Love makes the world go 'round

'A General Theory of Love' is turning into a bit of comfort-reading these days. I tend to skim through chapters right before I go to sleep. For a neurobiology book, it's a fairly romantic read.

I was reading it right now and remembered how much I'd enjoyed this idea of limbic resonance the first time that I read it. Our limbic systems which are sort of the most primitive and emotional parts of our brain, are not exactly information-sponges. As the book puts it, they don't pick up facts as rapidly as the neocortex does.

The book postulates that the limbic system is capable of something rather profound, however. That it enables us to share deep emotional states and is responsible for our capacity to form non-verbal connections with other members of our species which are in large part responsible for our elaborate social behaviour. And this leads not just to creating the capacity for empathy but in some cases it lays the basis for the bonds of companionship since it allows 'our systems to synchronise with each other through limbic revision'.

All in all, apparently love rewires the brain by changing its chemistry. And to adopt the book's guileless and somewhat mushy tone, 'In any relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our mammalian brains is limbic revision : the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love as our Attractors activate certain neural pathways and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.'

What all that means is that who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

It rarely happens that a popular science book ends up saying the same thing as your favourite Jane Austen novel. But when it does, you can't help grinning like a fool as you jump out of bed to type it onto your blog.

Because God is in the detail

I've been trying and trying to scrounge some time for my own self these past few weeks - time to read, time to listen, time to breathe, time to write something that would help me keep these experiences for posterity, time to just reflect on things, atleast for a little while.

I haven't been able to get much recreational reading done these days but one book I finally finished is one I had started to read many, many times but somehow had never got past the third chapter. Something always kept getting in the way - exams, illness, busy-ness. Perhaps, it was in the nature of this book even. It wasn't the kind that had you yearning to turn the page, to go racing to the end. It was more the kind that allowed you to slow yourself down and take your time. You could come back to it any time you wanted, even if you had to leave. You wouldn't be missing anything though you weren't paying attention.

So yeah, it was sort of meandering and ponderous even. And now that I'm at the end of it, I realise although it was barely 400 pages long, it felt like a much bigger book. It even sounds like a big book - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I wish I could say it was my first brush with this variety of magic realism - something that seems to be a running theme through some good South American writing - Jorge Luis Borges being another writer I've been told I should read.

Of course, my first brush would have been Salman Rushdie but in his hands, even when he writes multi-generational, blowing-in-the-winds-of-change books like Midnight's Children, there seems to be something artificial about this device - something not organic, something learned and not felt.

Marquez, on the other hand, manages to make his literary creations feel real with all their naked emotions and their incestuous longings and their bloody battles and their general sticky sweatiness. It's really incredible. His world-building is so detailed that it becomes difficult to deny that Macondo - this village where the many generations of the Buendia family live out their sordid little lives is a real place - you almost think you could be watching some Nat Geo historian telling you about it in the afternoons.

When we find out that these people who go exploring through the wilderness leaving their old dying town behind, to establish their own  village in what feels like the middle of nowhere, these people have no idea how time passes in the outside world, or even which year it's supposed to be or how far away from the sea they are, it feels not like a conceit that is supposed to make us believe that Macondo is a kind of fantasy Never-never-land, it feels truthful because the kind of people that they are, the times that they lived in, the education that they were allowed to acquire - that they probably didn't know much about navigation or geography or magnetism - we understand that it is plausible that these people would see a block of ice illuminated by sunlight for the first time and wonder if it's really a giant diamond.

The people themselves are vibrant and passionate - it's exactly how you'd imagine Latin Americans to be, down to the very last stereotype. And in a way that is what they are. You get the feeling that as time passes, the people that belong to this founding family cease to be unique and settle for being approximations of those that came before them. The many daughters and sons and nephews and aunts are all variations of the first two people we meet. Jose Arcadio Buendia who is big, strong, boisterous, extravagant, intelligent and imaginative and his wife Ursula who is tiny, quiet, pious, industrious, and grounded. Their defining characteristics get shuffled into several permutations and combinations as their children and their children's children live and breathe and fight and make love and bear children who grow up to repeat the patterns of their parents' lives.

All this reads as quite mundane, I realise now but that is what life is often like. On the whole, we live out our lives engaged in our passions and in our routines and these are often only significant to us because we live them.

A friend once told me, if there was a God, we'd be like ants to him. Running around in little circles, trying to preserve our precious little lives. When I asked her if she thought that we were gods to ants, she thought the idea was hilarious.

