Hail! Mount Helicon

Diane Spiotta's Stone Arabia

2012-01-12T19:39:00.001Z

Lately, I have fallen off the New Yorker Book Club bandwagon (which I was never fully on, I must admit). The latest offering of Diane Spiotta's "Stone Arabia" sounds great.From:

Spiotta has captured one of the ironies of using the Internet: the language of the Web is all action verbs—looking, opening, closing, searching, hell, surfing—but a computer-user is normally sitting quite still. The dream of the Internet is one of unfettered movement, but its reality is stasis. At most, we hunch over in front of our computersRead more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2011/08/book-club-real-life-on-the-internet.html#ixzz1jH56Db6x

.Sounds like a rich read!

nihil novi sub sole

2011-09-29T20:08:00.000Z

Ariel Levy writes about sexual revolutions before the sexual revolutions. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

Men and women in every generation have convinced themselves that they’ve stumbled upon something new: the erotic illuminati of the eighteenth century, with their electrified orgasms and unbridled hedonism; the voluptuary innovators of the seventeenth century, Restoration libertines like the Earl of Rochester and his circle (“Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse”); the Rabelaisians of the century before, and so on, back to the polymorphous perversity celebrated by Catullus and countless classical precursors. Everyone, of whatever era, can imagine himself to be a Cortez of coition, staring at a heaving Pacific of newly discovered erotic possibility.
We seem to have a peculiar urge to believe that the way we have sex, the thing that got us all here, is unprecedented. It’s like the familiar difficulty people have imagining that their parents had sex. The reason sex can be revolutionized again and again is that we’re reluctant to believe our ancestors could have known and felt what we know and feel. Yet what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the covers.
In the past century—as feminists discovered the clitoris, gay liberationists discovered homosexuality, and flower children discovered free love—the illusion of erotic novelty entered mass culture. Dr. Alex Comfort, the author of the international best-seller “The Joy of Sex,” first published in 1972, was convinced that his young contemporaries invented “playfulness,” asserting that it was “a part of love which could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness.” To this day, there are baby boomers who half believe that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” as Philip Larkin had it, “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

An intimate portrait of India's people and their relationships

2011-01-11T18:40:00.001Z

In "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking", Anand Giridharadas takes a different tack from Thomas Friedman and others who have described the now familiar call centers and globalization that have turned India into an economic powerhouse. Instead Giridharadas decides to focus on the country's most important assets- its people and their changing attitudes towards the world, their families and themselves. Giridharadas has an unusual vantage point as an Indian who grew up in the US and who returned back to his country for a fresh look (although one wonders why he now lives in Cambridge, MA). The book is primarily about how India's new economic, political and social roles have changed Indians' relationships with themselves and their families. The most important consequence of the "New Order" is that Indians whose role in life was traditionally defined for centuries by their birth and their caste, class and gender are now seeking to make their own place in society rather than to "know" it. This is a great thing for a country where identity was defined for hundreds of years by where you came from rather than where you wished to go. As Giridharadas describes, in the new India someone from the lower caste can finally dare to dream beyond what was regarded as his indelible destiny.

To showcase these changing Indian identities, Giridharadas presents us with several "case studies" and describes the life stories of people drawn from a wide slice of Indian society. There's the poor boy in a small village who was born into a lower caste and decides to remake his identity by pioneering English language and "personality development" classes in his village and organizing a personality pageant. There's the "rat-catcher" whose job is to kill dozens of rats everyday in the slums of Mumbai. Then there's the Maoist, a member of the divisive Communist insurgency in India, who resents India's rise to wealth and fame but who has a complex relationship with the country he criticizes. And in stark contrast, there's the Ambani family, India's richest business family whose clout extends over the entire Indian economic and political landscape. Giridharadas especially has an insightful portrait of Mukesh Ambani, one of the two Ambani brothers and one of the world's richest men whose empire stretches from petrochemicals to biotechnology. Giridharadas stresses how the Ambanis rose to prominence by cultivating relationships, a strategy that has helped them bribe slothful bureaucrats and journalists in creative ways that include paying for their children's education in Ivy League universities in the US. In an India where bribery is hardly an exception to the rule, the Ambanis' behavior is nothing novel. But one of the signs of a changing India is that while old-timers look with disgust upon the culture of bribery and corruption that the Ambanis have perpetuated, many young people see them as heroes who are cutting India's Gordian knot to an entrenched bureaucracy and socialist ethic and who are inspiring young Indians to dream big.

Further on, it is in describing the changing nature of the Indian family and relationships within it that Giridharadas really excels. Perhaps the two biggest changes in the Indian family during the last few decades have been the declining influence of parents on their children's lives and the empowerment of Indian women in middle-class families. This has led to new challenges and opportunities in the traditional Indian conception of marriage. Women are now regarded as men's equals in marriages and men are no longer supposed to be the sole bread-winners on whom their spouses precariously depend. Changing social mores have also awarded women an independence that was inconceivable for the older generation. Young men and women are now much more comfortable with casual sex and relationships. Indian women are now free to choose who they may or may not marry, or so it may seem. Yet as Giridharadas adeptly demonstrates, reality is more complex. Indian women and even men are still grappling with reconciling the modern with the orthodox. This has led to many of them living strange double lives where they have a wild time outside their homes but can instantly transform themselves into meek and dutiful sons and daughters in the presence of their parents. Ties to parents and family traditions are still too strong for many of India's young people to assert total independence. Thus an Indian woman who otherwise has a boyfriend and dictates the terms of her own life may still end up marrying a boy picked by her parents and sacrificing her freedom. The line between old and new is still not blurry enough for the young to casually transgress it, and it would be interesting to see how the changing dynamic between young people and traditions is played out in 21st century India.

Along with newfound independence come newfound problems. As young people are increasingly defying their parents and marrying for love, they are also increasingly become more intolerant of compromises and sacrifices. This has led to a spiraling divorce rate among young Indian families even as the taboos surrounding the word divorce have been as hard to abolish as that surrounding premarital sex. Giridharadas has a perceptive account of sitting in in an Indian court and watching divorce proceedings. Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Indian divorces are no longer limited to the wealthy class and Giridharadas watches as a wide economic cross section of husbands and wives airs its woes in court. The reasons why these people are seeking divorce are varied and range from the unsurprising (marital infidelity, plain boredom) to the revealing (the husband becomes jealous when his wife starts making more money and living a more affluent lifestyle). Divorce in India promises to challenge traditional male-female hierarchies in marriage and social customs as acutely as any other modern liberating tendency.

As insightful as Giridharadas's book is, I have some minor complaints. Firstly, he says nothing about the negative repercussions of lowering standards in the educational system to accommodate the previously underprivileged. Liberation from the shackles of caste has been a wonderful thing for India, but on the flip side it has led politicians with vested interests to lower the standards of public education rather than to raise the standards of the lower castes through improvements in primary education. This is engendering divisive sentiments which the author does not discuss. Secondly, while Giridharadas eloquently describes changing perceptions of caste and class, he says almost nothing about how the changing dynamic has impacted religion and religious relationships which have always been a key part of the Indian identity. Thirdly, while he makes sincere attempts to be objective, Giridharadas cannot completely escape the biases of an Indian who did not grow up in India and who is coming back after a long time to inspect his former country much as an anthropologist would inspect a tribe. On one hand this has led him to offer us some fresh, out of the box perspectives, but on the other hand it has led him to quickly generalize from his own limited experiences. Indian is a complex and vast country, and even an observation that might apply to seventy percent of its citizens would still exclude a very significant portion of the population. Thus Giridharadas's observations should always be accepted as containing a significant element of truth but not the whole truth. Lastly, I found Giridharadas to be slightly verbose and rambling. Sometimes he seems to be too much in love with his words and phrases and belabors a point in too many different ways. This would have been fine for a work of fiction but it can tend to bore the reader and obscure clarity in a work of non-fiction.

Notwithstanding these minor gripes, I would strongly recommend the book. In a stream of books that have told us about India's economic and political rise, Giridharadas makes a valuable and rare contribution by focusing on the most important aspect of any country- its people and their changing relationships with themselves, their nation and the world.

Vikram Seth's From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

2010-12-25T13:14:00.000Z

In 1981, Vikram Seth was 29 years old and at Nanjing University. In the summer while traveling on a 'guided tour' in Turfan, he was seized with the idea to return home to Delhi overland from China via Tibet. Based on a journal he kept, this would be his first book. This was before he embarked on that remarkable novel in Onegin stanzas - Golden Gate and a decade before the Suitable Boy catapulted him to his rightful place as a lyrical master of the modern novel.

The prose in this is book isn't lush or lyrical. The Cultural revolution in China had just ended a few years ago (in 1976) and now much-celebrated decade of economic reforms was still in its infancy. Seth used both diplomacy, charm, bull-headedness, and his knowledge of Chinese to make his way through uncharted territory for foreign travelers. Hitchhiking with chain-smoking truckers across isolated parts of China, dealing with guiding shi guiding (regulations are regulations) from small-town bureaucrats, the hospitality of strangers, and facing the legacy of the misadventure of China's cultural revolution.

Original cover with author's photograph. For some inexplicable reason the publishers decided to change the cover in later editions to a professional image of Heaven Lake which lacks the warmth of this picture of a Lhasa street taken by Seth on his Nikon.

Just before he enters Tibet on August 14 (a day before India's Independence Day) and while reading V.S Naipaul he thinks seriously about the two countries. "The Chinese have a better system of social care and of distribution than we do. Their aged do not starve. They children are basically healthy. By and large, the people are well clothed, very occasionally in rags." He poses a question still unanswered, would you prefer a life in China or in India with it's chaos, lower standard of living, but greater personal freedoms? Seth was studying the demographic effects on Chinese economy, a topic that was ahead of its time and would have made more interesting study a decade later when the huge mass of Chinese workers were set loose in the new economic climate. In 1981 China was still a lot like India but the young Seth who arrived in China for economic studies admits that he was rosy-eyed about it's achievements was somewhat disappointed after living there for a year.

See previous post review of Peter Hessler's more contemporary view of China in Country Driving. Reading them back-to-back made for an interesting juxtaposition. There is about a 25-year separation between Hessler's China of 2004-onwards and Seth's China of 1981. Yet, I was still struck by how little the country has changed in the interiors. These places are still backward and still being force-populated by the Han Chinese and the conditions of the minorities is still abysmal. What seems tragi-comical is the fact Seth writing that there was talk in Tibet of the Dalai Lama being allowed to visit.

