudflats, we start seeing the BNHS volunteers, in their blue T-Shirts saying "Save me", with the Flamingo neck making for the shapely 'S'. The crowds are surprisingly strong ... Hmm... either this is an elaborate hoax or there really are a lot of birds. We walk to the edge of the jetty and stare out towards the water. It is low tide, and the mud stretches for a distance before being kissed by water. And spread all over it, is a carpet of baby pink. Necks down, pecking the mud with love, are thousands upon thousands of flamingos. Guests in my city. Like they are college girls, and this is Fort Lauderdale in Spring Break. Like they are camera toting tourists, and this is Yellowstone in June. Like they are Bihari laborers looking for work, and this is ... well, Mumbai.

We stay there an hour, staring at the birds as they go about their business unhurriedly. BNHS has set up a tent with a lot of information on the flamingos, both the "Greater" and the "Lesser" variety. And they have volunteers in the 'Save Me' T-shirts everywhere, ready with information, happy to lend their binoculars.

It is my first brush with nature in Mumbai since my return, and it makes me see her in a new light.

The sister in law in visiting and is keen on a trip to the beach. Really? I ask her. You want to brave the beach in Mumbai? It is going to be a dirty, trash ridden mess, and overrun with people to boot. You are too negative, she tells me, a Mumbaikar at heart, two decades outside the city regardless. We get there early in the morning, and by the time we park our car and start walking towards the sand, I already know something is different. I can actually see all the way to the water. Which means .... "Where are the hawker stands" I ask no one in particular. The beach is mostly empty, and - here is the part that shocks me - clean. We get comfortable on our beach towels, watching the local lads playing a free-for-all version of beach cricket. The sun is still comfortably low on the horizon, the waves are crashing ashore with soothing regularity, the kids are busy building sand castles, the scattered palm trees are swaying in the morning breeze, the boys scream 'catch! catch!' every so often, and then break out in laughter as the catcher trips and falls right into the sea. "You know I quite forgot" I tell the wife an hour later, "we are still in Bombay".

How about a visit to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, asks the bird watcher friend some weeks later. 'Sanjay Gandhi' national park? What is their logo, a pair of scissors going snip snip? I fall back into my defensive humor. Hey, it is a really good park, says the friend, defending her city from the barbs of someone who is still an outsider. I look it up. Well, I realize it is a pretty big deal. Sanjay Gandhi National Park is spread over approximately 25,700 acres, making it the largest urban park in the world. For comparison, Central Park in New York is about 850 acres. Hyde park in London is about 625 acres. The park is home to hundreds of species of birds and animals and an even larger number of plants.

We reach there early one weekend morning. The plan is to pay a quick visit to Kanheri Caves located within the park, and then spend some time exploring the greenery. I realize as soon as we get there that the plan is too ambitious. The park is too darn big to explore in a day. And the Kanheri Caves are too interesting to just gloss over.

Kanheri caves are Buddhist caves dating from as far back as 1st Century BC to the 'newest' caves that are from the 10th century. These caves are half monument, half practical abodes. There are about 110 caves in all, and they take some serious climbing to visit. This area has a lot of these caves from many centuries back, but I haven't visited any of them. I haven't been to Ajanta / Ellora or even to the much more accessible Elephanta Caves. Maybe that is why I am awed by the caves here. Tens of caves have been cut into sheer hard rock. Steps have been cut in the hundreds to make these caves accessible. And in the caves are these glorious reliefs of Buddha in his many poses.

We climb down tired and hungry. Our bird watcher friend has come prepared with a picnic breakfast. But first, she suggests, let's get some cucumber. The vendors have placed themselves at the point of greatest thirst - right at the bottom of the stairs. We fall on them with gratitude, crunching into the juicy greenness of cucumbers greedily. Be careful, one of the vendor women says, seeing us walking under a tree. I look at her uncomprehendingly, and she indicates heavenwards with a lifted eyebrow. Monkeys.

There is an email in my mailbox from BNHS. A list of events they are organizing in the months of May and June. Yeoor Hills, says one. Silonda Nature Trail. Tungareshwar Wildlife Sanctuary Monsoon Trail. I haven't heard of any of these places. But then, who am I to claim to know Mumbai's natural charms? I trust you Bombay Natural History Society. Lead me on.

Book Review: The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)

2011-04-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

Philip Roth must be a tall man. So tall in fact that his literary shadow seems to fall on every Jewish author in the world. Even one that lives across the Atlantic. If you are a Jewish writer of fiction in this era, I don't know how you escape the Roth comparison. It isn't original for the reviewer to do so, but then, who wouldn't?

Howard Jacobson is the London answer to Roth. Before The Finkler Question, I don't think I have read what can only be called 'Jewish fiction' from Britain. I also don't believe I have read a Booker Prize winning book that I haven't liked.

As an aside -

Back from the early nineties, Booker prize winners have been a very safe bet with me. I have inevitably liked them. Back from the English Patient in 1992; through Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (my first, and favorite Roddy Doyle); Amsterdam (my first but not favorite Ian McEwan); Disgrace (Coetzee's great, small book, which I finally read last year); Life of Pi; The Inheritance of Loss (again not my favorite Kiran Desai, but a great book nonetheless); The White Tiger (how unforgettable was Aravind Adiga's Balram Halwai?). Through the years, the Booker has been a great source for me. And of course, there was the greatest of them all - Midnight's Children, the best Rushdie, which is saying something.

Some of these authors I have turned out to be disappointing with their second books, discouraging me from ever reading them again - Aravind Adiga and Yann Martel come to mind. But the winning book has almost always satisfied.

The same can't be said about Nobel prize winners. I realize that the Nobel is offered to a body of work, to an author, not to a particular book, so the comparison is not a fair one. But Nobel prize winning authors haven't always been a big hit with me - accessibility of their books being an important obstacle in some cases.

Anyway, back to the review, till a few weeks back, I hadn't read a Jewish book by a British author. And I hadn't disliked a Booker prize winner. Unfortunately, both these facts changed with Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question.

The Finkler Question is the story of three men - "two widowers and (Julian) Treslove, who counted as an honorary third". Two of them (writer philosopher Sam Finkler and long retired teacher Libor Sevcik) are Jews, and Treslove, who isn't one, would like to be one. Think of it as Dil Chahta Hai, thirty years and a couple of spousal deaths later, with a Jewish tilt. I say it is 'the story of three men', but really, it is more like the ruminations of three men, and the women in their lives, past and (infrequently) the present.

I had posted a while back (Honey, I shrunk the Plot, Aug 2009) about the evolution of the modern novel to a place where the plot has become somewhat unfashionable. I don't always mind that (The Elegance of the Hedgehog for instance). But sometimes, the introspective passages of a novel get a bit tired. And that is what happens with The Finkler Question.

There are, to be honest, some crackling sentences and paragraphs in the book. Breathtaking prose written by someone who has his hand right on the pulse. For instance, introducing the melancholy Mr. Traslove, Jacobson writes -

'Cheer up,' people would say to him in the canteen. But all that did was make him want to cry. Such a sad expression, 'Cheer up'. Not only did it concede the improbability that he ever would cheer up, it accepted that there could be nothing much to cheer up for if cheering up was all there was to look forward to.

Or this, with the men thinking about their lost wives (not the overly sentimental Erich Segal-ish first bit - that is what you need to get through to get to the delightful line at the end) -

How do you go on living knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

He wanted to ask Libor that. 'How did you get through the first night of being alone, Libor? Did you sleep? Have you slept since? Or is sleep all that's left to you?'

But he couldn't. Perhaps he didn't want to hear the answer.

Though once Libor did say, 'Just when you think you've overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.'

So, there are the ingredients for a great story - good characters, a very skilled writer. But then start the explorations of Jewishness. Which are fine, for the first fifty pages or so. Going back to Roth though, one gets the feeling that this has been done, and better, by the master many times over.

By choosing old men as the protagonists, Jacobson is able to place some vigorously politically sensitive statements in the mouth of his characters. It is the sort of allowance one would give old men that the reader doesn't cringe reading some of these.

And another thing - Jacobson keeps things light all along. The Finkler Question is quite exquisitely funny in parts - a funny take on Jews and their relationship to the world - so kill me for seeing a Roth connection.

There are some interesting takes on the outside world's view of Jewishness -

A character, whose upcoming Jewish culture museum has been desecrated by people who have 'wrapped rashers of bacon around the handles' of the door -

'It isn't just their overestimation of our horror of the pig,' she said, wiping her eyes. 'I'm sure, for example, they don't know how much I love a bacon sandwich, but it isn't only that, it's their exaggeration of our presence. They find us before we find ourselves. Nowhere is safe from them because they think nowhere is safe from us.'

Ultimately though, it is a sentence from early in the book that describes things best for me -

'Don't you get sick of us?' she said, as though wanting to change the subject. 'I don't mean us, I mean Jews. Don't you get sick of our, their, self-preoccupation?'

'I never get sick of you.'

'Stop it. Answer me - don't you wish they'd shut up about themselves?' <...>

'All Jews. Endlessly falling out in public about how Jewish to be, whether they are or they aren't, whether they're practicing or they're not, whether to wear fringes or eat bacon, whether they feel safe here or precarious, whether the world hates them or it doesn't, the fucking Holocaust, fucking Palestine ...'

I wouldn't say I am sick of it, exactly. That feels a bit harsh. But I did feel a bit tired by the end.

Listening for fireworks

2011-04-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

Mumbai is a full bodied, five senses sort of city. You can touch her in the crowds jostling for room on local trains, in the winding lines for Siddhivinayak on Tuesdays. You can see her, in every vibrant color of the visible spectrum, laid out vast in glorious detergent wetness, in Dhobi Ghat. You can smell her many scents, from the perfumed, air conditioned sophistication of glamorous malls to the base defecatory stench of Dharavi mornings. You can taste her, in vada pavs and Irani biryanis that feeble stomachs remember with terror the next morning. But most of all, you can hear her.

Every place has a signature sound. An acoustic identity, if you will, an aural autograph. From my vantage point, that sound for Mumbai is the bursting of firecrackers.

At first, I struggled to understand the 'any time any day' fireworks culture of Mumbai. "But what is the occasion?" I would ask, barely coherent when startled awake in the middle of the night by something that climbed right up the decibel chart. There has got to be a law against this. What's with waking the world up because your niece got engaged, or your son has got his driver's license or mother in law left town or whatever the momentous event happens to be.

"Appa, is it Diwali?" my daughter would ask me every time. No sweetheart, it is not. It isn't Diwali. And it isn't going to be Diwali tomorrow either. But try telling the fireworks crowd that. By the way, who are these people? What do they have against quiet and peace? And where is all this money for blowing up in smoke coming from?

Well turns out, there are times the fireworks crowd does go quiet. And that speaks volumes too.

It is the quarter-final of the world cup. The biggest match of the tournament so far. Pre-tournament favorites India are playing three time defending champion Australia. There is no news in the newspapers today but for this. It doesn't matter if your paper of choice is white or pink. It is all cricket everywhere. Ricky Ponting has played a gem of an innings. But this is a new India. There is confidence in the fans on the street, and in my office. We will make it, runs the quiet, confident refrain. But is there a hint of nervousness I hear just under the surface? I rush home to watch the Indian innings. (Did the guy who invented HD ever get a Nobel prize? No? What are the oldies in Sweden thinking?)

All windows and french doors of my 18th floor apartment are open as I pace in front of the TV, riveted by every ball being bowled. I can't sit because things are not going India's way when I sit. The God is still at the crease. And every time Sachin hits a boundary, I hear a roar of approval from crowds all around our community. I can hear sounds from miles around, and everyone in the country, at this moment, is doing the same exact thing - watching Sachin.

The fireworks gang is out in full force. Every boundary is celebrated with a pyrotechnic blast. The sky slowly filling up with smoke, the sounds reaching a crescendo. And then the city goes awfully, sickly quiet. Tendulkar is walking back on the screen, and India is still a long way from reaching its goal. My mom is on the phone. She is going to sleep. Can't take the tension. Here is the kicker though - "I will be listening for fireworks." So there are my mom and dad, lying in bed, quiet, TVs silenced, hearts still beating, determined not to hope. But their ears are pricked - listening for fireworks.

And what fireworks there are. It starts slowly, tentatively, but as it gets clearer and clearer that India was going to get to the finish line, the fireworks gang get more and more confident. The decibel level keeps increasing steadily. Finally, when Yuvraj hits that last boundary, running down the pitch like a man crazed, hugging Raina in a deathly embrace, the skies in Mumbai lit up again. The tentativeness is forgotten, the city speaks in booms. The joy of a people lights the skies up spectacularly.

"Do you still watch cricket?" was a question every acquaintance would ask on my return to India. Truth is, I did not. Watching from across the seas, in the silence of my basement, over a rickety internet site, never really got my juices going. I will try to get back into it slowly now that I am here, I had told myself.

"BOOM!" goes another of the massive rockets. It is official now. I am back to being a fan.

It is the 30th of March, a day before the financial year end. A day that is going to be really busy at work. The entire country wakes up with butterflies in the stomach, and it has nothing to do with the year end. India play Pakistan today in the semi-finals. It is a match-up to beat all match-ups. A no-holds-barred street fight. At half past noon, my blackberry buzzes. It is a text from my mom - "Match starts in 1.5 hrs. God bless India". Yeah ... no one is really going to be working much today.

We have set up a large screen and a projector at work. The crowd has started to get together well before the first ball is bowled. The boss and I try to hold a quick meeting while the match is still in its early stages. But every few minutes, we can hear the crowd outside cheering, whoops and yells pierce the walls of the meeting room. Our eyes meet. "I don't think this is working", my boss says, "Let us just do this another day."

BOOOM!! Go the fireworks later that evening, when the first Pakistani wicket falls in the chase for, strangely enough, the exact score that India had chased down just a few days back. And the BOOMs keep coming. Numbers two, three, four ... When the last man holes out, I run from my TV screen at home to the window. I don't want to miss a second of it. It is ecstasy. An outpouring of emotion unlike any I remember seeing in recent years. The skies are alight. The noise is deafening. India are through to the finals! (And Pakistan is going home.)

We decide to watch the finals with my parents. At least my mom will save on texting costs.

Say an alien were to visit India today. Someone who knows nothing of the country, and certainly nothing of the game of cricket. If this alien were to perch atop its spaceship roof, balanced precariously on the dome, listening to the sounds of the city, here is what it might hear -

BOOM. BOOM. [Some early bowling success for India]
Silence. Long, multi-hour silence. [Sri Lanka consolidates slowly but surely]
A collective gasp, an extended groan. [Mahela cuts loose in the closing overs]
Horns blaring, screeching of brakes, more horns. [Traffic comes back to life between the innings]
GASP!! [Things do not start well for India. Not by a long distance.]

And then things go really quiet.

The city, the country, waits.

Prays.

Dares not dream.

The skies are silent, forlorn. India is getting closer in the chase, but no one is getting the fireworks out yet. Not wanting to tempt fate. Afraid of being the jinx that brakes the slowly emerging spell.

All is silent, and we wait.

And then the moment arrives. Kulasekara, steaming in to bowl to Captain Courageous. Puts it in the spot, and the artist formerly of long locks, breaks every shackle, lets the monster shot loose. The ball sails over the boundary, the bat is swirled one final time for effect, and the deed is done.

YEAHHHHHHH! Comes a massive, collective yell from downstairs. And the skies - they finally, finally burst open.

The fireworks continue through the night. Smoke is everywhere. People are running out of their homes, waving India flags, hugging everyone in sight. Youngsters are shouting slogans. It is unlike anything the sleepy daughter has ever seen in her young life. We won, she knows, her grandma told her.

"Appa, is it Diwali?" she asks me, playing our old game. No sweetheart, it is not Diwali. It is bigger. Much, much bigger.

Book Review: The emperor of all maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

2011-03-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

A dear friend lost a loved one to cancer this past month.

It was an unhappy coincidence that at the time I was reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's much acclaimed book on the disease - The Emperor of all Maladies. Coming as it did right on the heels of a bereavement, there was unmistakably a sharper edge to the book for me. How can one, I wondered, go through this sort of pain and grief every day of their working lives? How can one live this disease for a living? And how, when it comes right down to it, can one write about it with understanding, compassion and scientific inquiry, in a way that doesn't belittle the grief of those touched by the subject?

The Emperor of all Maladies is a book that achieves what at first blush seems unachievable. It brings you face to face with one of the greatest killers of our age, opens it up to you, makes you intimate with it, and never ever lets the science or the history get in the way of the sheer humanity of the storyteller.

Readers of Brick and Rope likely know my weakness for doctors who can write. Atul Gawande of course has been a longtime favorite and I am a bit of a sucker for others of his ilk. That said, as much of the reviewing critics noticed last year when The Emperor of all Maladies made practically every Best Books Of the Year list on non-fiction, Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cracker of a writer. For one, he is instructive without being pedantic.

We tend to think of cancer as a "modern" illness because its metaphors are so modern. It is a disease of overproduction, of fulminant growth - growth unstoppable, growth tipped into the abyss of no control. Modern biology encourages us to imagine the cell as a molecular machine. Cancer is that machine unable to quench its initial command (to grow) and thus transformed into an indestructible, self-propelled automaton.

As I was saying, instructive, interesting, an evocative image to tell us what cancer is about. Then right after that comes a passage with another catching turn of phrase. (Wait for it till the end of the paragraph)

The notion of cancer as an affliction that belongs paradigmatically to the twentieth century is reminiscent of another disease once considered emblematic of another era: tuberculosis in the nineteenth century. Both diseases were similarly "obscene" - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, repugnant to the senses. Both drain vitality; both stretch out the encounter with death; in both cases, dying, even more than death, defines the illness.

Isn't that a remarkable last sentence?

One of the things I have wondered for a while about cancer is why it seems so much more visible now? It is the disease of our times, it appears. It is the ailment that is most commonly visible in the context of mortality. Why, I have wondered. Turns out, there are some really simple answers.

With a few notable exceptions, in the vast stretch of medical history there is no book or god for cancer. There are several reasons behind this absence. Cancer is an age-related disease - sometimes exponentially so. The risk of breast cancer, for instance, is about 1 in 400 for a thirty-year-old woman and increases to 1 in 9 for a seventy-year-old. In most ancient societies, people didn't live long enough to get cancer. Men and women were long consumed by tuberculosis, dropsy, cholera, smallpox, leprosy, plague, or pneumonia. If cancer existed, it remained submerged under the sea of other illnesses. Indeed, cancer's emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed. ... Civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans - civilization unveiled it.

And Mukherjee going on to offer more reasons on why cancer is so visible today, but I will let you read that in the book.

The triumph of The Emperor of Maladies is not merely that is a colossal compendium of knowledge about one of the most visible killers of our time, though it is that. It is not even that it is such a wonderfully written book with language that practically pulsates with emotion. It is that through the entire book, Siddhartha Mukherjee reminds you that he is, at the end of the day, a doctor. If the history and the science of cancer are the heart of the book, it is the patients that provide the soul to the book. They form the narrative thread that holds the book together, they keep the lesson from turning dry. And they kept my eyes from staying dry.

The Emperor of Maladies was a universally acclaimed critic favorite in 2010. I can see why.

The flexible policemen of Mumbai

2011-03-11T23:22:00.000-08:00

Horn. Screech. Horn. Horrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn. Men shouting. "98.3 FM Radio Mirchi - It's hot!" Screeeeech. Horn.

The white noise of Bombay on the road. My mind stopped processing it after a while. I don't hear any of it any more. Just like I don't see the beggar knocking on my car's window; or the children my daughter's age, coated in dust, lethargically wading through trashcans on what their more privileged peers call a 'school day'. I don't see anything. I don't hear anything. I am in my now customary hand-to-the-ear pose, the phone totting position that is symbolic of an Indian wheeling and dealing away. I am in my own little zone, till ... SCREEEEECH! Thud.

"Hey I will have to call you back, my car just got in an accident."

The dull thud. The siren sound of a traffic incident that is too puny to be dramatically termed a 'road accident', but is still large enough to be an eyesore till fixed. A fender bender, is what I used to call that - in that other life of mine all those ages ago, in Uncle Sam's yard. It is a first for me since I returned to India, so I am a bit disoriented, unsure of the process, the protocol. We are on the right lane, or what is half-seriously referred to as the 'fast' lane, on what is nominally a national highway. There are a million cars on the road, and my driver has just parked the car right where it got hit from behind, has left the car and is walking towards the culprit vehicle behind us. Soon the bender and bendee are engaged in some serious yelling, arms slicing through the air, spit flying, sweat tango-ing with the spit in mid air. And all the while, the two cars are parked right where they were. The backup is now really long, and getting longer every minute. The two drivers show no signs of letting up. To their credit, the cars stuck in the backup seem to take it all in their stride. No one is honking at us ... or let us say, people aren't honking any more than they do anyway, just to keep things interesting. They are rolling down their windows to hear more of the bender-bendee altercation, but 'no hard feelings' seems to be the mantra.

"Should we wait for the police?" I ask my driver, which in retrospect sounds remarkably naive. "Nahin sahib", he replies after a momentary pitying look. We need to go to the nearest police station, I am told, to lodge a First Information Report. Oh Kay, I tell myself. This is going to be interesting, if that is the word I am looking for. The car seems to be making all sorts of unnatural noises as we take off once again, to the disappointment, it appears, of the drivers right behind, who know they have just missed some action. To the police station, it is.