There was this throwaway line in an otherwise average film I saw recently - 'We are, each one of us, the hero of their life.' seeming to suggest that even at its most unremarkable, each life is inherently extraordinary.

And after reading this book, after sifting through these lives, I'd say I agree. All lives end, all hearts are broken. But it matters that we lived and it counts when we loved. 

Your Beautiful Mind

Upon G.'s expert recommendation, I've been spending these last few days of drudgery reading the most intriguingly titled book on psychobiology ever written - it's called A General Theory of Love and trust me, it hijacks your interest completely from the very first chapter - a chapter that oddly enough begins with a dreamy poem.

That first chapter, called The Heart's Castle - Science Joins the Search for Love, yields a most interesting paragraph about the intricate osmosis of intuition and rationality in matters of the (proverbial) heart and mind. It's quite unexpected to find such a well-written, almost romantically framed book about the scientific study of the brain in love.

And since I was so fascinated by it and so impressed with the writing that really resonated with my own mental image of the kind of thought processes I'd like to develop, I'm quoting it here.

"If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be of arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus, as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches us, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy."

While I am still upon the first chapter, I am falling in love with this book about the mysteries of love and I am delighted that the writers are experts of affective neuroscience, a field of study that has always been a little too esoteric and opaque for me to follow directly.

But all that aside, I am happy that what was a nebulous idea for me has been crystallised in such concrete words for me to keep here on this blog.

Lessons in Humanity.

When I was eight years old, my dear Aunt Bhanu had given me a birthday present that was a big box full of five illustrated and abridged versions of classic books. Now these weren't your regular books for kids, not Oliver Twist or Treasure Island or The Prince & The Pauper. These were slightly odd books to be giving to an eight year old. They were Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and of course, my then least favourite - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

It was reading these books perhaps that ignited my life-long fascination with science-fiction and more-so with morbidity.

I dont think their impact wud have been as great had they been the regular unabridged novels read without illustrations that I acquired in my teens, in my attempt to recapture the sense of wonder I had first felt when reading them.

The illustrations had been singularly excellent, and some scenes just stuck fast in my head. I still remember them as vividly as if I had the pages in front of me, alas, the books are lost to me now. Given away to classmates as grown-up novels took precedence or borrowed by younger cousins and not returned.

My mind's eye returns to me certain images though, and I can imagine them even today, my memory perhaps embellishing on what I had originally seen.

A large tear glistening on the hard brown cheek of the enigmatic Captain Nemo's usually stern, shuttered face as the mysterious young man with a hole in his skull, covered by blood-soaked bandages lay dying on a bunk in the background.

The explorers sailing on makeshift rafts, battling against violent storms, lost in a vast ancient underground sea filled with some magnificent and some monstrous fish.

Count Dracula, his long black cape whipping in the wind as he scared off hungry wolves with a snarl and a wave of a sinewy clawed hand as Jonathan watched wide-eyed from the carriage window.

The Time Traveller, adventurous yet afraid, shrinking from the Morlocks in the dark tunnels, realizing that the menacing creatures are the descendants of the downtrodden working classes of the distant past.

They were all stories that touched something inside my eight-year old heart and moved me to wonder, and sometimes fear.

But Frankenstein perplexed me. I did not know what to make of it. I did not know if I felt sympathetic towards the Creature or repulsed by him. I didnt know if I blamed Viktor Frankenstein or if I pitied him. But the haunting image of the Creature, who having received nothing but beatings and tauntings, longingly looking in through the window at a happy family eating a warm dinner around a simple wooden table, thinking how he would always, always be the outsider, shunned and reviled, lingered uncomfortably in the dark corners of my mind.

Tonight, I watched a screening of Danny Boyle's brilliant new play based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, at the NCPA, and I watched it alone as my erratic schedule and busy weekends wud allow.

I dont really watch movies or plays alone. I enjoy them as the communal experience they were probably meant to be, before home theatre systems and personal computers arrived. I am usually the obnoxious person in the audience who regularly gets shushed by people for whispering too loudly to my friend sitting next to me. So this was my first time watching this play all by myself, in a corner seat at the extreme right of the second row.

And while the staff at NCPA are always and extremely courteous, they seemed to take special care in showing me to my seat, literally walking me to it and asking if I was alright, probably becoz I was a girl who'd showed up all alone. They even seated three delightfully chatty old Parsee ladies next to me!