As Binlang Xie (his Chinese name) in his journey sees tons of Buddhist temples were destroyed. At Dunhuang and then again in Tibet, Seth is brought to tears seeing the destruction. In Tibet, Seth decides not to visit the Gandian monastery after being saddened by the destruction to Ramache. Similar to Peter Hessler, Seth as Mr.Xie was also woken up in the middle of the night for not registering properly with the local authorities.

Vikram Seth is a novelist, translator, travel writer, librettist, essayist depending on the occasion. But, he is always a poet. Whatever genre he picks to write, his traditional style of rhyming poetry always makes a cameo appearance. He wrote an alternative table of contents for his magnum opus - A Suitable Boy - in rhyming verse.

Cold in the mudlogged truck
I watch the southern sky:
A shooting star brings luck;
A satellite swims by.
The Silver River flows
Eventless through the night.
The moon against the snows
Shines insular and bright.

Here we three, cooped, alone,
Tibetan, Indian, Han,
Against a common dawn
Catch what poor sleep we can,
And sleeping drag the same
Sparse air into our lungs,
And dreaming each of home
Sleeptalk in different tongues.
(chapter: Southern Qinhai)

Map of Seth's journey

The book abounds in many delights such as Seth writing about his dream of inaugurating six-month intensive course in Chinese, where each week corresponds to a year in the life of a Chinese child. and the Mayonnaise Principle, the intake of new lexical information has to be controlled. The Mayonnaise Principle states that learning a language is like making mayonnaise: add too much at once and the mixture will separate out.

Like any journey, you learn about another culture, and you learn a lot about yourself in the process as well. In London he missed dalmoth, in China he missed California wine, and he wonder what he will miss when he wanders further. Summarizing the nostalgia of a wanderer, he writes:

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias

Seth dedicated the book the to people that he met on the way. People who could very exasperating when dealing with officially but were most helpful and accommodating when dealing with personally. What Seth attempted in 1981 was something that only a handful of people ever tried in that era and still not easy to do today. If had not managed to exit on the date stamped in his passport, he would have been arrested, as the local cops cheerfully told him.

Billy Collins on Horoscopes

2010-12-15T04:06:00.003Z

It was snowing rather heavily and not the best of all days during a Michigan winter to be driving around. This past Sunday would a good day to meet Death on the highway, but instead I survived to hear Garrison Keillor introduce Billy Collins on the radio in Segment 2 of the Prairie Home Companion (interesting aside on Emily Dickinson's 180th bday). Use this link to navigate the audio (Dec 11 show index).

Billy Collin's poetry amazes me each time on how accurately he capture a single gesture that is at once so-living and yet beautiful poetry that it can't be real. Reading horoscopes to me was just a terrible waste of time. But after this wonderful idea by Mr. Collins, they won't quite read the same again. He scans the horoscopes of those who are dead and the hilarity that results from it.

Horoscopes For the Dead

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.
...

...

And don’t worry today or any other day
about unwanted problems caused by your failure
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more pressing matters,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

Then he ends beautifully with this coda to the poem. Perhaps written after the first one, but now it seems like an essential part of the whole piece that starts off ironically, but then transcends that gimmickry to something much more. Vintage Billy Collins. What John Ciardi would've applauded as a ripple.

Horoscopes For the Dead 2

So leave it to me now
to plan carefully for success and the wealth it brings,
to counsel the dear ones close to my heart
and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way
though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the road by the shore of the bay.

And you go on being perfect just where you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed upon your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration straight up from earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

read complete poem... or hear Billy Collins recite it in Segment 5

Menand on Creative Writing

2010-12-06T18:15:00.016Z

The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Louis Menand writes on Creative Writing workshops in an old edition of the New Yorker.

Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop.

The above made me wonder how many writers are actually 'taught' or schooled. Of the writer's that I can think of most came from a different field. A large number of the ones that I can think of come from the field of journalism. But this is just an anecdotal sample and I can't think of a single writer who was a product of a program.

Salman Rushdie: Advertising
Vikram Seth: Economics
Somerset Maugham: Medicine
George Orwell : Police and then reporter
J.M. Coetzee: programming, library sciences
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: journalism
Ernest Hemingway: journalism
Haruki Murakami: bartending
Arundhati Roy: architecture
Amitav Ghosh: social anthropology

The creative-writing program is an American invention, and it has recently become an American export. The British were at first contemptuous of the idea of creative-writing courses; they regarded them, as the critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury once put it, as being “like the hamburger—a vulgar hybrid which, as everyone once knew, no sensible person would ever eat.”

Peter Hessler's Country Driving

2010-12-02T19:32:00.001Z

China looks a lot like India. When I visited China in 2006 it seemed to me as if Indians had been evacuated from their cities and replaced with Chinese people. A recent Economist article mentioned that there are more ways the countries are dissimilar than similar. Perhaps politically and economically, but on the level of the street it's shockingly similar: the level of noise, the throng of people, the hustle-bustle in the street, and of course the crazy traffic and driving with all the nice, loud honking. I thought that purposeless honking to be a uniquely Indian contribution to the world of transportation (see old post), but I was wrong. The Chinese are equally adept at this art. Also, they are adept at the art of driving really close to the next car and navigating through tight spaces.

Many of Peter Hessler's observations that to the Chinese traffic laws were 'mere guidelines' and that driving was a survival sport was nothing new to me as an Indian (I hazard to say that apart from Europe and North America, driving is mostly a survival sport). Peter Hessler has lived and worked in China for many years and his writing shows a genuine affection and respect for the Chinese people, but the tone of his description of traffic transgressions of the Chinese smacked of slight condescension. His explanation for bad Chinese driving was that the bulk of mass of the Chinese were suddenly uprooted from their pedestrian and cycling ways and stuck into cars much too suddenly, and they tend to drive as they walk. Taking the shortest path, huddling in groups, and making sudden turns almost as in mid-step and deciding to go the other way.

It took me a while to appreciate the subtle pun in the title. The first part of the book is about 'driving in the country', about his trips to the interior of China along the Great Wall. He writes: there is no one in the villages except old people and young children. Everybody else has left to work in the coastal provinces. His description of the Chinese crowd was both trenchant and hilarious, how people tend to gawk at first and that public opinion of spectacle could be muted, or could turn into an active crowd participation depending on whether someone in the crowd takes a stance or something random.

The second part of the book is about village called Sancha just a few hours outside Beijing that Peter Hessler used a retreat. This part chronicles the story for about half a dozen of years starting in about 2000. Initially it was an idyllic setting, a rural escape for Peter to write his books, but that all changed, and very rapidly. It reads like a modern version of Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart". Except in this case, it wasn't the white man, but 'the road'. In Sancha, the local peasants lived like noble savages almost untouched by the mad progress a few miles away in Beijing and on the coasts. The road was built and it brought more traffic and the breeze of change with it. The peasant family that Hessler gets close was quite 'entrepreneurial' and eager to embrace the change: first they try to grow leeches (which fails), and then starting a restaurant that serves simple home-cooked meals. One of the ironies was that rainbow trout that is offered as a 'local' delicacy to the city-dwellers seeking the pastoral ideal was never eaten by the peasants. It is imported from elsewhere daily. Hessler writes that the peasant, Wei Xiqi was most at ease when felling walnuts, but the pressures of business made him drink and smoke more. His wife turned to Buddhist religion, as their marital life got more disturbed on account of business pressures and Wei Wiqi's smoking and drinking.

Smoking is an indelible part of doing business in China. There is a whole language that depends on what brands you smoke, who you offer what brand, and other social cues that you need to adopt to be a Chinese businessman. Hessler's conclusion seems to be that road came to quickly, which changed the rural life in ways that were hard to predict and would be hard to predict what the effects would be.

Finally, he gets to the part that gets the most press: the coastal factory, the throbbing nerve of China from whence all progress - good and bad - has spread. He follows a factory in Lishui from the moment of its conception on a piece of paper in a soon-to-be industrial park. In a few months, the whole park is populated and the factory is in business. Hessler analyzes the factory on three levels: the management who are out to make fortunes if their product is successful (soon to be imitated by their neighbour down the road), the technicians who are relentlessly poached from rival firms cause they have insider information on how machines work and how to repair them, and lastly the migrant workers who are often underage and unreliable in term of sticking around if someone offers a better deal. Hessler writes about how technicians steal designs and move to rivals. How peasant families get by in the industrial towns, how labor commodifies itself in order to make an extra buck. He writes how a father is willing to barter the labor of his daughters to getter a better deal.

This last section is both frightening and poignant at the same time. The subtext is about the bewildering effects of globalization - people producing things that make no sense to them and what people on at the other end have no idea goes into making what they consume so readily and cheaply. By the way, the product that the factory made was the rings that hold a bra together, just the rings. Apparently, it's the most technically demanding part of the bra. A wonderful chronicle of being in the backseat of a country driving at breakneck speed. In comparison India is hardly be speeding, given our literal and figurative potholes.

Peter Hessler's stories in the book have appeared in some form in Peter Hessler's writing for the New Yorker
including the piece on the artists from Lishui or China's Barbizon which mass produces not masterworks, but copies of masterworks that are in great demand in the West as wall hangings.javascript:void(0)

Riding off into the twilight...

2010-09-17T22:02:00.004Z

"The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country"- Robert Oppenheimer

In "The Twilight of the Bombs", Richard Rhodes describes the post Cold War problems and hopes associated with nuclear weapons. The book bears many of Rhodes's trademarks- it is extremely well-researched and contains sharp portraits of the major players as well as fast-paced accounts of key events that make you feel as if you were there. Rhodes's abilities as a storyteller are still remarkable. This book is relatively slim and does not command the high-octane prose and phenomenal grip of Rhodes's masterpiece "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" but as usual, Rhodes's authoritative knowledge of nuclear matters provides many revelations and his novelist's eye for detail which keeps the reader hooked.

