Book Review: THE PASSING OF PATRIMONIALISM

The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911-1948; by Margrit Pernau; New Delhi: Manohar, 2000 (earlier version published in German as Verfassung und politische Kultur im Wandel : der indische Fürstenstaat Hyderabad 1911-48; Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1992)


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The incredible wealth and personal oddities of Hyderabad's last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan; combined with the striking anomaly that the Deccan outpost of, and successor-state to, the Mughal empire -- it is no coincidence that the graves of Aurangzeb and the first Nizam lie very near each other, in the Burhanuddin dargah in Maharashtra’s Khuldabad -- survived until the middle of the twentieth century; not to mention the state's bizarre decision to try and cling on as a monarchy even after the departure of the British, rather than strike a reasonable accommodation with the post-1947 Indian state; have contributed to the dominant popular image of the Nizamate, and of its court culture, as one of eccentricity and anachronism. If ever a polity was in the wrong time, popular historiography seems to agree, the Mughal relic in the Deccan was it. Margrit Pernau's first achievement in The Passing of Patrimonialism, then, is in taking and representing that polity seriously for a relatively non-specialist audience. Her book (the English version is a 2000 reworking of her 1992 German-language study) attempts to take the reader through the last four decades of British rule in India from the perspective of (for the most part) the Nizam's court and Hyderabad's political elites. While the Pernau of 2000 acknowledges that her 1992 thesis' implicit conflation of "politics" with the statecraft and maneuvers of the Hyderabad political elites is a bit too narrow given the book's subtitle, she unapologetically insists upon the subject's importance. One would be hard-pressed to deny it, although Pernau's concession does mean that one cannot take the book's stated ambit, "Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911-1948", literally. The "patrimonialism" of the title refers to Max Weber's classification of the forms of "traditional " political authority in his seminal Economy and Society. Following Weber, Pernau notes:

. . . three forms within traditional authority, that is authority which derives its legitimacy 'by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules ('existing since time immemorial') and powers. The first form is gerontocracy or primary patriarchalism, which functions without an administrative staff of its own and therefore can exercise control only over a limited area. . . . If an administrative staff develops, it can be responsible to the ruler personally -- the second form. In this case Weber speaks of patrimonialism. Alternatively -- and this is the third form -- it can appropriate particular powers and economic assets, in which case it would be called estate-type domination. . . . (Passing of Patrimonialism, pg. 51)

The "passing" the book's title refers to is thus that of Hyderabad from the pre-modern "patrimonialism" of the Asaf Jahi state to the modern, impersonal bureaucratic state. But the bureaucratic state Pernau apparently has in mind is not simply the Indian Union. While Hyderabad is commonly thought of in popular discourse as stuck in a time warp until its old order was replaced by virtue of the state's absorption into the Indian Union in 1948, Pernau sees the transition as having begun much earlier, such that the ancien regime was already all but dead by the time the Indian Army walked into the state. In Pernau's view, the passage from the second to the third of Weber's forms of "traditional authority" was initiated by the last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan (r. 1911-1948), who sought to create a modern administrative state structure that would nevertheless leave undisturbed the legitimacy and symbolic order of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, a monarchy that bore the trace of its distant Mughal origins in the sovereign's own title (the "nizam" of the title referred originally to Mir Qamaruddin Khan, the eighteenth century Mughal "nizam-ul-mulk" ("administrator of the land", a title given to Mughal governors) who founded the dynasty by achieving the de facto independence of the declining Mughal state's Deccan province). But The Passing of Patrimonialism isn't very clear as to whether this bureaucratization was the result of the last Nizam's own drive for centralized power (at the expense of that of other traditional elements in the state, such as the nobility); or of the Raj's determination by the 1920s to clip Osman Ali Khan's wings, by attempting to institutionalize administrative authority in the state in order to reduce its dependence on a man the British alternately regarded as bulwark and troublemaker.


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The book's failure to explore this distinction points to a wider issue. An account of Hyderabad's broader passage from the world of the "beloved" Nizam Mahboob Ali Khan (d. 1911) (held, along with his Minister Maharajah Kishen Prashad, to typify the traditional Hyderabadi courtly ethos) to that of the modern nation-state, would unquestionably be highly significant (whether or not even pre-1911 Hyderabad conformed to Weber's notions of the "patrimonial," given the size and extent of the state, and the fact of British paramountcy and range of "impersonal" means at the colonial power's disposal to influence events within the state, is a separate question). But The Passing of Patrimonialism only intermittently concerns itself with such an account, and even less so with a study of the state's increasing bureaucratization, with the result that the book's statement of thesis, laid out in Pernau's introduction, is somewhat misleading. Pernau does engage with her book's purported subject when it comes to discrete areas -- such as her superb account of the manner in which the patrimonial (and perennial) struggle between the aristocratic Paigah family and the sovereign, with the contours of Paigah power varying over time and dependent on the nature of the family's relations with the Nizam -- became institutionalized by the end of the 1920s, the rights and privileges of Paigah seigneurial authority over the family lands becoming appropriate subjects for legal/rule-based adjudication, rather than informal politics. But for the most part, the book does not provide an overarching account of a system passing into bureaucratic modernity. Indeed, at its most persuasive, such as in the long fifth chapter on the new forms of political mobilization in the twentieth century, the resulting sharpening of linguistic and communal boundaries as well as the simultaneous fluidity of the boundaries between the Indian nationalist, Hindu revivalist, and linguistic movements; and on the extent to which even orthodox Muslim "loyalism" ultimately undermined the polity; the book's account of the passing of Hyderabad's patrimonial structure does not seem to have anything to do with the increased bureaucratization of the state. The nazar controversy of 1920 serves as a good illustration. Osman Ali Khan's re-interpretation of the Mughal concept of nazar, from a personal presentation to the sovereign as homage, or at the time of a request; to an institutionalized (and highly unpopular) revenue stream collected throughout the realm; would appear to be a perfect illustration of the book's thesis. But Pernau discusses the issue only within the context of rising tensions between the Nizam and the British, and other critics who saw the new policy as evidence of Osman Ali Khan's avarice. A study of the new nazar policy as symptomatic of the passing of patrimonialism is strangely absent.


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Fortunately, the tale Pernau does tell is no less significant. The Passing of Patrimonialism is essentially a history of Hyderabad's politics during Osman Ali Khan's reign, and, given the paucity of overarching scholarly narratives on this subject in English, it is welcome as such a history. Ultimately, the broader historical passage Pernau's title alludes to is not the subject of her history so much as it is the backdrop to her account of the efforts of the Hyderabad ruling elites to negotiate both British paramountcy and the rising tide of nationalism, all the while attempting to preserve the old order. Pernau's book, that is to say, is not a study of the last Nizam's modernization drive as symptomatic of a long structural change, but is primarily a history of his strategy to negotiate that change. That strategy was doomed to fail -- Osman Ali Khan's regime ultimately found itself on the wrong side of virtually every major political trend, with the exception of the increased bureaucratization that was one of modernity's hallmarks, or of an overtly Muslim politics, although even both of these could not help but undermine the foundations of the ancien regime that had encouraged them. However, an adequate understanding of that attempt, that is, of Osman Ali Khan's position as a crucial transitional figure -- a "modernizer," but one who sought to use modernization to try and shore up his position and to hold outsiders at bay -- is essential, not only where the political history of the Deccan is concerned, but also because it encapsulates several major themes in Indian history that resonate down to our times: the dichotomies of "tradition" and "progress"; cultural autonomy and "outside" influence; the functioning of colonialism in the context of "indirect" rule; the grand narratives of nationalism and communalism (Muslim and Hindu); the more localized narrative of a sub-national (Telugu, but also Marathi) identity; not to mention (by the end of the period) an armed peasant uprising.


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The Passing of Patrimonialism is very good in illustrating the unintended consequences of political actors pursuing their own ends within the context of the hybrid colonial system that combined directly ruled British India with a patchwork of "native ruled" states, and over which (certainly by the late nineteenth century) British authority and influence was such that their characterization in the academic literature as instances of "indirect" rule is entirely justified. Pernau lucidly shows how, step-by-step, and cognizant of his early weakness within Hyderabad vis-a-vis the nobility and the throne's Minister (given that the appointment of the latter had long been one of the principal ways in which the colonial power exercised influence at the Hyderabad court, the position was an especial interest of the British, and, over time, no Minister could be appointed without British approval) the last Nizam sought to shore up his authority by courting the British Resident and importing (or accelerating the adoption of) British bureaucratic models within the state's administration; while, simultaneously, attempting to instal his own men in significant administrative positions. (The latter move adversely impacted the traditional aristocracy, and, indirectly, British influence, given the nobility's tendency to appeal to the British Resident for support in conflicts with the court.) This double (and somewhat contradictory) move would have been fairly typical of the dance the larger princely states had to manage vis-a-vis the Raj (the double move would become a trapeze act once nationalistic politics gained ground in the twentieth century, as India's new "mass leaders" challenged the legitimacy of the "traditional" rulers in profoundly destabilizing ways), were it not for the outbreak of World War I.

Pernau underscores that the British need to "keep Muslims loyal" in the face of an enemy that included Ottoman Turkey (still ruled by a Sultan who was nominally Khalifah (Caliph) of all (Sunni) Muslims worldwide) led them to solicit the overt support of the Nizam, as the ruler of the largest Muslim(-ruled) principality in India. This need became ever more urgent once it became clear that the war's end would spell radical changes to the nature of the Ottoman state. Not to mention that complications arose from Britain's position as global -- and not just an Indian -- power: while the British had extended assurances to Indian Muslim leaders that the position of the Khalifah as custodian of the holy places of Makkah and Madinah would not be affected, these promises were simply inconsistent with the expectations of Arab nationalists (also encouraged by the British) that henceforth they would rule in the Arab lands. While the Nizam's combination of loyalty and subservience to the Raj, and championing of a specifically Muslim agenda, would pose problems once the Khilafat movement made the two courses diverge, until that break, on Pernau's account, the Nizam was able to see his position as "Muslim leader" as an opportunity to leverage his relations with the Raj in his favor. However, what neither the Nizam, nor the British (nor anyone else) foresaw was the destructive impact the Nizam's new pan-Indian Islamic identity ("new" in the sense that it was understood to transcend the borders of the state of Hyderabad; the Asaf Jahi dynasty had always seen itself as orthodox Muslim, but had not laid any claim to wider Muslim significance beyond the Deccan, and had over time celebrated the notion of a court culture where Hindu and Muslim could not be distinguished on the basis of language or dress) would have on the legitimacy of his state in the eyes of its own population, the vast majority of which was Hindu.