"Saharsh Swagat Ahey!" claims a big signboard at the police station, cheerily welcoming people who somehow don't seem appropriately enthused at the prospect. So begins the adventure, I think.

"Once every few months," a wise man had said to me soon after my return to India, "you should go to a government office." I looked puzzled as he had continued, "It is a great leveler. It keeps you grounded."

It has been a good thirty minutes since we came in here. Two different men in uniform have come by to look at the car, have scratched their chins lazily, and have drifted back to where they came from, with nary a word on what I am supposed to be doing. The third man has just come out, and is going through the same motions. Promisingly, he is holding a pad in his hand, and has a pen tucked away behind his ears. He takes one quick look at me, incongruously dressed in a suit (Hey, what am I to do? I was on my way to a meeting!), and asks, "gaadi koun chala raha tha?" My driver steps forward, his expression equal parts deference and indignation. "Chalo" says the policeman, turns around and walks back in. Now 'in' is probably not precise. There is a little wooden bench placed in the porch of the police station, with just enough seats for the complainants to sit, and a desk at which the policeman is perched. My driver sits opposite the man, and they get going in Marathi. I look around helplessly for a while and as the conversation continues, slowly drift outside.

As good a time as any to browse around a police station.

There is a large framed notice outside called 'Rights of Citizens'. It seems to list all the right things, including telephone numbers of officials whom you might call in case you are asked for 'consideration' when registering your case. Hmm. How many of the complainants coming here can actually read this board, I wonder. And among those who did, how many would be able to work through the euphemistically phrased 'consideration'?

Step out some more and there are notice boards of some sort. The first of them is blank, but for a few internal administrative notices. But to the right of this, there is a notice board grandly saying 'WANTED'. Wow, now here is the juicy bit. I walk briskly to it. There are three pictures on the board. Black and white, photocopied from some other source, so they look like cutouts from a newspaper's classified pages. Three grainy pictures of men with varying degrees of facial hair. And that is it. No names, no details, no 'Reward of Rs. 50 lakh for anyone providing information leading to arrest'. Just three stupid pictures. Move on guys, this path to instant riches seems to be under construction.

Hey, was that ... is that ... it is, isn't it? It really is. A dirty, grimy cat, with a freshly killed mouse still dangling from its mouth, blood still wet! Hold your breath, don't puke, count, count - one. two. three. four .... Yes, better now. Seriously, a dead mouse? And the cat itself is being pursued by a determined dog. What is this? National Geographic HD? And for the love of God what is that constable doing on the floor? Oh, he is sweeping and mopping the floor! Now that is a flexible job description, isn't it? Crime fighter .... plus janitor.

My driver is walking out triumphantly, barely able to stop his grin. "Mil gaya sahab" he says, thrusting the copy of our FIR into my hands. I take a peek - it is three pages long! And densely written on every page in meticulously penned Marathi. So here is another skillset required to be a policeman in India - good handwriting! Doctors need not apply.

It is precisely 84 minutes since I stepped into the station, and we are on our way out. I am crossing the parking lot, filled to capacity with dust covered Maruti Omni and Daewoo Matiz cars. (Didn't they stop manufacturing Matiz many years back?) Each seems to have some illegible writing on them, under layer upon layer of dust.

We are almost at our car when a woman, nearly hysterical in her worry jumps out of her auto rickshaw and grabs the nearest policeman's arm. She is speaking with great urgency and despair, and the policeman seems barely able to keep up. I grab snippets of her story - "my handbag ... he snatched it and ran ... it has a passport in it! Visa bhi hai, Amreeka wala! ..."

I feel sad for the poor woman, who was probably shopping for her trip to the USA, before she had to pay a visit to the house of our hawaldars-cum-janitors-cum-marathi-essayists. We start backing out.

"Saharsh Swagat Ahey!" I read again, and we are back out.

Horrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn. Screech. Men shouting. "98.3 FM Radio Mirchi - It's hot!"

Book Review: Our Kind of Traitor (John le Carre)

2011-02-20T02:52:00.000-08:00

Is a spy novel relevant in this age? In fact, are spies themselves relevant? And - boy, things are getting seriously ridiculous now - are British spies relevant? The Brits? What are they, like the Rishi Kapoor of global politics? Once a proud and dominant member, reduced now to roles of fat, middle aged funny men in marginal films? So here is an author whose stock in trade has been this personality - now turned fat, middle aged and irrelevant. How, I ask myself, does le Carre go on? How does he write when his subject matter is getting from the front pages of global newspapers to the 'style' section? Trust the great man not to leave this question unasked.

Perry, an academic from Oxford, a man most unsympathetic to spies, is one of our protagonists in Our Kind of Traitor, and in this scene below, is meeting for the first time with Hector, master spy-runner.

A mutual inspection ensued. The two men were of equal height, which for both was unusual. Without his stoop, Hector might have been the taller. With his classic broad brow and flowing white hair tossed back in two untidy waves, he resembled to Perry's eye a Head of College of the old, dotty sort. He was in his mid-fifties, by Perry's guess, but dressed for eternity in a many brown sports coat with leather patches at the elbow and leather edges to the cuffs. The shapeless grey flannels could have been Perry's own. So could the battered Hush Puppy shows. The artless, horn-rimmed spectacles could have been rescued from Perry's father's attic box.

Finally, but long after time, Hector spoke:

'Wilfred bloody Owen,' he pronounced, in a voice that contrived to be both vigorous and reverential. 'Edmund bloody Blunden. Siegfried bloody Sassoon. Robert bloody Graves. Et al.'

'What about them?' the bewildered Perry asked, before he had given himself time to think.

'Your fabulous fucking article about them in the London Review of Books last autumn! "The sacrifice of brave men does not justify the pursuit of an unjust cause. P.Makepiece scripsit." Bloody marvellous!'

'Well, thank you,' said Perry helplessly, and felt an idiot for not having made the connection fast enough.

The silence returned while Hector continued his admiring inspection of his prize.

'Well, I'll tell you what you are, Mr. Perry Makepiece, sir,' he asserted, as if he'd reached the conclusion they had both been waiting for. 'You're and absolute fucking hero, is what you are' - seizing Perry's hand in a flaccid double grip and giving it a limp shake - 'and that's not smoke up your arse. We know what you think of us. Some of us think it too, and we're right. Trouble is, we're the only show in town. Government's a fuck-up, half the Civil Service is out to lunch. The Foreign Office is as much use as a wet dream, the country's stone-broke and the bankers are taking our money and giving us the finger. What are we supposed to do about it? Complain to Mummy or fix it?'

Did you see that bit? The sacrifice of brave men does not justify the pursuit of an unjust cause. You know right then, dear reader, that you are in good hands. The best in the spy business, in fact.

This passage came back to my mind recently when I was reading news coverage of the Tahrir Square revolution. This past Friday, Mint, in its Quick Edit section had a piece called 'The Trials of the Spies'. Here is what the piece said:

John le Carre would not have blundered so badly. After Egypt, it's the third time in as many decades that US spooks have been caught napping while major political upheavals and secret operations have passed "undetected". A Reuters report on Thursday said that US director of national intelligence James Clapper has told a Senate committee that spies were "not clairvoyant".

One advertised reason for such failures is the paucity of "human intelligence" (read: real spies) in places where there's trouble. There is little evidence of learning from past mistakes. Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta has said that his agency will pay more attention to social media for signals of trouble, as if the "other" side will merrily continue to use Facebook and Twitter. Le Carre's men (George Smiley for sure) would have posted more spies on the ground, instead of following Twitter.

So, it turns out, spies continue to be relevant. Hmm, there is a thought.

[By the way, unrelated note - is there any other newspaper in India that is half as good as Mint? Not even close my friends, not even close.]

So, past 80 now, is le Carre, the master of the spy novel, the man who single-handedly pulled up a whole genre of fiction from cheap thriller category to convert it into fine literature, still up and with it? Is the writing, in other words, still any good?

But then Luke had always been a worrier. From infancy, he had worried indiscriminately, rather in the way he fell in love.

He could worry as much about whether his watch was ten seconds fast or slow, as about the direction of a marriage that was null and void in every room except the kitchen.

How great is that? 'A marriage null and void in every room except the kitchen.' Oh yes, the man's writing is still sharp. The melancholic spy at the center of his world still very much alive.

Our Kind of Traitor is a short read. The tale of a young couple from Oxford whose path crosses that of a large family from Russia, with unexpected and far-reaching effects. In his most recent book before this one, A Most Wanted Man, le Carre showed rare form, evoking memories of his best days past. With Our Kind of Traitor, he keeps the faith alive, even if the flame doesn't grow much brighter.

Just what the doctor ordered for BIMARU

2011-02-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

Demographics is destiny. The fate of nations is often written in the language of population pyramids and median age. So they say.

Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani's book that was one of my favorite reads of last year, takes an interesting twist on the 'demographic dividend' cliché. Before we get to the twist, let us make the basic argument for a demographic dividend in India.

The median age of the Indian population today is 25.9, making it one of the youngest large countries in the world. Brazil's is 28.9; China's is 35.2 (increased rapidly from a few decades back, due to the one child policy); Russia's 35.8; the US is 35.8 and Japan is the second oldest country in the world with a median age of 44.6 (Monaco is the oldest at 48.9).

[For a full listing of median age of different countries, see here.]

Historically, when a young population has met enabling government and adequate capital, the results have often been spectacular. As Nandan writes -

In 2020, India is projected to have an additional forty0seven million workers, almost equal to the total world-shortfall. The average Indian will only be twenty-nine years old, compared with the average age of thirty-seven in China and the United States, forty-five in Western Europe and forty eight in Japan. [...]

India already has the second largest reservoir of skilled labour in the world. It produces two million English speaking graduates, 15,000 law graduates and about 9,000 PhDs every year. And the existing pool of 2.1 million engineering graduates increases by nearly 300,000 every year.

A talented pool of workers, along with abundant capital and investment, presents us with immense opportunities for creativity and innovation, which can in turn lead to rapid gains in productivity growth and GDP. This had once enabled Europe to emerge as a centre for manufacturing innovation in the nineteenth century; similarly, at the peak of its dividend between 1970 and 1990, the United States saw the birth of new technology-based industries that determined the direction of the global economy over the past few decades. Such an opportunity - to emerge as the new creative power and a centre for new knowledge and innovation - now lies with India.

So that is the standard 'demographic dividend' argument made about India. What is the twist? Well, the twist is what Nandan calls 'India's double-hump: The camel in our demographics'.

Demographer economist Ashish Bose first coined the term 'BIMARU' in the 1980's in a one-page summary of a large population report sent to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. BIhar, MAdhya pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar pradesh have long been the sick members of the Indian family. In recent times, their perennial illness seemed to also catch on to Orissa, making the new, equally sickening acronym BIMAROU. Ashish's new take on the demographic evolution of the country, vividly captured by Nandan's phrase 'double-hump' is this -

While India as a whole is young, and the population pyramid looks healthily like a true pyramid, it is not the same story across the country. The states in the South were remarkably young a few decades back, and have tended to dominate the growth story in India in the last two decades - think Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi. But now, the demographic story there has largely played out. The real dividend now is (surprise, surprise) in the BIMAROU states.

As demographers such as Tim Dyson and P.N.Maribhat have shown, if we peel India's demographics like an onion, we end up with two very distinct areas within the country - a north that, thanks to its recent high fertility, stays remarkably young over the next two decades, and a south which faces rapid ageing. By 2025 north India's population will still be very young, with a median age of just twenty-six. But the median age in the south would be about thirty-four - similar to Europe's in the late 1980's.

This means that India's demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted. The first hump in the dividend came from the south and has been 'expensed' in the economic growth that the south and the west of India experienced as early as the 1970s, when their infant mortality began to fall. In the northern states, however, infant mortality has only just started to trend down.

As a result, it is the second, larger hump in India's dividend which is yet to peak, and which will come from the northern states - and primarily from the BIMARU regions. Ashish has estimated that the share of BIMARU states alone in our population growth between 2001 and 2026 will be around 50 percent, while the share of the south will be only 12.6 percent. As a result, over the next decade, the north should begin to ride the crest of its dividend, towards higher growth.

So, is this just a lot of hot air, the lazy musings of a septuagenarian economist? Not quite. There is some real growth data that has started to support this thesis. Swaminathan S. Ankileshwar Aiyar, easily one of the most entertaining economic columnists in India, wrote a piece in early 2010, where he asked the question - where are the new miracle economies within India? No prizes for guessing the right answer.

Historically, the chronically poor states were Orissa plus the BIMARU quartet (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh), of which three have been sub-divided. Have these eight poor states participated in India’s boom?

Yes, absolutely. Indeed, five of India’s eight ultra-poor states have become miracle economies, defined internationally as those with over 7% growth. The best news comes from Bihar, historically the biggest failure. From 2004-05 to2008-09, Bihar averaged 11.03% growth annually. It was virtually India’s fastest growing state, on par with Gujarat (11.05%). That represents a sensational turnaround. Nitish Kumar deserves an award for the most inclusive revolution of the decade.

Other poor states have done very well too. Uttrakhand (9.31%), Orissa (8.74%), Jharkhand (8.45%) and Chhattisgarh (7.35%), have all grown faster than the standard miracle benchmark of 7%. [...]

The elephant in the room has always been Uttar Pradesh, a huge, poor state of almost 200 million people. The excellent news is that UP’s growth rate has risen impressively to 6.29% annually. This falls short of the miracle benchmark of 7%, but not by much. [...]

Rajasthan, which grew fast earlier, has slipped down a bit, to 6.25%. The most disappointing performance comes from Madhya Pradesh (4.89 %).

So are the BIMARU states starting to come around from their sickness? Hell, yeah!

I must say though - I find the sense of fait accompli that underlies conversations on demographic dividend in India somewhat frustrating. Indeed, demographics is a powerful force. But it isn't everything. Just because one has a good demographic story going, one can't sit back and start counting the moolah. Indeed, several economists have been consistently questioning the entire foundation of the demographic dividend thesis recently.

Reverend Malthus was the one who made the most infamous demographic prediction in economic history when he said that "Population has the constant tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence." May I am really behind on my newspapers, because I haven't heard of human civilization collapsing under the weight of population just yet.

Why didn't Malthus' demography driven prediction come true? One word - productivity. As population increased, if there had been no scientific innovation, and human economic productivity levels had been held at the same levels, his dire prediction might indeed have come true. What changed the story is the massive increase in productivity led by the industrial revolution. Michael Mandel makes this point powerfully in his essay in Business World here.

The point is not that demographics are unimportant. Indeed, there is enough data to prove that they are a tremendously powerful force. But they aren't enough by themselves. If that were not so, economists over the world would have been talking about the huge demographic dividend in Nigeria!

The BIMARU states could well be the future of India. There is enough early evidence to suggest that they are taking on that destiny. But they could still lose the plot from here. So M/S Nitish Kumar, Mayawati, Naveen Patnaik, Ashol Gehlot, Raman Singh and others - Here is a humble request from an optimistic Indian - you have a great thing going on. Please don't screw it up!

354: A Love Story?

2011-01-25T23:21:00.000-08:00

Her dress is short. Stop-you-mid-sentence short. A soft, figure hugging thing that isn't on intimate terms with the knees of the wearer. Stylishly unkempt hair. Black leather boots zipping up to pampered calves. Dusky, Smita Patil looks. "Hi!" she says with a suspiciously open smile, as she slides in next to my neighbour "looks like I am going to be sitting with you for two hours."

9W-354 flies the supremely busy Delhi-Mumbai sector. Both airports are so busy, and squeezing more flights in so difficult that Jet Airways has come up with the innovative strategy of flying really large airplanes on the sector. We are flying a Boeing 777 tonight. Seats 300 or thereabouts. A large hulk of a carrier that usually does international routes. So the inside is unlike anything one is accustomed to seeing on domestic routes. Clean, well spaced interiors. Full fledged in-flight entertainment system loaded with the latest movies (Look there - can you see the guy watching Munni badnaam hui? And there, and there too ..). Nine passengers per row, in a 3-3-3 format. We are in the middle three, the seats labeled D-F-G for some reason. Why the silent 'E', I wonder. I am settled into D, curled up with my book. Dusky-Miss-bare-legs is in G. And in F? Well, in F, the envy of every male in the Boeing 777, is my neighbour, slouched low in his chair, the nervous, unsuspecting object of the lady's affections, lost to the idiot box, trying to choose between Zabaan Sambhalke and Ye Jo Hai Zindagi.

It starts naturally enough. She presses the little light bulb on her controls - so she can read the in-house magazine, presumably. The light turns on in F. My neighbour looks up surprised, as does lady G. Turn it off. Try again. Same result. Their eyes meet, and they break out into a chuckle. "Here, maybe I should try pressing your button", says G, reaching over and across F, who is now paying full attention, Zabaan Sambhalke be damned. A pock-marked Pankaj Kapur is speaking on in impotent silence, unable to compete with babe-in-boots. His button - turns on his light too. So no reading for her tonight. "The magazine isn't very good anyway" says F awkwardly, and they laugh.

"What are you going to do in Bombay?" she is asking him when I put on my headphones, determined not to stare any more.

So much for that.

It is a few minutes into my 'Two and a Half Men', and G has just picked her legs up to the seat, knees pointing skyward, the extraordinarily short dress all bunched up at her hips. Oh come on! There should be a law against this kind of stuff! She unzips her boots, takes them off, and puts her feet down, crossing her now entirely bare legs at the ankles. And here is the thing. She isn't sitting with her legs pointing straight out under the seat in front. Neither is it turned towards her aisle which presumably has more space. Her legs are stretched out so they are in front of F, who is now shifting his own legs somewhat clumsily out of the way to make space. Okayyyy ... we have upped it a notch haven't we, miss?

I am back to Charlie Sheen's antics for now. All the while I am aware that Pankaj Kapur still doesn't have an audience, and that G is asking question after personal question of F. I take a break between episodes and take off my headphone, just in time to hear F ask "Do you always ask people so many questions?" He is smiling, but from what I can see off the corner of my eyes, it is a strained smile. G, on the other hand, is completely nonplussed. "Why not?" she asks in return, like this is a game in Whose Line is it Anyway? where you are supposed to speak only in questions. He shakes his head, still half smiling, half unsure. "I am going to watch this show, if you don't mind" he tells her finally. I can't see his face, but the tone sounds a bit tired, maybe even peeved. She doesn't say anything. For two minutes. "Listen" she says, after a bit, tapping him. He seems to be repenting his brusqueness from a few minutes back as he takes off his headphones again -

"Yeah?"
"Is this a Boeing 777?"
"I am not sure. Let me look .... yes, it does say so."
"Is that bigger than a Boeing 747?"
"I don't know to be honest. But it must be. After all, 777 is bigger than 747, isn't it?"

Laughter disproportionate to the quality of the joke. Friends again?

By the time the food tray come along, they are lost in conversation. "But I can never pack light. I always have sooooo many bags ...", she laughs as she hands him the little cup of achar. The conversation doesn't skip a beat as he takes it casually, opens it up for her and puts it back in her tray. "Isn't it difficult if you are traveling by yourself with so much luggage?" He seems to be doing more of the talking now. In fact, I get the feeling it is mostly him talking. He seems taller than I had imagined too. Or is he just sitting straighter?

"We have begun our descent into Mumbai" says the suave Captain's voice, and I start gathering up my stuff. "That is my favourite", F is telling Miss-booted-up-again, "you should try it some time." She is smiling as she looks around on her seat. "I could take you there" he adds, also handing her the buckle of the seat belt she has been looking for.

We are on the ground, and everyone is standing in the aisle, jostling for space, bending at torturous angles to reach bags up in out-of-reach overhead bins. I have just retrieved my upright and a sorry, crumpled up suit. F and G are still in their seats. "Don't worry" he is telling her, "I will help you".

The bus doors close with a hydraulic whoosh. I settle into my window seat, ready for the long ride back from the plane to the terminal. I can see the two of them on the tarmac, probably the last people off the plane, in line for the next bus, still talking. He has two bags in his hands and two slung on his shoulders. She is standing close to him, lightly holding on to his arms. He nudges her gently out of harm's way as a luggage trolley rolls under the plane.

The bus jerks awake, and we set off.

What? Why you laughing sirji?

2011-01-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

It is the monsoon and through some momentary impetuousness I have made the brave decision to get out to break the Sunday fast. Not having the courage to drive myself in the deluge that is Bombay during these months, I decide to cab it. The daughter and I bundle ourselves and our dripping umbrellas into a rickety black-and-yellow, much past its youth, and I wonder whether it has learned how to swim. The cabbie is incongruously cheerful and the prattle pours out from him quite in tune with the pattering on his roof. He rolls the passenger window down to turn the meter to 'start' and puts pedal to the floor. Not that the effect can be perceived, mind you - back when this car was built, Rajesh Khanna was the new kid on the Bollywood block, and 30 kmph made you dizzy. So let's just say that we are away at speeds moderately higher than a brisk walk. We are about to venture climbing up the flyover that will take us to Matunga and delicious vada sambhar when an SUV, horn blazing, flies past us. I hear the full Doppler effect as the monster car comes from afar, catches up, and soon goes past. Right at the point of going past though, it steps right into a large puddle of rainwater. Before I could scream in surprise at the effect, the water is being sprayed - through the still open passenger side window, and all over my 'casual but chic' sunday clothes. I am drenched in stinking rain water from a puddle. And as I start yelling at the SUV, I realize it is a government vehicle, as I read the inscription on its back - Jan Kalyan Vahini - Namaste. (Public Good Vehicle - greetings!).