The book can roughly be divided into four parts. The first part concerns the first Gulf War and the dismantling of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, the second part describes the race to secure nuclear material in the former Soviet republics after the fall of the Soviet Union, the third part briefly talks about South Africa's nuclear ambitions and and then in more detail about attempts to contain nuclear efforts by North Korea and the last part concerns the run-up to the second Gulf War and some final thoughts on the future of nuclear weapons. One striking omission in the book is Iran, and I think readers would have appreciated Rhodes's insightful thoughts on the Iranian nuclear problem.

The first part examines the troubling evidence in the 1980s that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear capability. Rogue Pakistani scientist A Q Khan had even tried to unsuccessfully sell Iraq a bomb design based on a Chinese weapon. At the same time that the US was providing aid and goodwill to Iraq to support it against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, it was also unearthing evidence in the form of dual-use equipment shipments and intelligence analysis that Iraq was pursuing enriched uranium. Interestingly, the technology that Iraq was using turned out to be electromagnetic separation, a primitive technology that the US did not initially believe would be used; for nations pursuing nuclear capability, separating uranium isotopes by using centrifuges is much more efficient. Yet electromagnetic separation is exactly the kind of technology that a relatively primitive and cash-strapped economy would pursue. This is a good example of how biases can lead to false conclusions in spite of supporting evidence. Later, Rhodes has pulse-racing accounts of searches for enrichment technology in Iraq conducted by the weapons inspectors of the IAEA and the UN. Even after the inspectors discovered evidence of enrichment in the form of equipment used for electromagnetic separation, this was not yet conclusive evidence of weapons building. Probably the most exciting moment was when, deep down in a small room in a basement, the inspectors discovered a report that did provide such evidence in the form of clear and detailed descriptions of materials and design for an implosion bomb.

The second part of the book deals with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the spirited and at times desperate race to acquire nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. There are many heroes in this story which stands as a model of bipartisan cooperation against a serious threat. Among these are David Kay, Hans Blix and Bob Gallucci who were nuclear inspectors and disarmament specialists. Probably the most prominent ones are the Democratic and Republican senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar who worked day and night to acquire funds from Congress to secure nuclear material and weapons from the three countries and have them transferred back to Russia. Concomitantly, Secretary of State James Baker hopped from one capital to another, urging the presidents of the new nations to sign the NPT and START using a combination of carrots (in the form of monetary rewards) and sticks (in the form of possible sanctions and threats from Russia). All three nations agreed that they were better off without nuclear weapons, and the result was a transfer of thousands of strategic and tactical weapons back to Russia. A third important and massive effort involved blending down the enriched uranium from Soviet weapons to reactor grade and shipping it back to the US for use in US nuclear reactors; Americans may be amused to know that about 10 percent of their current electricity derived from nuclear energy comes from nuclear weapons that their former foe had targeted against their cities. Curiously, the biggest reformer in this drama was President George H W Bush who orchestrated the largest arms reductions in history (he abolished entire classes of weapons, including missiles with multiple warheads and all ground-based weapons), and he needs to get much more credit for doing this than what has been given to him. Rhodes also describes the sense of wonder that directors of weapons labs in the US felt on meeting their Soviet counterparts for the first time, men and women who until then had been ghost-like figures in secret installations on the other side of the world, slated to possibly remain perpetually anonymous. When the director of Los Alamos Sigfried Hecker first traveled to the Soviet Union and met his counterpart Yuli Khariton, the man who had worked on Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs since the beginning, the latter said, "I have been waiting for this moment all my life". Everybody involved knew that this was a new chapter in history.

In the third part Rhodes first briefly talks about the dismantling of South Africa's nuclear program, which is a fine lesson for nations wanting to eschew nuclear weapons. In case of South Africa, the same reasons- internal strife, border conflicts and international alienation because of the government's apartheid policies- that provoked the country to acquire weapons also encouraged them to give them up. An uglier reason was their fear in the 80s that the weapons might fall into the hands of the black government.

Rhodes then describes in detail the difficult relationship between the US and North Korea in the context of North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Along the way, Rhodes also provides perspective by noting that the US had mercilessly bombed the North during the Korean War; since then the North Koreans have constantly been in a kind of perpetual state of war, surrounded by giant powers like Russia and China. It's also worth keeping in mind that the US had stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in South Korea as a deterrent until about 1990. Although these actions by the US do not justify the North's nuclear efforts, they do explain the paranoia and deep sense of insecurity that has fueled North Korea's animosity towards the US. Again, there are heroes in this story, but one singled out by Rhodes is former President Jimmy Carter who went to North Korea of his own volition in 1994 and successfully mediated the Koreans' proposal to stop reprocessing in return for light water reactors; the consequence of this diplomacy was the so-called "Agreed Framework" to regulate North Korea's commercial nuclear program, which unfortunately broke down in 2003 in the face of North Korean non-compliance and disagreements. Since then, North Korea has always had to be kept on a tight leash and there have been several moments of tension between the two countries, but Rhodes's accounts make it clear how diplomacy has averted another Korean War. Rhodes also has succinct discussions of efforts to develop and implement a framework for the CTBT, which was signed by Clinton but unfortunately not ratified by the Senate.

The last part of the book concerns the run-up to the second Gulf War. This story has been told before but Rhodes tells it succinctly and well. Meticulous weapons inspections in Iraq between 1992 and 1998 had unearthed no evidence of a WMD capability, although Iraq had also not furnished clear documentation of the dismantling of its WMD capability. As Rhodes tells it, regime change had already been on the table, especially pushed by neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz but even contemplated by former Vice President Al Gore. But even after 9/11, it does not seem like Bush was thinking of attacking Iraq. However, as the record indicates, something changed in his thinking in the next two months, and invading Iraq became a concrete strategy in his mind. Rhodes thinks that a major reason for this shift in his thinking may have been the anthrax attacks which followed 9/11. It seems that these attacks really rammed the threat of terrorism home; at one point alarms even went off in the White House and Dick Cheney suspected that he himself may have been contaminated. Nonetheless, as is well-known now, Bush and his associates decided to invade Iraq fueled by the tried and tested strategy of threat-inflation and on evidence that was dubious at best. Rhodes clearly establishes the prevarications of the administration's claims about WMDs in Iraq, based on discredited reports about uranium shipments from Niger to Saddam (reports discredited even by the CIA) as well as Chinese imports of supposed aluminum tubes for centrifuges, which turned out to be parts for short-range rockets. At best Iraq was years behind the difficult goal of building a nuclear weapon, a goal which would have needed extensive operations of enrichment and processing which would most likely have been detected. No matter how you cut it, there was no concrete justification for invading Iraq except one based on ideology and belief. Bush also seriously damaged arms reduction efforts by withdrawing from the ABM treaty, by his belligerent rhetoric against North Korea (which withdrew from the NPT and tested a nuclear weapon in 2006) and Iran, by lifting sanctions on Pakistan (a particularly recalcitrant and prolific proliferator) and by agreeing to supply India (which had not signed the NPT) with nuclear-related equipment. And yet in the midst of this tragedy it is easy to miss Bush's one success in arms control in which he signed major arms reductions with Russia; these reductions brought down the number of warheads on US delivery vehicles from about 10,000 at the end of the Cold War to about 2600.

This brings us to the final, eloquent part of Rhodes's book where he talks about the possible abolishment of nuclear weapons. He describes the very serious problem of nuclear terrorism; in his view, while it may be very difficult for terrorists to use a sophisticated nuclear weapon, it may be much easier for them to acquire enough material for a crude explosive. Even state-owned nuclear weapons are susceptible to accident, miscalculation and misunderstanding. The bottom line is that as long as nuclear weapons are around, there is always a possibility that they may be used. The only, truly final solution for reducing the threat of nuclear weapons is to get rid of them. How do we achieve this? I would have appreciated more detail from Rhodes in this regard, but he describes promising developments. For one thing, simple laws of physics dictate that without nuclear material one cannot make nuclear weapons. So securing nuclear material is key and the Nunn-Lugar initiative has set a worthy bipartisan example for achieving this goal. Many recent initiatives to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons have also been refreshingly bipartisan. Efforts to ban nuclear testing have already been fine-honed for decades, and getting all nations on board the CTBT would mean a lot; in this context Rhodes singles out Australian diplomat Richard Butler and his Canberra Commission for special praise. The fact is that, in spite of nuclear proliferation, there have been hundreds of nations which have found it prudent not to develop nuclear weapons for various reasons (not the least of which is their expense; according to Rhodes it costs the US 50 billion dollars just to maintain its current stockpile of weapons), so there is hope.

In the end though, only political will, strong leadership and international cooperation can rid the world of these terrible weapons. At some point, owning a nuclear weapon needs to become a crime. It is imperative to stop regarding these weapons as partisan, parochial concerns which can be leveraged to score political points in elections. Radiation respects no nationality and political predilection; life and death is a function of only one variable- distance from point zero. Nobody is really safe and mutual cooperation is not an expendable option. To underscore this point, Rhodes recounts a fascinating idea put forth by the Scottish writer Gil Elliot in his book "Twentieth Century Book of the Dead". Elliot talks about the international efforts to prevent and cure infectious disease and believes that war should similarly be treated as an international anathema that is to be abolished. Efforts to eradicate disease through public health campaigns crossed boundaries and saw even countries who were otherwise very hostile towards each other mutually cooperating. This was because disease was not seen as some other country's problem but as a common threat. Because of their sheer destructive power, nuclear weapons similarly pose a common threat to all of humanity. Rhodes says that only when nuclear weapons are similarly and completely depoliticized to the extent that infectious diseases are, only when the world sees them not as instruments of aggression and patriotism owned by specific nations but as a common scourge that threatens all of humanity irrespective of our political leanings and differences, only then will we all work together to abolish them.

What awaits us is Robert Oppenheimer's different country.

Book Review: THE PASSING OF PATRIMONIALISM

2009-09-17T16:24:00.000Z

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)

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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.

Original Photo HERE

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

2009-07-19T03:43:00.007Z

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

2009-05-27T04:52:00.001Z

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.

View all my Goodreads reviews.

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

Reading Orwell Lite

2009-05-21T19:24:00.000Z

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

2009-05-18T20:43:00.000Z

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.

View all my reviews.

What Murakami talks about when he writes about running

2009-05-14T02:49:00.003Z

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

2009-03-18T04:11:00.007Z

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

2009-03-12T15:46:00.004Z

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?