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What explains this blindness? One might just chalk it up to the inevitable law of unintended consequences, but Pernau links it to the ambiguous duality inherent in the position of the princely states vis-a-vis the Raj. That is, the princes were expected to maintain "traditional" rule within their borders, but at the same time had to follow the British "civilizing" lead (a ruler who stubbornly refused to implement any of the modern bureaucratic, administrative, educational, and technological methods being applied in British India, would soon find himself -- as an unfriendly reactionary -- on the wrong side of the state's British Resident). Conversely, the princely states could not go the whole hog in conforming to the British model: not only would this be suicidal for the native rulers' own position (which to a large extent depended on traditional symbols and models of patronage, few of which could survive the impersonal bureaucratization of the modern state), but it would also undermine the Raj's own rationale for why the princely states continued to be tolerated. That is, if the British were justified in letting the princely states survive despite their "backwardness", this was because "traditional authority" was better suited to Indian realities, and indeed, the Indian public was imagined to be greatly attached to the traditional forms of authority. (The cynicism of such justifications may be readily gleaned from the obvious point that this essentially relativistic argument could just as easily be used to undermine the ideological foundations of colonial rule in British India. Pernau, more charitably, refers to this unacknowledged contradiction within British imperial ideology, but that presupposes an integrity that I am not persuaded imperial policymakers possessed.) Wholesale importation of the British model would de-stabilize the traditional bond between prince and subject. The "traditional" rulers also began to serve a second ideological function once Western-educated Indians began to lead the nascent nationalistic movements: in contrast to the likes of the urban, Anglicized Indians who showed signs of making greater political demands than the Raj was prepared to grant; the nawabs and maharajahs could be held up as representatives of the "real" India. The (pre-Gandhi) Indian nationalists might have been "civilized" by means of their Western-style education and orientation, but that also made them un-Indian in the eyes of the colonial power, and hence un-representative. Progress, the Raj's message appeared to be, came at the price of political irrelevance.

In sum, the princely order was already accustomed to grappling with two systems, and even two symbolic orders; one applying to the native state's dealings with the "external" power, and the second applying to its dealings with its own people. On Pernau's telling, the Nizam (presumably in common with the other princes) did not appreciate that the second system could be profoundly affected by the vagaries of the first. Thus, the "external" approach of presenting the Asaf Jahi ruler as natural leader of India's Muslims, and custodian in some vague sense of Indian Islam, was not perceived to have any bearing on the Nizam's relationship with his own subjects. To the extent Pernau is right, the Nizam was no more wrong than the other princes about the relationship between "outside" and "inside". However, as the ruler of the largest native state, and the only one who had become implicated in pan-Indian symbolism, only the Nizam was playing such a high-stakes game. And Hyderabad was one of the handful of large states where the ruling family and the majority of the population belonged to different religions. Pernau is surely right to pinpoint the dovetailing of British and Nizam interests in Osman Ali Khan's adoption of pan-Indian Muslim garb, as setting the stage for a communal disaster within Hyderabad. The nationalistic mobilizations and communal conflicts that engulfed India in the decades after World War I would likely have made things challenging for the polity in any event, but the Nizam posing as Muslim champion made the destruction of his regime's neutrality, and, ultimately, its legitimacy, inevitable. Not to mention that the shift would also come to restrict the Nizam's room for maneuver where proponents of a specifically Muslim politics were concerned; by the 1940s the state was regularly bullied and co-opted by the fanatics of the Majlis-e-Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen (although the significance of the Nizam's own cynicism in encouraging the Majlis in order to undermine other power centers within Hyderabad; and Jinnah's opportunism in forging an alliance with the likes of Majlis leader Bahadur Yar Jung as part of the Muslim League's drive to present itself as India-wide representative of all Muslims, whether in British India or the princely states, cannot be underestimated either). By the time of Hyderabad's collision course with the post-1947 Indian state, Pernau notes that the old order had in any event become irretrievable: the Nizam still reigned, but his rule was becoming an empty shell in the face of a de facto coup d'etat by the Majlis's military wing, the Razzakars. In the wake of nationalism, while democratic politics ended up undermining the legitimacy of princely rule all over the sub-continent, the same politics also served to renovate many a prince as Member of Parliament or Minister after 1947. But Hyderabad's particular constellation of events meant there would be no re-invention for the Nizam and his descendants as modern politicians. Like that other state that lay directly across the fault-lines of the transfer of power from Britain to its successor states, namely Kashmir, the former ruling family in Hyderabad is today utterly absent from the public life of its former realm (except as the subject of news stories about ongoing litigation concerning the family fortune), in a way that would be unimaginable where the erstwhile rulers of the Rajasthan states, or Gwalior, are concerned.


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But The Passing of Patrimonialism overstates the case when it asserts that Osman Ali Khan's re-orientation of his throne as leader and symbol of India's Muslims was not intended to have any bearing on the throne's relationship with its non-Muslim subjects. That is, Pernau ascribes tactical, but not ideological, significance to this move where the Nizam was concerned. But it is difficult to square this with Pernau's own account of the last Nizam's "attitude towards the Hindu-Muslim question" within Hyderabad (pgs. 150-151): what policy could be less likely to maintain Hyderabad's internal Hindu-Muslim equilibrium than the virtually complete sidelining of Hindus from the highest echelons of the cabinet after 1924 -- especially given that the same period saw the first Hindu-Muslim riots, and the arrival of the Muslim tabligh and Hindu nationalist "re-conversion" drives to the Nizam's domains. Doubtless Osman Ali Khan was no closet Majlis ideologue, but it is hard to shake the impression that he was (or grew) susceptible to the puritanical political Islam espoused by the likes of Osmania University's Habib-ur-Rahman and (later) the Majlis. The last Nizam probably did not have any radical moves in mind, but Pernau devotes insufficient attention to his encouragement of a shift in emphasis where the bases of his rule were concerned, in favor of a more overtly Muslim garb for the state.

The final act of this communal drama was grisly indeed: Pernau estimates that "one tenth to one fifth of the male Muslim population" was massacred in the conflagration that followed the Indian army's entry into Hyderabad in September 1948, as the Razzakar oppression of Hindus during the Nizamate's last years was apparently followed by indiscriminate massacres and violence against Muslims, "primarily in the countryside and provincial towns." (Pg. 336). The claim (which Pernau mentions in passing, citing the work of Omar Khalidi, Wilfred Smith, and a few others) is startling, not just because carnage on this scale is more commonly associated with the 1947 violence (especially in Punjab and Bengal), but because attention on human rights violations during this period has tended to focus on Razzakar atrocities against the peasantry prior to the Indian army action, and on the army's own human rights violations in the wake of the "police action." The latter pale in comparison to the sort of violence Pernau mentions, and I do not know if this lacuna in so many writings on the period points to the factual unreliability of the claim that so many were killed, or to the scandal of a most under-studied example of the sort of "popular" mass killings (perpetrated not, or not simply, by the arms of the state, but by large populations) Mahmood Mamdani discusses in his permanently useful study of Rwanda When Victims Become Killers,. In such circumstances, the horror of violence -- by victims whose sense of historical grievance unmoors retributive violence from any sense of "measure" -- is shocking not just because of its brutality, but because it is experienced by perpetrators as liberation. Intriguingly, my (admittedly anecdotal) experience discussing this issue with a couple of people from Aurangabad and Hyderabad points to disbelief, even among Urdu-speaking Muslims, that the killings could have occurred on such a scale. This too is in stark contrast to the situation vis-a-vis the 1947 Partition massacres: while in both situations, notions of community honor and shame contribute to reluctance to discuss the violence (especially sexual violence), except in general terms, everyone seems ready to acknowledge its scale (even if primary responsibility is often sought to be foisted on the "other" religious group). Where Hyderabad is concerned, there is an almost complete absence of discussion of the sort of popular violence Pernau references, except in the general sense of an instance, even if extreme, of recurrent Hindu-Muslim communal violence. Nor can it be simply a question of blotting out a trauma, since my sense is that it is not difficult to solicit reports of atrocities by the Indian military. Perhaps the fact that the brunt of the violence was borne in villages and smaller towns, as opposed to in larger urban areas where the Indian military was able to exercise control relatively quickly and effectively, offers an explanation. The urban masses, whether elite or subaltern, Hindu or Muslim, and especially in the nerve center of Hyderabad city, did not experience the singularity of violence on this unprecedented scale; what they experienced might well be accountable by means of narratives of "normal" Hindu-Muslim violence, or of the end of an old order (the fall of the Nizam's regime). But the fact that Pernau seems to be one of the few authors who has even tackled the issue -- and it is hardly the main focus, even of her work -- leaves the lay reader in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide whether the silence is itself a singular historical phenomenon worthy of study (apart from, of course, the fact of such a carnage, which ought to inform a whole host of historical and political narratives; The Hindu carried one of the few popular articles on the issue in 2001); or if it raises questions about the scholarship underlying the claim of so many killed. Stated crudely, one finds oneself asking whether Pernau, Khalidi, and Smith, et al., are right as far as the number of those killed is concerned (the fact of widespread massacres is not in dispute, given the anger and concern expressed by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru upon hearing of the reports, not to mention the Noorani article in The Hindu), in a way one never needs to where the other, academically well-plowed massacres of India's atrocious 1940s, are concerned.