But perhaps it was appropriate that all my thoughts about this marvellous play were confined to the solitude of my own mind becoz perhaps that's the lesson that I needed to learn from it.

Of course, the play with the fantastic ensemble cast of Jonny Lee Miller as the hard-hearted Frankenstein, Naomi Harris as the compassionate Elizabeth and the always-wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch in a strangely moving performance as Frankenstein's Monster is chock-full of subtle and not-so-subtle messages if you'll look for them.

Everything from the Biblical idea of Original Sin, the onslaught of science in the modern age, the grave consequences of hungering for power without responsibility, the hypocrisy of society, men trying to play God, slavery, love, loneliness, poetry, childhood and its innocence lost to the very nature of the human condition is covered in the sparklingly witty dialogue of the play. And inspite of the frequent ideological heavy-lifting required of it, the lines of dialogue pronounced by the excellent actors crackle with surprising humour and comic whimsy in a way they never did on the page.

The play may be about a lot of things but at its centre lies the relationship between the man and his creation. And how that creation, abandoned by his 'father', is quickly and brutally taught several lessons about humanity and human beings.

We sense every emotion that passes quicksilver-like on the grotesque face of the Creature - his struggle with his newly given life at the beginning of the play, his abandonment by his creator, his pleas for help as he begs for food, his cries of pain as he is mercilessly whipped, his joyful exultation when he watches the first sunrise of his life, his shrinking from a gentle old blind man's touch, his introduction to music and books by this old man who becomes a very obvious father figure, his sonorous recitations of the poetry he comes to adore, his tender longing for a lover, his violent anger at being rejected and taunted by the very people he silently helped, his heart-breaking anguish at being the only one of his kind, and his cynical but truthful observations on mankind are incredibly and brilliantly rendered by Benedict Cumberbatch (whom I loved as Sherlock Holmes on BBC's new series), and it is a bit of a shock when the actor turns up in his natural handsome avatar at the end of the play.

Also in a stunning reversal from the book, the Creature becomes the hero of the story, so much more than the monster that prowled at the shadowy edges of Viktor Frankenstein's rather eventful life. We experience all that happens from the Creature's perspective. And this is probably where the play triumphs most of all. The Creature becomes a mirror that displays all our flaws back to us, ruthlessly and relentlessly. We tell ourselves we're good people and we'd have been better to him had we encountered him, but there's that nagging doubt at the back of our mind.

We realize that we are indeed guilty of all the crimes he accuses mankind of. We are afraid of what we do not understand, we treat with hatred and hostility those who are not like us, we do not keep all our promises, we are cruel, even and especially to those whom we profess to love. We corrupt the innocent, we exploit the weak, we undermine the strong, we despise the truly good.

The Creature, we learn, is born a somewhat gentle soul, a lover of beauty, nature, and poetry, with a tender heart that is capable of kindness to children and love for mankind.

He desires a bride he may love and keep as his own friend and companion. But Frankenstein cannot keep this terrible promise and destroys her. The Creature exacts revenge as he rapes and murders Frankenstein's wife on their wedding night, cynically declaring "Now I am a real man!" to the grief-stricken Frankenstein who chases after him endlessly to finally destroy his creation.

The play ends as the book does at the North Pole, where the Creature admits to Frankenstein that he feels remorse for Elizabeth's death and admits that he always yearned for his creator's love. Frankenstein confesses that he was incapable of loving and that he envied the Creature's ability to feel love, which made him more human than Frankenstein wud ever be.

And I understood the real reason Bhanu Mami had told me it was important that I read this book properly. She had always known that it was Frankenstein who was the real outsider, and not the Creature. But perhaps, this was a lesson I needed to learn in a darkened auditorium, as three hundred other people collectively drew in their breath at the ending. That, in truth, each one of us is all alone, but those of us who can manage to reach out to another person will never really be lonely.

Octopus Garden

My mother tells me that one of my worst habits is the way I treat books. I buy a whole pile of them and arrange them carefully on my bookshelves and start reading a myriad books around the same time, then leave them off to begin new ones and the cycle continues endlessly. She says that this is becoz of my essentially easily distracted attention and fickle nature.

I must confess that while this treatment of books is shabby indeed and I do regret not finishing a lot of the books I start, I have truly honorable intentions and I do intend to finish reading all those books I turned away from in favour of new ones.