You are never too far from a good laugh here in India. Most of it is at the expense of unintentional comedians roaming our streets every day.

Just this other day, I am at an airport with a senior banker who has kindly offered to take me to the lounge based on his gold card, or some such. I am happy for the partial quiet and peace the lounge offers, so take him up on it pronto. My benefactor, after making sure I am comfortably 'lounging' away, makes a beeline to the coffee machine. He looks bemused at the many options on the machine and finally, decisively presses 'cappuccino'. The machine sputters for a few moments, pours out the drink and is done. My benefactor looks at his cup, grunts, and starts scanning around for an attendant. "What is this" he scolds the confused employee - "is this all you give in the name of a coffee? Why don't you guys get your machine fixed?" - And promptly sends the man looking for 'some real coffee'.

My favorite laughs are on signboards. Take the library I went to the other day, for instance. This is one of those places that rents out books 'two at a time for two weeks'. The books look like they were printed the weekend after Gutenberg got done with his thing. A musty smell is everywhere, and the odd yellowing page is fluttering away in the dead breeze of the fan. A borrower, probably not a regular, is looking at the section on 'English literature and poetry'. He doesn't look the type, so the snob in me is instantly on guard. Aha, I tell myself, unintentional comedy alert! Our friend looks at Tolstoy, Dickens and Faulkner, and finally decides on a James Hadley Chase. Funny enough, but the setup has more potential. So wait for it, I tell myself. 'Bhai sahab ...' he begins loudly as he addresses the librarian. 'Yeh kitaab kitne ...'. 'Shhhh!' goes the librarian, rolling his eyes at the uncouth customers he has to deal with. 'Shhhhh!', and points to a board hanging on one of the bookshelves. 'PLEASE MAKE SILENCE'. Ka-Chinnnnggggg!

Then there are signs that truly intend to be funny. But somehow their writers seem to have gone just a little offbeat with their message. Take this one for instance. Driving down Bandra, my favorite Bombay suburb, the other day, I notice a firm that is engaged in the unfortunate but quite necessary services of post mortem arrangements. 'XYZ', the board proudly proclaims, and for those who were fortunate enough not to have had a past acquaintance with them, it boldly states what it offers - 'FUNEREAL SERVICES!' (Yes, no typo there. And the exclamation mark is decidedly not mine.) Now, the owner probably bought too large a board, and saw that there was still a lot of space that he could fill out. Why waste good real estate, I say. Let us just convert these into advertisement billboards for our funny slogans. But how can you write a funny slogan to attract people to a 'funereal' services company, you ask. See, that is why you weren't hired for this job. Here is how - "GRAVE PROBLEMS - NOW RESURRECTED!"

I was at a furniture shop yesterday. We looked at some piece, the guy gave us a price, we ignored him, gave him a completely made-up price from the top of our head, and told him about three other competitors who were ready to give us the product for said made-up price. He is more than happy to jump into the conversation, and gives us five reasons why this product is just not comparable to anything else on the market. "That teak is only for termites sir! This here is top quality material. I made it myself, with my own hands." We go good-naturedly back and forth for a half hour before it is time for us to leave. "I will let you know" says my wife to him, as she gathers her stuff. We are on our way out when I notice this gem right behind the"own hands" guy - "Customer is a KING" the sign grandly, if somewhat ungrammatically, states. "And a KING never bargains!"

Incredible !ndia - Come for the casket, stay for the jokes.

The Best Books of 2010

2010-12-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

Curtains, 2010. You weren't too bad, all considered. Though you were following 2009, so the bar was set pretty low.

On the plus side: Aung San Suu Kyi was released; Tendulkar reached 50 centuries in tests; and Wikileaks redefined the word 'classified'.

On the down side: An empty chair received the Nobel Peace Prize; the Tea Party kicked Obama's backside; Pakistan got flooded; and people followed Julian Assange everywhere - and not for the reason he might have hoped for.

On the downright crazy side: The world was actually surprised when Greece's economy proved to be a basket case; the Burj Khalifa was opened in Dubai; and Zulkarnain Haider did ... what exactly?

So as I was saying, not a year that will be placed in history books next to 1776, 1917 or 1947, but what the hell. It wasn't 2008 or 2009, and that is an attractive enough quality.

The world of books was somewhat similar. There were some notable events, to be sure. At least a couple of books came out that created quite a splash.

Readers of Brick and Rope might remember that I usually look at three 'best books' lists at the end of each year to get ideas or what to read the next year. The New York Times Notable Books list, the Washington Post best books list and The Economist best books list are my favorite sources. This year, I added two more sources - Michiko Kakutani (who is one of my favorite book critics) came out with his own Top 10 list which I scoured, and I also looked at the Time best books of 2010 list. Here then are the books I found on multiple of these sources - If you are looking for books from 2010 to buy or read, you can't go wrong picking one up from this list.

THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2010 (FICTION)

1. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
2. To the End of the World, by David Grossman
3. Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart
4. A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
6. The Impressionists, by Tom Rachman
7. Room, by Emma Donoghue
8. Faithful Place, by Tana French
9. Selected Stories, by William Trevor
10. The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris

THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2010 (NON-FICTION)
The non-fiction world is so vast that every year there is very little consensus across publications on the 'best' non-fiction books. It tends to depend mostly on the areas of interest of individual reviewers. This year was no different. There were indeed three books (the first three on the list below) that were fairly universal in their appeal. The rest of the list is largely biased by my own areas of interest. Here goes then:

1. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; by Rebecca Skloot
2. The Big Short: Inside the doomsday machine; by Michael Lewis
3. The Emperor of all Maladies: A biography of cancer; by Siddhartha Mukherjee
4. Crisis Economics: A crash course in the future of finance; by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mehm
5. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime; by John Heilemann
6. Medium Rare: A bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook; by Anthony Bourdain
7. Honor Code: How moral revolutions happen; by Kwame Anthony Appiah
8. The Mind's Eye; by Oliver Sacks
9. At Home: A short history of private life; by Bill Bryson
10. The Grand Design; by Stephen Hawking

To these lists, let me also add a couple of honorable mentions from my own bias. Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Steig Larsson were other great books published this year.

My own reading this year, as in the past, has been focused on books published in prior years. So my favorite reads from 2010 are mostly made up of older books. Anyway, here are the ten books I most enjoyed reading in 2010.

MY FAVORITE READS IN 2010

1. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; by Geoff Dwyer
Lyrically good writing, with some of the most witty and astute observations of Venice and Varanasi that you are going to find anywhere. Geoff Dwyer is magical!

2. Too Much Happiness; by Alice Munro
One of the books from last year's critics' choice. I haven't read such a stunning collection of short stories in a long time. Alice Munro is a Canadian author I had not read before, but that is going to be fixed pretty soon!

3. Let the Great World Spin; by Colum McCann
Another selection from last year's critics' choice. Set against the backdrop of New York in the seventies, McCann conjures up some amazingly diverse voices of strangers whose lives are all touched by witnessing an act of phenomenal physical prowess.

4. Diary of a Bad Year; by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee is a perennial favorite, and his latest book cannot easily be classified as fiction or non-fiction. Phenomenal performance by a master.

5. The Yiddish Policeman's Union; by Michael Chabon
Whodunnit meets alternate history, noir fiction meets meditations on chess, poetry meets prose. No one does it quite like Chabon.

6. Netherland; by Joseph O'Neill
The 'it' book from 2008, which made all 'best of' lists that year, and I finally got around to reading earlier this year. The second great New York book on this list. With some cricket thrown in for good measure.

7. The Big Short; by Michael Lewis
Without doubt the best of the very many books on the great recession I read over the last two years. Insightful, focused on one specific aspect, witty, and just very, very, good. After some misses in a row, Michael Lewis is back!

8. Imagining India; by Nandan Nilekani
In the year that I returned to India, Nandan Nilekani's book was mind-opening. Optimistic without being jingoistic, deeply thought and written with the voice of someone who has had the inside view of many of the changes talked about in the book, Imagining India is a book that is a manifesto for Indian governments present and future. Nandan for PM!

9. This Time is Different; by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff
Financial market data from the last eight hundred years (!). Some remarkable charts showing trends of past financial cycles and mass hysteria. No one has done more to collect such intractable data than Reinhart and Rogoff. Fascinating!

10. Six Degrees: The science of a connected age; by Duncan Watts
Network Theory is as engrossing a field of study as any you are likely to come across. With applicability across completely unrelated spheres of life, this is the theoretical backbone behind The Tipping Point.

There we are then. Another rather satisfying year in reading. More fiction oriented than 2009, so I couldn't quite keep to my attempt to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Maybe 2011 will be the other way around - though if I look at the critics' choice list for the best books of 2010, I rather doubt it.

Happy new year, everyone! Wish you some great books in the months to come.

Idlis in Singapore

2010-12-26T03:15:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, we planned an extended family getaway to a beach destination. The customary demurrals and protestations from my mom followed, but she finally relented and off we all went. On day 2, we were whiling our time away at the all-you-can-eat buffet after another busy day counting the waves, when by brother said something that got me thinking - "You know", he said, "it's you Amriki return people that have started this trend of destination vacations. No one is satisfied any more with just visiting relatives' homes."

All my childhood, every time we had a vacation at school, we would pack ourselves off to a tiny village in Tamil Nadu, navigating crumbled roads and sweltering heat on the way, to my grandparents' tiled and thatched roof home, with its cowshed in the backyard, vast fields of paddy and no running water. My brother and I were thrilled to bathe at the well, 'hrrrumph'-ing as we tugged every bucketful of water up the pulley. We played hide and seek in the yard, looked into the sun with a mixture of awe and anticipation as local men slithered up to the crown of coconut trees, coming back with a fresh loot of green every time. It was fun, no questions about it, but it was - The. Same. Thing. Every. Single. Time.

O how the world is changing. When I started working in India twelve years back, an international vacation was still a novelty - out of reach of most of us. In my second innings here, everyone seems to be either going for an international vacation, or has just returned from one. When I told people at work that I was going to be away for a couple of weeks at the end of the year and was planning to Singapore, the collection reaction was a yawn, not a gasp. More people could give me tourist tips than would have been able to tell me the best train to Goa ten years ago. Indians, it appears, have been bit by the travel bug.

In 2001, 4.5 million Indians made international visits. In 2009, that number was 11.1 million. A compounded growth rate of close to 12% - one of the fastest in the world over this period. These 11 million international trips by Indians created tourism revenue of $8.35 billion last year, up from the $1.3 billion we spent as a nation in 1997.

A total of 880 million international tourist trips were undertaken across the world in 2009. This makes Indian tourists a 1.3% market share segment. That is up from a 0.66% share in 2001.

The numbers on domestic tourism are even more impressive. The total number of domestic tourist visits in 2009 in the country was - hold your breath - 650 million! (Also known as two times the population of the United States) This number was 236 million in 2001. So domestic tourism has grown at the rate of 14% in this period.

Now, let us not get carried away here. While tourism is certainly growing, Indians are starting from a very low base. As I said before, we spent $8.35 billion last year in international travel. The largest spenders in this category are (another surprise) the Germans, who spent more than $81 billion last year. The Americans spent about $75 billion and the Chinese about $40 billion. So global tourist hotspots run no risk of being overrun by thepla stands and idli houses anytime soon. Niagara Falls' dubious honor in this regard is quite safe. But it is appropriate to say that tourism departments across the world are waking up to the Indian traveler. A quick search quickly turned up reports by the tourism departments of Netherlands, South Africa, and a host of other countries on the phenomenon of the rising Indian traveler and how to attract him to their respective countries.

Back to my trip though. I am in Singapore for my end of year break. Random interesting fact - Singapore is the #1 destination for Indians traveling abroad, for obvious reasons. Less obviously, Singapore is the third most visited city in the world in terms of international tourists - behind Paris and London. How common is Singapore as a tourist destination? I ate a hearty breakfast of idlis at Murugan Idli in Little India (yes, there is a Murugan Idli here - and I love it!), only to realize that a good friend from India was there just hours later. I ran into another friend from back home at Clarke Quay yesterday night, and met a third one for lunch today. So long story short, Singapore pretty much IS little India.

My trip is not over yet, which means more lazy mornings, more late nights, more avoiding the blackberry. I am now officially part of India's tourism statistics - One more guy going abroad, one more person visiting Singapore, one more plate of idlis at Murugan. Yawn.

The most useful Indian websites

2010-11-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

The web is less intricate in the land of Indus. For a country that is the helpcenter to the IT world, life in India is remarkably concentrated in the physical world. It is not that people don't use the Internet. Just that the Internet hasn't penetrated every aspect of one's waking hours as it has in America.

That said, there are a handful of websites I have found to be tremendously useful in my nearly six months in the country. So, in the hope that these are the first of many more, and that readers of Brick and Rope can point me in the direction of other such sites, here is my list of the five Indian websites I have found to be most useful in these early months back.

1. Make My Trip: I was familiar with this travel site from the times when I tried to buy tickets to India. I am realizing now that is pretty useful for domestic travel as well. Leisure travel is a relatively new phenomenon in India, but by all measures it is here to stay. Everyone I know seems to have travelled to all corners of South East Asia, and major parts of Europe. Bangkok seems to be more visited than Bangalore - and more accessible, what with the B-area's traffic problems. Make My Trip and Yatra have proven to offer decent rates, good packages, and credible vacation ideas. All power to these and their yet to be born look-alikes.

2. Book My show: The traditional Indian way to burn leisure money - Go to a movie. Book My Show has cornered the market for online ticket buying. As part of our Diwali celebrations, the entire family (including three screaming kids) decided to brave it to Rishi Kapoor - Neetu Singh's Do Dooni Chaar. When the chaotic shouting out of movie choices had died down, my brother said 'chal book karte hain'. He looked at me puzzled as I starting wearing my shoes - 'On the Internet!' he said, with a look that was equal parts exasperation, surprise and pity.

3. Bigflix: OK, so if your entertainment budget is smaller than the four figure sum that seems the norm for watching a movie in this country, look to Bigflix. This is one of those situations where it is not clear how such an obvious copy of a successful concept could possibly be legal. Either the Netflix guys don't think India could ever be a market for them, or the trademark protection laws here are made of Swiss cheese. Anyway, count me in the camp of people who are happy not to care as long as the next set of DVDs lands at my doorstep on time.

4. 20 North: They say that there isn't anything you can buy in the US that you can't buy at the local mall here anymore. The spirit of the statement is creditable, and quite believable too. But really, there are things you only get in the US. So if you have an itch to buy the latest electronic gadget that hasn't yet hit Indian stores, or your infant has an itch if he wears locally made diapers, head to 20 North. Anything that can be bought online in the US, and is legal in India, can be bought on 20 North. They offer a single price inclusive of all duties, shipping etc, and deliver it in good time. So in some ways, you actually can buy anything you can buy in the US.

5. Flipkart: After multiple disappointing tips to local booksellers, I had started getting really worried about avenues for buying good books. A good friend (and friend of Brick and Rope) had mentioned Flipkart to me some months back, and I seem to have filed away the information in my mind under the category of 'I promise I will get to you at some point'. Well, my desperation in recent weeks led me to dusting off that file, and at the doorstep of Flipkart. What can I say? What it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in the sheer size of its book collection. I maintain a running list of books I want to buy, and I tried it out on the site. Of the 47 books currently on my list, there was only one that I couldn't find here - Mendelbrot's The Misbehavior of Markets. The deals are truly hot, and the innovations around delivery are just what I would look for in India. I am unlikely to ever visit Flipkart for inspiration on what books to buy, but once I know what I want to buy - well, it seems like a no-brainer right now.

So that is my short list. The Indian websites I have found to be most useful in my time back. May your tribe grow in strength.

Footprints in white

2010-11-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

There are many good reasons to come back to India. Weather isn’t one of them.

If you go strictly by the mercury, Mumbai should be pretty heavenly. The monthly average temperatures in the city according to weather.com are remarkably steady. The lows are in the mid-seventies, and highs are in the mid-eighties. A sort of Puerto Rico, if you will. In fact, the average temperature charts of Mumbai and Puerto Rico look remarkably similar.

All of which is divine and ‘party-time’-y, till you add in the humidity.

Living in Bombay is like being on the inside of a cloud. It is vaguely misty all around, and you feel perpetually wet. No, the cloud metaphor is probably too … fresh. Let me try another. Living in Bombay is like being a flea on a water buffalo. It stinks, it is difficult to get around, and you are always sticky. (Yeah, this one is probably closer.)

It is the stickiness that gets to me. Always has. I have been bothered by the heat, don’t get me wrong. Particularly those few years when my parents lived in the Nagpur-Chandrapur belt - where summer time temperatures routinely touched 110. Oh yes, I have been bothered by the heat. But it is the stickiness that really gets under me skin. No so my wife. She is bothered neither by the heat nor by the humidity. ‘Balmy’. That’s her word for Bombay weather. It is 85 degrees and 80% humidity outside. And she sticks with ‘balmy’. Which is usually the starting point of our A/C debates.

Here is the summary of the Great Air Conditioning Debate in my household: I believe the air conditioning should be kept turned on the entire day. My wife believes I am a crazy head-case who probably thinks electricity is produced by rubbing coconuts. We have raging debates on the pros and cons of AC vs Windows (not the Gates ones, the ones that ventilate). The ‘children will catch a cold’ argument is brought out. The ‘it’s so dusty outside’ contention is put forth. The ‘be green’ line of reasoning is asserted. And all the while, the AC remains turned off. I remain sticky.

Aha! Said the wife the other day. I know exactly what we need to do to resolve our situation. She had a big grin on her face that day as evening was turning into night, and our conversation was taking its usual inexorable course towards the GACD. Wait right here, she said with a twinkle as she ran into the bathroom. Out she came with her answer – the brahmastra, the solution to the intractable stickiness problem. ‘Talcum Powder!’ I exclaimed, aghast. ‘But that’s for kids’. ‘Oh don’t be a baby!’ she said, thrusting a jar with suspiciously floral pictures on it, and a label that says ‘Lime flavor’. ‘Just layer it on, and see how you feel.’

That was about a month ago. The ‘layering it on’ has continued. India is probably the only country where talcum powder is used by adults as a cosmetic, comfort and beauty product. It is much more common around the world for it to be used for medicinal reasons, or on babies, in other words, with people who are in no position to complain about it. We desis are different.

I stand in the bathroom, towel wrapped around my waist, fresh from a cold shower. Out comes the floral jar. A few liberal sprinkles here, some shakes there, rub, rub, rub. Soon, my torso is white and smooth and powdery all the way to my neck. I wash my hands, step back from the mirror. All my sprinkling has layered the bathroom tiles white. ‘Maybe that’s the business model of talcum powder manufacturers’ I think to myself, ‘– build the product in a way that usage is inherently wasteful’. I step on the white, leaving my footprints on the sands of lime.

‘So?’ she asked me after the first few days. ‘How are you feeling about talcum powder now?’ I proudly unbutton my shirt, showing her the white under my collar. I smile. ‘By the way, hasn’t it been a while since we had the Great AC Debate?’

Book Review: Luka and the Fire of Life (Back with Rushdie the entertainer!)

2010-11-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I wrote about books I am reading. Other topics have dominated Brick and Rope recently. If someone was going to get books back on this blog, past readers must know it had to be Rushdie.

I have been a fan of Rushdie's ever since I started reading. Midnight's Children is one of the best books I have read in my life. For soaring imagination that leaves you gasping, for metaphors that are as daring as they are cheeky, for the sheer pleasure of reading the English language, there aren't many that can compare with Rushdie.

Luka and the Fire of Life comes rather quickly on the heels of his other recent book The Enchantress of Florence. The two books couldn't be more different from each other. My wife is an occasional reader of Rushdie, and in her opinion one of the best books he has written to date is Haroun and the Sea of Stories. This is not an uncommon viewpoint. Written while he was in exile after the Satanic Verses fatwa, Haroun is certainly the most accessible of Rushdies. Written as a gift to his first son Zafar, the book was an allegory cum fantasy cum magic masala that appealed to readers of all ages. Luka and the Fire of Life is written in much the same style as Haroun, and is meant to be a gift to Rushdie's second son Milan.

The main characters of Haroun continue on in Luka, though the protagonist now is Haroun's younger brother. The surreal, children's book style continues as well. We have guest appearances from some of the more endearing concepts from earlier, like P2C2Es.

Most of all though, we reconnect with Rushdie the entertainer, the Shah of Blah. The playfulness of language, the shameless puns, the Capitalization. They are all back with a vengeance.

[Luka] landed with a thump in the riverside dust and it rose up around him in a little golden cloud, which quickly formed itself into a creature, like a tiny living flame with wings. 'Feed me and I live,' it said hotly. 'Give me water and I die.'

The answer was obvious. 'Fire,' Luka said quietly, and the Fire Bug grew agitated. 'Don't say that!' it buzzed. 'If you go shouting fire at the top of your voice somebody will probably come running with a hose. To much water around here for my liking anyway.'

<...>

'You want to know what bugs me?' the Fire Bug said indignantly. 'Nobody's friendly about fire. Oh, it's fine in its place, people say, it makes a nice glow in a room, but keep an eye on it in case it gets out of control, and aways put it out before you leave. Never mind how much it's needed; a few forests burned by wildfires, the occasional volcanic eruption, and there goes our reputation. Water, on the other hand! - hah! - there's no limit to the praise Water gets. Floods, rains, burst pipes, they make no difference. Water is everyone's favourite. And when they call it the Fountain of Life! - bah! - well, that just bugs me to bits.' The Fire Bug dissolved briefly into a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks, then came together again. 'Fountain of Life indeed,' it hissed. 'What an idea. Life is not a drip. Life is a flame. What do you imagine the sun is made of? Raindrops? I don't think so. Life is not wet, young man, Life burns.'