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Although The Passing of Patrimonialism doesn't quite justify its title and introduction, it is invaluable as a study of the government-level politics of Hyderabad during the reign of the last Nizam. This is so despite the fact that Pernau's book leaves the reader none the wiser on the question as to why Hyderabad's political elite pursued (at least once it became clear that the departure of the British was imminent) a policy that does not need the wisdom of hindsight to be described as suicidal. How is one to account for this blindness, right to the bloody and bitter end? Perhaps it couldn't be otherwise, given the book's focus on strategy and maneuver, and its relative indifference to the ideology of the narrative's principal figures (apart from the ethos of the traditional nobility, sketched as backdrop at the book's outset). Equally, however, the mystery might be a function not just of this study's limitations, but of the sparsity of the historical record in key respects -- unlike their rather prolific counterparts in British India, many of the prime movers in Hyderabad during this period (including the Nizam and the Razzakars) left few private papers that have been made public. Moreover, the Nizam had many policies implemented orally, and, as Pernau notes, on occasion in direct contradiction of the written policies (principally in order to satisfy the British with respect to a particular demand, while actually creating facts on the ground to opposite effect). The foregoing, and the intersection of the ritualized forms of Mughal court practice in the context of a thoroughly modern colonialism, combine to lend an air of kabuki to the proceedings that the historian is charged with deciphering. However, The Passing of Patrimonialism is superb in evoking the practice of colonial statecraft in the context of indirect rule. That practice -- conducted in an elaborate dance of letters, personal interviews, "advice" from the British Resident, appeals and counter-appeals to (and reprimands from) the Viceroy in Delhi (and even, by the 1930s, to politicians in London), and ministerial intrigues -- is masterfully recreated by Pernau's judicious marshaling of a wide range of sources, and drives home, both the reality of indirect rule and the ceaseless attempts of the princes to try and game the system, however rigged.


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Pernau memorably offers a glimpse into the true nature of that system by means of her discussion of the Nizam's attempts to call into question the nature and basis of British paramountcy, in order to regain control over the province of Berar (leased to the British under dubious circumstances since the mid-nineteenth century, the arrangement confirmed in perpetuity since the early twentieth; apparently leading Mahbub Ali Khan to joke that his G.C.B. award actually stood for "Gave Curzon Berar"). Confronted with a claim that was legally sound, the Raj was forced to articulate the naked force (as opposed to liberal conceptions of the rule of law and treaty rights) that ultimately underlay British supremacy vis-a-vis the princely states, a supremacy "not based only upon treaties and engagements, but exist[ing] independently of them”; it was, after all “the right and the privilege of the Paramount Power to decide all disputes that m[ight] arise between States, or between one of the States and itself." (March 27, 1926 letter from the Viceroy to the Nizam, quoted on pgs. 143-44). In our post-9/11 world, when nostalgia for the British empire and arguments for new imperial arrangements have become commonplace in the writings of both academics (such as Niall Ferguson) and popular writers (such as Robert Kaplan), we would do well to keep the crude honesty of Lord Reading's words in mind, both for what they teach us about the nature of imperialism, and for, as Pernau shows, the distorting effect the cloaking of the latter has on the politics of the governed. None of this predetermined the Nizam's utter lack of political realism or wisdom in the final analysis. But, as Pernau recognizes, the manufacture and maintenance of shadow sovereignties increasingly divorced from reality, and essential to effacing the nature of colonial rule in the eyes of "indirect" subjects, surely incentivized a system where reflexive conflation of form and substance, and a disastrous over-estimation of the latter based on the former (especially when the increasingly hollow form remained decked out in the iron clad regalia of solemn treaties with, and political guarantees by, a colonial power that, in the final analysis simply decided to wash its hands of the mess and leave), was a real possibility:

While in former times symbols had been an impressive language understood by both the British and the princes, a language in which the struggle for power was conducted, by 1930 the British had forgotten all they ever knew about the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Consequently they no longer regarded symbols as signs but as substitutes for real power and used them accordingly. Hyderabad remained tragically unaware of this change; part of the overestimation of its own power, which ultimately led to its downfall, can be traced back to this. (Pg. 220)

Truck: A love story

There are only two outcomes to reading this book. Either you will love it or you would not finish it.

Michael Perry’s “TRUCK: A love Story” is an autobiographical account of two parallel stories. One that involves the resurrection of an old International truck and the other revolves about finding the perfect woman after many imperfect ones. And by that definition of it being an autobiography, the book falls squarely into the category of Non-Fiction. However, I wouldn’t hold anything against you if you consider this book more as a fiction novel than anything else.

It’s a book that you will appreciate more if you have ever witnessed small town America first hand and if you like reading about cars and what they can do besides take you to place B from place A. But even if neither are your forte, I would still recommend this as good reading. Worst case, you just won’t finish it.

The author’s observational skills are superb. And perhaps why, he works successfully as a writer. His speech is hardly pedagogic. In fact, he almost seems apologetic when he has a bit of advice to share. All through the book, his recollections are always attached with some kind of message. And I am very grateful to him for never spelling it out.

The book essentially revolves around an old beaten up red pickup truck. Michael teams up with his brother-in-law to repair before the next hunting season. However, he isn’t much of a mechanic and he spends most of his time doing simple tasks about the truck. But in the meantime, the author busies himself observing. Narrating stories of neighbors, paraplegic motorcycle riders and intensely tough women…

One such woman he eventually falls in love with. The second half of the book the truck narration takes a back seat while the author describes the cultivation and the culmination of a wonderful relationship. One that begins with smelling her hair and eventually ends with sinking in her hair! And in good fashion, the book ends with a unique marriage and most importantly a running and functional pickup truck. Albeit, with a four point harness just because it would be funny.

There are delightful characters littered through the book. You cannot thank the author for their development since they are all real to begin with but you can thank him for describing them so well. From his brother in law who recommends to “walk it off” no matter how deep the crisis to his British best friend with whom he spends most of him not talking at all.

And of course the woman he meets seems wonderful too. He says this about her.
“I am falling deeply in love with a particular woman because on a regular basis she allows me to say the wrong things, back up and try again. She has this reasonableness. I love that about here”

It’s these simple sentences that get to you. And you would find them all over the book.

Maybe I am biased here. Because I too have loved, and I too find pickup trucks beautiful. But the real reason I loved this book is the utter reality of it all. We might not be able to write about our individual lives but I am certain if we did, we would all have best sellers on our hands.

AFRICA'S WORLD WAR by Gerard Prunier

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Africa's World War, Gerard Prunier's fantastic exercise in a sort of double contextualization -- of both the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing trans-continental Congo conflict, involving at least half a dozen countries and yet more non-state militias and organizations -- is essential reading. Prunier analyzes the causes and course of the conflict in significant detail, without losing sight of his non-specialist audience, and all the while going beyond the glib explanations (of the "ancient ethnic hatreds" variety) much loved by the international community when it comes to many conflict situations, especially African ones. Prunier is rightly skeptical of the "New World Order" that emerged in the wake of the Berlin Wall's fall, not to mention the neo-colonial "old" order championed in Africa by the likes of France; at the same time, he eschews the facile (and condescending) anti-imperialism of many on the left, tending to deprive African political actors of agency. But perhaps most notably, Prunier seeks to correct the record when it comes to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, and the movement he leads (the Rwandan Patriotic Front ("RPF")), presenting a far more complicated and disturbing picture of the RPF's activities in the Great Lakes region than readers of Philip Gourevitch's one man pro-RPF lobby would be familiar with. This isn't simply an academic question for Prunier, as he strives to demonstrate how Rwanda's post-genocide government shrewdly (and cynically) exploited the Clinton Administration's guilt over its inaction in the face of the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Rwanda's (then Hutu-led) regime -- with disastrous consequences for the rest of the region, as Rwanda used the excuse of pursuing the genocidaires in the neighboring Congo (then called Zaire) to invade its gargantuan neighbor, fueling a conflict that has been estimated to have claimed four million lives over the last decade -- the deadliest conflict since World War II (indeed Prunier implicitly suggests the Bush Administration, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, were more clear-sighted with respect to the RPF, Powell reportedly telling Kagame at their first meeting that the carte blanche hitherto given the RPF to remake the region in the name of security for the Tutsi-dominated regime, was history).



Africa's World War is a lot more nuanced than the above has probably made it seem. For instance, Prunier's debunking of the myth of the virtuous RPF does not lead him to ignore the very real security threat that the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the RPF's 1994 victory over the genocidaire regime, continued to pose to the new government; but he rightly questions the offensive conflation of the Hutu refugees in general with the genocidaires. Nor does he pull any punches when discussing the RPF's own gross violence and its own blatantly discriminatory attitude towards the Hutus. Finally, the international community's combination of moralistic posturing, cretinous imbecility, and hypocrisy comes in for its share of the flak too. This isn't a book with "good guys" (although this reader found himself wishing Prunier had spent more time fleshing out the character of Joseph Kabila, the seemingly callow successor (and son) of Laurent Kabila, whose prior career had been devoid of anything suggesting that he would turn out to be the shrewd and capable customer he has turned out to be in running a country that was in dire straits when his father took it over from the West's erstwhile Cold War ally (and kleptocrat supreme) Mobutu Sese Seko, and no less so when Mobutu's successor died), but one that highlights the shifting complexities of the region's politics. For instance, taking the "international" dimension of the Congolese wars as an example (one among many), the reader quickly learns that it is impossible to engage with the Congolese wars that brought down the Mobutu regime in 1996-97, and then continued to rage for years due to a variety of reasons, local, economic, and international, without engaging with the history of the Congo's neighbors, including (apart from Rwanda), Uganda (where Kagame and the RPF cut their teeth in the 1980s in that country's civil wars), Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and Angola. The complexity of the situation chronicled in the book can sometimes feel overwhelming, despite the helpful key at the front of the book, and running footnotes might have been more helpful than the appendix; one hopes that future editions spare a thought to this effect for the lay reader.



But no caviling can detract from the fact that Prunier's is the indispensable English-language book for understanding the Great Lakes wars of the last decade, combining empathy and engagement with cynicism regarding the motives of the players that borders on the ruthless. In the final analysis, and despite the book's title, Prunier sees his subject as more analogous to Europe's seventeenth century Thirty Years' War rather than to World War I, both in terms of the conflict's structure (with much of the momentum provided by private/princely interests and greed rather than reasons of state per se, and in terms of its wide-ranging impact. Prunier's thesis is that the conflict has gone a long way toward consigning the "old" African "system" -- a relic of the Cold War and half-hearted de-colonization -- to the dustbin of history, much as the Thirty Years' War paved the way for the Westphalian system that would dominate Europe in subsequent centuries. Especially in the Great Lakes region, the old world, born of imperialism, ethnic conflict, economic pressures, Cold War ripple effects, and the weakness of the nation-state (a weakness, nowhere greater than in the Congo, transforming just about every civil war into a conflict with trans-national ramifications, as everybody's enemy set up shop in the Congo, where the central government was too weak to keep anybody out). As to whether the new beast slouching towards Bethlehem is "better" or "worse" than the dying animal, there are no easy answers -- if the Thirty Years' War is any guide, the jury might remain out for a few centuries yet.


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Not everyone is impressed with Prunier's book, including the U.S. army's Thomas Odom.