2008-10-30T14:58:00.004Z

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"

2008-10-23T13:16:00.002Z

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

2008-09-01T18:24:00.002Z

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.

Profile of a fiend

2008-04-08T13:19:00.001Z

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?

2008-04-03T19:15:00.002Z

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

2008-03-26T16:27:00.002Z

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.

The definitive and chilling history of terror

2008-02-29T18:22:00.002Z

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
Knopf, 2006

Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower is the best history of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden that I have come across. Wright traces not just the history of the terrorist, but the fascinating if disturbing history of Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, where religion was more intimately linked with people's way of life than in any other nation in the world, and where a perception of the world engendered by old tribal customs and anti-Western attitudes fanned hate and extremism that was nonetheless seen by its practitioners to be essential to maintain their culture and religion- a point that has been sadly lost on Westerners. As CIA agent and bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer says, they don't attack the US because of "its freedoms". They attack the US because they see the US as interfering in their quintessential Islamic way of life, what they hold dearest, irrespective of whether it's justified or not. They are as much in love with Islam as any one ever was with any entity. That is what is frightening.

Wright traces the roots of extremism in the Middle East through Saudi Arabia's history, where extreme and primitive religious traditions juxtaposed strangely with immense wealth driven by exploration for oil. It was in this milieu, after World War 2 that Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri grew up and acquired a taste of jihad. Often lucidly Wright talks about the environment where they spent their childhoods, and brings the rustic Saudi Arabian landscape to life. Wright also talks about the enduring influence of Syed Qutb, the devout Egyptian religious scholar who was disturbed by what he perceived as the hedonistic coed culture of the United States, when he visited the country as an exchange scholar in the 1950s. It was his writings and his image as a martyr- Qutb was jailed and executed as an extremist in Egypt- that greatly inspired Bin Laden's and Al Zawahiri's calls for worldwide Jihad.

Wright also documents in considerable detail both Bin Laden's and Al-Zawahiri's transformation from educated, well-to-do moderates to extremist radicals in love with the Quran and martyrdom. Bin Laden's extremism was only set aflame during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Wright vividly describes the deadly brotherhood and romantic visions of martyrdom that bound the Jihadis together in that war-torn country. It only helped that Bin Laden had the money to draw followers and finance missions. After that, it was only natural and a small step before Bin Laden turned his already brainwashed and transformed psyche towards the US.

On this side of the Atlantic, Wright also narrates the urgent and often heartbreaking efforts of the few CIA and FBI agents who recognized Bin Laden's threat in the 90s, the marginalized Michael Scheuer among them. The central tragic figure in the book is John O'Neill, the brilliant, swaggering but restless and tormented FBI agent who was desperate to snare Bin Laden, often fighting tenaciously against the foot-dragging and bureaucracy in the government agencies. A man who never achieved satisfaction in life, O'Neill was a heavy drinker who lived with three women at the same time. After many failed attempts to capture Bin Laden and convince the administration to be more serious about the threat- a journey that along with some other dedicated FBI agents led him around the world from Africa to the Middle East- O'Neill finally had enough and took up a new position as head of security...at none other than the World Trade Center. O'Neill could have escaped in the initial attacks. But keeping with tradition, he decided to go inside the flaming towers to save others. The man who more than almost anyone else had been trying to catch or kill Bin Laden tragically perished inside the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Wright's book is a gripping treatment of an urgent subject. It demonstrates what fearsome power religion can summon, how it can completely transform the minds of men in the service of romanticized deadly causes, how blind ideology can have devastating and heartbreaking consequences. It shows us how the Middle East is largely and tragically still a land stuck in time, where irrational beliefs and tribal brotherhood can manifest in the most violent ways. The story of these gentle-looking, pious Jihadis is chlling by any standards. It is yet another illustration of the insidious nature of religious faith. It deserves to be read, and we all deserve to read it and think about what we can do to stop such fanaticism. The leader of the United States is not even close when he says that the men of Al Qaeda are cowards and fanatics. They are anything but that; they are cold, calculating, determined men who have dedicated their lives to what they see as the most just cause in their lives. They need to be stopped at any cost, and understanding where they come from will be the first step in trying to do that.

Imitation as a form of tribute

2008-01-22T21:39:00.001Z

I know there’s some of us who’d rather that people leave the classics well enough alone (in my case, the sentiment comes because of horrors like Mr. Reshammiya remaking Karz), but two readings in the past month have left me in no doubt that the fan fiction/pastiche genre is alive and kicking.

Exhibit A: Jamyang Norbu’s ‘The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes’.

For those who come in late, Sherlock Holmes is officially dead. He battled with Professor James Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and fell to his death along with his arch nemesis.

Of course, he will return to London soon as chronicled in ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes’, casually explaining his two year absence away as

"I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa."

Expanding on these two Watson-less years in the life of Sherlock Holmes means placing his adventures in the hands of an equally accomplished sidekick/raconteur – Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Hurree Babu’, in Her Majesty’s Service.

While I read Kipling too far back to have any lasting memories, Holmes features in my reading list at least once every year or so – frequently enough for me to comment on how faithful Norbu’s style is to the original. The typical fringe characters – the competent police officer shown up as bumbling by the infallible Holmes, the indefatigable enemy almost equal in skills to Holmes (but not quite) are all here.

And so, of course is Holmes. Norbu manages to invoke the side of Holmes not expounded upon in the Doyle tales as much – the melancholic violin-player and drug-inhaler, as also the world-weary philosopher who seems to perk up only at the sight of an intellectual challenge. Importantly, Norbu does all this without sacrificing the hard-nosed investigative nous the man exhibits at the best of times. Equally magical are descriptions of the ‘roof of the world’ – Tibet and the pair’s journeys through this most inhospitable territory. Palace intrigue, Eastern mystique and vintage Holmes. What more could one ask for?

This book won Norbu the Crossword book prize in 2000.

Exhibit B: Neil Gaiman's "Marvel 1602"

Somehow, the Marvel universe has always held a fascination for me. I personally prefer the muted film versions of Spiderman and X-Men over the flash and !!multiple exclamation points!! of the comic book versions. However, there's no denying the mythology that surrounds the best of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's work.

1602 takes these characters to a completely different place, yet retaining their essence. Transplanting the usual suspects of the Marvel universe to the early seventeenth century, this graphic novel adds in a generous dose of palace intrigue ( Queen Elizabeth, succeeded by King James of Scotland) , some other mythology and makes for intriguing reading. I had an easier time getting the 'in' jokes for the X-Men and Spiderman, though I'm sure there's a bunch I missed with Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Nicholas Fury and Bruce Banner (later to become the Hulk) livening up proceedings as well.

Strongly recommended, and not just for the comic book fan.

John Wright's Indian Summers

2007-12-19T01:29:00.001Z

John Wright's Indian Summers shines in the places you'd expect it to least do so.

Seeing John Wright's persona while he was coach and contrasting him sharply with his successor Greg Chappell, it was plainly obvious that Wright played his cards close to his chest when it came to the media. He was obviously a tough cookie but he didn't air his dirty laundry in public and welded a team emerging from the debris of the match-fixing scandal, taking it to the top of world cricket (well, among the top 2-3 teams). A World Cup final, a drawn series in Australia and an away series win in Pakistan were the zenith of this Indian team under him.

Would his autobiography be tell-all, with juicy nuggets about the personalities in Indian cricket he was involved with? Would he play up his role or play it down? What did he think about living in a fish bowl with over a billion opinionated onlookers ?

The book starts off at around the time Wright retired from Test cricket. A miserable stint away from cricket in New Zealand was followed by coaching for Kent and then came the call-up to be the Indian coach. The first hesitant steps and the forging of a team in Sourav Ganguly's mould are chronicled here. The book kind of reaches its peak in terms of interest quotient around the '01 Australia series in India (aka 'The Great Escape'). He is fairly candid in admitting that he should probably have quit on a high after the win in Pakistan since it was time for a new approach and new ideas.

Wright plays true to form in the book. Except for a few sly jabs at the (mis) management of Indian cricket, the book is devoid of attacks of any sort. Wright is honest in his assessment of Dalmiya who got things done for him and is only praise for the top guns of the team - Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Kumble and Laxman. He carries especially warm regard for the tyros who came of age in his regime - Kaif, Harbhajan Singh and Sehwag. There is criticism and dry humor when it comes to talk about the selection system. But it's not harsh enough and is a very sympathetic understanding of the circumstances that lead to it.

That doesn't mean the book is not worth a read though. What comes through the writing (partnered by India Today's Sharda Ugra and Paul Thomas who worked off his diaries from the era) is Wright's genuine passion for the game, a hard-nosed attitude towards winning and an unaffected warmth about the country of India.

More than anyone, this 'foreign coach' seems to have understood that the Indians deserves a great cricket team. He intersperses the chronological progression of events with his description of experiences in India, the passionate Indian cricket fans he encountered, how knowledgeable many of them are about the game and how the country of India and being there meant so much to him. These sections of the book defined the book for me in many ways - explaining who he was and what all this meant to him. It makes the book much more than the mere chronicle of events which a half-decent session of browsing through Cricinfo archives would yield.

A recommended read for the Indian cricket fan.

The books of Christopher Priest

2007-12-12T13:43:00.000Z

Having read two books by Christopher Priest, I heartily recommend a look at his works. The name may not be very familiar to many, but the film "The Prestige" certainly raised his profile into the sights of many (it did for me). It was based on the book of the same name by Priest.

Priest writes very interesting fiction - whether it can be classified as science fiction or not is perhaps a matter for pedants, but he weaves very interesting tales using unreliable narrators, flashbacks, history and science, and layered stories, which will be familiar to those who watched Christopher Nolan's film.

I've read two books by Priest: "The Separation" and "The Prestige", and found both of them very engaging. In The Separation, Priest tells an interesting "what-if" tale of two brothers during the 2nd World War and how their meeting with Rudolf Hess during the 1936 Berlin Olympics changes their life. It is both an incredibly well-written book as well as being an intensely surreal tale. For me, it was the closest I have come to reading a "Mulholland Drive"-like story. If anyone made sense of the threads, let me know!