This is vintage Rushdie. The kind of fun writing I fell in love with in Haroun. And I am glad to see it come back into his increasing dark and rather difficult writing of late.

Also back are allegorical references to the present that were so often to be seen in the Rushdie of past. Luka, while on his perilous adventure, comes upon the Respectorate of I, a land ruled by rats, with a barbed wire contraption (the O-Fence) going all around, and where 'present occupants take Offense very sharply indeed.' Any resemblance to lands present are purely coincidental?

Do you believe two and two make five?
Do you agree the world is flat?
Do you know our Bossss is the Biggest Cheese alive?
Do you Ressspect the Rat?
O, do you Ressspect the Rat?

If I sssay upside down is the right way round,
If I insissst that black is white,
If I claim that a sssqueak is the sssweetest sssound,
Do you ressspect my Right?
Say, do you Ressspect my Right?

Do you agree nothing's better than I?
Do you approve of my hat?
Will you please ssstop asking what, how and why?
Do you Ressspect the Rat?
Do you, don't you, don't you, do you,
Do you Ressspect the Rat?
As I said, any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Not everyone will like Luka. There are many reasons not to like it. It is cheesy, for one. Kiddish. Lame. Harry Potter lite. But for a Rushdie diehard like me, there is enough to cheer on. Enough to rekindle old love.

Yes I do, I do Ressspect the Rat.

Chasing dreams in the City of Joy

2010-10-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

"... But isn't that why we came back to India in the first place?" I ask my wife rhetorically. We have a stereotype breaking sort of marriage, the two of us. I am the emotional one and she is my rational counter-balance. Every so often, I come up with a half baked spur-of-the-moment idea and she patiently points out all the ways in which it is impractical, irrational, expensive, unnecessary and actually rather silly. Yeah, yeah, I retort impatiently, but it would also be fun! I am not the impulsive, spontaneous sort either, don't get me wrong. But compared to my super deliberative wife, I am practically Richard Branson.

So here we are, discussing the latest idea - that we should go to Calcutta for Durga Puja. It is going to be crowded like hell, tickets would be exhorbitant, and our daughter will tire of it all before we even get started - comes the rational argument. "But isn't that why we came to India in the first place?" I go, "To be a part of it all, to add to the crowd, to soak in the din?" Nope, head still winning over the heart. "And we could have bhog every day at the pandals!" A glimmer, a softening of the expression. Is it ... is that ... the beginning of a smile?

Durga Puja is big in Calcutta, so I thought. ("First of all, it is called Pujo", she reminds me) I have only been here a few hours and I know this much already. I was way wrong about it being big. Pujo in Kolkata (yeah, I am talking the talk now) is beyond 'big'. 'Big' feels puny as a descriptor for this. Pujo is Kolkata. Kolkata is Pujo. Sorry Dev Kant Barooah and your silly India-Indira slogan.

It starts right at the airport. You know this isn't just another day. The entire airport is decked up in lights, there is a throbbing, buzzing crowd outside, smiling and laughing for no particularly apparent reason. No, this isn't just another day. This is shoshti, the day after Mahalaya. The sixth day of the month, the first day after the mother goddess Durga has been placed for viewing. The beginning of the five days of festivities known as Pujo.

What strikes me the most is the scale. The scale of everything about Pujo is so much grander than just about anything else I have witnessed. It seems to dwarf Diwali in South India, Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai or Christmas in Virginia. It seems more like Carnival time in Brazil. Why, you ask? Well, ...

First off, everyone has the entire time off from work. Every workplace around is closed for the 4-5 days in question. Which means everyone and their seventy year old uncle is participating in the celebrations. Or at least all those who haven't run out of town fearing the dizzying numbers of out-of-towners who descend this tiem of the year. Like a certain newly desi family that shall remain unnamed, which was walking around with open mouths gaping at the pandals.

Ah, the pandals. The Bongs pronounce it pan-dell, which starts off sounding a bit pretentious to me, but I get with the program soon enough. The pan-dells are these massive works of art. Now, back in Mumbai, when I walk into a Ganapathi pandal, I expect to see a tent of some sort, a host of hoardings hawking assorted local businesses, some food stalls and a stage with the elephant god on it. The key distinguishing feature between one pandal and the next is probably the size of the idol. Not so in Pujo. Every pandal is unique. And I mean truly, undeniably, to-the-naked-eye unique.

It all starts with a concept. Each pandal has a concept, and is built entirely around it. The pandal in Salt Lake's IA block was built to mimic a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. So they build an entire edifice like the Bangkok temple right here, in the middle of Salt Lake, Calcutta. The artwork inside mimics the Thai style, even as the content is local. Or there is the pandal built to show the 108 forms of durga. Or the one that is built like an underwater coral reef. Or the one built entirely of bamboo baskets. Or the one that is designed as a celebration of the iconic palki chole song. Or the one that ...

So much creativity. So much art. Artists working in the hundreds, creating sculptures out of half a million ice-cream spoons in one instance, toiling for months. All for five days of viewing. To be dismantled after less than a week and never seen again. Perishable art, that lives on only in memories and poor 2-D representations.

Most Calcuttans don't seem to cook during Pujo. Home kitchens are shuttered as everyone flocks to the local pandals for bhog. The line at our local pandal is long, snaking its way around on itself. "But it is already two in the afternoon", I protest to my wife. How could so many be queueing up for lunch? Then of course, these are Bengalis. Late meals are just part of the I-Card. Khichuri is on the menu. And beguni. And aloor dum. Yum.

Communal meals aside, another thing that seems to distinguish Pujo from Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai is the near absence of visible politicization. Mumbai last month was drowned in hoardings of local politicians of all colors raining down their 'shubhechha's from every vantage point available. With white kurtas, folded hands and empty smiles, politicians were overtly and brazenly linking themselves with the celebrations and with the elephant lord. Pujo seems, at least on surface, to be somewhat different. There is the odd hammer and sickle flag at places. Or the pandal supposedly designed by Mamata herself. But by and large, Pujo does not appear to be trigger happy time for local politicians.

If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing, some wise guy once said. And so it is with Pujo. It is too much of a good thing. And everyone within a few hundred kilometers seems to know it. So they all land up, these entertainment impoverished masses. For a week of pandal hopping and adda (the inimitably Bong version of shooting the breeze). The crowds are maddening. Our solution to the problem has a seriously South Indian flavor. "Let us go early in the morning", I suggest. Like I am the first guy in the world that has thought of that bright idea. Yes, we are told, there is a good chance you will avoid the crowds if you go at adequately off-peak times. But we are keen on seeing the pandals with their lights still on. Which means it needs to be dark outside.

For the third day in a row, the alarm rings at 3 AM. We get dressed in double quick time, and are off. By sunrise, we have seen about 15 more pandals. That makes our Pujo tally about 40 pandals. Not bad for three days, huh? "So have we seen most of the big ones?" I ask our driver innocently. He laughs, then grows confused and silent as he realizes this was not meant as a joke. "Just in Salt Lake there are 207 pandals, sir" he says, and gets back to his driving, trying to snuff out a snigger.

A taxi driver’s monologue – Cuffe Parade to Parel

2010-10-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

[8 PM. The skies over Mumbai are dark. The roads are bright, busy, noisy. Your average Wednesday night.]

Haan, Baitho na sahab.

[Shuffles in his seat, reaches out the window on the far side, turns the meter down. Clink. Silence.]

Achha sahab, ye bank me kya naukri top best hota hai?

[‘What is the best kind of job in a bank?’ – in Mumbai Hinglish, his language of choice for the rest of the ride.]

Marketing? What is that? Ah, I understand. But there is some other kind of job too, isn’t there? Sounds like danger. Yes, risk management – that is what it is. See, that is what my elder son does. Risk management. In a bank in France.

Three children sahab, I have three. Two sons and a daughter. The eldest is in France now. The second one, he is studying sahab. Learning MBA. And the daughter I just admitted in college. Good kids, sahab. Sab theek nikle.

God has given me everything sahab. Do you know, I have three flats now. In Vasai, Tardeo and Mira Road. One is 500 square feet, another is 600 square feet and the large one is 800 square feet. That is where I live sir. Have given one for bhada, and the last one I am going to give to my daughter. Everything I have sahab, everything.

I am from Bihar sahab, Sitamarhi district. Ran away from home when I could. Why? Arrey sahab, what could I do there? No food, no job. Father would beat me every day. So I ran away. My father was mad, real mad. HA HA HA!

[Sudden, loud laugh. Face breaks open. Hands thump the steering wheel.]

It was a tough life sahab. Mumbai nagri. Tough. I did three jobs a day. Went to a factory in the morning. Worked at the sahab’s house in the evening, and drove a taxi at night. What all I saw in those taxi rides, you wouldn’t believe. Ajab shahar!

I had only one pair of clothes then sahab. Same shirt and pant, every day. I would wear them during the day, wash them when I got home at night after my taxi shift, and wear it again the next day. I sent my son went to Wilson college sahab. He always wore his shirt tucked out. You see, the seat of his pants was all worn out, and he didn’t want anyone to see it. And his shoes! You should have seen his shoes. The sole was almost gone. We would stuff a rag into the shoe before he put them on. I still have those sahab. My son’s worn out pant, and the shoes with no sole. Every time he comes to India my son sees them. Never ever throw them, he tells me. They are a reminder of old days.

AREY THEEK SE CHALA NA BE CHOO …

[Obscene gestures at another taxi driver who had cut into his path. Broad smile. No hard feelings, it says.]

You see this street sahab – Haji Mastan’s trucks used to come here, all those years back. The police would be standing here waiting. And when the trucks came, all of a sudden the lights would go off. Poof! In a minute sahab, in a minute. Every street light would be off. Every building light would be off. The men would unload the trucks in the dark, and they would be gone. The police? Bah! Tamasha tha sahab.

Achha sahab, aa gaya Parel. What, you want to continue riding the cab or what? Bas. Story khallas. HA HA HA!

[Sudden, loud laugh.]

In the shadow of Lalbaugcha Raja

2010-09-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

All is quiet tonight. No drums to jerk me awake in the middle of the night with their strident call. No people dancing in the streets, sloganeering spontaneously. No firecrackers, bursting in the distance, sending a disquieting chill down my spine for a split second before I realize their ritualistic origin. The sky stays stubbornly dark. No breaking out into splashes of shimmering light, no shooting stars in reverse. All is quiet tonight. It is deafening.

The elephant lord Ganesha is the first to be invoked in every Hindu puja, the first to be remembered before starting any auspicious task. It is a boon he received from his repentant father Lord Shiva who had decapitated him in a fit of anger, and whose soldiers in turn decapitated an elephant (the 'first sleeping living creature you find') thus creating this uniquely identifiable God, even by the standards of the gloriously creative pantheon of Hindu Gods. Ganesha is also the first God in a meta sort of way. As the festival season gets underway in India, Ganesh Chaturthi is the first one that really gets it all kicked off. Yes, I do recognize that I had only recently blogged about Krishna Janmashthami which clearly preceded Ganesh Chaturthi by a few weeks. I have no idea why that is, so I am going to completely ignore it.

Ganesh Chaturthi starts, somewhat oddly, on the fourth day of a lunar month, and ends ten days later on the 14th day of the month. Why this odd choice of dates, I have asked myself. It is as if all the round dates were taken and Ganesh had to settle for the middle seats in the seating chart of Hindu festivals. Anyway, this past Wednesday was the 14th day. The day when the Lord is sent ritually on his way back home to Kailash mountain.

These are ten days when Mumbai creates her most iconic imagery (and yes, this is a context where calling the city Bombay would be truly discordant). Ganesh 'mandals' come up everywhere in the city. Communities set up the Lord in the most extraordinary poses, deck him up in the most ornate ways. By far the most popular, the most visited Ganesh mandal in the city is Lalbaugcha Raja. For seventy five years (since 1934), Lalbaugcha Raja has presided over central Mumbai, with each year bringing in ever greater crowds of devotees. For almost its entire history, the Raja has been in blue collar heartland of Mumbai, the land of the mill workers. In these last few years though, things have changed. Gone are the mill-lands. Disappearing rapidly are the local blue collar and lower middle class workers who formed the soul of the Raja. Much in this area is being replaced, rather rapidly, by newly constructed luxury residential complexes. It is in one of these residential complexes, I am afraid to say, that I now live.

I first sensed Lalbaugcha Raja this year the same way I sense almost everything in this city - through the traffic patterns. I usually take 40 minutes on my commute back home. Almost all of it, I spend calling people as the driver solves grander puzzles like 'how to get there from here before the million other people who are all trying to do the same thing?' Usually, I don't notice much outside the window at this time of the evening (yeah yeah, I know - I need to smell the roses. Have them sent home please.) One fine day, I realized one hour into the drive, that things were taking unusually long. Wonderingly, I looked out the window. And I never looked back.

To say that Lalbaugcha Raja is popular is like saying Bill Gates can afford to eat out a bit more. It is like all of Mumbai is here for ten days. The lines, winding and re-winding onto themselves, go on for kilometers. There are thousands of people at all times. The lights are dizzying. The noise is deafening. I want to visit some mandals this Ganapathi, I had mentioned to my driver some days ago. I am wondering where to go. Not caring for his life or limb, he turned all the way around and looked hard at me, foot continuing its love affair with the accelerator. 'Aap tho Parel me hai sahab', he says, 'Lalbaugcha Raja chodke kya dekhenge?'. I had put it down then to some minor local celebrity I didn't know about. But now, looking out the car window, I knew this was something else altogether. This was the mandal to beat all mandals, the Ganesh to out-modak all Ganeshes. This Raja truly ruled Mumbai these ten days.

'The lines are ten hours long', informed the driver, when I asked him how I could see the Ganesh. He seems to enjoy my ignorance of most things Mumbai. The shocked look on my face now makes him smile. 'Aap kya soche, aise hi dekh lenge?' So that is what all those barricades are for! And those long queues - they aren't exactly waiting for a concert. I have got to find an off-peak hour, I tell myself. It can't possibly be this crowded every day, at all times of the day. And I live a short walk from here. Surely, I have a positional advantage.

A few days into the festival, the family sets out at the stroke of midnight. It will take us ten minutes to walk there, we figure. At this late an hour, how many people are going to be waiting around? The first thing I notice on getting out, is all the food. Makeshift food stalls are everywhere. Vada Pav. Dabheli. Mirchi pakoda. Tens of other small eats. Here is the scary part - every one of these stalls is doing brisk business. Then there are the little rides, the kids' play stalls. Mini carousels, mock pony rides, toys. It is a veritable fair out here. I live a stone throw away, and had I not stepped out tonight, I wouldn't have know how much was going on righht under our noses. With every passing step, the wife and I are both sure we aren't going to be seeing the Raja tonight. Not if these crowds had anything to do with it. There might well be an off-peak hour to see the king of the mandals, but this, quite clearly, wasn't it.

'Subah saat baje darshan hoga', the policeman informs us when we ask him. Seven hours away! I am desperate. I have promised the daughter I am going to show her Lalbaugcha Raja tonight. She is braving the crowds, ignoring the toys, ignoring the waves of sleep that must surely be coming ashore - all because she is going to see the Raja. The wife and I exchange worried glances. Here is the thing about being married for eight years - glances carry out conversations. She nods, I nod in return. She sets off purposefully, tugging the daughter along. I follow resolutely with the infant son. Off the family goes in a line. In a direction exactly opposite to where Lalbaugcha Raja sits on his throne.

We find a little side street, and we take it. It is well lit, and has the telltale decorative lights. It must lead to some Ganesh idol. It has got to. Every lane in Mumbai leads to a Ganesh this week. Surely this one is no exception? It isn't. There he is - the great elephant god, standing on one leg in this particular idol. With an outsize mouse idol at his feet, his ride. There are barely ten people here, in this forlorn mandal living in the shadow of Lalbaugcha Raja. We walk briskly to the stage. The daughter is beyond herself with excitement. She runs up to the idol, touches the feet, poses and smiles as her mother clicks pictures, points out the mouse, and the incongruity of such a tiny animal being the chariot of the elephant lord. Fifteen minutes later, she is safely at home, all washed up and tucked into bed. 'Appa, you know what I saw today?'. I stay diplomatically quiet. She is smiling to herself as sleep drifts in.

It has been three days since the Visarjan - the immersion of the lord in water, symbolically sending him on his way home. I saw two workers trying to pull out one of the bamboo poles that held up the makeshift pavilions. They work distractedly, ineffectually. Their heart doesn't seem to be in it. They don't seem to want to believe it. He is gone for the year.

Lalbaugcha Raja lived in my neighbourhood for ten days. I never saw him, and now he is gone. Gone are the hour long rides home. Gone are the food stalls selling Chinese Bhel, whatever that is. Gone are the policemen, waving impotently at masses of people. Gone are the drums - much too loud to be melodious. Gone are the street hawkers selling pictures of the Raja for twenty bucks. It is all gone.

All is quiet tonight. And it is deafening. Next year ... I tell myself. Ganapathi Bappa ...

The owner of this restaurant also eats here

2010-09-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

It is a little white signboard. It hangs on a rough, brown string that might have come straight from a sack that delivered the batata this morning. Just about eye level, right above the sort of tiny wash basin where you have to aim as you spit out the water, stepping back to make sure you aren't splattering your shoes.

"The owner of this restaurant also eats here" it says.

I appreciate the absence of an exclamation mark. Signboards in cheap establishments (and I don't mean 'inexpensive') often make up in exclamation marks what they lack in content. Not here. 'The owner of this restaurant also eats here'. Very matter of fact. A little sign over an overgrown spittoon and an overused hand towel.

I am at Ramanayak's, a small, very crowded South Indian eatery in Matunga. This is the first leg of a little quest - to find the best small restaurants in Mumbai. Now, this is glamour city, the home of Bollywood. No dearth of fancy joints here. If you wanted to spend as much on a meal as an average Indian family makes in a year, you wouldn't find the task too onerous in dear old Bombay. But that isn't what I am after. I am looking for the iconic small eateries. The old, familiar, hole-in-the-wall eateries that amchi Mumbai wears on her sleeve.

My dad first visited Ramanayak forty years ago, when he was a sprightly young man, living away from my grandpa for the first time, trying to earn his first paycheck. And here he is now, all these years later, squeezed into the impossibly small space behind an incredibly narrow table, grinning wide as he asks for 'one more appalam' in a too-loud voice that shows he is excited. Ramanayak is likely much the same as it was forty years back. It is on the first floor, behind Matunga local station, which means one has to climb some slippery and rather muddy steps to get here this monsoon day. The crowd is probably even more than it might have been in my dad's youth. Food is still served on banana leaves, a tad too fast to take care of the massive throughput at peak hours, like those guys who serve at weddings - Tamil weddings at any rate.

A few weeks later, I find myself in a narrow street crowded with hundreds of pedestrians. Only, I am in a car that is inching forward ever so slowly. We get to a beautiful green and white mosque, sitting majestically at the junction of a T in the road. Aap yahan utar jayiye saheb, says the driver, yahin kahin hai. We step out gingerly, and start walking. There are street vendors on every inch of pavement. (And on most inches of the road). Selling pretty little kiddy things that are tailor made to catch a kid's eyes. I know they probably wouldn't last the week if I bought them, but I am tempted at every stall, as we make our slow trudge through the people. This is Crawford Market. Not the market building itself, which is a stunning piece of old gothic architecture of the kind that dominates South Bombay. This is the area surrounding the building. Somewhere in all this bustle is Rajdhani. Like many popular restaurants in recent years, Rajdhani has expanded its network, and can now be seen in many parts of Mumbai. (I saw one in Pune too, last I was there). But this is the original. One of the first places where Mumbaikars could go to taste a good thali of Gujarati food. Another true hole-in-the-wall, Crawford Market Rajdhani is a narrow storefront place that extends inside in thin rectangular fashion. The server washes our hands at the table with rose-scented water from a carved pitcher. ("Should I drink this water appa?" my daughter asks). Out come the dhokla, the patra, the bengan bhajia, the khaman, khandvi, samosa. "I am full appa" exhales the daughter, "I almost finished everything!" Yes sweetheart, you are a wonderful girl indeed, but maybe I should tell you - those were just the starters.

There are no such preambles at Lucky. Another old favorite that has since sprung up all over Bombay, Lucky believes in keeping things simple. Biryani. That's what they do. And boy, do they do it well! It is late at night, and the family is tired from a long day out. Not enough energy to cook at home, not enough desire to eat out. Lucky take-out to the rescue. It is an assembly line back here, behind the actual restaurant, in this lane lit up like a bride for ... is it Eid? Or Ganapathi? There are about twenty plastic molded chairs, for people waiting for their take-out orders. The man at the counter barely looks up, as he takes my order (one veg biryani, one chicken biryani, two papads). He doesn't seem to say anything to anyone, which puzzles me. How is anyone back there going to know what I ordered? The crowd in this waiting room looks surprisingly glitzy for a dingy place in the middle of the night. My jeans and open toe footwear are certainly doing their bit to pull the sartorial average down. Nahin madam, chicken biryani khallas, the guy says now, still not looking up, which is a pity because the woman at his counter has just brought the average back up. So I got the last one for the day. Suck on that, better dressed people. My wife stirs in the car when I get back in. Her eyes are still closed, but she is smiling. That smells good, she says.