Reading Orwell Lite

It’s George Orwell season again, an observance that may outlast the swallows of San Juan Capistrano. War is always a good occasion to trot him out, as are obfuscating politicians. So, really, he goes well with anything.
- Willing Davidson

In his 47 years on the planet George Orwell certainly packed a lot in his life before he finally packed his bags and moved further upstairs. He served in the Burmese Imperial Police, made time to join other writers in fighting in the Spanish Civil war, and later was known mingle with sweepers and others by dressing and working like one in order to research his material better. Orwell, of course, had a strong political agenda and is best known for his essays on poverty, politics and his grand works. As Willing Davidson writes, he goes with anything including social comedy.

A few months ago, I read Coming up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and realised that Orwell's writing is not always like listening to Beethoven's openings - heavy, dark and laced with deep sarcasm. There is a light version of Orwell, much like the playful melodies of Mozart or Schubert.

The hero of Coming up for Air is George Bowling, an middle-aged insurance agent with a crabby, penny-pinching wife and two kids who are more of a burden than a joy to bring up. Bowling is aware that he is the regular Joe - living in a suburban home outside London and one who fears his boss and his wife. He has not much to complain or much to live for. Frustrated with his boring job, nit-picking wife he has the feeling of being drowned by it all and wants to 'come up for some air'.

It's not really other women that he wants to chase, but something more innocent - his childhood. For sometime he wants to go back to his old hometown and go fishing and relive those sunnier and happier days. So, Bowling goes AWOL and embarks on this nostalgic adventure trip using the cliched excuse of a business trip. It is an entirely innocent desire, but not something that you would expect a grown man to indulge in or his wife to allow him to do so.

"If Hilda finds out, there will be a dreadful row", Bowling is convinced. Sure! I dare any husband to be able to actually convince his wife that the 'lost weekend' was really spent trying to find any old fishing spot from childhood and not spent seeking the arms of another woman. So, despite being a childish, but chaste adventure, Bowling feels guilty all the time. Yet, the promise of the forbidden pleasure makes Bowling feel he was coming up for air. As is to be expected, much as we would like, time does not stand still in our boyhood homes. People die, things happen. Bowling did not conceive of his old home,, as a Utopia, but he is ill-prepared to face the reality decades after days of youth.

In this particular novel, Orwell's gift for comedy shines on every page. So why is Orwell's gift for comedy not often mentioned. Perhaps because comedy in Orwell is a consequence of his acute observation. The human species when observed closely nothing but comic and absurd (A fact on which Kurt Vonnegut based his entire ouevre). That in summary is just the storyline. Orwell's critical eye misses nothing on marriage, bosses, urban development. Uncannily prescient, he sees through the hollowness of people trying to flaunt their fake green/organic culture credentials.

The first chapter is an absolute delight:

"... Do you know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type
that's nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of the party? I'm that type. 'Fatty' they mostly call me. Fatty Bowling. George Bowling is my real name.

But at that moment I didn't feel like the life and soul of the party. And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a morose kind of feeling in the early mornings, although I sleep well and my digestion's good. I knew what it was, of course--it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water
in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you've bitten into a sour apple. Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a
landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an end. And I was fat as well as forty-five. As I stood up to soap my crutch I had a look at my figure. It's all rot about fat men being unable to see their feet, but it's a fact that when I stand
upright I can only see the front halves of mine. No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she's paid to. Not that at that moment I particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.

But it struck me that this morning there were reasons why I ought to have been in a better mood. To begin with I wasn't working today. The old car, in which I 'cover' my district (I ought to tell you that I'm in the insurance business. The Flying
Salamander. Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck--everything), was temporarily in dock, and though I'd got to look in at the London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off to go and fetch my new false teeth. And besides, there was another business that had been in and out of my mind for some time past. This was that I had seventeen quid which nobody else had heard about--nobody in the family, that is. It had happened this way. A chap in our firm, Mellors by name, had got hold of a book called Astrology applied to Horse-racing which proved that it's all a
question of influence of the planets on the colours the jockey is wearing. Well, in some race or other there was a mare called Corsair's Bride, a complete outsider, but her jockey's colour was green, which it seemed was just the colour for the planets that happened to be in the ascendant. Mellors, who was deeply bitten with this astrology business, was putting several quid on the horse and went down on his knees to me to do the same. In the end, chiefly to shut him up, I risked ten bob, though I don't bet as a general rule. Sure enough Corsair's Bride came home in a walk. I
forget the exact odds, but my share worked out at seventeen quid. By a kind of instinct--rather queer, and probably indicating another landmark in my life--I just quietly put the money in the bank and said nothing to anybody. I'd never done anything of this kind before. A good husband and father would have spent it on a
dress for Hilda (that's my wife) and boots for the kids. But I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.

After I'd soaped myself all over I felt better and lay down in the bath to think about my seventeen quid and what to spend it on. The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskies. I'd just turned on some more hot water and was
thinking about women and cigars when there was a noise like a herd of buffaloes coming down the two steps that lead to the bathroom. It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours is like a quart of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic stamping outside and then a yell of agony.

'Dadda! I wanna come in!'

'Well, you can't. Clear out!'

'But dadda! I wanna go somewhere!'

'Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I'm having my bath.'

'Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME--WHERE!'

No use! I knew the danger signal. The W.C. is in the bathroom--it would be, of course, in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I could. As I opened the door, little Billy--my youngest, aged seven--shot past me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. It was only when
I was nearly dressed and looking for a tie that I discovered that my neck was still soapy.

It's a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you've once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.
....

Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does still, but she's got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and when she's more upset than usual she's got a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire. She's one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up,
and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids' boots are wearing out, and there's another instalment due on the radio--that's Hilda's litany. She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast, and glooming at me, 'But, George, it's very SERIOUS! I don't know what we're going to DO! I don't know where the money's coming from! You don't seem to realize how serious it IS!' and so on and so forth. It's fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won't mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact she'll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.

e-book: Coming Up for Air

THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The fictional autobiography of a SS officer devoted to his duty -- whatever that may be and however unpleasant the work, such as, um, mass murder -- The Kindly Ones is not a great novel, principally because it isn't clear whether Littell subscribes to the notion of the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt put forward in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as opposed to the notion that the Nazi perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities were evil in some larger than life or monstrous way. This incoherence mars Littell's characterization of the novel's chief protagonist, and hence the book itself: Maximilien Aue is at one level a conscientious and capable Nazi functionary, and if he has a "flaw", it is that he is too honest and sincere, and is thus insensible to the various political currents around him, mastery of which is essential to advancing one's career in any bureaucracy. Aue is also wracked by a traumatic childhood love, namely his sister's; the two were separated by their mother and step-father after their illicit relationship was discovered. Moreover, Aue cannot, even as an adult, seem to forgive his mother for re-marrying after her husband (a World War I veteran drawn to German's burgeoning right wing political scene in the 1920s) goes missing. This Aue -- the vehicle of some rather obvious psychoanalytical cliches -- ends up drawn to Hitler as a sort of replacement father-figure, and winds up a true believer. When exploring the former, Littell's novel is a superb and compelling recreation of the Nazi SS structure, deepening one's appreciation of what Arendt might have meant by her now famous phrase; when exploring the latter, i.e. the erotic/psychological life of Aue, however, The Kindly Ones is just, well, banal, and simply does not justify its thousand-page length.



The above notwithstanding, The Kindly Ones is nevertheless one of the most important novels in years, and ought to be read, principally because of a stunningly plausible recreation of the atmosphere of "total war", and the mentality that enables and implements it. For that achievement, one might forgive the novel its many flaws, not least of them its flimsy and unconvincing evocation of Greek myth (the "kindly ones" of the book's title are the Furies) in a world where industrialized mass slaughter has drained the life from those myths, making them seem quaint. Littell's ability to position his imagination within the Nazi regime is remarkable, leading to a tour de force that is comprehensive and necessarily claustrophobic. Not to mention historically sound: much of the novel makes for a worthy companion-piece to Mark Mazower's indispensable Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rules Europe; both books take the reader deep within the monumental cruelty and imbecility of the Nazi regime, but also within the "normalcy" of the regime. Mazower's work is the more clear-sighted, but Littell's novel is more wounding, imprisoning the reader in a world that is unacceptable, and seemingly inescapable. When we finally do escape from it into Aue's inner life, we are disappointed: his pining for his lost love/sister, his parental baggage, are rather uninteresting, and a weak denouement to a narrative that has taken us from Germany to Ukraine, the Caucasus, Stalingrad, and back to Berlin, all by means of a vantage point that is alien to us. Littell undoubtedly has a point with the Aue family romance, but this reader was past caring by the point The Kindly Ones concludes by delving into it, the novel's anti-climax all the more feeble given the hundreds of pages of "total war" narrative that have preceded it.


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What Murakami talks about when he writes about running

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you are running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand it anymore is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important part of marathon running.

Almost all books on or about running are written by running experts, or great runners (in some cases by sports journalists detailing some great rivalry or a race). Very few books have been written by your average runner. That's odd because most runners are more likely to be average than not (though everyone thinks he/she is above average). As a result few books talk about what the experience of running and what the activity means to the average runner. Books not about technique, or diets, or workouts, but what it means to lace a pair of shoes and set forth - mostly alone.

Haruki Murakami's novels are not the easiest to read, but What I talk about when I talk about running is not one of them. The book is his memoir on his 20+ years as a runner. How it changed him, and how it helped him become a better writer. Murakami wasn't always a runner. Before he started to run 36-50 miles a week and at least one marathon a year, he ran a jazz bar. Only in his early 30s did he begin to write. After he quit running the bar, he began to write seriously. At that point of time he also began to run. Bit by bit, he built the endurance to run longer and longer distances till one day on a whim he ran laps of the Tokyo Palace to complete 22 miles. According to him, writing is a lot like running. You may have a lot of talent, but you need to sit at your desk and actually write. He writes that many writers are extremely talented -- words and ideas simply flow. But, very rarely do such writers manage to sustain this creative energy. They dry out as they age (or commit suicide) as they have not developed the discipline to write when inspiration doesn't come easily anymore, or they have exhausted their wellspring of ideas. Murakami says that he is one of those writers who has to bore through rock and dig, everyday, to find inspiration. Writing a serious, full-length novel means having to sit at a desk for hours for six months to a year. Most people cannot sustain that. Most people cannot sustain or maintain the training for a marathon either.