The Prestige is not so inconclusive as The Separation. It does not have to neatly tie up (or at least bring together) the narrative strands like the film version. Unlike the film, some of the "twists" are revealed earlier in the narration. But Priest's telling of the fin de siècle Victorian times, the atmosphere of the magic hall, the cuts back from modern times to the past (something the film eschewed) is again masterly. In passing, one must also congratulate Christopher and Jonathan Nolan for their superb adaptation of the themes and stories in the book to a screenplay, for the book isn't all that screen-friendly. Without losing any of the essence, they managed to come up with a version apt for the movies.

I do not know how to get hold of more Priest books locally. "The Separation" happened to be in the local British Library, while "The Prestige", thanks to the movie, was available in a local bookstore. Where will my next Priest come from, I do not know. But, at least, the next time you pass by the bookshelves of authors whose names begin with P, look for Priest and give him a try. And let me know.

How rational thinking led to insanity

2007-10-22T06:27:00.000Z

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
By Richard Rhodes
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

Richard Rhodes is perhaps the foremost nuclear historian of our time. His past two books (among many others on extremely varied subjects) on the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs are landmark historical studies. But as readers of those books would know, they were much more than nuclear histories. They were riveting epic chronicles of war and peace, science and politics in the twentieth century and human nature. In both books, Rhodes discussed in detail other issues, such as the Soviet bomb effort and Soviet espionage in the US.

In this book which can be considered the third installment in his nuclear histories (a fourth and final one is also due), Rhodes takes a step further and covers the arms race from the 1950s onwards. He essentially proceeds where he left off, and discusses the maddening arms buildups of the 60s, 70s and 80s. One of the questions our future generations are going to ask is; why do we have such a monstrous legacy of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the earth many times over? The answer cannot be deterrence because much fewer would have sufficed for that. How did we inherit this evil of our times?

Much of the book is devoted to answering this question, and the answer is complex. It involves a combination of paranoia generated by ignorance of what the other side was doing, but more importantly threat inflation engendered by hawks in government who used the Soviet threat as a political selling point in part to further their own aims and careers. It is also depressing to realise how in the 50s, when the Soviet atomic bomb programs were still relatively in their beginning stage and the US had already amassed an impressive fleet of weapons, opportunity was lost forever for negotiating peace and preventing the future nuclear arms debacle that we now are stuck with. Rhodes details a very interesting and disconcerting fact; every US president since Truman wanted to avoid nuclear war and was uncomfortable about nuclear weapons, yet every one of them had no qualms about increasing defense spending and encouraging the development of new and more powerful weapons. It was as if a perpetual motion wheel had been set in motion, oiled by paranoia and deep mistrust, not to mention the clever manipulation of ambitious Cold Warriors. In the 50s, hawks like Edward Teller influenced policy and exggerated the threat posed by the Soviets, when in fact Stalin never wanted any kind of war with the US.

Later, this role was taken up by people such as Paul Nitze who admittedly was the "father of threat inflation". His job and that of others was to exploit the uncertainty and fear and turn it into a potent force for justifying the arms race. Into the 60s and 70s, Nitze gathered around him a cohort of like-minded people who included today's neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. They wrote reports that tried to argue against detente, and advocated further and more powerful arms buildups. In the middle of this politicking, it seems a wonder that presidents could negotiate treaties such as the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the NPT. Reading accounts of these people and their clever spin-doctoring and manipulation of the threat, one cannot help but feel a sense of deja vu, since it's largely the same people who inflated the threat of WMDs in the Bush administration, as well as much else. What can we say but that public memory is unfortunately short-lived. Reading Rhodes's accounts gives us a glimpse of the birth of today's neocons, who have wrought so much destruction and led the country down the wrong path. Rhodes deftly recounts the workings of key officials in both governments, and how they influenced policy and reacted to that of the other side. He also has concurrent accounts of economic and military developments in the Soviet Union, and how channeling of funds towards defense spending created major problems for the country's growth and development.

However, the major focus of Rhodes's book concerns the two principal characters of the endgame of the Cold War and their lives and times; Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Rhodes paints a sensitive and insightful portrait of Gorbachev, as a man who was a reformist since the very beginning when he was a minister of agriculture. Rising to high positions from humble and trying beginnings, Gorbachev realised early on the looming menace of the arms race and its impact on his country's development. He tried sensibly to negotiate with Reagan's administration to cut back on nuclear arms. He could be compassionate and sympathetic, but also a very good politician. Rhodes's portrait of Reagan is less favourable, and Reagan appears to be a complex man who harbored complex and sometimes puzzling ambitions. On one hand, he was a man who wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and end the threat of nuclear war. On the other hand, he was a naive idealist who sometimes thought of himself in messianic terms, thinking that God had a special role for him in the Cold War. Rhodes rightly compares some of Reagan's thinking to religious thinking. Reagan quite bizarrely encouraged tremendous defense spending (more than the earlier three presidents combined) and massive and dangerous weapons developments and military exercises. Rhodes's account of the NATO military exercise named Able Archer in 1983 which almost spurred the Soviets to ready a nuclear strike speaks volumes about Reagan's belligerent policies, particularly strange given his "other side", which eschewed nuclear conflict. An intelligent but not particularly intellectually sophisticated president, Reagan liked to hear about policy more in the form of stories than reports, and because of his relatively poor and unsophisticated background in issues of national security had to depend on his advisors for insight into these issues.

These advisors, especially Richard Perle and others, persuaded Reagan to stall negotiations with the Soviets, whose main insistence was that that he give up his dreams of SDI or "Star Wars", a costly space-based weapons system that was clearly going to engender more animosity and arms buildups. This system was not just threatening and unnecessary, but would not have even been technically effective. Again, one cannot help but think of the Bush administration's flawed insistence on missile defense systems. Reagan refused to back down on this central point in negotiations with the Soviets in Geneva and Iceland, mainly advised by Perle and others. Egged on by false hopes of security through SDI, he squandered important opportunities for arms reduction. In the pantheon of presidents trying to reduce Cold War nuclear threats and curtail weapons development, Reagan is surely the biggest offender. However, it is also not fair to blame him completely; clearly his hawkish advisors played a key role in policy making, even while his more moderate advisors struggled to find a way out of the madness. Ronald Reagan was a complex character, and a comment by Gorbachev, if perhaps a little too critical, accurately captures his personality; Gorbachev once said that he would love Reagan as a dacha neighbor, but not as president of the US.

In the end, it was largely inevitability that ended the Cold War. In this context, Rhodes also dispels some myths about it. One of them, cleverly used by conservatives these days, is that it was Reagan who was the principal instrument in ending the Cold War. Rhodes makes it clear that it was Gorbachev who was instrumental. Allied with this myth is another one, that the US drove the Soviet Union into the ground essentially by bankrupting them, as if that somehow almost points to a clever strategic decision by Reagan to increase his own arms spending to induce the Soviets to increase theirs. But this myth is also not true. The Soviet Union carried the seeds of its downfall inside itself since the beginning, and the fruits of those seeds were beginning to show since the 1970s. Gorbachev recognised this, and it was largely the economic situation in his country and his own actions and realisation of the inevitability of affairs that ended the Cold War. Reagan in fact may have slightly prolonged the Cold War, and he certainly made it more dangerous towards the end with his idealistic visions of more security through wondrous weapons building. He also made negotiations much more difficult by constantly casting Soviet-US relations under the rubric of good and evil, piety and godlessness, and by smooth talking rhetoric and debate. Robert McNamara has said that our immense nuclear legacy arose from actions, every one of which seemed rational at the time, but which ultimately led to an insane result. Ronald Reagan is perhaps the epitome of a US president who had his own remarkable but largely flawed internal rational logic for justifying enormous nuclear arms accumulation.

Throughout the book, Rhodes's trademark style shines through; meticulous research that envelops the reader, remarkable attention to detail and internal logic, a novelist's sense of character development and the retelling of key events- such as his gripping account at the beginning of the book of the Chernobyl tragedy that exposed many of the Soviet Union's weaknesses and contradictions,- cautious and yet revealing speculation, and narration that instills in the reader a rousing sense of history and human nature. He gives sometimes minute-by-minute accounts of the deliberations and meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev. As in his other books, he liberally sprinkles all accounts with extended quotes and conversations between key participants, thus giving the reader a sense of being present at key moments in history. I have to say that this book, while very good, is not as engaging as his first two books, but it nonetheless is solid history and storytelling, and a chronicle of one of the important periods of the century, a period that influences the world to this day.

Anne Enright's Della

2007-10-19T15:53:00.000Z

Anne Enright has won this year's Man Booker Prize edging out Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. While I was trying to gather momentum to obtain the book, I found this story from the New Yorker (2005)- Della.

On the shoulders of giant bombs

2007-09-28T02:14:00.000Z

Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons
By Joseph Cirincione
Columbia University Press, 2007

As of this time, the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons and has roughly half of them on a 15 minute alert. Russia has more than 15,000. Other countries around the world have thousands. Together, this destructive force can destroy our planet many hundred times over. Those who lived through the Cold War would find this scenario all too familiar and at the same time surreal. At a time when nuclear terrorism is causing paranoia in the world, this situation sounds nothing less than fantastic and unbelievable. If we pass this age with the preservation of our sanity, future generations will no doubt look back and wonder and ask; how did we get to this stage? What happened?

In this smart, succint and well-informed book, Joseph Cirincione, one of America's foremost WMD experts gives us a peek into the past, present and future of nuclear weapons. He tells us how a race against the Nazis- later proven to be non-existent- gave rise to the great power unleashed from within the atom by brilliant scientists. He briefly but thoughtfully captures the spirit of those times, and gives understandable and simple descriptions of the basic science behind the two main designs of atomic weapons. He also pays due attention to a lesser-known fact- the petitions that were unsuccessfully circulated by some scientists to try to stop the bombs from being used in Japan, efforts that failed in the face of political ambitions.

After this exposition, Cirincione launches into an account of the arms race during the Cold War. From reading this description, we realise that atomic bombs are much more a product of political paranoia and strategizing than sound science and policy decisions. While it is legitimate to understand the urgency that gripped the US during the Cold War in the face of a frightening foe, it is now quite certain that hawks in the US government urged the development of more atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs under the guise of having a ready arsenal for instant annihilation, while at least in the earlier stages of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was never interested in and indeed cowered away from fighting the US. In Khrushchev's words, Stalin "trembled and quivered" at the thought of a war with the US. All those fears of World War 3 were unjustified. Unfortunately, those fears gave rise to a burgeoning fleet of ever more deadly and efficient nuclear weapons in the US. This served as the perfect excuse for the Soviets, who then were given carte blanche to develop their own weapons.