I haven't been to all my favorite small eateries in Bombay yet. Crystal on Marine Drive is near the top of my list from days past. Its all-veg menu and 1950s music aren't exactly the wife's cuppa. Got to find a buddy. Come back Sri, why don't you? And then there is Khichdi Samrat, the hole to beat all holes in the wall. A joint dedicated to khichdi - now that is focus.

It is Thursday. Where could I go this weekend, I wonder. I hear there is a South Indian virundhu on at ITC. Fancy shmancy 'dosa creations'? Or dhansak from little Jimmy Boy in Kala Ghoda? ... Decisions, decisions.

On Malcolm Gladwell

2010-09-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

The book I am currently reading is called Six Degrees. Published in 2003, it is written by the sociologist Duncan Watts. It is an engrossing read, peeling back layers upon layers of an entire science I never knew existed. Every morning, on the drive to work, turning open the book is an act of suppressed excitement. There is an anticipation of what delightful turn this novel science might take next. So, you might ask, if this book is all that jazz, why are you talking about Malcolm Gladwell out of nowhere?

Gladwell, you might recall, came out of almost nowhere to become an international celebrity with the publication of The Tipping Point in 2000. Everyone from the President of the United States to that rather slow guy in your office was carrying the book around. For a while it was pretty much the 'it' book of the times - the turn of the century book that indeed seemed to symbolize newer intellectual frontiers our race might conquer in the next hundred years.

It took me a little while to fully realize this, but Six Degrees is about the same phenomenon that The Tipping Point had taken on three years previously. It takes on a broader canvas of network problems than the purely sociological ones that The Tipping Point took on, and it does not list the Gladwell book in its dauntingly long bibliography, but take my word for it, these books are closely related. And with the passage of a decade since I last read The Tipping Point, it has caused me to evaluate truly what I think of Malcolm Gladwell.

Let me get the basics straight: I like reading Gladwell. I own all of his books, and find myself referencing his ideas remarkably often at work. Here is the thing though - I reference his work sheepishly, almost ashamed to be linking my argument with his. Reading Six Degrees has only made that feeling of ambivalence, that sense of sheepishness about liking Gladwell stronger. Once you browse through the depth of insights that have been created in network theory, The Tipping Point starts striking you as singularly shallow, and rather misguided.

Take the idea of connectors, mavens and salesmen for example. These are the three categories of 'special' people that Gladwell identifies in the book. In his version of the story, the specialized skills of these people are what make an idea truly cross the tipping point and become a phenomenon. Network theory however, is littered with examples from all sorts of fields outside of sociology, in which sudden phase changes take place, tipping something over into an entirely new state almost overnight. To take a simple breakfast example, when I heat an egg over a frying pan, it transitions over from liquid yolk and white to a solid omelette most suddenly. The egg doesn't go from liquid to solid in a gradual manner. It is quite abrupt. One minute it is all liquid, and the other it is solid. There has been a tipping point somewhere in there. A similar thing happens with the spread of epidemics. They are largely localized in small groups till, at some 'tipping point' they cross over and become full fledged epidemics. There are many more examples where these came from. And there is precious little role for 'connectors' or 'mavens' or the like in these processes. Yet fundamentally, the network mechanics that made a disease an epidemic, or that result in your omelette not being a gooey mess are the ones that make hush puppies popular (if you remember the hush puppies example in The Tipping Point). What dawned on me when reading Six Degrees is that there are no 'special' skills that tip a contagion over. There is, instead, randomness. And the more randomness there is in a network, the easier it would be for an idea to catch fire.

Gladwell, when starting his thesis, started with the famous Six Degrees of Separation study by Stanley Milgram. In this study, Milgram gave 300 odd people letters that needed to be delivered to a stock broker in Boston, not known personally to the test group. The subjects were supposed to send the letter to anyone they thought would be socially closer to the target, and the process continued till the letters eventually reached the target. The result was that it took approximately six steps for letters to get to the target. Hence 'six degrees of separation'. Malcolm Gladwell made the curious assertion in his book that half of the letters that reached successfully came through only three of the target broker's friends. These were, in his mind, the connectors. Six Degrees gives you an entirely different feel for what went on. Turns out, Milgram's study was set up ... shall we say, questionably. The details are less important, but suffice to say that the study was biased (unintentionally) to produce the results that it actually did. And in fact, the much publicized 'six degress' soundbite was also highly exaggerated, because an overwhelming majority of the letters never reached the target at all. And all of this is published research. Which gets me to Gladwell. Gladwell's theory that there are these pre-identifiable 'special' people who possess skills that make them key to tipping things over, and that these three friends of the target were such 'connectors' seems mighty far-fetched once you go through the details of the original experiment. Which makes one wonder - Did Gladwell read through the details of the experiment before he drew his conclusions? Or was he happy to fit the facts around an elegant theory he had in his mind?

The crime rate in New York is another such story. If you recall, Gladwell makes the argument that the reason the crime rate in NY city dropped so dramatically (in I think the nineties) was the zero tolerance policy the police there had towards petty crime - shoplifting, breaking window panes, graffiti. 'The power of context' Gladwell argued, went on to reduce violent crime in the city. Steven Levitt, in Freakonomics, takes on this same crime rate data and draws a much more believable inference in my mind. Levitt links the reduction in crime in NY (and LA and many other major cities that saw similar reductions in that time frame) to the Roe vs Wade supreme court decision. Making abortions legal, in his view, dramatically reduced teenage childbirth and unwanted, single parent children at the margins of society. This is what reduced crime twenty years later when that generation entered adulthood. A much more believable theory, and more consistent with all the facts in the last (like the reduction in LA crime, where there was no 'zero tolerance' policy by the police). Gladwell, you feel again, has crafted a theory and stuck with it, facts be damned.

Then of course, there was the Eigenvalue controversy with Outliers. In referencing the concept in the book, Gladwell repeatedly talks of Igon values, demonstrating amply that he has little idea of exactly what the concept is, or how it applies in his current context.

What do all these prove? Is Malcolm Gladwell an imposter?

My view: Gladwell is a journalist, a storyteller. He sees stories in everyday life and makes them come real. Does he seem to ignore relevant facts sometimes when making an argument? Sure. Does his research into a subject strike you at times as shallow? Yes. Does he cherry pick anecdotes that seem to support his stated thesis and ignore every anecdote that doesn't? Absolutely.

In short: Gladwell's intellectual credentials are suspect, at best. But he is interesting. And he gets me interested in subjects - interested enough to read more and get to understand the real dynamics behind them. For that, I am grateful.

Govinda from a bubble

2010-09-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

"Ap-pa-aa-aa-a", drawled my daughter in her newly acquired singsong accent that we have decided is a cross between American friends past and South Indian grandparents present, "Do you know whose birthday it is on Thursday?"

Crap! Did I forget the wife's big day? Nah, that's still a few months away. Parents, in-laws, brother? ... No, no, nope. "Who?" I ask finally. "I don't know, some little baby's", she says impatiently, brushing aside her own question as if were a needless distraction. "The baby likes to eat a lot of cream. So on Thursday, he is going to climb to the top, and break the pot and eat up all the cream. Isn't that funny?"

Ah, that kind of birthday. It is Krishna Janmashthami, beginning of the much anticipated 'festival season'. Govinda Aala is everywhere in Bombay. Every other street seems to have some Govinda related event scheduled. There is a Sukhwinder show right near my neighbourhood I am told. Wherever I look there are hoardings. Advertising events, wishing people well (I might be able to write 'shubheccha' in Marathi myself). But most of all, hoardings of local politicians - mammoth boards showing some supposed 'leader', inevitably clad in white, his plumpness contrasting nicely with the emaciation of people he supposedly leads, smiling ingratiatingly as he looks down upon the snarled traffic below with suspiciously bloodshot eyes.

I live in Parel, which is, I gather, close to being the Marathi heartland of Bombay. Govinda celebrations being something of a Marathi working class tradition, I get to see a lot of action right under my nose. It was late in the night as I was getting back home this past Sunday when we ran right into one of the 'mandals'. One minute the car was cruising like you only can in the middle of the night in Bombay, and the next minute we had screeched to a near complete halt. Tens, maybe hundreds of young men and women were walking about purposefully, carrying out godly duties at an ungodly hour. The epicenter seemed to be a small by-lane which was already decked up in colorful lights, twinkling with an unsynchronized randomness that was positively dizzying. Most of these people were on foot, but many were on motorbikes - two, three, four to a bike. And no one was talking. Everyone was shouting. Not in anger or frustration, mind you. Just excitement. The energy, the adrenalin was everywhere. Particularly with those on the poor, overloaded motorbikes. A new surge of adrenalin seemed to charge up their bodies as soon as they were astride, as if the bike were a docking station sending power surges through the riders' rumps. They would shout to each other, to random people they recognize across the street. They would gesticulate, look wildly to and fro as if desperately seeking Krishna, and laugh for no apparent reason.

It was an upside down world. Our car was a small dollop of milk, drifting slowly in a sea of saffron. Saffron was in the flags, the clothes everyone was wearing, in the towels and shawls visible on most shoulders. Some of these were plain. Others had a Tiger painted on them. Still others, a sketch of Balasaheb, yet others still a simple bow-and-arrow, the election symbol of the Sena. A half truck passed by, one of those U-Haul variety. It was open in the back. And stuffed inside it were maybe a hundred more young men in various stages of delirium. There was a row of men sitting on the truck bed, their legs hanging over the edge. The rest were all standing stuffed worse than the 7:40 local. And no one seemed to mind it one bit. They were joshing each other, laughing, singing, and generally having a good time, even as they moved along in a fashion that wouldn't have been out of place at Auschwitz. It was a frenzy, and just for a moment, I am ashamed to admit it, I felt scared. Here was this crowd, energized by some power unseen, all acting in seeming randomness, but somehow connected to each other in a giant plan. A surge of sheer energy, a tide of govindas, an ocean of bow-and-arrows, a sea of saffron. An moving slowly through them - a half-pint, bespectacled, bookish, banker, tired to the bones, returning home with a wife and two sleeping children. I reached out slowly in the dark and locked the car doors. As I said, I am not proud of it.

Dahi Handi is what they call it here in Bombay. The celebration of the birth of Lord Krishna by breaking a pot of buttermilk and cream. In years past, the pot would be hung by the local organizers on a rope at about the height of a two storey building. Groups of young men (the 'govindas') would form human pyramids with no other structural support, as one their troupe would attempt to climb to the top and break the handi. Many groups of govindas would participate and the winner would take home a nice, though by no means princely, prize. Of late of course, like much in India, the Dahi Handi tradition has gone to excess. The handi is now hung, I am told, at about the height of an eight storey building. Govindas practice for weeks and months before the D-day (where D here stands for ... you know.) Insurance companies offer policies to govindas that might break their arms and legs in the process of climbing to such great heights. The prize money has become enormous, sometime amounting to lakhs of rupees. And the politicians have come into the act. There are BJP organized events, and Shiv Sena organized events, and all sorts of variants.

At the heart of it all, though, is the spirit of the people. The working class of Bombay. Having a whale of a time, while living in their cramped quarters. Laughing as they paddle through waterlogged streets in makeshift boats during the monsoon. Finding a way to smile through adversity. Dahi Handi is their festival, and I can only watch it from my bubble, through the windows of my car.

Janmashthami is a much more sober affair in South Indian households. My memories of it are mostly about the kolams that my mother would draw outside the house that evening. She would draw tiny baby footsteps that would lead from the outside all the way to the puja room, representing the baby lord entering our home. My brother and I would keep checking the size of our feet against baby Krishna's prints and wonder at how how small a baby would need to be to have such tiny feet. My mother would make seedai and poli. We would eat, pray and go to sleep. Tame? Sure. But I never had to take out an insurance policy against seedai related injuries.

So for all those govindas out there, who would be traveling in crowded trucks later today to break dahi handis - Here is wishing you all the best! May you break every handi and none of your limbs. May the human pyramid hold up. May you climb the eight stories, standing on the shoulders of your brothers. May you taste the sweet buttermilk of success. May the lord Krishna bless you all.

Govinda aala re aala, zara matki sambhal brij baala!

Move it!

2010-08-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Death of a dear one, divorce, moving. That is the top three list of most stressful events in life. Not sure who came up with this list and how, but why shouldn't I do my bit to extend urban myths? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I say.

Anyway, my point is, moving can be stressful. And that is what I have been up to recently. I have traded off my run down corporate guest house with paid-for domestic help for a spanking new apartment with surprisingly uncertain plumbing and no help at hand.

Our furniture and domestic goods (also known as seven years of accumulated junk) were delivered by the shipping gods this past week - dented, wrinkled, but largely intact. My life is 190 unopened cartons, a dusty kitchen and a constant search for service providers.

So keep faith, O Brick and Rope reader! I haven't given my writing pen out to dry yet. Just feeling a little moved, is all.

Happy Birthday, India

2010-08-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

White kurtas. A little parade.  A play written and directed by Deshpande sir, the local playwright. Saare jahan se achha. Two laddus in a small polythene packet. The rest of the day off. That is what August 15 always meant to me as a kid.

We lived very close to my school. And I was a regular in Deshpande sir's productions. So odds and ends from home would routinely find their way onto our sets during those plays. One particular year, it was a little agarbatti-stand, shaped like an Om. It was made of marble or ivory or something equally fancy. It was on our open-air set and was placed prominently enough that one can clearly make it out in pictures from that day. I was playing a freedom fighter of some sort. I get shot towards the end of the play, and fall to the ground. I lay on my back, legs awkwardly collapsed, hands spread, eyes closed, face open to the skies, trying to breathe as little as possible to keep my stomach from heaving. In the background, a chorus sang a melancholy refrain - ay mere pyaare watan ... ay mere bichde chaman ...

It was right about then.  It started to pour. The monsoon had come by to pay Independence Day respects. The chorus (themselves well protected under a roof), went on ... tujh pe dil kurbaan. Tu hi meri aarzoo ... tu hi meri aabroo ... tu hi meri jaan. And I lay there, face up to the sky, drenched.

It was supposed to be the last scene of the play, so as the chorus started to wind down, we all got up, did our curtain calls in double quick time, bundled up whatever we could from the set, and ran indoors.

We never saw the Om shaped agarbatti-stand again. To this day, mom talks about it. Every time we talk of my acting, of Deshpande sir, of Independence Day, that is what she comes back to. Hrumph, she goes. You lost my agarbatti stand.

That is what Independence Day must seem like, to many in generations past. A symbol of possessions lost, opportunity squandered. A milestone for another year passing by without much changing. Everything is the same, and I don't have my agarbatti stand any more.

"The whole New India story ..." a friend still in America asked me the other day, "do you really see it?"

I was in the car, as I seem to be most of the time. Traffic was a snarling, belching, lugubrious, thousand wheeled beast, enveloping me, crushing me. Simplex Infrastructure, read the many signs on whatever was being constructed right in the middle of the road. Metro ban raha hai, the driver told me once. It is always something that is being built. Traffic is so bad because they are trying to build something. They are building that thing because traffic is so bad. It is all circular. Always back where you started.

The entire city of Bombay is in logjam because of the Metro and Monorail projects. Local trains, which used to run every 12-15 min back when I had the courage to ride them, now run every minute. Each of these is now 12 coaches long, instead of the 9 that used to be the norm before (or was it ten?). I still have to let five or six of them go by before I can get into one, said the security guard in my office once. The more extensive networks of the proposed Metro and Monorail might solve part of the problem. But the path to a less congested city, it appears, goes through five years of a super-conjested one. Go figure that one out.

Where one highway is clogged, another seems to be buzzing along. The other day, I had a video chat with someone over Yahoo Messenger ... while I was on the road! Broadband internet on the go. It is quite the thing here. And so much the norm that you are liable to get pittying looks if you sound impressed about it. The fashionable thing is to complain about how Reliance speeds compare with Tata Photon speeds, and how fast you can stream movies or play games while on the go. Let me repeat - while on the go! You see, there is so much of 'go'-ing involved in the India of today, you have got to find ways to make it productive. Enter Mobile Broadband. But then you reach home, go up to your apartment on the 13th floor, and try calling the guy living in the next building. Ting-tong-ting, goes the annoying jingle on your cell phone. Call failed, says the screen.  You are too high up, someone told me, you can't get reliable cell phone connections there. Too high up? Doesn't that take me even closer to the satellite thingies that send the signal down? Or whatever? Help me someone, I am technologically challenged. How come you can talk face-to-face with someone half-way around the world, while you are zipping along the road, but can't talk to the guy in the next building once you are in the immobility of your home? Explain, gods that govern technology, with additional responsibility for paradoxes of India, explain!

The airports are the most visible signs of the New India. Airports in India of old were glorified Greyhound bus-stations, only worse. Now, every large city seems to sport a swanky new airport, each trying to outdo the other in its architecture, its facilities, its cool reflections of places on the other end of long flights. But even here, the signs of a new emergence are everywhere. "Airport Modernization Under Progress" declares a little board in Chennai, right where you wait to be picked up by your ride. "Pardon the Inconvenience."

In fact, that is it. That might well be the slogan for India of today. "Modernization Under Progress. Pardon the Inconvenience." Do you really see the New India story, you ask me? Yes sir, I do. And it is ugly. The New India is emerging out of the womb of the old. The labor is painful. I can hardly bear to be in the same room. And what is emerging is squiggly, messy, sticky and cranky. Yes sir, I do see the New India story. It is a story of birth. It is chaotic, and slimy, and filthy, and grimy. But it is being born. I can see it, right from where I stand. Squiggling, wriggling its way out of the mother. It is not much to look at yet, but I am proud.

Tu hi meri aarzoo
Tu hi meri aabroo
Tu hi meri jaan.

Book Review: Too Big to Fail (Andrew Ross Sorkin)

2010-08-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Annual Meeting of Berkshire Hathaway in 2009 was different from meetings in years past. For the first time, Warren and Charlie were going to take questions from a panel of financial journalists, instead of directly from shareholders. Three journalists were chosen to be the voice of the shareholders, the youngest of whom was a baby-faced young man called Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Not being a regular reader of the New York Times, I wasn't familiar with the name. He carried himself off competently enough during the meeting, even if he wasn't particularly insightful. At the 2010 Annual Meeting, I found myself standing in line to get Andrew Ross Sorkin to autograph my copy of Too Big to Fail. As he signed the book, taglining it with 'BRK 2010', I found myself wondering exactly how young he was (thirty-three). And whether it was too yuppie for me to be seeking an autograph of someone so young (jury still out). And whether Too Big to Fail would live up to it's proud-to-say-I-met-the-author billing (it doesn't).

Too Big to Fail is where Wall Street meets daytime television. It has a dizzyingly large cast of characters. Each character has a complicated back story, that sounds awfully like the back story of someone else you can't quite remember. And at the end of every episode (and a few times in between), the background score plays a dramatic note, we get a close-up of a character with a 'look' on his face, and the audience is led to feel that right this moment, they are on the precipice of something momentous. Only, there is nothing momentous that ever actually happens.

The best part of Too Big to Fail is the peek it offers into the backstage of the Great Recession. Sorkin has clearly had great access to some of the most important players in the drama. Some of the tiny details of color that he offers in the book offer a perception of stunning levels of access. The book presents call logs from the phone of Hank Paulson, quotes from key participants in some of the closest of closed door meetings, copies of documents that might one day be in the Smithsonian. That, in a nutshell, is the charm of Too Big to Fail. It is a compilation of insider stories of people who were newsmakers during the tumultuous days of 2008.

Reading about the recession and the administration's response play out as a reality show, one can't help forming a few (possibly irrational) personal impressions of the key players. Here are some of the impressions I ended up forming:

Hank Paulson: Comes across as someone who never really made the transition from dealmaking wall street CEO to government official. He comes across as someone who had no intellectual peers in the lame-duck administration, and who pretty much did whatever he thought necessary, with the implicit support of the president. But too often, he comes across as someone who (a) still acts as a market participant, rather than as a government executive, and (b) is very (almost too) aware of the legacy he can create through his stint of little over a year in government. He seems well meaning, and smart, and patriotic. But too often, he seems to get carried away in deal heat. One of the most dramatic instances of this deal heat is the government's hostile takeover of Fannie and Freddie (who ever heard of a hostile takeover by the government?)

As Labor Day weekend approached, the Treasury team and its advisers started to plot the actual details of the dual takeover. They knew they would have to move quickly, with military precision, and in secrecy before the GSEs could start rallying their supporters in Congress. They wrote scripts specifying exactly what they would tell the companies and their boards. They wanted to make certain that there could be no compromises, no delays. Internally, Treasury officials talked about offering Fannie and Freddie two doors: "Door 1, you cooperate; Door 2, we're doing it anyway."

Talk about hardball. A similar story plays out in the bankruptcy filing of Lehman where one of the Directors, under much pressure from the administration during the decisive board meeting, asks with some angst: "Let me see if I understand this: Are you directing us to put Lehman into bankruptcy?"

One can see Paulson the deal-maker everywhere. Paulson the calm bureaucrat in-charge of the administration's response is MIA.