Running long races is hard and even if you have done that distance a hundred times, you cannot simply wake up and run well. The body is rather unforgiving and cannot be easily fooled. Like cramming for an exam, I am piling the miles to get ready for the annual Dexter to Ann Arbor half, perhaps a little too quickly. I am banking on the fact that I am still young, and I can log a 20+ mile week at the start of training. I know just too well how painful the last few miles can be if you are not there yet in terms of distance. In the book, Murakami recalls the Chiba marathon (his worst ever) where he made three mistakes - not enough training, not enough training, and not enough training.

It's fairly obvious that any kind of serious runner has to be competitive to some extent. Running races are not like horse races. It doesn't matter who you pass or who passes you; in the end, all you are interested in is -- did you beat yourself? did you surpass your own expectations? did you fight in the last few miles, to get the time you wanted? There is competition, but it's is 'I' vs 'me'. The mind against the body. Writing is also like that. You don't really compete against somebody. Everyone pretty much runs their own race. As a writer, you have to find your own voice, hit your own stride.

The above is all true - the pain, the discipline, the competition. Yet, like any runner knows, that's not just why runners run. At some point, Murakami developed runner's blues - he did not feel like running as much as before. Then one day, in Boston, as he stood by the Charles River seeing the boats in the water and the sky. The desire for running came back again. He answers a fundamental question that usually bothers only non-runners - Why do people run? To live longer? To be healthier. One answer is to live life to the fullest. The other is that there is something beautiful to be out there in the open, hearing the sounds around you punctuated by your own breathing. At some point, you hit the 'zone' where the mind is perfectly calm and the legs roll like they were not a part of you.

How Fiction Works - James Wood

One of the most extraordinary experiences was reading John Ciardi's How Does A Poem Mean? Ciardi, a poet and translator, knew enough about words to not title the book as: "What Does a Poem Mean?", or "How Poetry Works", and that makes a world of a difference. The book completely transformed how I read and perceive poetry. Ciardi wanted readers to understand that a poem is 'a performance', and the key to enjoying or appreciating one is to see how the poet goes about that performance; focusing not on what it means, but on how it goes about getting to meaning and how it goes beyond. Meanings are like seeing ripples in a pond.

James Wood is acknowledged to be one of the best literary critics writing for the general audience today. He has been praised by his peers for writing better reviews of the books than the books themselves. His recent review of Naipaul's biography and of the man himself is characteristic of his writing (Wounder and Wounded): clear, crisp prose without sentiment obscuring the critical analysis of a writer and his work.

In “The Enigma of Arrival,” the long book that Naipaul wrote about the Wiltshire countryside in which he has lived, intermittently, since 1971, there is a searing parenthesis in which he tells us about two derelict cottages he has been converting into a new home. One day, an old lady was brought by her grandson to look at the cottage where she once spent a summer, and, confused by Naipaul’s renovations, thought she had come to the wrong place. Naipaul was “ashamed,” he writes, and so “I pretended I didn’t live there.” But what is the source of the shame? Is it his building project or his very presence in the English countryside? He lives there but is ashamed to live there; the house for Mr. Naipaul in England, as for Mr. Biswas in Trinidad, is a homeless house. The man is still unaccommodated.

After reading that review, I was persuaded to read James Wood's book - How Fiction Works that was published earlier last year. James Wood's little red book written in short sequentially numbered paragraphs attempts to unlock the mysteries of 'how fiction comes about' to the common reader. After we agree that the 'common reader' of this book is to a little more uncommon, James Wood has largely succeeded in his aims.

What I liked about the book is that James Wood writes as a reader, one who really enjoys reading, and not as a critic who simply relishes tearing books and their authors apart. There is a delicious footnote in the book where he ponders over the metaphysical question of "Why do humans read? Does it provide an evolutionary advantage". His opinion is that we simply do, and we enjoy it. You feel connected to his career as happy reader when you hear him share his personal anecdotes about reading to his daughter, attending a concert with his wife, or his experience as a teenager reading books.

We grow as readers, and twenty-year olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it

Wood said that all the passages in the book were taken from the books in his study, which some critics took as an oblique boast. Perhaps that may be true, but from a reader's perspective it is best that an author writes about the world he or she knows. There is no doubt on that account. The intimacy that Wood shares with the books he discusses makes me wonder if he sleeps with them. After reading his dissection of subtleties of language and detail in a short passage from Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas I felt that my own reading of the book a few years ago could be likened to: a hastily consumed the meal in the confines of a car when I should have been eating it at a table course-by-course over a few hours savoring every morsel. Wood is great reader at the level of the line. He says that he simply loves this line by Virginia Woolf:

The day waves yellow with all its crops.

. He beings with Narration and then breaks down the commonly-understood unreliable first-person narrative and the reliable third-person narrative by showing that they are respectively not as unreliable or reliable as made out to be. Using a lovely example from Henry James's What Masie Knew, Wood demonstrates the flexibility of free indirect speech, a device that allows the author to step into the voice and thoughts of the character without intrusion, and then step out again. In a sentence like, 'He sat through the concert as idiot tears filled his eyes', the author can step into the mind of the character without intruding with a sentence like,'He sat through the concert thinking "I must be an idiot to cry through this piece"'.

In the chapter on Consciousness he contrasts three characters - King David, Macbeth and Dostoevesky's Raskolnikov to show how the modern novel is interested in the the private thoughts of characters as never before. We only hear King David speak to others, we never hear him think to himself. Macbeth only thinks when he soliloquizes, and has to voice his motives. Compared to the modern Raskolnikov who is extensively shown to be thinking, though we are not often told his motives; we infer them. The 20th century character refuses to stay stable, always "in psychological torment....the chronic instability of the self".

In an oblique way, Wood admits that poets have masterful control of language and writes that "like all great novelists, he was a great reader of poetry". Earlier in the book, he calls every novelist is a poet-manque. The whole chapter on language can be substituted by any book on poetry appreciation. Of course, Ciardi's is the best. Personally, I find that reading a poem often takes longer than reading a book, because in a few words there is so much going on. There are so many shades of meaning and diction matters much more in poetry than in prose. At the same time, he dislikes the obsessive Nabokovian stylistic intrusion in novels.

In the last chapter (Realism) Wood the reader disappears, and the literary critic writing for other literary critics rears his ugly head. He spends a number of pages defending realism in fiction from critics who have savaged the whole idea as a set of outmoded conventions and that fiction can never say anything 'real' about reality. Maybe realism needs defendind, but his arguments would be better in literary seminar or journal. Thankfully, he writes at the end of the chapter that fiction is about 'lifeness', which he summarizes in a quote from George Eliot:

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow human-men beyond our common lot

I thought all the debate about realism is really superfluous and is correctly the domain of fusty academics. I tend to go with Ciardi's assertion that what matters is the performance and the writer achieves that masterful gymnastic display. What words are used, what is described, and what is left out.

Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov

Browsing through bookshelves turns up unnoticed gems, works that are less well-known, but not lesser in any way. My earlier experience with Orwell's Burmese Days was a case in point. I was intrigued by Mikhail Bulgakov after first hearing about him a few months ago. He remained in the Soviet Union not for reasons of patriotism, but because he felt that a Russian writer had to live in Russia to write about it. Much of his work was banned and not published in his lifetime for being too critical of the Soviet regime. If Stalin had not personally liked him, Bulgakov would have ended up in a gulag or been executed long before dying of natural causes in 1940 at the age of 48. Most of his work remained in his desk drawer only to be published twenty years or more after his death. The early editions were highly censored and it was only in the early 80s that Bulgakov was considered to 'safe' enough to openly published. Of course, his fame and popularity was well-known via the samizdat. See (Wiki entry and kirijasto).

I was looking for his masterpiece The Master and Margarita which happened to be checked out, and I settled for his earlier work - The Heart of A Dog. It was published in 1925, less than a decade after the revolution, and it is remarkable how prescient the book is. The chief character is Prof. Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky, a world renowned scientist and surgeon. In his latest experiment he takes the testicles and hypophysis of a common criminal and successfully grafts them onto a mongrel. The dog slowly sheds off his 'dogness' and slowly becomes a human. The professor and his assistant, Dr. Bormenthal are first delighted with their scientific success and then horrified by the results. He cannot seem to evolve any more from a slovenly, drunken individual, but does manage to get a job as a cat exterminator in the Soviet system.

In the end, the professor concludes that this procedure excites only physiologists and scientists, but produced nothing of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. He says that instead of using a criminal, if he had used a scientist or poet, that would not a be great contribution to society either. Even lowly peasants produce geniuses in the natural course of events.

The professor represents the intelligentsia and he has no patience for the tom-foolery of the proletariat with their daily singing and collections for starving children in parts of the world. He says that the best way to ruin your appetite is to speak of medicine or Bolshevism at the dinner table. He shares his observation that patients who read the Pravda lost weight. His scientific knowledge or expertise is not valued by the local youth Comrade Shvonder, who is the chairman of the apartment complex, and who wants to take over several the professor's rooms cause he believes that he doesn't need all of them. The professor's insistence that having a dining room is critical to his mode of life is not something that Shvonder sympathetic to. The professor is as much a part of the system that he despises and needs to call one of his well-connected friends to get rid of Shvonder's socialist plans.

The self-styled Poligraph Poligrafovich Sharikov, dog turned human, in the meanwhile gets drunk, fights with his 'father' the professor, steals money, finds support from Shvonder to obtain papers for his legal existence, harasses women and spouts Engels. The dog is a symbol for the proletariat who are artificially being raised out of their sub-human existence by grafting them onto a different life. Despite the best intentions, that cannot result in anything but chaos. In a telling episode, the professor complains about how all the galoshes got stolen right after the revolution. There was no breakdown in law and order in the pre-Soviet times.

Sharikov, as he grows more human, turns into a complete menace. The professor quite sadly remarks that the Sharikov no longer has the heart of a dog, but the heart of a human. Bulgakov presents the cynical view that moving up the evolutionary chain also increases the capacity for mischief and evil. The professor then undoes the procedure on the mongrel Sharik who returns to being playful dog and who only thinks of his next meal.

In this book, Bulgakov criticizes the anti-intellectual atmosphere that the Soviet regime was creating, and also mocking the attempts to re-make the proletariat. While the professor has scientific freedom, he has no freedom to say what his wishes about the system. Sharik was fine as a mongrel, but in trying to remake him, they created a Frankenstein that would soon be out of control. At the same time, Bulgakov also mocks the science, the pompousness and sheltered life of academics, and the self-congratulatory nature of scientific discoveries. The professor despite all his disdain for the regime has to fall back on his friends in high places to resolve issues with the pesky Comrade Shvonder.