But then I love books, I have never let a single page tear or the spine fray and what few stains there are on their pages have been thoroughly regretted.

Then I read these two truly marvellous quotes by fellow booklovers from a bygone era and realized that well, atleast I'm not the only grave offender here.

The first one is the by the famous O. Henry who raised short stories to a sublime art form and in whose stories every character, however ordinary, is treated delicately with great care and tenderness.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."

The second one which I adore beyond measure is by the inimitable wordsmith Winston Churchill, one of the singularly most brilliant orators that ever lived.

"If you cannot read all your books...then fondle them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances."

Wud you like to turn the page now?

Watching The Jane Austen Book Club, a movie that came thoroughly recommended by members of my own book club, I cudnt help wondering if life really is like a book, specifically one of Jane Austen's books. I mean, if you think about it, maybe it's like this. The non-readers think what happens is fate. But the readers, they know, all along, that it's all just part of the narrative, life is like a story-line.

Besides, as my friend M. points out, present-day India isn't all that different from eighteenth century Victorian England that Austen wrote about.

Everyone thinks about marriage and people pair up, sometimes even with the right person and there are these big fat families with these stereotypical characters and their money issues, and the need to do what is proper against the desire to try the most inappropriate thing we possibly can.

Perhaps, it's all becoz people havent really changed all that much over the last two centuries. Circumstances might have altered, societies have supposedly evolved but our emotions are just as confused and confounding at times.

Well, about the movie, it's pretty interesting, especially if you've read all the Austen books. Each character is sort of based on an Austen character type. The marry-everybody-off-and-gossip-about-it lady, the never-say-die romantic, the beautiful-but-bashful woman, the passionate-but-picks-the-wrong-partner girl, the sensible Plain Jane who finally finds true love and of course, the quiet, handsome, misunderstood Mr. Nice Guy. Six books and six people in the book club. And the events of the book subtly parallel the events of their lives, and the decisions they make are mirrored with those Jane Austen wrote for her characters.

Like my friends said, it's not necessary to have read the books, but already having read them will provide an added dimension.

In fact the movie is exactly like a Jane Austen book, too. You can see the happy ending coming from a mile off but we learn a lot about these people as we go along, we care about them and we cheer when they do get their happy endings.

I cud argue that life doesn't provide happy endings to everyone, and working in a hospital puts that in even sharper perspective. But perhaps that's becoz life is like an Austen book without the direct payoffs, if she'd written them to be longer and more complicated. Even in her books, not everyone has a happy ending, and often, choices are shown to have wildly unpredictable consequences. In her books, those that are too charming are never to be trusted and almost every character has hidden depths.

I like how the movie talks about the minor characters in the books having a secret life that even Austen wasn't aware off. Like speculating if Charlotte Lucas from Pride & Prejudice could be a lesbian, for example. But hasty interpretations aside, I think I'll quote my brother, who prefers sci-fi over other kinds of books, like Grigg in the movie. But on my insistence, he read Sense & Sensibility and then Persuasion and he said, "Austen's books are more than how-to-get-married manuals, they're about determinedly doing what brings you happiness, at great initial risk. They're highly individualistic."

I agree. Which is probably why they're such best-sellers more than two hundred years after they were written. And they keep making these fabulous movies with these great actors that win Oscars. There are Jane Austen scholars who dissect and describe every single character, line of dialogue, description and turn of events to find a rich collection of underlying themes.

And without pontificating, they still talk about things everybody cares about. Not the existential dilemmas of one hallowed soul, but the everyday decisions and compromises that regular yet unique people must make.

Which is why I wonder if I really am living out a Jane Austen novel. And this way, we all get to be Elizabeth or Anne or Marianne or Elinor or Emma, leading ladies of our lives, striding into a glorious future of our own making.

P. S. If anyone knows a guy like Grigg, the sweet sci-fi geek who cares about the environment and doesn't care about upholstery, please contact me pronto! :D

And for me, keep this day.

I had the rare but ultimately fortunate idea of cleaning up my old schoolbooks cupboard again, since Mum kept insisting I clean it or she wud throw the whole lot of books away.

I found this old scrapbook I used to keep, in which I loved to record interesting lines from the books I'd read. Or snatches of a brilliant poem. You know the feeling?

When you read a certain line and are gobsmacked by the truth and beauty and goodness of it?

That happened to me again as I found several tonight.