Some numbers are instructive, and almost heartbreakingly convey how close the US was to negotiating arms treaties and stopping the growth of the nuclear monster that spwned all future problems and generations. The Soviets conducted their first test in the middle of 1949. At this point, the US had a couple of hundred atomic bombs, while the Russians essentially had none. This would have been a perfect time to try to bring about a test-ban treaty, that would have made any further development of nuclear weapons very difficult in the USSR, while guaranteeing the US a fleet of bombs adequate for deterrence. This belief is cemented by looking at the current arsenals of Britain and France; both of them have around 200-400 weapons, and they have always considered them sufficient for deterrence. In fact, right at the end of World War 2, General Leslie Groves who was the head of the Manhattan Project had drawn up a list of major Soviet cities that could be targets for atomic weapons, and concluded that about 200 bombs of the crude Hiroshima/Nagasaki type would be sufficient to destroy them. In 1950, the US had bombs with much improved efficiency, and even fewer would have been sufficient for deterrence. Unfortunately, hawks in the US such as Edward Teller pressed for more weapons. The anti-Communist McCarthy period convinced political leaders including Truman that more bombs must be developed to deter Russia. A great chance for securing peace was lost.

The rest is history; the US launched into H-bomb development and eschewed early possible test bans, thus giving the Russians the perfect chance and excuse to develop both fission bombs and hydrogen bombs. The strategic edge that the US had was rapidly lost and the Soviets caught up, because the law of diminishing marginal utility applies perfectly to nuclear weapons, and further testing and development helped the Soviets who were behind much more than the US who was already ahead. During the 1950s, as test ban treaties were constantly forestalled, the Russians made up for the atomic deficiency that they had in 1949. By the end of the 50s, they not only had many atomic bombs, but a delivery system (exemplified by Sputnik) that could potentially launch a missile carrying a thermonuclear warhead. The advantage that the US had was lost forever, and after this, Russia always would have thousands of nuclear weapons that would compete with the US for mutually assured destruction. However, it was only in the 1980s that the Russian stockpile exceeded that of the US. The stockpile of both powers reached grotesque proportions with tens of thousands of weapons, a number that went way beyond deterrence or any other rational doctrine, factually sufficient to destroy the whole earth thousands of times over. This was nothing short of insanity, whose fruits will be far reaching indeed.

Cirincione expertly gives accounts of these developments. He also gives an account of the various treaties that far-sighted members of the scientific community and government managed to implement, including most importantly the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, that prohibited nuclear testing underwater, on ground, and in the atmosphere. Probably the most important weapons treaty was the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed by Lyndon Johnson. It is probably the one that promises the most hope for general weapons reductions around the globe. The one good thing that Richard Nixon did was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the SALT treaty of the 1970s. After this, various US presidents and Russian premiers did their part in trying to implement treaties.
Probably the biggest failure in this regard was Ronald Reagan, who with his espousal of "Star Wars" and arms growth, aggravated the arms race more than any other president in history, but also financially bled the Russian economy. A new book on the arms race by that most authoritative nuclear historian Richard Rhodes is coming out in October, in which he describes how the young neo-conservatives Rumsefeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz convinced Reagan to not accept negotiations for arms reductions. The evil in the Bush administration has deep and insidious roots.

But it is really in analysing the reasons why states may or may not acquire nuclear weapons that Cirincione shines. Interestingly, the same reasons that may propel nations to possess nuclear weapons may convince them to give them up. In case of Britain and France for example, national prestige definitely played a role in weapons development; both proud nations wanted in some part to redeem the historic role that had played in the world over past centuries. Prestige and patriotism fuelled by the BJP was also a reason for India's nuclear tests in 1998. But the same reasons also encouraged South Africa and South Korea to give up weapons development; both throught they would set a model example in front of the world. The most common reason touted for possessing nuclear weapons, security, can also be a reason to not have them. Some states like South Korea and Brazil think that they appear much less antagonistic when they don't have these weapons. Countries certainly can also abandon such programs because they fear military aggression and political instability. In case of states like Iran, the situation clearly is different. In fact, promise of military assistance from the US can be important in convincing such countries to give up their own programs, like it did for Germany and South Korea. Security on the other hand clearly played a role in the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programs. Economic reasons constitute yet another major reason for weapons building. Countries may decide to abandon nuclear weapons in the face of fear of economic sanctions, as Libya did for example. One hopes that North Korea will be such a case. However, the case of India is also interesting in this context. It is now known that Homi Bhabha, the Indian nuclear architect, greatly downplayed the cost of building reactors and bombs, that encouraged the Indian government to provide funding and facilities for nuclear development.

The point that Cirincione makes on the basis of these myriad examples of countries that have either pursued or abandoned nuclear programs because of various reasons based on security, prestige, economics or politics, is that using sticks and carrots, nations can be induced to give up their nuclear ambitions. Clearly some nations need to give them up more than others, and this is something that needs to be understood.

Finally, Cirincione talks about the future; how the world can become a safe place in spite of there being nuclear weapons. In the matter of nuclear proliferation, there have been two camps and I have talked about them in detail in a past post; those who think that a little nuclear proliferation could actually increase security by deterrence, and those who think that only minimising nuclear arsenals and discouraging nations from obtaining them will make for a safe world. Cirincione makes it clear right at the beginning that he belongs to the second camp. For him, the goal is to reduce nuclear proliferation. He also importantly argues that, in the current scenarios of possible nuclear terrorism, stopping proliferation would be the most fruitful way forward.

Cirincione suggests cogent strategies to break through the pall of nuclear destruction. First and foremost, he has prescriptions for the US to lend credence to its suggestions to stop nuclear proliferation. It's simple. With 10,000 bombs, America clearly has a menace safely stashed in its backyard. In such a situation, any lesson denouncing nuclear proliferation that it tries to impart to the world is going to naturally sound hypocritical. On the other hand, I personally would be orders of magnitude more comfortable seeing nuclear weapons in the hands of the US rather than Pakistan or Brazil or many other countries. But it is at the same time completely disconcerting to have a country which along with Russia has been the biggest progenitor of the gargantuan killing power that straddles the world today trying to tell other countries to not have any nuclear weapons. Clearly, the US needs to still drastically scale down its nuclear stockpile. It then needs to let the UN and the IAEA decide nuclear policy. It needs to ratify the CTBT before it can set an example before other nations.

But the real repurcussions of measures needed to stop nuclear proliferation go deep, and remind us that individual problems cannot be divorced from general policy and especially foreign policy. Unfortunately, with George Bush's foreign policy, almost any recommendation that the US makes is likely to be pooh poohed. The US has to improve its image as a safeguarder of peace and also as a nation that truly desires peace. It and other countries will have to offer a healthy combination of carrots and sticks to other countries to relinquish their nuclear ambitions. The NPT should be modified and enforced and its tenets extended in whatever way possible to other countries. It is obvious that for any such action, wounds will have to be healed, to foster cooperation between the US and other nations.

At the same time, it is key to allow any country to adopt electricity from nuclear power if it so chooses, and nothing should come in the way of such development. Nuclear power promises to be a saviour in this era of declining fossil fuels, and only a system of international control can make nuclear material for peaceful applications available to all countries. No country should be able to have a unilateral say in such a system, and no special lobbies should be allowed to have a say in its workings. The crumbling and ineffectual structures of the UN and IAEA need to be revived and if necessary to be recast into a new organisation.

The most crucial issue of today's nuclear era is that of nuclear terrorism. Deterrence does not work for terrorist groups who clandestinely acquire nuclear material and then post a deadly package to another nation without a return address. While this problem is a particularly recalcitrant one and again goes much beyond its immediate features, its resolution crucially depends on securing nuclear material in states. Russia for example lost a considerable amount of nuclear material at the end of the Cold War that may be in terrorist hands. International cooperation advocated by Cirincione is necessary for working together to secure such material. Countries like Pakistan and Iran which are likely to funnel nuclear material into the hands of terrorists need to be marked and kept under constant watch. Every country needs to contribute funds to such an effort.

When I think about the problem of nuclear weapons, I am constantly fascinated, amused, as well as frustrated by how far its repurcussions go. The future of nuclear weapons seems to be intimately tied to the destiny of countries and to the vagaries of human nature. Their existence was conceived by collective human brilliance, and their future will depend on collective human wisdom. This future is deviously intertwined with the rise and fall of governments and civilizations. To secure such a future, we all have to work together. Perhaps a hundred years into the future, our descendents may think of nuclear weapons as a historical accident that passed. For that time, even the awareness that nuclear weapons are tied to national and human destiny will keep us alerted and go a long way.

Till then, we will be always standing on the shoulders of bombs, and gravestones of lost ideals and failed policies, but perhaps also under clouds of optimism and hope.

Prelude to misery

2007-07-13T00:51:00.001Z

Stephen Walker- Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

There are several great and insightful books written about the bomb (with Richard Rhodes's book being the gold standard), and one is always prone to wonder if there could be anything new on the topic. However, no book, for lack of space, can cover all aspects of this momentous and defining time in history. Stephen Walker's Countdown To Hiroshima is the best account I have seen yet of the personal perspectives of some of the men and women who worked on the bomb. Walker sometimes gives an almost minute-by-minute description of events as a chapter. For example, shortly before the bombing, one chapter is titled "One hour to Hiroshima". The next chapter actually is "45 seconds to Hiroshima", with a riveting description of the dropping and explosion of the bomb almost by the second.

Even among the people who Walker portrays, many of whom were ordinary people who became extraordinary, he especially focuses on two sets of pivotal actors; the men who organised the first atomic bomb detonation in the hot desert of New Mexico on an eerie, black morning, and later and most importantly, the remarkable small group of men who flew the planes that dropped the bomb and changed history. But Walker also considerably focuses on the men and women who finally bore the terrifying relentless of this fever pitch- the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their leaders.