Tim Geithner: For the period of this book, Geithner is still Governor of the New York Fed, not yet the Treasury secretary. In much of the drama though, his attitude is quite indistinguishable from Paulson's. Sorkin talks about the AIG rescue, and the media stories about how Goldman had orchestrated it to benefit from the AIG bailout cash:

The new reports, however, kept feeding off one another and therefore missed the underlying truth: Paulson himself had had very little to do with the rescue of AIG; it was, rather, orchestrated by Geithner (and executed, in part, by Treasury's Dan Jester). While the fact has often been overlooked, Geithner, by his very nature - as has been demonstrated throughout this book and in his subsequent policies as Treasury secretary - is as much a proactive deal maker as Paulson, if not more so.

Chris Cox of the SEC comes across as completely out of his depth. Sheila Bair as capable, if self-centered and narrow minded.

Vikram Pandit comes across as something of a bumbling fool, with very little idea of his own company's precarious position, and with a team that is universally thought of in the industry as incompetent. There are times when industry players are wondering about the viability of Citi and Pandit and team are torn halfway between fear for their own survival, and greed for a large deal that could magically make them stronger. And you are left scratching your head thinking, am I missing something, or are these guys really out of it? In the way some of the backroom meetings are described, I must admit that Pandit also comes across as petty, which is disappointing for me in a parochial way. It is clear in the book that Sorkin's access to Pandit hasn't been nearly as open as that to other players (there is not a single backroom story of an internal meeting in Citi, for instance). This lack of access might have something to do with this, but the impression of a bumbling, petty Pandit is clearly left on the reader.

Strangely missing from all the action in Too Big to Fail is Ben Bernanke. He is there in every key meeting of course. But the way the story is presented, it is very much from the perspective of the market players and administration officials. Bernanke seems to be just following the action. Again, my impression is that this is a matter of access, and that Sorkin has not had as much access to Bernanke as he has to other players.

For all its razzmatazz, its unprecedented access to inside players, its dramatic quotes and blow by blow narrative, Too Big to Fail, in my mind, loses the plot. The back stories of key players turn into a few too many backgrounds, till one story starts merging into another, and you are not sure which character has which story any more. Also, 500 plus pages of description of what is essentially a series of meetings between different combinations of a small set of people tends to get a tad repetitive after a bit.

And finally, this trivial factor which is a decisive killer in my mind: There are way too many typos in the book. Too many editing mistakes. Which is shocking for a book of this prominence. It is like the publishers were in a hurry to get the book out there before the public's fascination with the recession faded away. And they cut one corner too many. The third time they spelt 'frustrated' as 'frusterated', I gave up on the book. But then, you are not me. It might not bother you when you read - "I don't speak Russian," Weinberg replied in turning down the president down. Me, it does. So the book doesn't work for me. Too Big to Fail is too big. And it fails.

A terrible place to browse

2010-08-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

In hindsight, the winding long line of cars trying to get in should have been warning enough. When so many people are headed somewhere, it is foolhardy to go to the same somewhere looking for peace, serenity and escape. But hope triumphs over reason, and I trudge on.

I am trying to get reacquainted with my weekend ritual of visiting a book shop and spending quality time surrounded by books and book-lovers. In the two months since my return to India, I haven't settled down enough to restart. Today, I decided, was the day. So off I went. My destination was Landmark, a large bookstore situated in - alarm bells, where are you when I need you? - a mall. A friend told me they are a good mainstream bookstore - wide selection, comfortable seating space, store recommendations, the regular works. You will not miss Barnes and Noble, this friend had informed me knowingly.

I ought to kill the guy.

It started with the music. I step into the store and the blaring sound hits me in the face. Tsamina mina eh eh ... What the heck? Did I step into a club by mistake? Nope. This is the place. Landmark. A bookstore with blaring dance music. If you can hear yourself think, let the management know, and they will kindly increase the volume of the music. WAKA WAKA EH EH ...

I wade through the crowd of people eagerly working out the PS3 demos being offered free by the store. When I finally get to the books section of the store, I can barely make out where to start and where to head. You see, these guys seem to have missed the 'merchandising' lecture during their marketing course. The display of books is as creative as a Microsoft program. In fact, Microsoft might well have designed the store, because everything works on a directory style structure. Looking for a book? What subject would that be - History, Business, Fiction? What kind of history - Western, Indian? What alphabet does the author's name begin with? See - here is the book. Easy, wasn't it? What, you are looking to browse leisurely? Looking for inspiration, you say? Well sir, we are in the wrong place then aren't we?

Apart from the utterly unimaginative and dull display of books, there is the little matter of the books themselves. The titles seem to fall into three broad categories:

(a) Junk food books - tasty and fast, but injurious to your long term health. This is the dominant category here. There are more Sydney Sheldon books than I could ever imagine existed. I would be damned if there are more Sydney Sheldon readers anywhere else in the world - and the dude has been dead for three years. That tall tower you see there? That is a pile of fresh Jeffrey Archers. And yes, your eyes aren't deceiving you - that is indeed a David Baldacci in the 'Landmark Recommends' shelf. Right next to the Chetan Bhagat.

(b) Boiled veggies - mind-numbingly boring non-fiction, written in the manner of a text book. Indians seem to love textbooks. And the more direct, the better. Don't bother with creativity or making it fun, thank you. We are quite happy to read a book called 'How to improve your career?'

(c) Books that hit the stands years if not decades back, and have disappeared from the front shelves of bookstores around the world, except in Mumbai. Tipping Point is prominently displayed. As is Hot, Flat and Crowded. It is like they have no idea which year they are living in.

Some of the best books I have read in recent years are tucked away in strange corners. If Landmark had been my only source of books, I would never have come across The God Delusion, or Chabon, or Ishiguro. I would have been reading my fiftieth P.G. Wodehouse for the twentieth time. (Wodehouse is another author no one seems to read outside this country).

When I left the country, there were a small number of extremely talented Indian authors writing high quality novels, making truly remarkable contributions to the language. One day, I would tell myself, I will get good enough to publish a book of my own. After the visit to Landmark though, I have decided I want to truly stand out by being the only literate person in the country who has not written a book yet.

I spend a fruitless hour wandering around in the noisy aisles, stepping over piles of untidily stacked books. All I had to show for it at the end was Kingsley Amis' 1954 novel Lucky Jim, and David Leavitt's story of Ramanujan - The Indian Clerk. Great books, but not worth an hour of stress.

I get home two hours after I had left, silent and brooding. "Managing two kids by myself isn't easy" says the wife, when I ask her what she has been up to. "I hope you aren't going to make this browsing at Landmark a weekly ritual." "Not a chance, dear" I tell her with feeling, "I wouldn't do it to you."

Working in India: My first two months

2010-07-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

“Sir I am going to send you a paper on manpower requirements”, someone said to me the other day, “Can you please approve by tomorrow sir?” Right there, you have three illustrations of work culture in India – or at least, culture at my workplace in India.

Exhibit A: I present, the ‘sir’s. Part respect for authority, part weight of tradition, part brown nosing, the ‘sirs’ are never far in India. Everyone is ‘sir’ing and ‘madam’ing each other to death. I am sure this isn’t the culture at more progressive, modern employers in the country, but in the staid, old-fashioned part of Indian banking that I now call home, this is the way we do it … sir.

Exhibit B: The ‘paper on manpower requirements’. If there is one near truism in Indian industry today, it is that every darn thing is growing. This is a country that can’t help itself growing at this point. The macro-economic tide is rising so fast, even the leaky boats are rising with it. Everywhere I look, companies are hiring. Mid-teen annual growth rates – in other words, growth Western companies would kill for – attract looks of puzzlement and pity. If you are not growing at 30%, you might as well seek early retirement. People are being offered jobs all the time. Just yesterday, I signed release forms for nine people on the team. Nine people. Lost in one day. And it doesn’t even register in the grand scheme of things, even within my company

Exhibit C: The ‘approval by tomorrow’. India is a country forever in a hurry. Nothing can wait. Everything needs to happen tomorrow. Or preferably, yesterday. In my US avatar, I would routinely sit in meetings where the presenter would offer a plan for projects planned to be implemented in the next 12 to 18 months. Out here in des, the presenter would probably be asked to have his head checked. By tomorrow.

A day later, I receive the promised paper, and it is double-take time again. The request is for 250 additional people. Two hundred and fifty people! In most other worlds, that would be a fair sized company all by itself. Here, approval for that kind of hiring is being sought ‘by tomorrow’. Why so many people, you might ask. I am not sure I fully understand myself. Personal productivity isn’t exactly on top of everyone’s agenda around here. Targets not being met? Throw some people at the problem. Turnaround times too long? Hire more people. Got a brown thumb? Hire some people. The solution to almost any problem you have in India – in personal life or at work – is the same: Hire some people. It is never – make the process more efficient; improve personal productivity; rethink the business model. And when you can hire someone for an annual salary that is the equivalent of the cost of two PCs, why not? There are a billion of us here. Efficiency-shefficiency. Bah

It has now been about two months since I re-joined the Indian workforce. And it has been a blast. It has been everything I was ever hoping it would be, and then some. Like almost everything about India, it has also been an overwhelming blur. All too much. Too much activity, too many people, too much travel, too much growth, too many friendships, too much competition, too much fun

After years of working in an advanced market where the big questions had all been answered years back, it is great to work again in a company where every day you make a foundational decision, a design choice that might shape the company for years to come. That of course, is the greatest kick. To restate an item from my list of why I am returning to India, it feels great to make a difference

Two things have been particularly pleasant surprises in these two months. First, the hours. Deciding to return to India, I had convinced myself that the most nightmarish stories I had heard about work hours in India were going to come true for me. Maybe it is this worst-case expectation setting that did the trick. I am finding the hours much less grueling that I had feared. I do work longer hours than I did in the US, don’t get me wrong. And the longer commutes are killing. But it hasn’t added up to horror story scenarios. Over these two months, my most common schedule has been to leave home at 8:30 in the morning, reaching work at 9:15-9:30; leave work around 7:00, to reach back home about 8:00. As I said, no picnic, but not exactly a nightmare either

The other pleasant surprise has been the length of the week. When I made my list of Top 10 things I will miss about life in America, #3 on my countdown list was ‘two day weekends’. Guess what? It turns out, I don’t miss it much after all. My current employer has a five-day week, bless their heart. It has been the best surprise ever. And to think that they did not mention this during my recruitment process! Clearly, they haven’t figured out their key marketable propositions. Then again, this is India – who expects great marketing

By the way, did I say two pleasant surprises? Make that three –

Arjun, chai laana kadak!

Business hotels - India style

2010-07-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

I have been traveling more than I had bargained for when I moved back to India. Way more. Which might sound like a terrible thing - but hasn't turned out to be. At least, not yet.

Don't get me wrong. The 'get up early to catch the morning flight' part hurts like hell. I would rather get my legs waxed. But two things make business travel less painful than hot wax on hairy skin - the airlines (about which I wrote a recent post), and the most remarkable set of hotels Indian cities sport.

In my seven years in the US, I had my fair share of business travel. Overnight stay on such travels would mean a Marriott, a Holiday Inn, a Hilton, a Sheraton, maybe a Hyatt. Nothing to sniff at, but you would have people looking at you kinda strange if you told them you were looking forward to a night there. The stay is what you endured so you could get business done. In India however, it is all the wrong side up.

"Where are you staying?" my dad asked when I told him of my latest travel plans, this time to Delhi. How is that relevant, I might have asked a month back. But I have learned. It is relevant. In fact, it is more darn interesting than whatever I might be going to Delhi for. Hotels in India you see, are palaces for hire. And if you are going to stay at a palace of some sort, no shame in looking forward to it, is there? Not everyone agrees with this philosophy of course. Frequent corporate travellers take great pains to be blasé about the Taj-es, the Leelas, the ITCs they stay at oh-so-often. I am new to the breed, and haven't developed the necessary refinement in my sensibilities yet. So let me tell you while I still have my sense of perspective about me - these hotels are too incredible for words! I haven't seen anything quite like them.

It starts at the airport. The hotel was supposed to get me picked up. In the context of this particular hotel, 'pick up' meant a chauffeur in crip white uniform, peaked cap and all, politely wishing me a good morning, picking up my luggage, and driving me to the hotel - get this - in a BMW 5-series sedan. The whole transaction has a surreal, upside down feel to it. The driver is clearly better dressed than I am. My shoes are way too dirty for the interiors of the immaculately maintained interiors of the car. He speakes in hushed tones around me, like he is afraid to break my internal train of thought. And all I want to do is shout to the world that I am been driven around in a BMW 5 series - that I am the prince of flipping Persia!

I am shown to my room by someone whose sole job seems to be to say 'sir' every other second and perform mindless tasks of helpfulness like pressing the elevator button for you, or offering to help you open the door to your room. I say 'room' of course, but I mean it only loosely. It is usually a wastefully large space for one night, designed and decorated so tastefully that you can't help feeling a bit ashamed about your own bedroom. The 'standard' in these rooms seems to include such basic essentials as plush slippers to slip your feet into, a bath robe and an evening robe, some large array of toiletries left for your pleasure, and the locally popular snack tastefully set up for your attention. These 'essentials' out of the way, the hotels start trying to outdo each other with the crazy things they imagine someone needing. This one hotel had, along with its regular toiletry kit, an emery board. Now I should probably be ashamed of myself, but I don't really know what an emery board is. It looked like a file of some sort, but I am not quite sure what to do with it. Then there was this other hotel that had near the toilet what I can only imagine was a bidet, though I hadn't actually come across one outside of the pages of a book, and wouldn't know how to use one if my life depended on it. And this other one had a shiny, long handled shoe horn. And this other one had a brush at the end of a polished wooden handle. Only, I wasn't quite certain what I was supposed to use this brush on. Was this to brush my shoes? If so, why the long handle? Or maybe it was to brush my coat? My hair? Heck, these things should come with instructions. One of the hotels I frequent has a 'pillow menu'. In it, they have a variety of pillows, by shape, firmness, thickness and some other parameters that escape me. I guess you can pick the pillows you want and they will send them along. I say 'I guess' because I have never tried the option - I would probably die of pretentiousness before I got through the call. A hotel in Hyderabad had some sort of a portable touch pad that had (among other things) a one-touch way to turn off all the lights in the room, pull the curtains, turn off the TV, and Lord knows what else. Now that toy kept me going for a while.

So there is this race on, with the hotels set to outdo each other with new and innovative ways to wow their customers. Which is all fine by me. All power to them, I say. But there are certain things that I wish they did not innovate on. Take lamps for instance. No two lamps seem to have the same kind of switches. If this one has a push bottom on the top, the other one has a turning one on its base, and the third one has some sort of a foot based operation. Why all this variety guys? Do you really want me to spend all this time looking for ways to turn on the light? Speaking of spending time figuring out stuff, what is with the shower controls? First of all, each hotel seems to have perfected some unique way of making their shower seem like the best you have ever taken in your life. If you only took showers at these hotels, you might think single shower-heads are for the sanitarily underpriveleged. Each shower is a combination of multiple heads set at strange angles so that every part of your body gets a direct jet aimed at it. For a habitually long shower taker like me, this is the good Lord's gift, and I am happy to spend a good hour inside. Only, and here is the rub, every hotel has a different set of controls for their shower. So here I am, naked as the day I was born, staring dumbly at a confusing array of knobs and handles trying to figure out which of them does what. And there are unforgiving mirrors that force you to face your ignominy. "So Mr. Hot-Shot Banker", they seem to taunt, "figured out how to turn on the water yet?"

All this is to say that there are ways to go overboard. And these hotels do. Frequently. But am I complaining? Heck, no. Keep at it guys. Keep trying crazy stuff to go one up on the hotel next door (Did I tell you about this hotel that had a rectangular toilet seat? You would need to be Larry Craig to sit comfortably on them, if you know what I mean). Keep trying crazy stuff, and you will keep my life on the road interesting.

My conference in Delhi is done, and everyone has been dropped back to the airport. I reach Bombay late in the evening. It is raining, the monsoons providing their own multi-directional showers to the millions of Indians who will never see the inside of a Leela. The pick-up area at the airport is a mess. The cacophony of car horns is unbearable. Small, dirty puddles of water are everywhere. a passing car sprays a speck of mud on my trouser. My driver is late. As my mother once said on getting out of a swank mall into the bustle of Bombay traffic, "We are back in India".

Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

2010-07-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

How does one take an incident every American journalist seems to have written about and put a new spin on it? How does one make an instruction list the center piece of the 'Miracle on the Hudson'? How does one dare to take the superhero cape away from Captain 'Sully' Sullenberger?

Readers of Brick and Rope doubtless know my boundless admiration for Atul Gawande. The surgeon with the scalpel-sharp writing has charmed me with everything he has written. Complications was a stunningly good book that was an obvious choice for my list of Best Books of 2008. Better was his next book where he started making a transition from the high ground ethical questions raised in Complications to more prosaic themes - like how surgeons can save thousands of lives a year by the simple expedient of washing their hands more thoroughly. That transition continues with The Checklist Manifesto.

Warren Buffett often says something to the effect that "I don't have particularly better ideas than other people. I just avoid making dumb mistakes." The Checklist Manifesto is about avoiding dumb mistakes. You will never become the best at anything just by following a set of written instructions and following them to the T. But by making a checklist and sticking with it, your mind will be free of the distractions of the mundane, and can concentrate on the things that are truly differentiated. In other words, checklists won't make you great, but by creating and following checklists, your mind will be let free to pursue greatness.

Gawande leads the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery Saves Lives program. As part of this, he and his team led a worldwide test to administer checklists as part of standard procedure in operating rooms across eight different hospitals in dramatically different parts of the world. They created a two-minute, nineteen step surgery checklist that they piloted across these hospitals. After running this pilot for some months, they found results that would have been stunning to the level of unbelievability had they been caused by a new drug in the market - Surgery complications reduced by 36% in these hospitals, deaths reduced by 47%. The checklist turned out to be a hero bigger than the superstar surgeons operating in the OT.

Is there something special about surgery that makes it amenable to checklists? Hardly. If anything, it seems like a much more complicated sphere of activity, more prone to surprises and curveballs than endeavors you and I are likely to be engaged in every day. So if checklists work there, wonder where else they might work. Gawande introduces us to the use of checklists in investment strategies (make sure you are running through a list of must-do checks before investing in a security), in building construction, and of course, with the Sully Sullenberger example, in aviation.

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists.

Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.

Gawande's books are always thought provoking. I have a feeling that this one, while the most mundane of his three so far, is likely going to be the most behavior altering for me. Just today, I found myself advocating checklists for two very different activities performed repeatedly at work. And I found myself referring to Gawande and his experiments with the surgery checklist.

Particularly useful to me was Gawande's exploration of what makes a good checklist. The Boeing guys, so he informs us, are masters of checklist making, having made thousands of them over time for aircraft maintenance, piloting, and special situations (like multiple birds hitting a plane simultaneously). Citing examples from there, Gawande offers some simple principles on what makes an effective checklist and what makes a bad one.

With such a prosaic topic for a book, there is scarcely a chance for Gawande to write the soaring prose he employed in his previous books, particularly Complications. There isn't room to soar in The Checklist Manifesto. For all the twists and turns in the operating room stories, the book tends to be a bit dry. Gawande tries gamely to make his exploration of checklists in professions outside medicine as interesting as his medicine stories. But it isn't clear to me that he succeeds. There is a different level of energy, a whole other level of tautness in his tales the moment the doors to the OT close. The construction stories, the investment stories - they aren't quite the same thing.

The Checklist Manifesto isn't exactly racy reading. But learn from it, and it will probably pay you back many, many times over. Once again, Atul Gawande has written a book that will leave the reader a better person for having read it.

Read the book. Better still, use it.

Flying domestic in India

2010-07-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

I was 24 when I got on an aeroplane for the first time, as my then employer flew a group of us 'MT's from Bombay to Bangalore.

Now there is a sentence dripping nostalgia in every word. Oh the times when we could proudly proclaim our MT-ness! The age when Bombay wasn't Mumbai and Bangalore wasn't ... whatever it is now. Ah, being 24! The time when one could get to be 24 years old, not-uncomfortably off, living for six years in Delhi and Calcutta (yes, with a C, thank you very much), and not have stepped on an airplane yet. As the line from a half remembered sher goes - woh din guzar gaye, woh zamaana guzar gaya. That day is gone, that age is past.

Flying in India has been democratized. Or at the very least, it has been ungentiled. Everyone flies, or can conceive of flying some day. My driver mentioned yesterday that he wants to fly home to Patna one day. (He said a load of other things, but that is for another post - too juicy for me to do justice in passing.)

Flying in India has also become fun. Much more so than flying domestic in the US ever was. There, flying was about getting from point A to point B. Here, that is only a side benefit of the adventure, the story.

It was pouring bucketsful when I woke up in the wee hours of the morning. Like seemingly all flights out of Mumbai, mine left at an ungodly early hour. I groan. I hope it stops just enough for me to take off.

The driver is in a talkative mood. Something about the water he had to wade through to get to work that morning. 'Morning' of course, is driver language for 'so freakin early that the birds are still in REM dreaming about the squiggly worms they will have for breakfast in three hours'. The monsoon is in full glory. It poured 102 mm yesterday. Also known as a wet month's worth of rain in Washington D.C. And it is going strong. I ask the woman at the check-in counter whether flights are taking off. Her plastic smile doesn't falter. Yes sir, they are, she says. And they are. Flights are blithely ignoring the downpour, and taking off like this is a bright sunny Florida morning. They are made of hardy stuff, these Indians. It took a mild shower for 30 minutes for Delta to cancel my flight from Baltimore last month. In this weather, their planes would just be very expensive airport props.