Bulgakov's attempt to publish criticism of the Soviet regime under the guise of science fiction was not successful and like most of his work remain unpublished for decades after his death.

Where have all the vowels gone?

Christian Bok has written a book - Eunoia that contains five chapters and uses only one vowel in the entire chapter.

Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language.

Forms are important in fiction and more so in poetry. While one may not agree with Robert Frost's assertion that free verse is like "playing tennis without a net", there have to be some bounds. Even the greatest abstract painting needs to have the limitation of a canvas. Great art is about surpassing the given limitations and working with a limited set of tools you make something great out of seemingly nothing. All of English literature has used only 26 letters.

Of course, rules are artificial but it's not just about surpassing limitations. Christian Bok takes rules and limitations to an absurd extreme in his latest attempt. From the excerpts I really doubt that there is any genuine merit, other than it being a mere intellectual exercise.

Of two writers who excel in wordplay I can think of two - Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie. Seth's wordplay is less obvious, more subtle and cerebral, while Rushdie's is more clever and immediately enjoyable. Of course, this stuff is all fluff, a mere accompaniment to their main story. They do have something substantial to say. When the chief aim is to satisfy some arbitrary rules, then you are not telling a story but are simply just checking off little boxes. I greatly suspect that Bok has managed to check off the boxes and still succeeded in telling a coherent and compelling story. The chief problem is that too many embellishments are distracting and interfere with the story itself.

For Bok's book, the writing is on the wall:
Books like these generate headlines for a week, then get consigned to a box and are largely forgotten. The only people who would care to remember are trivia enthusiasts. Of course, the relevant details are the the title, author and the interesting factoid. The eunoia, or 'beautiful thinking', of the labored words and sentences will be forgotten and inconsequential.

Stephen King "On Writing"

Carrie, Stephen King's first ever novel, was the first book of his that I held in my hands. I returned it back to the school library after 20 pages. This is easy to understand if I reveal that I had been looking for books by Stephen Hawking. Exactly why the missing "Haw" did not attract my attention is unclear, but there was more slime than time in this brief history.

I never ventured into King-dom, not because of the mishap recounted above, but because I don't read horror. I like the movies though, so I read Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and after experiencing The Shining, I read about the Overlook. I wasn't too impressed. It was wordy, too long, and only occasionally did the hairs on my neck demand that I shut that book and try not too look outside at the blackboard night on whom someone was writing, slowly but with careful intent, my name in blood...

So it is strange that the first King book I've really liked is non-fictional. In On Writing, King takes a practitioner's view of writing. He feels blessed to be able to write and make money off it. He wouldn't probe that bit of magic too much. Instead, he makes sure he doesn't take it for granted and work at it like hell.

King begins with a brief autobiography - he thinks it would be good for me to know how some of that must have affected his work. He then constructs a toolbox for writing. It is surprisingly small (vocab and grammar on top, Strunk and White in the middle, organisation below). Just basic skills.

The last section is On Writing. If you had to read anything about writings, you should read this. He talks about themes, about the way he revises, about reading, about blocks, about ideas and flow. It works for him, but you don't have to do it that way. This section is written with great clarity and cohesion.

If I had to apply Strunk and White's mantra of "omit all unnecessary words", this post should read as:

"Read a lot, write a lot" - Stephen King, "On Writing".

Cross-posted on my personal blog

Tipping Point

The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity
By James Lovelock
Basic Books (2007)

In this clarion call to arms, eminent scientist James Lovelock warns us cogently and eloquently of the impending doom that we have forced upon our planet by global warming. Lovelock is well-qualified to offer such gloomy predictions; it was this extremely versatile scientist who in the 1960s and 70s proposed the idea of Gaia, the notion that the earth is a self-regulating organism whose regulatory mechanisms are intimately coupled to the activities of species in its biosphere. One species- man- has tilted the balance of these mechanisms and thrown them into disarray. The species that will pay the biggest price for this deed is also man himself. Through careful speculation and excellent scientific arguments about details, he rationalized this notion until it has now become widely accepted.

Lovelock's premier argument is that global warming (which he amusingly always refers to as "global heating") has already rendered our planet incapable of the self-regulation that it has admirably demonstrated for millennia. The temperature rises which global warming are going to bring about are beyond those which the earth can endure in a homeostatic manner, and its catastrophic effects are likely going to manifest within decades. There is a horrific precedent for believing this; the same kinds of temperature rises fifty five million years ago led to catastrophic mass extinctions and sea-level rises, inducing an ice age that lasted 200,000 years. We are in danger of inducing such a global pandemic by our efforts right now. The most serious manifestation of man-made global warming is in positive feedback. Two examples suffice; the well-known melting of ice which leads to less reflection of sunlight which leads to more melting, and the heating of the upper layers of the ocean that kills algae. These algae are crucial players in maintaining cooling by the emission of sulfur compounds that serve to reflect sunlight from clouds. Lovelock documents both these effects well as well as others that are resulting from the 'double whammy' that we are serving our planet; simultaneously emitting CO2 and depriving the earth of biomass that normally absorbs it.

While the first part of the book describes Gaia and how it's been affected irreversibly by global warming, the second part basically deals with the muddle headed perceptions of energy, food sources and environmentalism that affect many in the political establishment and media, most prominently environmentalists themselves.

There is clearly a rift between environmentalists that threatens to slow down action against climate change. One section, unfortunately the bigger one, is the more vocal one consisting of organizations like Greenpeace, who have a wrong-headed and irrational perception of environmentalism. They tout phrases like "sustainable development" and "renewables" without really understanding their limitations. They participate in emotion-laden protests and demonstrations just to prove their point. Their environmentalism mainly deals with trying to save cuddly creatures and colorful birds in remote parts of the world, while there are organisms much more in need of saving, including the microorganisms and algae which play extremely crucial roles in maintaining the homeostasis of Gaia.

The second group of environmentalists is a minority, and Lovelock is one of them. They understand that global warming has already done its damage and our goal now should not be mainly "sustainable development" but "sustainable retreat". They understand that much more important than saving a few endangered species in New Guinea is to prevent deforestation and use of more landmass even in developing countries. They know that debate about saving the environment cannot be dictated by emotion. Most importantly they understand that nuclear energy is the best short-term and perhaps long-term solution for our energy needs.

When it comes to energy sources that we should pursue, Lovelock's thesis is clear and rational. Renewables (solar, wind, biofuels) may sometime make a dent in the energy equation, but renewables are not going to save us soon enough. The phrase soon enough is important here. Lovelock is a reasonable man and does not discard renewables entirely. The problem is in trying to find good energy sources as fast as we can. But each one of the renewables is currently fraught with problems of inefficiency, environmental unfriendliness and lack of scale-up plans. Solar panels are expensive and inefficient. Wind farms consume huge tracts of land, land on which forestation usually soaks up carbon dioxide, and in addition need back up from fossil fuel generators when the wind is not blowing. Biofuels struggle with maintaining energy balances and pose similar land-use problems. It will be at least 50 years before renewables make a significant contribution to our energy needs and their use becomes cheap and widespread. But by that time it will be too late. The single-most important factor here is time.

The answer is clear and rational; especially for the short term future, nuclear power is the most efficient, readily available, widely-implementable, environment-friendly and safe source of power. Even if the problem of waste disposal is not trivial, it pales in comparison with the benefits we will incur, and especially the catastrophe that we will find ourselves in if we don't do it.

While Lovelock hopes fusion will become important soon, fission is currently our best bet. We already have the technology unlike that for renewables. Its efficiency is marvelous- a good numerical argument to keep in mind is this; global CO2 emissions for a year make up a mountain that is a mile in diameter and sixteen miles in height, a behemoth. In contrast all the nuclear fuel providing power for a year will constitute a cube that is sixteen meters on a side. It was Lovelock's espousal for nuclear power that represented a break from the 'green' party line. But now, nuclear is going to be as green as we can think of. To stave off fears of nuclear waste, Lovelock has even offered to bury the waste from a nuclear reactor in his backyard and use its energy for heating his house. In addition to these facts, Lovelock also clearly describes the paranoia that the public has for nuclear power, while all the time they face risks and dangers much more damaging and insidious.

One very cogent point that Lovelock makes is about how religious faith has caused problems in enabling our stewardship of the planet. He correctly points out that all religious texts were written at a time when man and his life were the focus. At very few places in the Bible or the Koran or even the Eastern texts is there an emphasis on the planet. None of the major world religions put nature before man. Now however, emphasizing man is going to be meaningless unless we emphasize Gaia, because without Gaia we won't be around. There need to be new "religious" principles, infusing the care and stewardship of the planet into children's minds, instead of the narrow self-serving interests of man that will become irrelevant once the sea-levels rise or the North Atlantic current slows down.

The same factor- time- that makes a good argument against renewables, also makes the strongest argument against libertarian "solutions" to climate change. Libertarians argue that the free market will eventually find solutions to the climate change problem without government intervention. But even if this solution might work in principle, 'eventually' is not going to be soon enough, good enough for us. We may have a little more than 20 years to beat a respectable retreat. For that we need legislation against carbon emissions, against use of oil for transportation, against land use right now. The libertarian approach may have worked 50 years ago when we had time. Thinking about renewable sources could have saved us if we had begun 200 years ago. But now even if these solutions work, they almost certainly will come too late to save us. As they say, "operation successful, but the patient is dead". To save the patient in time, we are going to inevitably have to make compromises, sacrifice at least some of our freedom to large scale government actions. We have to operate now in a manner reminiscent of how we operate in wartime. In times of legitimate (and in these times I stress the word 'legitimate') war, citizens don't complain about sacrificing freedom because they know their lives depend on it. Now Lovelock says we face a similar scenario.

On the downside. Lovelock makes some statements which I think should be better referenced. For example, I would not completely trust his contention that most of the cancers that we are going to die from are caused by our breathing oxygen. While oxygen certainly can produce free radicals and cause damage, such a significant role should be more firmly supported by evidence.