It was through this book that I got to know about the monumental challenges that the bombers and their commanders faced, and the obssessive yet essentially security that enveloped the whole operation. Walker begins with a riveting account of Trinity, the first atomic bomb test. He focuses on Don Hornig, a young physicist whose job was to safeguard the bomb before the test. The test was conducted in the desert haunts of New Mexico during the black haze of dawn. Everybody had nerves of steel in the moments leading to the test. Nobel laureates worked together with technicians and construction workers. Nothing could be left to chance. Robert Oppenheimer flitted in and out of the scenes, his body racked by a cough worked up by years of compulsive chain-smoking. Everybody worried about his health; he had been almost physically present at every step leading to the bomb in the last four years.
Don Hornig's job was to babysit the bomb on top of a tower where it was supposed to be detonated. Walker paints vivid and apocalyptic sounding accounts of the rain that suddenly turned the desert into muck, the thunder that growled as if in retaliation for some sin that the scientists were committing, and the flashes of lightning that actually threatened to detonate the bomb. The bomb was almost a religious experience for some. Walker takes us to the top of the tower with Don Hornig, sitting beside that black nebulous object amid lightning and thunder inside a makeshift tent. It was only a few minutes before the detonation that Hornig was ordered to step down from the tower. The rest is history. A new force was born in the next few minutes, brighter than than the sun, that has nonetheless cast humanity into a suicidal straitjacket ever since.

The people of Hiroshima of course did not know anything about this. They were gearing up to fight to the last man, woman, and child. The depiction of life in the city is stark. Rationing was strictly enforced, and everybody was supposed to do the backbreaking work necessary to defend their homeland, age and physical condition notwithstanding. Walker focuses on a few sets of people whose lives, either shattered or tragically cut short, he traces in the last few days before August 6. There are the two sisters, one of them sick, who have to come down from their home in the hills everyday to pick grass for eating. There is the doctor who has already been sickened by the war and envelops himself into a drunken stupor the night before. There are the lovers who hold hands in the garden of Hiroshima on the night before, confident that the war can end soon and they can get married. The bomb has the capacity to change everything into nothing, all this imagery, all the stuff which is the raw material for stories and civilization.

It is also interesting to read the political deliberations that went on in the Japanese and US governments. Walker has had access to newly declassified documents, and from them, one gets the painful sense of lost opportunity that could have made things so much more different. For one thing, many Japanese ministers and leaders wanted to negotiate with the US through the Soviet Union for surrender, with the singular condition that they could keep their emperor. There were others though who subscribed to the standard Japanese tradition of considering the thought of surrender as the most revolting and cowardly thing they could possibly do. Our brave soldiers have died in the thousands defending Okinawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima. We should not let their sacrifice be for nothing. We will train our teenage girls to fight to their last breath, with bamboo spears in the absence of all other weapons...One can only remotely imagine the nightmare that would have been precipitated if it become necessary for the Allies to storm the beaches of Japan.

But even more than the Japanese, the Allies lost a chance not only to avoid getting a blot on the escutcheon of their history, but also to preserve their hard won nuclear knowledge and preserve the lead for a little while more in the arms race. It is now clear that Truman and others consistently ignored entertaining the thought of letting the Japanese surrender by keeping their emperor. They did not do this with the wilful intention of killing innocent Japanese, but as I have written before, they were too preoccupied with possible Allied casualties, and more tellingly with the diplomatic potential of the bomb, to contemplate conditional Japanese surrender. Truman's secretary of state Henry Stimson had visited and studied Japan and knew of the strong commitment to culture, emperor, and traditions that the Japanese exemplified. Truman chose instead to focus on the looming Soviet threat. The atomic bomb would be the perfect preemptive weapon.
History would indeed have been very different if Truman had considered letting the Japanese keep their emperor and surrender without the bomb, something to which they would likely have agreed sooner of later. That he did not in some ways paved the way for the next fifty years of nuclear enslavement, a trend that continues to the present day.

But the main part of the book really concerns men about whom relatively less has been written. These were the men who commandeered the planes that dropped the bombs. Walker's book will put to rest any illusions that dropping the bomb was as easy as uploading it onto a standard bomber and then simply releasing it at the opportune moment. Dropping the bomb involved choosing the best bomber pilots in the air-force, training them for almost a year at a top-secret base in Utah, acclimatizing them to the rigors of living and traning in the South Pacific, and finally making sure that they preserve the nerves to carry out their mission. To lead such a band of handpicked and hardened pilots, technicians, bombers, and crew would need a remarkable air-force commander. Fortunately, Colonel Paul Tibbets was just the man for the mission.

Probably the most amusing anecdote in the book concerns the grilling that Tibbets received before they could make sure he was the perfect man for the mission. Experience and skill was not an issue; Tibbets had been one of the best bomber pilots in Europe. But to lead and organise such a secret mission, it would take much more than just skill. They wanted to look for rock solid resolve, courage, and also honesty, so that the man would never compromise the utmost secrecy of the project. To gauge these qualities, they asked Tibbets if he had ever been arrested. There was one occasion when Tibbets had been arrested for being in intimate association with a women in the back of a car on a Florida beach. The officials waited for his answer. If Tibbets lied, he would have been out of the show right away. Tibbets spoke the truth, and changed his life for all of of history to read about.

In Wendover, Utah, Tibbets assembled a crew of handpicked men who would accompany him on the flight. They trained for a year in specially modified B-29 bombers, day after day, making pass after pass in the air, till they would get it perfect and drop with fatigue. Life in Wendover did not come without perks. To make sure they stayed happy and honest, Tibbets's men were given carte blanche to behave almost any way they wanted. Alcohol was generously supplied in infinite quantities. Living quarters were such that generals would not get them. Affairs with local girls were hushed up with bribery and cajoling. The men could not be distracted from their goal, which in large part involved a single manuever, to learn to bank at an angle of 60 degrees and fly away as fast as they could. This was for an important reason on which their lives depended; the bomb's shockwave would rapidly reach them, and this impossible pass in the air was about the only way they could get away from it safely without having their plane flattened like a tin can. But they did learn how to do the pass, after practising it literally thousands of times, until they could do it blindfolded.

From Wendover, the team flew to Tinian Island, one of the hard won, sun baked South Pacific islands that the Allies had captured the previous year. In the sweltering year-round heat, the island had been turned into an engineering marvel, the largest airforce base in the world until then, with the largest possible runways one could imagine. The few Japanese who had escaped into the overlooking hills watched with frightened faces and wide eyes. The giant B-29s that bombed Japan day and night lined up like hundred of mosquitoes or pirhanas, and like zombies, got off the runway, dropped their cartload of bombs on Japan relentlessly, and came back for more before taking off again. The operation was harsh and obssesive, because it was commandeered by the harshest and most obssesive man in the armed forces- Curtis LeMay. LeMay had only one mission, to bomb Japan back to the stone age until it surrendered. There was absolutely no concern in his mind about civilian deaths or their numbers. Indeed, LeMay probably annihilated more cities and people than either "Butcher" Harris (commander of the RAF who ordered the Hamburg and Dresden bombing raids) or Hermann Goering (commander of the Luftwaffe). It is one of the ironies of history that by the time the bomb crew was ready to drop their payload, Japan was a smouldering heap in which many times more people had been killed than would die in the atomic bombings.

Walker also gives a good sense of the immense secrecy surrounding the project. None of the bomber crew except Tibbets actually knew what kind of bomb they were going to drop. Nobody else on the whole of Tinian Island except the general commander knew what the crew was there for. The assembly of the bombs took place in remote buildings on the island. The buildings were guarded around the clock with dozens of military police (who also did not know what was going on inside). The secrecy was enforced without exception; there were shoot-on-sight orders for anyone who ventured close to the bulidings, generals included. The uranium and plutonium bombs promptly made their way after the test to Tinian, one on a ship guarded by men willing to pay with their lives, and the other one by plane. With the bomb sat specialists recruited by Oppenheimer for their realiability and nerves, specially inducted into the army for the mission. One of them was Deke Parsons, whose job was to "arm" the bomb in flight. Walker conveys the immense difficulty of this seemingly simple task. The bombs could not be armed before they were loaded on because there was actually a danger that they could detonate prematurely by electrical discharges or impact. Once on board, they had to be armed quickly, in an extremely cramped space amid turbulence and constant movement. The arming was complex, with many pins to be inserted, removed, and turned. The casing was rough. Parson, like a man possessed, practised arming the bomb in the 100 degree heat for hours when the plane was on the ground, until his hand was bleeding from the effort. Once up in the sky, failure could not possibly be contemplated.

On Tinian as in Wendover, the quirky crew, men of all shapes, sizes, and inclinations and personalities, were treated like kings. The treatment oddly resembled that given to condemned men before they are executed. They were treated to fine gourmet food specially made by the chef, gallons of booze, air-conditioned quarters, movies in their own theater. Jealous and curious inquirers were quickly shooed away at gunpoint. Even if the men did not know their exact mission till the last moment, they knew that it carried the risk of capture or easy destruction. To make sure the weather was right for bombing and to serve as a cover against anti-aircraft fire, two other planes would lead the plane with the bomb. Taking off itself was no simple operation. With the increased load, the plans could easy tumble down and crash on the runway, ending the mission, the lives of the crew, and possibly detonating the bomb and the entire island before it all even began. It was hard to imagine anyone in the world except Tibbets and his crew pulling it off at that point.

On the day of reckoning, Deke Parson finally told them the nature of the "gadget" that armed guards had been safeguarding with their life for so long, and which they were supposed to deliver that day. He still did not tell them the mechanism by which the gadget operated. Before the crew took off, they posed for historic photographs. Just before take off and after coming back, they would become some of the most unlikely rock stars of the century. Tibbets's mother went down in history. Her proud son named his plane after her- Enola Gay.

After take off, things went smoothly. But a measure of how much attention to detail had to be still paid is illustrated by a fascinating fact recounted by Walker. The bomb was exquisitely designed to be detonated at a particular height above the ground, where it would cause the most destruction. To achieve this, it had built inside, a precise set of radar antennas that were activated sequentially. Each radar antenna would send signals vertically to the ground as the bomb was falling, and judge the height from the reflected signal. The timing circuitry was programmed to detonate the bomb at the precise height as indicated by the antenna. But there was a problem. If Japanese radio transmitters broadcast anything at the particular radar frequency, the bomb could be activated and possibly detonate in flight. To circumvent this deadly and bizarre possibility, one man was recruited for the express purpose of scanning radar frequencies emitted by Japanese transmitters. Space on the Enola Gay was exclusive to say the least. The radar scanner was finally installed in the only remaining space- beside the toilet.
As the bomb falls, Walker's riveting, almost second-by-second account of what was happening inside it and inside the plane creates a bizarre contrast; a clinical and sanitized description of bomb and flight physics, as if almost divorced from the very much human impact that was going to be created in ten seconds.