It is remarkably crowded, considering the hour. But then, this is India. It is always remarkably crowded. I get to security, adding my bags onto the really short screening belt, which can barely take two bags at a time. Perfunctorily patted down and declared eligible to go in, I pick up my bags on the other side. I walk up to the coffee shop, happy to have navigated things so smoothly. This is going to be a good day.

Coming to India has not helped my coffee selection problem. I still don't understand the name of any of the flavors. Is mocha the thing I used to like? Or was it latte? What is a machiatto? Isn't Aztec the name of some clan in medieval European history? Forget it, it isn't worth the trouble. Maybe I will just check my email.

Wait a minute, where is my cell phone? Shit! I didn't pick it up at the other end of security screening. I run. Which screener was it? I think this one. 'Nahin sir, yehan tho nahin hai', says the potential thief in uniform, denying any responsibility. I run through every belt. Talk to every security guy. Are they trying to be unhelpful or is ignorance their natural state of being? Mr. I-am-in-charge-here comes by. Calm down sir, he tells me, zen like. Calm down? Somebody just stole my cell phone. Don't ask me to freakin calm down! It cannot disappear, he states. Any minute now he is going to read out the law of conservation of mass. "Did you put it in the bag before screening?" In the bag? Why would I ... oh ... oh ... of course! I put it in the bag! Right ... here. I can't meet the guy's eyes. "Sorry", I mumble. "Chalta hai sir" he smiles and ambles back. I continue mumbling apologies to every uniform I see, but no one seems to notice. Trust, JS. Not everyone is out to rob you. Trust. Calm down.

I am still shaken when I get into my window seat. Which is probably why it takes me a while to realize that my neighbor is watching TV. TV? On a domestic flight? Turns out, that is part of the drill. I am going to be flying a lot in the coming weeks. Let me pick something I can watch consistently. Mentalist, Season 1. Yup, that sounds about right.

"Can I have a newspaper please?" asks someone. Of course. It is coming back. You can ask for a newspaper of your choice! I forgot all about that. I ask for The Economic Times, ignore the trash that passes for news in this pink rag, and go right to the crossword. Hello, old friend. Nice coming across you here. How are things going down? (Get it? Across, down? Cheap, but funny, if you allow yourself)

The flight staff all look like they just got off a Bollywood couch. Why is every one of them so pretty? What do the non-pretty, non-handsome people do in this country? I look around. Oh, I get it. Flying in India is about a handful of beautiful people waiting on a plane load of ugly people, self leading the pack. Suddenly a western voice booms too loudly over the intercom - "Good morning, my name is Jeff". What the heck is going on here? Is this some sort of a call center in reverse? Turns out Jeff is one of the many western pilots that fly domestic airlines in India. Well, who knew?

An hour later, I am done with the pilot episode of the Mentalist. Simon Baker is ridiculously handsome and insanely good. I am hooked. I am also full, because they feed you like farm pigs on these flights. My neighbor hands back his tray to the hostess. His napkin is covering the tray, like a shroud over the mortal remains of what once was a thriving meal. RIP breakfast, you were good while you lasted. Or maybe he is just guilty about all the leftovers.

It is barely 8AM. I have had a day's worth of adventure. Flying is tiring.

Book Review: This Time is Different (Carmen Reinhart, Ken Rogoff)

2010-06-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

This one ain't for the faint-hearted. If you are a casual reader of economics, a topical enthusiast who chomps away a little macroeconomics with the morning coffee, a passing-through-bloomberg channel surfer, a lover of Freakonomics, take my word for it - keep away from This Time Is Different. If, on the other hand, you are a serious student of macroeconomic theory, a policy wonk keen on learning from the lessons of market tragedies past, a historian of money matters - your wettest, wildest dream just came true.

Which probably explains the enthusiasm of Niall Ferguson. Ferguson of course, wrote the immensely informed (and informative), not to mention entertaining, history of markets The Ascent of Money, which I thoroughly enjoyed and heartily recommended in an earlier book review. Here is what Niall Ferguson said about This Time is Different -

"This is quite simply the best empirical investigation of financial crises every published."

Niall Ferguson said that. I didn't need any more to pick up this imposingly dense book.

When someone starts writing a book about financial crises of the past, the one impossibly large shadow you have to deal with is that of Charles Kindleberger. When Kindleberger wrote Manias, Panics and Crashes, he wrote essentially the definitive book on this subject. That book became an instant classic, and remains the only book on this theme to have made a serious mark on the common investor or market player. You cannot write a book on this topic and avoid comparison with him. So what is the verdict? Here is mine -

Winner by a unanimous decision, in the Blue corner, ladies and gentlemen - Reinhart and Rogoff!

Here is the thing - Kindleberger, for all his great insights, was not an empirical analyst. His analysis of past manias and crashes was entirely anecdotal. Reinhart and Rogoff go in the exactly opposite direction. Their book is essentially an abstract from one massive dataset they have created. They don't have much of a story, can't write an exciting paragraph to save their lives, and don't paint a single shocking mental picture over 400 pages. But here is what they actually do - they put together a dataset of macroeconomic information the likes of which have never been put together in the past. They gather information about inflation, currency rates, domestic government debt, international debt, government defaults, recessions and the like for over 66 countries, going back (rub your eyes) 800 years! If you are in a bookstore this week, flip to the appendix of This Time is Different, and skim through the sources of information they have used to put together this dataset. A more shockingly thorough piece of empirical research is scarcely likely to have been put together by two people. The more academic of Brick and Rope's readers are probably aware of more books with this kind of depth (are you there, UC Vasi?), but I surely haven't come across one.

Anyone looking at this ocean of data can come up with any number of unique insights pertaining to their own area of interest. For instance, I was interested in the India angle on many of these (so I am parochial), and here are some interesting nuggets I found: Did you know, that -

India's share of world GDP in 1913 was 7.5%, and is 4.0% now. But India is still, just as it was in 1913, number six on the league table of GDP shares. Some of the countries above have changed (Japan is in, France and UK are out), and the world has grown a bit flatter (top 5 countries now make up 46.6% of global GDP, as opposed to 50.2% in 1913), but India's position in the league table has been unchanged.

India has defaulted on its international debt obligations three times in the twentieth century - 1958, 1969 and 1972.

Since 1800, India has spent 11% of years in some form of default or debt rescheduling. (There is good company - China has spent 13%, so has Germany. By the way, the latest 'surprise' sovereign basket case, Greece, has spent 51% of all years since 1800 in some sort or default or restructuring - so why was everyone surprised again? Probably because they convinced themselves that this time it is different.)

This Time is Different is in many ways, just an illustration of some of the many ways this thoroughly detailed dataset compiled by the authors can be used. It is less a book, and more a catalogue inviting you to try out this cool new data source.

There is a thesis to the book, of course. Which is, quite simply, that whatever be the kind of bubble you might be seeing today, you can rest assured that the market has seen something like this in the past, and that eventually, the bubble will burst. This time is no different from any other time in the past. No, housing prices will not continue to rise. No, the latest technological innovation isn't going to make old ways of valuation irrelevant. No this crisis isn't so deep and unique that we won't emerge out on the other side. This has all happened before. And will happen again too.

But the thesis, and the high level comparison of the latest economic crisis with crises past, are almost sideshows, in the stunning display of the Reinhart and Rogoff's valuable new contribution to the study of markets, their new and comprehensive dataset. And this new gadget is so shiny that the authors get understandably carried away with it.

Academics will love This Time is Different. The lay reader will probably not get through the book. Start reading this great book at your own peril!

A trip to the barber shop

2010-06-20T01:29:00.000-07:00

Five weeks, that is my frequency. Has been for years now. At week one, the head still looks sharp and military. By week three, it looks full. By four I feel like shampooing every other day, and by five, it is out of control waviness. Time to visit Mr. Scissorhand.

"I have this great barber" says my Dad. O-oh. This is not going to end well. "Let me introduce you to him." We are in his car, with him at the wheel. My mind is racing. Where is the escape route? Should I jump out when the traffic is light and making a run for it? Two problems with that - (1) his car doors don't open unless the ignition is turned off - damn you auto technology!, and (2) traffic is never light. "Mm-hmm", I mumble, "Maybe we should go for some ice-cream?". "I put some in the freezer only yesterday. This guy does a great job. Just tell him my name, and he will give you a special cut." That's all I need, a special cut from a local barber, whose only skill, if my dad's past favorites are anything to go by, is going to be the ability to ignore inflationary realities and charge a price out of the 1970s.

"It's that one over there" says my Dad, dropping me off, "go around the corner". 'That one' happens to be a small, dirty blue, tin roofed establishment. A few months back, I would have taken it for a porta-potty, but of course, we don't need porta-potties in India. The world is our bio-degradable potty. So it is probably what my dad claims it to be, the place where I am going to be shorn of some of my hair, and all of my dignity. I turn the corner, and peer at it anxiously. Look for little things. Signs that the guy inside isn't a maniac with scissors and a ear-fetish. A crowded, cracked wooden bench outside, a chai store next door, loud tinny music from the '80s (doubtless the worst decade in Hindi film music). Nope, nothing yet. I look up. India is a land of unintentional humor. 'Good Luk Hair Dressers' the board proclaims. Good Luk indeed.

The bench outside is crowded. Everyone is sipping dirty half cups of steaming chai, and sharing pages of one overused Urdu newspaper. Maybe they are busy, I think hopefully. But no such luk. Seeing me, a man with either a week long stubble, or a really puny beard stand up and says, chalo, ready hai. I step inside. When I say 'inside', I use the word loosely. What separates the space from the 'outside' isn't entirely clear. Now there are benches, and chappals, and chai and newspapers, and now there are barber chairs. We are 'inside'. I sit stiffly in the chair, looking for a few inches of tablespace where I can place my glasses. 'Kya karna hai?' the man with the stubble / beard asks. 'Haircut,' I say meekly, afraid to ask what else I could possibly get done in this place.

Here is a thing I love about India. You don't need to know too much to get along. People are happy to make assumptions on your behalf. This is no Starbucks where you have to make fifteen decisions under time pressure and intense staring just to order a cup of coffee. I say 'haircut' and he gets down to it. Out come the scissors - not, I might add, from a glassful of antiseptic solution, but from his dirty drawer, a place where hygiene might go to die. Out comes a robe, white speckled ominously with flecks of black. He starts clipping energetically. Or to be more precise, he starts clipping lethargically while having an energetic conversation with one of the newspaper guys outside. The indecipherable and unworthy music I had heard outside is coming from a speaker right above my head, so he needs to really shout to make himself heard. And I am surprised I can't hear the guy regularly at home a few blocks away. Halfway through the cut, I feel the scissors go dead. No action. I open my eyes. Our man has stepped out to his friend, to make a particularly important debating point. Ambling back slowly, he is lazily combing his beard ... with the same comb that he then shoves into my hair.

A sweet smell of oils is in the air. I turn around to see my neighbor in barber-ity slumped in his chair - seemingly halfway between an orgasm and death. His barber is giving him a maalish, hence the smell. The man is kneading his scalp with an energy that would make the softest aata for chappatis at home. He is massaging the face, rolling the eyebrows (nobody told me they massage eyebrows!), patting the cheeks. Through it all, the man in the chair is making a persistent, low guttural groan. If the barber had asked him to sign away his family wealth at that moment, the man would have been only too happy. "Karna hai kya?" asks my man with the stubble / beard, seeing me staring open mouthed. No, I shake my head. Lasting effects of an upbringing in a guilt-based value system - if something feels so good, it can't possibly be right.

I stand up, daring to look at last in the mirror. Well, he hasn't messed it up. I won't have to skip work on Monday. 'Kitna?' I ask, keeping up the laconic image. He pauses, a moment too long. Damn, I shouldn't have asked. Now he is going to fleece me. 'Tees' he mumbles, and then louder, looking me in the eye this time, 'Thirty'. Thirty bucks. A haircut, a story, music from the '80s, the day's headlines in Urdu, seeing a man in heaven. All for seventy cents.

I walk home jauntily. It turned out OK, didn't it? "How much did he charge you?" is the first thing Dad asks as I enter home. "A good price" I say, keeping it enigmatic. "I told you", he says. "You should have given him my name. He wouldn't charge you a rupee more than fifty." Yes Dad, good luk with that.

Book Review: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Geoff Dyer)

2010-06-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

Talk about clever! In reviewing J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year recently, I had mentioned that the 'clever' is probably the best way to describe the book. Experimentation in narrative technique by a master of the art. Well, it looks like this is going to be the year of clever fiction reading for me, because Geoff Dyer just pulled off an absolute stunner in genre defying writing.

I have never read Dyer before. In fact, I hadn't even heard of him till the end of last year. Then, The Economist and New York Times both selected Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi for their best books of 2009 list. [See this post for critics' choice books from 2009, a post that I now realize incorrectly has '2008' in its title.]

JV, DV is a book in two parts. The first is set in Venice. The setting is that of a major art festival. Artists, critics and journalists from across the world are gathered in the city. Party invitations are counted, coke is being snorted, hair is dyed, love is made casually but with an intense, drug-induced sensuality. The art community, its movers and shakers walk the first half of this book's pages, perpetually high, always looking for free booze, nervously peeping at the party invitations stack of their colleagues, to see if there were other better parties they were not being invited to. Our protagonist for this part of the book is Jeff Atman, a journalist with a small art magazine (called Kulchur, if you will).

This is the easy reading, incredibly witty, playfully erotic half of the book.

She was on a slightly higher step, sitting with her feet discreetly together, but as she laughed he caught a glimpse of white knickers that set his heart racing. The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear. Laura's underwear ... Whenever she shifted position slightly, he hoped to sneak another look up her dress.

Laura said, 'Are you trying to look up my dress?'

'No! Not now. Now I'm making a real effort to look you in the eye. But a few minutes ago I was, yes.'

'How old did you say you were?'

'Early to mid-forties-ish. But some things are timeless. You're fourteen, you want to look up women's dresses. You're forty, you want to look up women's dresses. You're seventy, you've got one foot in the grave, but you're hoping, even as your gaze turns towards heaven, that you might get one last chance for a look up a woman's skirt. Hemlines go up and down, but nothing really changes.'

See what I mean?

Then abruptly, but not jerkily, the book shifts to Varanasi. Dyer has introduced the name before, in his Venice half.

'From the Sanskrit, isn't it? Nasi, place. Vara, many. Place of many names.'

She laughed. She had perfect teeth, quite large: American teeth. 'I have absolutely no idea whether that is extremely impressive of completely Ben as in bull, Ares as in shit. Which means it's probably both.'

So off to Benaras it is. Dyer takes us on a ride of Varanasi the likes of which you might rarely have seen. It is detailed, colorful, unflinching, achingly real. We see the ghats, the circle of life. We see the holy men, the crooks, the monkeys. We see Varanasi through the eyes of an Englishman, a journalist. If this journalist is the same as Jeff from the first half of the book is never made entirely clear. He might be. Or not. (And, you start wondering to yourself, it can't be coincidence that Jeff's last name is Atman ...)

As light hearted and carnal the first half of the book is, the second is ponderous and spiritual. Now, we are no longer in a novel. We are in a travelogue. A story, a painting, of Varanasi.

Thanks to Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, notions of karma and dharma had become common currency, but words like moksha, bhakti and rocana were new to me. Terms like these didn't lend themselves to straightforward translation because they were ideas that did not have an equivalent in our limited western consciousness. One concept that did make sense was darshan: the act of divine seeing, of revelation. This was what Hindus went to the temple for: to see their god, to have him or her revealed to them. The more attention paid to a god, the more it was looked at, the greater its power, the more easily it could be seen. You went to see your god and, in doing so, you contributed to its visibility; the aura emanating from it derived in part from the power bestowed on it.

[...] Here in Varanasi, the ill-informed tourist did not see the same city that the thousands of pilgrims saw, the pilgrims who came here and the ones who lived here. But this was not to say that the visitor was not capable of his own form of darshan. Even if I didn't know what I was looking at, I could still see. And if ever somewhere was designed with the eye in mind - there was probably a Sanskrit term meaning exactly eye-in-mind - then Varanasi was that place.

If the Venice part of the book is incredibly good, the Varanasi portion is positively divine. And in juxtaposing two such hauntingly powerful yet entirely different pictures right next to each other, Dyer forces the reader to think about the contrast, the interplay. At one point, Dyer describes an exhibition of pictures in Varanasi thus:

The absence of people was not a universal principle. People were there or not there, there in some pictures and not there in others. A hand-out said that all the photographs had been taken in India, but there were no individual captions, nothing to tell you where anywhere was, or what anything was, or when it had been. There were just these pictures of places, pictures of places that were in these photographs. There was nothing to help you get your bearings and then, after a while, once you accepted the idea, you realized that you didn't need these things that you so often relied on, that there were no bearings to get. A given picture had no explicit or narrative connection with the one next to it, but their adjacency implied an order that enhanced the effect of both.

That is probably the best way to describe this entire book.

After much thought, I had chosen Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi to be my 'transition' book, the book I will start reading in the US and finish reading in India. With it's structure where the first half of the book is the West and everything moves East midway, it seemed perfect. Having read it now, I couldn't be happier with my choice. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is an absolute cracker of a book, certainly one of the best I have read this year. Geoff Dyer is a must read author. With this book, he has made a compelling argument - I have to read everything he has written. Tathastu.

Living in India: My first week

2010-06-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Round and round the carousal went. Still no signs of my luggage. And so it begins, my return to India.

The woman at the Delta counter is both polite and philosophical. I think you should wait some more before you file a lost luggage report, she says, with the 'sir' that seems obligatory in India whenever anyone speaks to you. Be patient, she says, and I am no longer sure that she is just talking about the luggage. Let me take one more look. Not yet ... not this one ... not that one ... no, no ... hey, isn't that ...?

Maybe there is a lesson here for my life in India. Be patient, the Delta representative had said stoically. Wait, and they turn will come.

"Appa it is hot!" Those are officially the first words my daughter says on stepping on Indian soil. So predictably American, such a cliché. But all I want to do is to hug her and promise that I will protect her. For all my bravado, I know I am scared to come back. Scared for me, scared for the future, scared above all for her. Scanning, searching the sea of faces turned expectantly at every bedraggled traveller spit out by the automatic doors of the airport, I hold her hand tight. Don't worry, my darling, I will keep you safe. So keep hold me tight, and don't let go. "There!!" she squeals, prying out of my grip and running towards my parents. For a moment I am in shock, staring at my empty hand, the grip my four year old wriggled out of. And then they are all here, the noise, the hugs, the smiles that reach ears, the tired relief of finding your loved one at two in the night. I am grinning. I am screaming to make myself heard. I am asking my daughter to 'be careful'. She doesn't seem to know what I mean, and ignores me altogether.

The first night is the worst. I am severely jet lagged, and can't bring myself to sleep. The din, the excitement, the sheer chaos of the airport is still pumping adrenaline through my body. And my mind, much as I try to tame it, is running wild. At every toss and turn, I find myself assailed: Did I make the right decision? Is it going to be worth the price? Is this all going to work out?

A week has gone by. A week since the craziness of an airport screamingly awake two hours after the time when tomorrow turns into today. A week since my sleepless night. And I am loving it!

Life is crazy, but (dare I say it?) a tiny bit less crazy than I had expected it to be. So maybe that is the secret - Expect worse than the worst, and everything feels good in comparison. The commute from my transit apartment to work is interminably long, but on the positive side, I am getting more reading done than I could ever have imagined! I finished my first book since my return - Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, a dazzlingly inventive piece of fiction by Geoff Dyer. (More on this startling book in a separate book review post.) Work is even more exciting than I had imagined, the opportunities even more promising. I have had lunch or dinner with friends every day of the week, and the list of friends I haven't yet called is still long (Sorry Zen, I will call you tomorrow, I promise!).

Bombay is more attractive than I had given it credit for. Driving into town every morning, as I get on the Bandra Worli sea-link (which is one stunning piece of engineering), you have only to look left - this is becoming a truly modern skyline. It isn't quite there yet, but there is enough here to make it easy to visualize - one day soon, this might resemble a Manhattan, a Hong Kong, a Shanghai. Did Haji Ali always look so beautiful? So resplendent at night, gloriously reflecting its image in the lapping waves? Was the drive from Bombay to Pune always so scenic? Was VT always a World Heritage Site, and I never noticed? And talking of VT, every time my car crosses the machhi-mar slum, with its colorful, docked wooden boats, its drying nets and loud undecipherable music, my driver reminds me "Kasab yahin se ghusa tha sahab". And I feel scared all over again.

It is early on Sunday morning. I am sitting in the balcony of my parents' house in Pune. The air outside is crisp, cool and very still. All is quiet. Or almost all. Unseen birds are chirping. An auto rickshaw revs. From the next apartment building, I hear the tinkle of a bell. Someone is evoking a reluctant God on a weekend. If I strain my neck, I can just about make out his hand, this man clad in white dhoti shaking his bell. My father is reading the newspaper, lounging on his favorite deck chair. The air is carrying the wafting smell of something nice, something very ... familiar. "Coffee?", my mother asks.

Book Review: Solar (Ian McEwan)

2010-06-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

A Booker prize-winning author, celebrated as one of the greatest of his generation. The hottest global issue of the day (if you can pardon the cheap pun). The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. One of the major literary events of the year so far. Put it all together and what do you get? A big fat dud, that is what.

Ian McEwan's Solar is a disappointing (and ultimately unsuccessful) effort of a 'serious' author to write a comic novel. McEwan is witty, has a good way with his words, is sensitive. He can create depth in characters, he is astute with his psychological observations, he is a great pacer of his books. He is not, someone should tell him, funny. Doing the laugh-out-loud stuff is not for him. Solar, Mr.McEwan, is tedious, forced, and (gasp!) boring.