It is very difficult to find wholesome solutions to climate change. We seem to have now done a good job of recognizing the problem in the first place. But unfortunately it's too late to implement quick fixes that will wake us up from this nightmare when we will find that everything is all right. In an age where politicians are pushing for more oil drilling, rapid action and awareness is essential. We have to beat a retreat and live to fight another day, unlike Napoleon in Russia in 1812. For that we need coherent and rational thinking and global fixes, with all the compromises that they might entail. Going nuclear, and perhaps even indulging in grandiose fixes like "space reflectors" which reflect sunlight from miles-wide arrays, may be possibilities. Lovelock sounds an alarm in his book that is backed up by evidence and grim prognostication. Gaia will do whatever it takes to establish her equilibrium, equilibrium that's inherent in the laws of her physics and chemistry, equilibrium that will be established even if it means the loss of humanity. As a pithy line in an X-Files episode once put it, "You can't turn your back on nature, or nature will turn her back on you". It's simple.

Infidel: keeping the faith

"Who are you?"
"I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magaan."

Ayaan Hirsi Magan (she changed her last name to Ali in the Netherlands) ) could pay a high price for the effrontery of crossing the gulf that divides patriarchal, tribal Islam from western democracy; the price may be her life. She didn't just 'immigrate' from Somalia to Europe; she changed her definition of morality. And she didn't hold her newfound beliefs in silence, but proclaimed that these were superior to those she had left behind. This is why hardcore Islam pursues her like an avenging fury. This kind of Islam demands not only the 'submission of will' but also the suspension of disbelief from those who are born into it.

Hirsi Ali has written an autobiography, 'Infidel', which is full of shocking events that the reader must believe because the author's voice has the ring of truth. She does not give herself enough credit for her courage, which is her most remarkable quality. I read the book from start to finish one night because I could not put it down.

Hirsi Ali writes:
'Ma taught us to tell the truth because otherwise we would be punished and go to Hell. Our father taught us to be honest because truth is good in itself...From the beginning I was Abeh's (father's) favorite.'

The book was written largely in chronological order, and Hirsi Ali begins with her childhood in Somalia, where she and her two siblings were brought up strictly by her mother and grandmother, and taught their place in the clan hierarchy. Her grandmother forced the two little girls to undergo circumcision in their mother's absence, in spite of both parents' opposition. The author says: 'Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.' She feels that this painful experience scarred her younger sister not only physically but also mentally; she became withdrawn and perpetually angry.

Hirsi Ali's father was scholarly and kind to his children, but he had multiple wives and abandoned his family for long periods of time. Her mother grew bitter and beat the children mercilessly. Hirsi Ali had to do all the housework from her teenage years onward, because she was 'the eldest daughter'. When she began to menstruate, her mother beat her and screamed: 'Filthy prostitute!'

The family lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, and the author's mother was heavily influenced by the 'pure Islam' she observed there. Hirsi Ali saw women in burqas for the first time: 'The front of them was black and the back of them was black too. You could see which way they were looking only by the direction their shoes pointed.' Her mother tried hard to be 'baarri' (the Somalian equivalent of the Hindu 'pativrata'). Hirsi Ali defines baarri thus: 'A woman who is baarri is like a pious slave. She honors her husband's family and feeds them without question or complaint. She never whines or makes demands of any kind. She is strong in service, but her head is bowed...She is a devoted, well-trained work animal.' But her mother could never forgive her father's disloyalty.

Somalia rapidly disintegrated after the colonial powers left in 1960, and the family moved to Kenya. Here, Hirsi Ali came under the influence of a teacher who was Saudi trained, and for a while she was a fervent believer in Wahhabi Islam. However, she fell in love with a Kenyan Christian boy who questioned her beliefs. Also, she began to hate the Saudi-sponsored Imam who shouted, 'TOTAL OBEDIENCE: this is the rule in Islam'.

Eventually, when marriage proposals for Hirsi Ali were discussed, she realized: 'I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent -- always--- on someone treating me well...Every Islamic value I had been taught instructed me to put myself last.' Finally, one day her father accepted a proposal for her from a Somali of the same clan who had emigrated to Canada. This horrified Hirsi Ali, who began to think about an escape route. En route to Canada, she managed to slip from her family's stranglehold in the Netherlands. She was ultimately tracked down and forced to account for her behavior. Her father was furious, writing: Go to Hell, and the Devil be with you.' Her mother was kinder(surprisingly), saying: 'You have made a terrible mistake, but you will always be my child.' When Hirsi Ali was asked to justify a divorce from her husband, she simply said: 'It is the will of the soul. The soul cannot be coerced.'

Hirsi Ali worked as a English-Somali translator. She says of this time: 'When I went to the awful places, the police stations, the prisons, the abortion clinics and penal courts, the unemployment offices and the shelters for battered women, I began to notice how many dark faces looked back at me.' Hirsi Ali worked towards her degree in Political Science and felt she had a responsibility to communicate the isolation of Muslims and the distress of Muslim women in Holland to the larger public (especially honor killings). She got her BA and then her MA, finally running for parliament on this platform.

Quoting Hirsi Ali:' Drinking wine and wearing trousers are nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.' She was intoxicated not just by the social mores of Europe, but also by its democratic principles. She made a docu-movie about Islam called 'Submission' with Theo Van Gogh, which led to his assassination and to her living under the shadow of a 'fatwa'. Constantly accompanied by security guards, she lost her privacy and her peace of mind, but she declared nevertheless: 'I'm not going to apologize for the truth.'

Her beloved 'Abeh' could not bear to be estranged from her for long, and they began to talk again. To me, this is one of their most telling exchanges:

'"Abeh, if I ever return to the faith, you are the first person I will tell." My father was quiet. Then he said:"Meanwhile Ayaan, if anyone asks you, do you believe in God, don't answer. Reply that it is a very rude question".'

Profile of a fiend

Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element- Jeremy Bernstein
Joseph Henry Press, 2007

The making of the atomic bomb was one of the biggest scientific projects in history. Some of the brightest minds of the world worked against exceedingly demanding deadlines to produce a nuclear weapon in record time. To do this, every kind of problem imaginable in physics, chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering had to be surmounted. Many of the problems had never been encountered before and challenged the ingenuity and perseverance of even the best of the brightest.

To accomplish this feat, human, material and monetary resources were poured in on a scale unsurpassed till then. Factories were constructed at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford that were bigger than anything built until then. The resources required were staggering; at one point the Manhattan Project was using 70% of the silver produced in the United States. Steel production in the entire nation had to be ramped up to fulfill the needs of the secret laboratories. Extra electricity on a national scale had to be generated to power the hungry reactors and electromagnetic separators. The factories at Oak Ridge were giant structures; one of them was a whole mile under one roof. The gargantuan factories and the resulting employment increased the population of the small town from 3000 to about 75,000. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of people and an estimated 2 billion 1945 dollars had been spent on the biggest technical project in history. The entire country had had to be mobilized for it. In just three years, the scale of the project was consuming about as many resources as the US automobile industry, an astonishing achievement. Only the United States could have done something like that at the time.

Of all the myriad and complex problems involved in the project, two stand out for their formidable complexity and difficulty. One was the separation of uranium-235 from its much more abundant cousin uranium-238. The differences between the masses of the two isotopes is so small that at the beginning, nobody believed that it could be done. Indeed, the atomic bomb effort in Germany largely stalled because its leaders could not think of any way this could be done in any reasonable time. An entire town had to be constructed at Oak Ridge to surmount this problem. Even today this is probably the single-hardest problem for anyone wanting to construct an atomic bomb from scratch.

However, the uranium separation problem was at least anticipated at the very beginning. Compared to this, the second problem was completely unexpected. It involved a material from hell that nobody had seen before. This material was highly unstable and difficult to work with, intensely radioactive, and its discovery was one of the most closely-kept secrets of all time. The material would play a decisive role in the project and in the nuclear arms race that was to ensue. Today, its shadow looms large over the world. This material is plutonium.

Now in a succinct and readable book, well-known physicist and historian of science Jeremy Bernstein tracks the history of a diabolical fiend. Bernstein has earlier written biographies of Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe and a recent book on nuclear weapons. He is an accomplished veteran physicist who has known some of the big names in physics of the century, Oppenheimer and Bethe included. Bernstein is a fine writer who recounts many interesting anecdotes and bits of trivia. But he does have one annoying habit; his constant tendency to digress from the matter under consideration. He could be talking about one event and then suddenly digress into a four page life history of a person involved in that event. One gets the feeling that Bernstein wants to put his opinion of every small and sundry event from the life of every scientist he has met or heard of on record. At times, the connections he unravels are rather tenuous and long-winded. Readers could be forgiven for finding Bernstein's digressions too many in number. But at the same time, those interested in the history of physics and atomic energy will be rewarded if they persevere; most of Bernstein's forays, though exasperating, are also quite interesting. In this particular case, they weave a complex story around a singular element.

Plutonium was discovered by the chemist Glenn Seaborg and his associates at Berkeley in 1940. In a breathtakingly productive career, Seaborg would go on to discover nine more transuranic elements, advise four US presidents, win the Nobel prize, win enough other awards and honors to have an entry in the Guinness Book, and have an element and asteroid named after him while still alive. After fission was discovered, it was hypothesized that elements with atomic numbers 93 and 94 might also behave like uranium. In 1939 Seaborg was a young scientist working at Berkeley when he heard about the discovery of fission. In the next year he performed many experiments on fission at Chicago and Berkeley. In 1940, another future Nobel laureate named Edwin McMillan discovered a radioactive element past uranium with a postdoc, Philip Abelson. In logical sequence they named it neptunium. Abelson and McMillan's June 1940 paper on neptunium was the last paper to come out of the United States on fission and related issues; the need for secrecy in such matters had already been realised by senior scientists. There matters stood until December 1941- a decisive time due to Pearl Harbor- when Seaborg, McMillan and their associates Joseph Kennedy and Arthur Wahl discovered element 94 by using tedious and clever chemical techniques. After uranium and neptunium, Seaborg decided to name the new element after Pluto- the god of fertility but also the god of the underworld.