And now that my blog has replaced that scrapbook, I deposit them all safely here lest the pencil-writing fades and I lose those lovely thoughts.

Hook: And now, Peter Pan, you shall die.

Peter: To die would be an awfully big adventure.

Peter Pan,

J. M. Barrie

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

Auguries of Innocence,

William Blake

(I didn't actually read this one, I heard it quoted by Captain Picard in a Star Trek movie and immediately loved it and googled it on the first incarnation of my computer on a 56kbps connection and it took an hour for it to load. I still remember how frantically I searched for these lines then.)

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot,

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned...

Eloisa to Abelard,

Alexander Pope

(I didn't read this either. It's from the movie. This was on the last page of the book, and since I'd grown up written with a ball-pen with ink that is now dreadfully smudged.)

Under the spreading chestnut tree,

I sold you and you sold me.

There lie they and here lie we

Under the spreading chestnut tree.

1984,

George Orwell

(I still remember how excited I was when I brought this book home in a terribly tattered but delightfully complete edition that my surly school librarian had handed to me. I finished it in three hours and realised for the first time in my life, what it means to be truly free.)

My words fly up,

My thoughts remain below;

Words without thoughts,

Never to heaven go.

Hamlet,

William Shakespeare

(I shall never be the same for having read this. I have never read words written like this before or after. I had always expected Shakespeare to be a snob's delight. I had never thought I'd be so bowled over by the wrenching depth of his writing.)

And finally, last and definitely not the least,

I sit beside the fire

And think of all that I have seen,

Of meadow flowers and butterflies

In summers that have been.

Of yellow leaves and gossamer

In autumns that there were,

With morning mist and silver sun

And wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire

And think of how the world will be

When winter comes without a spring

That I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things

That I have never seen.

In every wood, in every spring

There is a different green.

I sit beside the fire

And think of people long ago,

And people who will see a world

That I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think

Of times there were before,

I listen for returning feet

And voices at the door.

Bilbo Baggins singing "I sit beside the fire and think.."

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,

J. R. R. Tolkien

(I'd read this in tenth standard when the first movie was about to release. I was moved by the profound wistfulness and latent wanderlust in what is deceptively simple verse. This is written on the very last page. I shudnt really put this here becoz I have it nearly memorized. But it's fitting that it acted as a bookend both there and here.)

A Serious Woman

Today of all days, I was accused by a certain friend (not an old friend, luckily), of being "too serious". Apparently, I read serious books, I watch serious movies even when stressed out while others prefer to watch "timepass" movies and I use a serious tone even when joking. (I used to think that last was called being sarcastic, but well, definitions change.)

In all probability, she says, one bright and shiny winter day, I just might turn into a blues musician. Or maybe I already am one and I just dont know it yet. She must've believed that I'd consider that a somewhat alarming prospect. Although, why I wonder. Blues musicians seem perfectly normal happy folks.

On days like this, one realizes that what Dawkins said about altruism is true. It is only a front for selfishness, if only thrice removed from the first action. No one, ever, ever, says or does anything that is not selfish. Take that, Ms. Rand. You wrote all those books with such passion, and it was all just a lot of preaching to the converted.

Speaking of being a serious person, I keep entering these bookshops (I did it again today) hoping to find a new Wodehouse book to read, only to realize I've probably read them all. Why didn't you write more books, Sir Pelham Grenville? No one writes them like you anymore. You, Sir, are seriously funny.

No matter. I'll just read the books I have again. Reading Wodehouse's prose never fails to enrapture, even on the hundredth encounter. Stuff like "He was white and shaken, quite like a dry martini." or "She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel." never gets old.

All in all, today is the kind of day that makes one want to curl up in bed with a lovely book, A Pelican at Blandings, in all probability, and switch off the distracting cellphone.

And quote for the day? Well, this one.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read." by, who else? Groucho Marx!

O Captain, my Captain!

I have been fascinated by Walt Whitman since the first time I watched Dead Poets Society ages and ages ago at the behest of C. This wild-haired, bright-eyed monkish figure that loomed above Robin Williams' classroom, a figure Williams' enthusiastic revolutionary of a teacher used in frequent memorable scenes to inspire his impressionable young students. Last week, I bought a Wilco Classics edition of Leaves of Grass from the Crossword sale and I intend to read it in its entirety. But much like my textbooks, I find it impossible to read any manner of poetry at a stretch becoz for me, it demands more concentration of thought than I can supply for longer than an hour. Otherwise, I feel like I am not reading it with the sort of passionate attention that it surely deserves.