A quick summary - Solar is a humorous take on the shady side of science, playing out in the context of a global warming scientist. The protagonist is Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist. The novel plays out in three disjointed periods, 2000, 2005 and 2009, with a lot of flashbacks thrown in to connect the three. When the novel opens, Beard is an illustrious if bored star of his narrow academic world. He has limited interest left in science, though he is quite happy to squeeze every last bit of juice out of his Nobel Prize.

In an inward, specialized world, he was, courtesy of Stockholm, a celebrity, and he coasted from year to year, vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives. ... He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

His personal life, on the other hand, has all the spark that he can handle, and then some. He is on his fifth marriage, and it is going the way of the other four. The colorful personal life and bland professional one collide in an event of unexpected violence, of the sort that McEwan has always liked. A book thus far sleepy and muddled, comes awake, if briefly.

Beard gets involved, through blatantly unethical means, in the science - and business - of global warming. In a few years, he finds himself on the verge of what he thinks is something dramatic. 'My dad is changing the world', as his daughter says, too cutely by half. On the personal front, Beard has let himself go. Too many women, too much food (all of it junk), a lifestyle of slovenliness. Like the planet itself, he seems on a path of self-destruction, blissfully unaware the whole time that what he considers progress is taking him ever a step closer to the precipice. The reader, as in many McEwan novels, can see the impending disaster taking shape, even if Beard cannot. Will Beard's sins come back to haunt him? If so, which of his many sins would get there first?

The comedy in Solar, such as it is, is in the utter cluelessness of the Nobel Prize winning scientist. Even as everyone can see that his choices are disastrous and he is going ever deeper into a sinkhole, Beard seems ... apathetic. "I shouldn't have to care. I won the Nobel Prize. I am trying to save the world." - or near enough.

There are many different ways in which Solar doesn't work. The most important is this: The comedy is too forced. It feels like McEwan is trying too hard. For instance, there is the juvenile humor of Beard's penis freezing when he whips it out to pee in the Arctic. The entire episode of the Arctic expedition seems (to me) to have little other purpose in the rest of the novel. And here is the thing - it is not funny! It reads like something Judd Apatow might write, not Ian McEwan.

There are parts that do work, to be fair. I particularly liked the science. McEwan has clearly done a lot of research into climate science, and solar energy alternatives in particular. The pieces where they are discussed (sans silly attempts at humor) are the better parts of the book. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough about global warming in a book ostensibly about a scientist working on it. Of course, the real science of global warming would be out of place in what McEwan is trying to achieve here. As one of the characters in the book says -

It is difficult to be serious about global warming and not be consumed by it.

And McEwan surely doesn't want to get consumed by anything as serious as this in Solar.

There is also a great little set-piece with Beard in a train that I loved. Numerous reviewers have hated this piece, finding it derivative. I have to say that personally, this was one of my favorite parts in an otherwise spotty book. Beard is sitting in a train, opposite a young man. Beard has just bought a bag of chips, with a Union Jack on its cover.

So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of the impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart, discharging a clammy fragrance of frying fat and vinegar. It was an artful laboratory simulation of the corner fish-and-chip shop, an enactment of fond memories and desire and nationhood. That flag was a considered choice. He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment ton the center of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. his theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain.

This remarkably well written passage is the beginning of a four page episode that culminates, for my money, very satisfyingly. The plot of this particular set-piece is nothing too original, as McEwan quickly divulges a few pages later. But the writing is artful enough to make it entirely worthwhile.

Unfortunately, such pleasures are few and far between in Solar. Even more unfortunately for McEwan, they happen, more often than not, when he is isn't trying to be funny, but is rather writing on a more intimate level. As I said before, humor is not his thing.

After Atonement, Ian McEwan gained the justifiable reputation of someone who is a master of the language and who was going to define great fiction in the new millennium. Saturday was certainly no Atonement, but it was a great book in its own right. On Chesil Beach was a lightweight in more ways than one, as I mentioned in Brick and Rope's review of the book in December. Now Solar has turned out to be an outright dud. I wonder whether I would have it in me to read the next McEwan. After all, there is only so many passes you get for writing one all-time-great book.

Re-Discovering India #1: The Monsoon

2010-05-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

"Re-Discovering India": Facts about India that I either - (a) never knew, (b) never appreciated, or (c) once knew and appreciated, but have since forgotten - the distinction between the three flavors being mostly semantic. Contemplating my eager homecoming, I find myself getting re-acquainted with these old friends.
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In two days, I will pack my bags, and get on the interminably long Air India flight from New York, Mumbai bound. At about the same time, some hundreds of billions of molecules of air and water currently residing above the Indian Ocean will decide, all at once, with dramatic suddenness and unremitting decisiveness, that they too like the warm lanes of Mumbai and heartland India better than their cold, wet, oceanic hosts. Without so much as an Expedia search, they will set off on their long journey, these fickle winds, to keep their annual appointment with the subcontinent. The first of these guests will arrive in Kerala around the 1st of June - dark, rumbling, and gloriously, ominously wet. The monsoon will be here.

It was only a few days ago that I realized my arrival in Mumbai is going to coincide with that of the monsoon. Seven years of scrupulously avoided rains had dulled my memory of them, but those faint echoes from the past were enough to cause some flutters in the present. My first concern was for my daughter, the sheltered child who has only seen rain in sputtering, playful moods. Even the 'thunder storms' the local weather channel warned of occasionally would be no more than a few hours of pouring rain accompanied by the periodic clap of thunder, the fitful lightning, and then a glorious rainbow. An inconvenience, sure. A dampener of picnic plans. But not something to fear. Not an angry, malevolent God.

I try to prepare her for what lies ahead. I tell her about the rain, the unceasing wetness. "But appa", she says with the touching certitude of a child, "if it rains, I can wear my raincoat when I go out to play!" No my darling, you can not. No raincoat can stand up to the fury of the monsoon. Ask the many dispirited Duckbacks of my childhood. Each met a monsoon, and didn't have the pleasure of meeting another.

[Quick primer on the monsoon for those who, like me, only remember enough from high school science to mumble random keywords when the topic comes up: Super hot summers in the sub-continent and the Thar desert cause air over central and northern India to become considerably hot, and hence create low pressure. Cooler - and hence high pressure - air from over the Indian Ocean rushes in to fill the low pressure area, carrying a load of moisture with it. The winds are blocked by the Himalayas, rise up because of it, cooling as they rise. Water precipitates, it rains - the southwest monsoon. Now, why all this gets initiated suddenly on June 1 every year is beyond me, but there you have it.

Around September, the sun has moved south, the subcontinent and northern lands get cooler, the Indian Ocean air is still hot, the winds rapidly get into reverse gear and go right back. On the way, they pick up some moisture from the Bay of Bengal, and dump it over some of the southern cities like Chennai (which gets, I understand, about 70% of its precipitation from this retreating, or northeast monsoon). End of science class.]

So, how wet is the monsoon? Here is a comparison that surprised me perhaps more than it should have. First, take a look at the average rainfall received every month in temperate Washington DC.

Data from weather.com

Steady as she goes, right? 2.5 to 3.5 inches of rain every month, all through the year, for an average annual rainfall of 35-40 inches.

Now compare this with Mumbai's average rainfall, with the same scale on the y-axis:

Data from weather.com

See the difference in the skyline? It is dry as a bone for eight months of the year. But between June and September, it pours like like no four-year old girl in Washington DC has seen. Average annual rainfall: 85-95 inches.

As I was saying, the monsoons are monstrously wet. When I see clogged roads and overwhelmed sewage systems in Mumbai come July, I will try and remember this chart. The poor city is receiving, in one soggy quarter, more than twice the rain that relatively wet Washington DC receives the entire year! Give the poor sewers a break, will you - future, frustrated me?

The monsoon hits the Kerala coast with dramatic suddenness and punctuality, on or around June 1 every year. This year, the Indian Meteorological Department, with their customary bravado, have stuck their neck out and made the bold prediction that the onset of the monsoon over Kerala would occur 'around May 31'. Whew! That was hard work, wasn't it folks? You can now sit back and start your sophisticated calculations for next year thank you very much.

The scenes in Kerala around this time are stunning, to state the obvious - nature resplendently blooming. As I have been looking this up over the last few days, I have found nature pictures whose sublime beauty defies mere verbal descriptions. Look at this photo blog for some spectacular examples. Interesting fact about the New India of course, is that entrepreneurs, bless their hearts, have found ways to make honest money around this spectacle of nature. NatureNest is one of the companies that offers Kerala tour packages tailored for what they call "monsoon tourism". Alappuzha, Kochi, Kumarakom, Thekkadi ...: 'watch the swaying paddy fields', 'backwater cruise on Punnamada Kayal', 'bamboo rafting in Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary' ... mouthwatering promises of natural beauty in God's own country. Note to self: sights of India I would like to see - add to list.

So, where was I? Ah, yes, Mr. Monsoon: Mumbai. June. You, me, four year old daughter. No raincoats, no umbrellas. Just mano a mano. Date?

JS + AS = SS (24 May 2010 - )

2010-05-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

Some sentiments are best expressed in verse

Linda Pastan is a poet who deals mostly in subjects of parenting, family and loss. A Perfect Circle of Sun is her first book, published 1971. Interestingly, Linda Pastan lives in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb that is a stone's throw away from where I live.

To appreciate the poem below, the most relevant fact to keep in mind though is this: Linda is a woman, and a mother multiple times over. [After yesterday, so is my wife.]

Notes From The Delivery Room
Linda Pastan
A Perfect Circle of Sun

Strapped down
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
Common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root end up, soil spilling
from between their toes -
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up...bear down...the audience
grows restive, and I'm a new magician
Who can't produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

Why am I returning to India?

2010-05-20T21:53:00.000-07:00

I guess it was inevitable. After I wrote the post on Top 10 things I will miss about living in America, many readers were left asking - "So ... why are you returning to India again?"

It is a fair question, even if somewhat unanswerable, at least unanswerable satisfactorily. The case for America is taken to be self-evident. You can touch and feel the reasons. Large house, big car, low traffic, clean air, gadgets and toys. What's not to like? In the land of the free, every pleasure can be had for a price.

So why the return to snake-charmer land? Why the willful walk to treacherous traffic? The deliberate decision to go to potholes and pollution? Why the conscious call to jostle mallus in a mall?

Yes, dear reader, there is both rhyme and reason. I am no cheerleader for the 'everyone should return to India' brigade. I do not return with silly, overly romantic notions of how great life in India is, or how all my emotional and spiritual vacuums are going to be filled just by stepping on Indian soil. But while I am no chest thumping jingoist, I can't deny that there is a certain pleasure I feel in returning to the country of my birth. Irrational? Sure. Without reason? I beg to differ.

Here are my top 10 reasons for returning to India:

10.Help: Never having to do my laundry again. Ever. Expecting hot chai after work and not feeling guilty. Having the house cleaned and my books dusted every day. Finding the car hand washed every week, as if by magic. Having a never ceasing topic of conversation with the wife. ("You can't imagine what the bai did today! I really think we should fire her. But then, Sanjana fired her bai last month and still hasn't found another ..."). Domestic help - You are a new dimension to my life.

9. Bollywood: Watching trailers of the latest movies. Discussing the latest in the rivalry of the Khans. Hearing snatches of A.R.Rehman's music from that car waiting for a green signal. (Saying 'signal' instead of 'light'). Watching movies in theaters that seat a thousand people - not the glorified TV screens that call themselves 'cinemas' in America. Having samosas during interval. (Having an interval). Bollywood - You are escape like Hollywood could never be.

8. Festivals: Pandal hopping during durga puja. Eating piping hot khichuri off paper plates. Waking before dawn to be the first to set off crackers on Diwali. Looking for old yet white kurtas for Holi. Eating ghujia at friends' houses. Neighbors setting up Golu on Navratri, women going to sing in each other's homes - a new person's home each night. Chants of 'Ganapathi bappa moriya' as elephantine idols are paraded out to their watery visarjan on Ganesh chaturthi. Festivals of India - I haven't seen your color in seven years, and I can hardly wait.

7. Having life "in your face": People on the roads (oh so many people!). Poverty and luxury jostling for space. Slum dwelling children playing in the water from a broken pipe. Hearing the bells of a temple, the muezzin's call from a mosque. Men proudly wearing their religion on their foreheads, and women their marital status. Life that hasn't been sanitized out of all character. (Life that hasn't been sanitized - yes, that too.) Feeling alive, in a hyper New York sort of way. Having life "in your face" - it gets tiring, but it never gets boring.

6. Getting personal with work: Making your closest friendships at work. Having long chai sessions every day. Getting invited to the boss's house for dinner. Having 'colleague' be a loose, and seldom used synonym of the word 'friend'. Really caring about your work. Having it be more than just a job that pays the bills. Going on offsites to the best resorts. Having spouses (and kids!) invited. Mixing business with pleasure - You are rarely efficient, but always fun. I have missed you!

5. Having mojo: An economy growing at 8%. Subji-walahs with two cellphones. A spring in everyone's step. Boundless optimism. An obstinate belief that the future will be better than the past. Trans-generational mobility. Old giving birth to the new and shiny everywhere you look. Opportunities for everyone to make their children's lives better than their own. An elephant waking up. A society discovering its mojo. I felt it last when I left India, and have seen it grow every time I have visited. As the woman told the waiter in When Harry Met Sally's restaurant scene (shamelessly unrelated link to an all time favorite movie clip), I will have whatever she is having.

4. Family: Being able to meet my parents over the weekend. Getting my daughter to know her grandparents. Seeing my brother more often than once every other year. Calling to tell him a silly joke, or to discuss the latest T20 match. Having an extended family. Sleeping on the floor because there are more guests in the house than beds. Making jokes the next morning about the ceiling fan's ineffectual groans, the uncle's snoring, dad's too frequent trips to the bathroom. Family - you don't come with a 'hassle free' guarantee, but then what worthwhile thing ever does?

3. Making a difference: Tackling the big questions. At work and in life. Building teams. Creating strategies. Driving change. Making something new, something big, something that might last long after I am gone. Touching people's lives. Giving back to the society that subsidized my education, my opportunities. Making a difference - in a way that you can't being away.

2. Food: Thali at Saravana's in Chennai. Dhokar Dalna at Aheli in Calcutta. The all night dhabas in Delhi. The hole-in-the-wall Khichdi Samrat in Bombay. Eating pani puris outside cinema halls. Ganne ka ras that can't possibly be germ free. Vada Pav at the halfway stop being Bombay and Pune. Kachhi dabeli. Dhokla. Calcutta's mishti doi. Sri Krishna Sweets' Mysore pak. My mom's chinna vengaya sambhar. Food. For vegetarians. It doesn't get better than India.

1. Belonging: Taking people for granted. Inviting oneself over for lunch. Instinctively knowing the cultural context. Breaking out in a smile when 'pehla nasha' starts playing on the radio, because it reminds me of college. Making Ramayana and Mahabharata references in everyday conversations. Not having to be PC. Being part of the mainstream. Belonging - I am really looking forward to belonging.

So, as I was saying - there are good reasons to return to India. Koi shak ya sawaal? (Bonus points for identifying the pop culture reference)

The Big Short - Michael Lewis

2010-05-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

Every time a part of the financial market goes kaput, you can find tens of 'experts' claiming that they told us so. It isn't usually difficult to spot these post-facto gurus in their fifteen minutes of fame (they are rarely right the second time) - they are being courted by the financial press, and are spouting intelligent sounding 'analysis' that tries to suggest that what happened was inevitable and that every newspaper headline in the last two years was pointing in that direction. In many ways, the spectacle is not much different from a market boom, in which some other 'experts' try to tell us how this time it is different.

In one sense, however, market crashes are different from market booms. When prices inflate, the 'experts' being interviewed on CNBC are money managers who are making a lot of money out of whatever asset class is booming right now. But in busts, the experts are usually academics, economists, financial journalists - people who are watching from the sidelines, rather than making bets in the market. They are rarely people making money out of the crash. They are rarely, in Wall Street lingo, shorts. In a crash, some people lose everything, some lose a little less - but everyone loses. Except those who don't - the shorts. These few are the heroes of The Big Short.

Michael Lewis burst into prominence, of course, with his 1989 book Liar's Poker. Lewis' intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Wall Street, and Salomon Brothers in particular, along with his breezy narrative style with the penchant for the graphic (remember 'Big Swinging Dick'?) made that book an all-time business classic. Over the last ten years, Lewis has been writing at the rate of a book a year - wayyyy too much in my opinion. Most of it, I am sorry to say, has been mediocre at best - The Oscar winning The Blind Side and the nerdily interesting Moneyball notwithstanding. So it was with some trepidation that I started reading The Big Short. After a long interval, this is Lewis coming back to the subject that first made his career - Wall Street shenanigans. Can he do it again? Can he pull off another Liar's Poker?

The verdict?

Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Lewis is back! This is by far the best, the most interesting book about the recession of 2008-2009 that I have read. (And as readers of Brick and Rope have probably learnt by now, I have read a lot of them - many more than anyone should have to!) This is it. The one Great Recession book you have to read.

The Big Short gets at the financial meltdown in a unique way. It tells us the story of a few big shorts in the mortgage market of the early aughts. Money managers who saw that the mortgage market was overheated, that the bubble was bound to burst, and bet big on the bubble bursting. These guys didn't just wring their hands in frustration at the other idiots making boatloads of money on the perpetually rising housing market. They bet indecent sums of money, their entire lives and careers on their assessment that house prices could not continue to rise, that subprime mortgage lending was dirty and bound to blow up. They don't need to say 'I told you so', because it is obvious from their trades - if they had bet along with everyone else, their financial lives would be over by now. Instead, they made for themselves filthy bucketsful of money. So yes, they did tell us so.

For long, I have heard about the trillions of dollars of losses caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown, and I must admit I have wondered about that. A typical subprime loan is about $200,000. So to make a trillion dollar loss, 5 million subprime loans have to go bad. So when people take of multiple trillions of dollars worth of mortgage related assets, I have always wondered how exactly that was possible. I knew that Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS's) somehow created this mechanism, and this latter was what brought AIG down. But when it came right down to it, I didn't really understand what was going on inside all these three letter acronyms. Enter Michael Lewis.

[A CDO's] logic was exactly that of the original mortgage bonds. In a mortgage bond, you gathered thousands of loans and, assuming that it was extremely unlikely that they would all go bad together, created a tower of bonds, in which both risk and return diminished as you rose. In a CDO you gathered one hundred different mortgage bonds - usually, the riskiest, lower floors of the original tower - and used them to erect and entirely new tower of bonds. The innocent observer might reasonably ask, What's the point of using floors from one tower of debt simply to create another tower of debt? The short answer is, They are too near to the ground. More prone to flooding - the first to take losses - they bear a lower credit rating: triple-B. Triple-B-rated bonds were harder to sell than the triple-A-rated one, on the safe, upper floors of the building.
... [Goldman Sachs's] nifty solution to the problem of selling the lower floors appears, in retrospect, almost magical. Having gathered 100 ground floors from 100 different subprime mortgage buildings (100 different triple-B-rated bonds), they persuaded the rating agencies that these weren't, as they might appear, all exactly the same things. They were another diversified portfolio of assets! This was absurd. ... But never mind: The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.

This image, of a tower of mortgage loans being converted into a mortgage bond, a tower of bonds being converted into CDOs, CDS's being used to 'multiply' mortgage loans virtually ... keeps coming up in the book. And every time, the image gets a little clearer, the mechanics of what happened behind the scenes, comes more in focus.

Every market player comes for the withering attack of Lewis' cynicism. Particularly striking to me was his assessment of the caliber of people working at the rating agencies:

"You know how when you walk into a post office you realize there is such a difference between a government employee and other people," said Vinny. "The ratings agency people were all like government employees." Collectively, they had more power than anyone in the bond markets, but individually they were nobodies. "They're underpaid," said Eisman. "The smartest ones leave for Wall Street firms so they can help manipulate the companies they used to work for. There should be no greater thing you can do as an analyst than to be the Moody's analyst. It should be, "I can't go higher as an analyst." Instead it's the bottom! No one gives a fuck if Goldman likes General Electric paper. If Moody's downgrades GE paper, it is a big deal. So why does the guy at Moody's want to work at Goldman Sachs?"

Which makes another point about Lewis writing about Wall Street - The time for polite language describing the recession in clinical, academic terms is over. Lewis' language is the crude, macho language of a Wall Street insider. It is like nothing has changed in South Manhattan since Liar's Poker.

In the end, the image that endures is that of the shorts themselves. Market players who aren't just heartless monsters getting rich on the misery of ordinary Americans. The shorts, who believed the world was wrong, and were willing to bet that it would right itself.

His bets against subprime mortgage bonds were to him more than just bets; he intended them almost as insults. Whenever Wall Street people tried to argue - and they often did - that the subprime lending problem was caused by the mendacity and financial irresponsibility of ordinary Americans, he'd say, "What - the entire American population woke up one morning and said, 'Yeah, I'm going to lie on my loan application'? Yeah, people lied. They lied because they were told to lie." The outrage that fueled his gamble was aimed not at the entire financial system but at the people at the top of it, who knew better, or should have: the people inside the big Wall Street firms. "It was more than an argument," Eisman said. "It was a moral crusade. The
world was upside down."

I could go on and on. But I'll stop here and just say this - read the damn book!