Concomitantly with the American effort, the Germans were also trying to understand the properties of plutonium and Bernstein devotes a chapter to their efforts and background. A resourceful German physicist named Carl Friedrich von Weiszacker had observantly noticed the dwindling and disappearance of papers from the United States after the paper by McMillan and Abelson appeared in mid 1940. He also realised the advantage of using plutonium in a nuclear weapon. But as the history of the German atomic project makes clear, Weiszacker's report was not taken too seriously, and in any case the Germans were too cash and resources-strapped to seriously pursue the production of plutonium. Notice was also taken by accomplished physicists in the Soviet Union but it was espionage that provided them with information about the real potential and importance of plutonium. The fascinating story of Soviet espionage is superbly narrated in Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Plutonium was soon isolated in gram quantities by Seaborg's team and its enhanced fissile properties were investigated. After the enormous problems with separating U-235 were realised, the great advantage of plutonium became obvious; plutonium being a different element, it would be relatively easy to separate from its parent uranium, thus avoiding the difficulty of isotope separation. After plutonium was discovered, it was found that it is even more prone to fission than uranium. Compounded with its relative ease of separation, this property of plutonium made it a key material for a nuclear weapon. It was also realised however that many tons of uranium would have to be bombarded with neutrons to produce pounds of the precious element. By 1942, it was known that at least a few kilograms of both uranium and plutonium would be needed for the critical mass of a bomb. To this end enormous factories were constructed at Oak Ridge (for enriching uranium) and reactors at Hanford in Washington state (for producing plutonium) in 1943. The reactors at Hanford would keep on producing the material for thousands of nuclear warheads until the late 1980s. A secret lab at Los Alamos was concurrently established, headed by Robert Oppenheimer. He would bring a group of "luminaries" to the mesa high up in the mountains for working on the actual design of an atomic weapon.

At Los Alamos, initial designs of bombs with both uranium and plutonium involved the "gun method" wherein a plug of fissile material would be shot down at great speed along a large gun barrel into another mould of fissile material. When the two met a critical mass would suddenly materialize and fission would result in an explosive detonation. However, a fatal flaw was unexpectedly encountered in 1944. When the first few grams of plutonium arrived at Los Alamos from Hanford, it was observed that Pu-239 had a very high rate of "spontaneous" fission due to the copious presence of another isotope, Pu-240. Even today, the feature that distinguishes "reactor-grade" plutonium from "weapons-grade" plutonium is the higher presence of Pu-240 in reactor-grade material. Because of the presence of extra neutrons from spontaneous fission, a gun type bomb though it would work for U-235 would be worthless for Pu-239 since by the time the two pieces met, fission would have already started and the result would be a "fizzle", a suboptimal explosion. Because of this difficulty the whole lab was reorganised by Oppenheimer in August 1944 and experts were brought in to investigate new mechanisms for a plutonium bomb.

The result was one of the most ingenious concepts in nuclear weapons history and design- implosion. The idea was to suddenly squeeze a sub-critical ball of plutonium using high explosives into a highly compressed supercritical mass, causing fission and a massive explosion. The problem was that this microsecond compression had to be perfectly symmetrical, otherwise the Pu-239 would simply squirt out along the path of least resistance like dough squeezed within the cupped palms of our hands. To circumvent this problem would require the capabilities of some of the greatest scientists of the day. The Hungarian genius John von Neumann supplied the crucial idea of using "lenses" of explosives of differing densities to direct shock waves that would symmetrically converge onto a point, just like light through glass lenses. The concept required a paradigm shift- nobody had used explosives before as precision tools; they were generally used to blow things out, not in. Even after the idea was floated, the engineering and diagnostics obstacles were formidable. Chemist George Kistiakowsky from Harvard was put in charge of a division that would painstakingly develop the moulds for the lenses; machining had to be accurate to within microns as any air bubbles, cracks or irregularities would immediately impede the symmetrical shock wave. Another challenging device was the "initiator", a tiny ball of radioactive elements in the center of the sphere that would release neutrons right after the implosion, but not a moment before. Its design was so challenging that it is one of the few things that's still almost completely classified. One of the physicists who worked on both shock wave hydrodynamics and on initiator design was Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs. He was ironically brought in as part of a British team to replace Edward Teller, whose reluctance to pursue implosion and obsession with hydrogen bombs tested the patience of theoretical division leader Hans Bethe. Information obtained by Fuchs would prove invaluable to the Russians in building their own implosion bomb.

Compounding all of these difficulties was the hideously diabolical nature of Pu-239 itself. Chemists and metallurgists had never faced the challenge before of working with such an unusual and dangerous material. Pu-239 exists as several allotropes, different physical forms of the same element, depending upon the conditions. When one investigates the use of plutonium in a bomb and then looks at its allotropic behavior, it's almost as if nature had conspired to keep humans from using it. The reason is that at room temperature, Pu-239 exists as an allotrope named the alpha phase allotrope. The problem with this is that while it is dense, it is brittle and won't do at all for an implosion. On the other hand the allotrope of Pu-239 that is suitable for a bomb, the delta phase, exists only at 315 degrees centigrade and above. This is a catch-22 situation; the useful and machinable allotrope exists only at high temperatures while the one at room temperature is worthless. A very clever solution to this was discovered by human ingenuity; Cyril Smith, head of the metallurgy division at Los Alamos found that adding a small amount of the metal gallium to Pu-239 stabilized the valuable delta phase at room temperature. This was found only a few months before the first test of the bomb.

In the end, while the uranium bomb was reliable enough to not require testing, the implosion bomb was too novel to use without testing. On July 16, 1945, the sky thundered and a new force surpassing human ability to contain it was unleashed in the cold desert sands of New Mexico at the Trinity test site. Plutonium tested on that ominous dawn would reincarnate into Fat Man, the bomb that leveled Nagasaki in less than ten seconds.

In addition to Pu-239's unusual chemistry, there were of course its radioactive properties that make its name so dreaded for laypersons. But we have to put things in perspective. I would easily be within a kilometer of Pu-239 than within a kilometer of anthrax or VX nerve gas. Plutonium decays by emitting alpha particles and simple laws of physics dictate that these particles have a very short range. You could hold Pu on a sheet of paper in the palm of your hand and live to talk about it. The real danger from Pu-239 comes from inhaling it; it can cause severe damage to lungs and bone and cause cancer. Its half-life is 24,000 years and another law of physics dictates that half-life and radioactive intensity are inversely related. To help understand Pu-239's true nature, Bernstein narrates a fascinating study of 37 technicians and scientists at Los Alamos who ended up getting Pu-239 into their system. This group was whimsically named the "UPPU" (U Pee Pu) group as Pu-239 could be detected in their urine. The group was tested periodically at Los Alamos for many years. The verdict is clear; none of these people suffered long-term damage from Pu-239. Many of them lived long and healthy lives and some of them are still alive. As with other aspects of nuclear power, the danger from plutonium has to be carefully reasoned and objectively assessed. As with other nuclear material, Pu needs to be handled with the utmost care, but that does not mean that fears about it should outweigh benefits that one could get from its potential for providing power. There is naturally a real proliferation danger with plutonium, but even there, risks are often inflated. Terrorists will have to steal a substantial amount of Pu using special equipment from facilities which are usually heavily guarded. Stealing Pu and using it is not as easy as robbing a bank and laundering the money.

However, there are sites in the former Soviet Union where plutonium is not that heavily guarded and these will have to be secured. 5 kilograms of Pu-239 if efficiently utilised can be used for a weapon that will easily destroy Manhattan. It is very difficult to keep track of such small quantities through inspection. International collaboration will be necessary to keep track of and contain every gram of plutonium at vulnerable facilities. At the same time, power-generating plutonium is indispensable for the future of humanity. Forged on earth by human brilliance, Pu outlived its initial use. Most of the warheads in the US arsenal including thermonuclear warheads use plutonium for the fission assembly. Several hundred tons of both weapons-grade and reactor-grade plutonium have been produced and are being produced. Hundreds more sit in fuel rods immersed in huge water pools, glowing eerily with a bluish light. Plutonium production sites in the United States are facing a heavy and expensive backlog of cleanups.

Plutonium seems to be a classic case of the "careful what you wish for" adage. Glenn Seaborg would not have imagined the consequences of his discovery that hazy morning in December 1941, when after an all-night session the angry element revealed itself to a warring world, kicking and screaming from its fiery radioactive cradle. But as Richard Feynman once so lucidly put it, science is a set of keys that open the gates to heaven. The same keys open the gates to hell. Plutonium constitutes one of the keys to heaven that's given to us. Which gate to approach is entirely our choice.

Books: A mirror into your soulmate?

From the NYT: It's not you, it's your books:

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Related story on NPR

Will this lead to more pretentiousness? However, I think after a while it is easy to tell the cheaters. So, guys get off the computer and read some books! Perhaps, to make it easy for guys, girls should wear t-shirts that self-identify them. Like, "I love nerds", or "If you're into books, I'm into you!".

Sacks's Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist who writes popular books and articles on the brain. His latest book Musicophilia is on music and the brain. The title of the book is inspired by this story of Tony Cicoria (Abstract of the first chapter). Tony after being struck by lightning suddenly developed a strong attraction for making music. At the age of forty he began playing the piano. This sudden love for music was beyond mere passion. Something had got structurally altered in his brain that made him play and appreciate music beyond the level of an amateur after having no training or practice for most of his adult life.

As far as we know, no animal has been trained to tap to an external auditory beat. True, animals make beautiful music, but not for pleasure; music does not drive them into ecstasy. Yet, there are many among us who can't hold a note, or manage to follow a strict rhythm. Yet, humans are unique in the facility to hear and enjoy music. Apart from the few who unluckily have amusia and others whom music drives them mad, the rest of us relate to music. Isn't it just structured noise?

My envy is directed to the one in 10,000 people who have perfect pitch, the ability to tell which note is being played or key without any external reference. For such people, each note or key has distinct flavor or 'color'. And, if you play a transposed (shift the key) version of the song, they can immediately tell that it does not feel right. In a manner we can tell that something is wrong if tomatoes suddenly appeared to be green or cabbages yellow in a grocery store. Apparently, Mozart had this ability and once told his colleague that since the last time they played together his colleague's violin was a semitone flatter.

Who is to blame? Language. Apparently, all of us have an innate ability to acquire perfect pitch. Learning of language between the ages of four and six interferes with tonality and we all lose this facility except for a few lucky ones. What attaches credence to theory is that musicians who are native Mandarin Chinese speakers are six times more likely to have perfect pitch than than musical American counterparts. Why? Because Chinese is a tonal language which may preserve this sensitivity to tonality that the rest of us lose.

Music is special to us. It has a precise mathematical structure and at the same time a lot of emotional content. Sacks talks about people who seems to have one, but not the other. Bathroom-only singers seems make up for lack of talent by volume and brio. A truly great artist is a master of both - technique and feeling.