So, for the present, I am content to read his poems from my trusty poemhunter ebook, like I usually do, sporadically and hopefully, with the kind of joyful focus it calls for.

Having read many of his lines like the lovely Song of Myself where he says "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you", I now think that he was an incredibly learned man, as much aware of the world of science that governed the exterior as he was understanding of the innermost questions, thoughts and workings of his own personal world, literally, "insightful" and "introspective".

This poem by Whitman holds sway over my imagination since first I heard it in the film, I suddenly thought of it again today. Isn't it wonderful?

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here - that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

The lines of the answer fill me with this strange soaring feeling, it is like a knowledge that others have pondered what I have pondered and that Whitman gives a most reassuring answer, dont you think? :)

Comeuppances

For the life of me I cud never finish The Fountainhead inspite of having attempted to read it on three different occasions as many as three years apart, hoping that perhaps at 21 at last I was mature enuff to read the whole thing.

Well, no such luck. Now I just randomly skim the book, stopping and reading wherever my gaze happens to land at that particular moment in time.

Regardless of never having reached the ending, a lot of lines and vignettes come to mind. The one that follows is perhaps one of the book's best-known lines but today, I really envy Roark's self-centered detachment from the world of mediocre minds.

I think there's this famous scene from the Roark's trial, but I cant remember precisely where that falls becoz of my disjointed reading habits. In this scene, Toohey confronts Roark and says to him,

"Why don't you tell me what you think of me, Mr. Roark?" to which Roark replies,

"But I don't think of you."

Exactly.

I have a mental image of me whooping and cheering in the courtroom when he says this. But I'm sure Roark being Roark wud care nothing for it.

Now I imagine I was the one saying that and derive even greater satisfaction from it. Altho' this whole exercise makes me feel like I have missed the point by miles. No matter. My aim is achieved and I am in a much, much better mood now. :D

Jo khayaalon pe pehre daale woh aankhen hain kahaan?

At a quarter past three in the morning on a rather rainy muggy Friday morning, when insomnia drives all longing for restful sleep from my rather expectedly sluggish mind, I cannot, inspite of trying hard, banish all thoughts from my mind, so it will be clear and I cud finally sleep.

But as easily as this was achieved once before, an empty mind and easy sleep remains rather out of reach tonight.

So, here I am, hoping that writing will be therapeutic and set my mind to rest or atleast tire it out sufficiently.

So little has happened in the past day that I am surprised that a novel I'm midway thru is effectively disturbing my mind enuff to prevent sleep and as I type this after two hours of tossing and turning in bed, I cant help but get a somewhat tenuous grasp on what it is exactly that is so troubling about this book.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, (this is an intentionally distorted title, its new revised edition is titled In the First Circle) or atleast the 1968 edition I have borrowed from A. is unlike any other novel I have read before. And since, the only other Russian novel I have ever read is War and Peace, I cant help but wonder if it is the specific conditions of that place that inspire such sprawling, devastatingly perceptive works of literature or if that is just a lucky fluke.

The book, the title of which suggests Dante's idea of the First Circle of Hell which was a relatively benign "zone" reserved for saintly folks who for some reason ended up in Hell but were kept away from the scary, hard-core fire and brimstone, is set in a special prison or sharashka in the Soviet Union of the 1950s where the prisoners are scientists, professors and engineers, all imprisoned on flimsy, mostly cooked up charges, forced to work on the megalomaniacal Stalin's crazy pet projects.

These prisoners are highly intelligent folk, whose intellect will now power the invention of new machines that will in turn empower Stalin's stooges a.k.a. Security Officers (glorified thugs, dimwitted but ruthless) to spy on and imprison ever-increasing numbers of the hapless populace. Apart from these privileged prisoners who are educated and somewhat well-read, we learn that the rest of the country and even the Party members are indoctrinated with Communist propaganda that consists mostly of distinctly anti-American platitudes and a truckload of not-so-clever lies.

Therefore, anyone who questions these State-sanctioned beliefs is immediately labelled anti-Soviet and jailed for ten to twenty-five years, except for the (un)lucky folks who're immediately shot. Ironically, a lot of these anti-Soviet terrorists are former Red Army soldiers who at the end of World War II were transferred promptly and efficiently from German POW camps to Gulags or labour camps with no regard for their wartime bravery and without any real court trials.

There are atleast fifty different characters in the first 300 pages of the book that I've encountered so far and some of them make more of an impression than others when the book's focus flits from one character to another, seemingly randomly in the beginning.

I'm beginning to see how they're all connected and how this style of narration (which I'd found incredible in My Name is Red) is fleshing out the characters, exposing their backstories, clearly etching their motivations and their internal conflicts while providing a terrifyingly sordid picture of the external threat, a bleak militarised communist state with a sinister yet obviously and dangerously insane leader.

Reading thru the book, my brain kept feeding me references like V for Vendetta, Das Leben der Anderen, 1984 and Animal Farm before I wud remember with a jolt that this novel is based on Solzhenitsyn's real-life experiences and the characters are based on real people he met in one of these intellectuals-only special prisons, where life is arguably easier than the cruel labour camps of Siberia, but where the prisoners are shackled by invisible chains reinforced by informers and spies, where these brilliant people cannot trust the canny cleverness of their equally brilliant compatriots.

I am not certain if I liked the experience of reading this novel. It overwhelms me like it has now, becoz I am terrified and repulsed by the world the author evokes and even more nauseated when I realise that this is not mere fiction. As the Washington Post reviewer on the back-cover says, there are no villains in this book, only a cold, detached system that effectively dehumanises every person it touches. Even Stalin comes across as a pitifully obsessed, happily self-imprisoned madman, terrifying tho' his actions are, moreso becoz they are oddly random (like Amon Goeth from Schindler's List times million), he is himself trapped in a prison of his own making behind bulletproof glass windows and gunmetal doors, a comfortable, safe cocoon where he confines himself on account of his morbid fear of dying.

Also, there are no true heroes. Everyone has made bad choices inspite of or perhaps becoz of their great intelligence or exasperating stupidity respectively but there is a chance, slim tho it is, of redemption, of freedom, for the spirit if not for the body. There are tragic love stories as well, considering many of these male prisoners left young wives behind, but the tragedy is not dramatic but quiet and therefore, more brutal.

When as a nine year old I first heard of socialism, I had thought it a noble idea, one that I had supported and argued for even, in a very memorable debate long ago. When I realised how it all had panned out in reality, I felt very disappointed in people who had let this great monument of the human mind crumble becoz of the flaws of human nature. Which is why this book becomes even harder to contemplate for me. It really is a hell that this book describes, I wud gladly pick the eternally downward bound boulder of Sisyphus over this claustrophobic prison(I do believe that is not supposed to be a tautology).

I am not close to the end of the book yet but I can predict that the end, like the course of the book, will be bleak and dreadful for some and filled with hope of the future for some others of these varied, numerous characters but then, what else can one expect from reality?

Therefore, I think I'll try my luck with dreams once again. Hopefully, these runaway thoughts that kept haunting my mind are now exorcised onto the blog.

Show me the money

Last week, on a whim, I decided to carry off Kautilya's (or Chanakya if you prefer to call him that) "Arthashastra" from my friendly neighbourhood library to the great amusement of the benevolent Doshi uncle.

Well, he waved it in front of my face and frankly, I was tempted. And while everybody who knows me knows that Economics isnt really my 'sweet subject' (far far from it actually), I must admit I am fascinated by this book.

Written in attractive large font on equally attractive glossy white paper, I had absolutely no trouble reading it. And I realised that while its not dazzling me into loving Economics or anything (I stopped after many attempts by my Eco teacher failed pathetically, altho I have read The Creation of Wealth and The Wealth of Nations and stuff by Thomas Friedman, I continue to maintain a polite disinterest in the subject), it has successfully dazzled me with Kautilya's (lovely name, that) sensibility, matter-of-fact phrasing and his impeccable observational skills, all contributing to a sort of lucidly expressed brilliance.

While this version is edited lovingly by Srichand P. Hinduja, the President of the Hinduja Group, the translation by S. Dharmashastry is easy to get (he's even highlighted the important points), overall a very simplified condensed version of the masterful treatise.

But finally what I loved was Kautilya's adorable matter-of-factness, thats where his genius lies.

Sample these nuggests,

"He who punishes severely is hated by the people, he who punishes mildly is despised." (On Punishment)

"One should not speak ill of one's enemies. They are one's own creation." (On Policy towards Enemies)

"Power invariably alters the mind." (On Military Might)

and my personal favourite,

"When guilt is removed, there will be no guilty men. When guilty men are removed, the guilt will continue to contaminate others." (On Law and Justice)

I cannot help but wonder how good old Niccolo Machiavelli compares. :D

Strand

Its always such a delight to discover a new bookstore! My very first memory of a bookstore brims with the lovely smell of fresh new paper, the feel of plastic covers and the whirring of the table fan on Kamat kaka's counter. I was tagging along with mum on a summer afternoon when I was about six. She was looking for some obscure Marathi book while I ran excitedly amidst rows and rows of Tinkles, Champaks and Chandamamas stacked in doddery towers that threatened to fall over if I pushed them and mum kept warning me about running there. Kamat kaka was the one who kept telling her it was fine if I played there and 'Mangesh Bookstore' in Worli was the place I was introduced to Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, Asterix & Obelix, Tintin, the famous Young Scientist and Childcraft books and much later, Harry Potter and Roald Dahl. Mum, of course, insisted I read Pu La's books which I did, surprised when I liked them as much as I did.

But by then, I could tell the onslaught of the Crosswords of the city had hit them hard as Kamat kaka and his son were forced to stock Hindi music cassettes, and the bookstore turned into a circulating library. Mum and I were there when kaka told us they were selling the store which was suffering losses anyway. I was in my last year of school and although, I felt really sorry for Kamat kaka, I cudnt really put my finger on what it was that I was left feeling exactly.

I was still not old enuff to understand nostalgia, and I was just young enuff to scoff at adult sentimentality. But I think I realised she had lost something intangible and important, when mum said the bookstore of her childhood was gone.

A coffeeshop now stands in its place, not a real coffee-shop really, you know, like Cafe Mysore is, but just another of those generic air-conditioned, glass-doored outlets of a chain thats mushroomed all over the city, where the coffee tastes the same if you drink it in Saki Naka or SoBo.

Of course, I also fell in love with the Sion Crossword and the sprawling Landmark, and Oxford with its lovely Cha Bar, and Mangesh Bookstore seemed nothing more than a quaint little anachronism to me when I thought about it.

But that was only until recently I discovered the joys of buying books in Strand, where there was another Kamath kaka (albeit with an 'H' at the end of his name, and a Karwari nasal twang that comes with it!)

The first time I entered Strand, I was struck by how tiny it was as compared to the acres of Landmark. "Where are all the sectionplates?" I exclaimed audibly as C. dada nudged me in my ribs and muttered something about me being a birdbrained idiot in my ear.

We bought a ton of books; he turned his nose firmly up at the Dan Browns in the corner while I carried on moving to the usual suspects. Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse.

I picked up "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen" and "Right Ho, Jeeves!" to add to the pile of esoteric books he'd made.

As kaka made up the bill for us, we realised we were three hundred short of the total bill. Dada shrugged and gave me a look that said I cudnt have my books. I sulked as he picked the two books off the top of the pile and put them to a side on the counter before saying, "We're not taking these."

Kaka looked at me, smiled, called to me and pressed the books in my hand. "You like Wodehouse, na? Take these and read. Pay next time."

I was hardly a kid, but he'd just treated me as kindly as if I was one.

I glanced up at dada who looked like he didnt know how to react to this. He shrugged again as Amit uncle put the books into two plastic bags and held them out to us.

As we exited, dada said, "That wud never happen in a Crossword, y'know? Arent you glad we came all the way here to buy books?"

I nodded thinking to myself. He was right. That wud never happen in a Crossword. They didnt have a concept of "pay next time". That requires trust and a shared love for books.

And a love for books can only be found in a real bookstore.

P.S.

I found this today while I was deleting old stuff, in the My Documents folder in my pc in a MS Word file entitled simply "Strand"; the date stamp says it was written on 22nd May, 2005. I dont know why I wanted to put it up today but I did. I thought it wud be a good way to start a new blog. Also, its interesting to note that five years down the line, my writing style has scarcely changed.

Of course, Kamath kaka died a couple of years ago and his sister now sits in what was once his chair at the annual Strand sale. I dont know why I feel so oddly attached to Strand Bookstore though I only discovered it when I was 16. I wish I had been able to cherish Kamat kaka's Mangesh Bookstore as much as I cherish Strand today. Perhaps, now I am old enough to know nostalgia and no longer young enuff to scoff at adult sentimentality.