If one can call anything associated with the conception of such a terrible weapon as perfect, then everything in the mission went perfectly. The weather cleared up soon, but not before Hiroshima was consigned to fate at the last moment; the initial intended target was Kokura. It was the bad weather over Kokura that sealed Hiroshima's fate. Apart from this, the mission went smoothly, with no Japanese antiaircraft fire, and perfect detonation and destruction of a beautiful city. As they watched the burgeoning mushroom cloud with astonishment, the crew of the Enola Gay exemplified the ambivalence about the bomb that everyone has felt since then. For some, it was simply a job to be done. For others, it was a vision that would rob them of sleep throughout their lives. After coming back, the men were in a surreal mood, not having slept in days. They were hounded by the media and declared heroes. Everyone was satisfied and happy, including General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project in Washington, but admittedly excluding Robert Oppenheimer.

In Hiroshima of course, the story was different. Walker gives a sobering narration of the destruction of the city. These stories have been recounted in detail in dozens of books, including John Hersey's famous Hiroshima and Rhodes's book. There was the drunken and disturbed doctor, who was saved from the brink of death because he had to attend an early morning house call on a house on a nearby hill. When he started walking back to the city, dazed, the sky a fantastic hue of colours in the background, he saw people looking like zombies ascending the hill towards him. Many of them uttered animal-like screams and fell down motionless. They were human beings, charred black by the heat, bones sticking out, desperately looking for water, and a way to survive. The man who had spent the earlier night with his lover in the garden never saw her again. The sister whose twin was sick did not see her either. The soldier who was on duty a short distance away saw two huddled figures, his wife and child, blackened and fused together on the road near his house. All he did was pick the bones up, to bury the later. Many of these survivors must have died of radiation poisoning later. The few surviving photographs of the time depict a snapshot of misery and things that the human mind can do, tales for generations to come.

Paul Tibbets is still alive. To this day, he has never regretted dropping the bomb.

Roger Ebert: Awake in the Dark

2007-04-22T23:29:00.001Z

I like reading reviews, but not before watching the movie. Reviews are always spoilers. By acting as filters they rob a movie of its raw effect. The movie is no longer a personal experience, but an exercise in hunting for elements described in the review. While still personal, the movie need not be a private experience. You cannot possibly catch every nuance and subtlety sitting there alone. I like reading reviews immediately afterwards, while the taste still lingers because they are like discussions with an expert. To me, the ideal movie review is not dictation on 'this is what to see', but a discussion on 'this is what I saw, did you?'

Like most, I was introduced to Roger Ebert, not through his popular TV show, but through his reviews (courtesy: IMDB) on his website. In most cases, whether I agree with his final verdict or not, Roger Ebert has always made a movie more rewarding in retrospect by pointing out scenes, lines and their delivery.

It is to be expected that any professional film critic would (should?) have a more heightened sensibility, a better sense of history, knowledge of movie-making craft, and more experience than you, and would naturally be better equipped at illuminating aspects of the movie. So why are Roger Ebert's reviews like sparkling diamonds among shards of glass? Most other reviewers often adopt a nasty, sneering and confrontational stance. They wear their prejudices like badges of honour. Either the film is cursorily dismissed, or they get caught up in so much over-analysis that you begin to wonder, 'What was that movie about? What about the big picture?' (excuse the pun!) What sets Ebert apart is not only that he writes in plain English, eschewing high-falutin' secret film code, but that he genuinely loves the movies. He deserves all the acclaim and fame because he isn't out to be the Great Dictator, or worse, the Great Patronizer. Every Ebert review is an effort to convey the emotion that he felt, nothing else.
For example, see this review of Fargo:
"... [the Coen brothers] have elevated reality into a human comedy - into the kind of movie that makes us hug ourselves with the way it pulls off one improbable scene after another. Films like "Fargo" are why I love the movies."
Tell me how many reviewers write, 'I love the movies' ?

If I had a choice of job at a newspaper, it would either to be on the restaurant or movie beat. I would expect my voraciousness and enthusiasm to overcome the lack of taste or talent. Being a film critic wasn't something that Roger Ebert grew up dreaming about. He sort of stumbled upon the job, which was to 'stay awake in the dark and write about it.'

"I had not thought to be a film critic, and indeed had few firm career plans apart from vague notions that I might someday be a political columnist or a professor of English ... My master plan was to become an op-ed columnist and then eventually, of course, a great and respected novelist. My reveries ended with a deep old wingback chair pulled up close to the fire in a cottage in the middle of the woods, where the big dog snored while I sank into a volume of Dickens."

Forty years of Roger Ebert's reviews, essays, and interviews are collected the book - Awake in the Dark. The movie reviews in the book are same as the ones available online, but it was fun to reread some of them. The real treat is the collection of essays and interviews. His essays on movie personalities range from Ingmar Bergman to Spielberg, Robert Mitchum to Tom Hanks, and they are not short biographies but a collection of snapshots. The piece on Meryl Streep was written just before Silkwood was released in 1983 and was remarkably prophetic. The collection feels like an old photo album whose very datedness makes it even more wonderful.

The really juicy part of the the book is at the very end where film-criticism and critics go under the microscope. The series of essays published in Film Comment in the summer of 1990 are collected under 'Symposium'. Richard Corliss (Time and Film Comment) and Roger Ebert conducted a 'healthy' debate, in other words, just stopped short of getting at each other's throats. In this series of essays, Corliss accused Ebert of selling out in his popular TV show with Siskel (now replaced by Roeper) and perpetrating the film capsule that was less about analysis and more about writing catchy slogans that look good on publicity posters and movie covers. He then accused him of pandering to the current moviegoer who did not have the patience to read a long, serious film review. Ebert replied in the next issue and accused Corliss of hypocrisy by preferring to write in Time, a publication of 'chirpy patois' and hardly a place where Corliss would being doing justice to legacy of Kael, Kauffman and Sarris. Then Ebert went on to defend, what I call the 'the mid-brow' school of film journalism; he disagreed that serious film criticism was dead. According to him, there were more people than ever who are interested in it, but you couldn't expect that of every film-goer. The good news was that films have gotten better and there is a market for movies that would not have been made earlier. The 'class' is still growing and the 'mass' needs to be educated gently not alienated. The final piece is by Andrew Sarris himself who quite humorously opens with: " ... like Jean Brodie, I am still very much in my prime." He adds notes to his much-debated 'auteur theory' and sorts the debate between his 'young' colleagues. This section is one the delights of this book and you will relish all the essays on film criticism. To paraphrase Jean Brodie, if that is the sort of thing you like to do.

Ebert writes:

"I now find that I have been a film critic ... I am not on the op-ed page, have not written the novel, do not own the dog, but do have the cottage and the complete set of Dickens. And I am still going to the movies for a living."

Ebert is still recovering from cancer treatment in late 2006 and has been watching movies but not writing as many reviews.

the talented patricia highsmith

2007-04-18T05:18:00.000Z

Book sales are always a great place to land deals. Consider the $1 purchase of Nothing That Meets The Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith. This compilation was, for better or worse, my introduction to the author of the Ripliana, the author whose first novel Strangers On A Train had been transformed by Hitchcock into one of his finest films. Perhaps it was the title (taken from one of the short stories in the collection) that drew my attention (although The Talented Mr. Ripley isn't without its own appeal). Or perhaps it was the cover (lovely design). That's in addition to the stories in the collection, of course.

The Ripley canon alone illustrates some of the themes in Highsmith's writing: questions of identity, a very internal world created by an often detached wordscape. There's a sense of Poe to some of the stories and yet the feverish texture of the master of the macabre is replaced by a crisp economical veneer.

The story that I remembered most from the collection, the story that remained to motivate me to pick the book off the table at the sale, is a story called Music To Die By. The story serves up descriptions of murder and the intent thereof in a most disturbingly mundane confection. The events in the life of postal worker Aaron Wechsler seem unsettlingly prophetic now.

The rest of the collection is filled with equally appealing yet diverse material. As a sample, consider the following paragraph that opens a delightful nugget called The Hollow Oracle:

The black mass of the house sprang out of the darkness, and he tripped on the wooden step. He knocked on the screen-door frame, seized the knob and wrenched it back and forth as though he must be let in before a pursuer overtook him. Like a murderer he held the powerful clawhammer straight down at his side, in a grip that made the hammer a part of his arm, welded in the ache of his muscles. He shook the door until the sound grew crazy in the silence, and he stopped, losing then the momentum that had carried him the two miles down the road, the murderer's momentum that had started twenty minutes before, like the beginning of the act itself. In the stillness there was time to hear his own gasping breath, to feel the eyes in the dark behind him. He pressed close to the house, making no sound.

2005 was the year that I saw all of my Ripley films: The Talented Mr. Ripley (whose fabulous opening credit sequence with its wondrous interplay of aural and visual jazz offered an echo of the book), Purple Noon (Scorsese championed a re-release in 1996, but my first experience was a poor VHS copy; I hope to make amends with the DVD) and Ripley's Game (of note is John Malkovich's chilling intellectual reading of the character). I hope Ripley Under Ground gets a release some day. The interesting thing about the films is how different the interpretation of the text and the character itself is in each one, unlike a series like the Bond films, where each new James Bond was forced to comply with a template of attributes thus limiting what he could offer to the character. If the synopsis of The American Friend (the second interpretation of Ripley's Game) is any indication, I'm in for another different experience. That's always something to look forward to.

The Felt Community by Rajat Kanta Ray

2007-04-01T07:37:00.000Z

[Cross-posted at Qalandar]

The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality Before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Rajat Kanta Ray (Oxford University Press, November 2002 (India); January 2003 (U.S.A.)

I

Rajat Kanta Ray's insightful and deeply learned book "addresses a knotty old question: what were nations like before nationalism?" (Preface, ix). More specifically, what was India like before nationalism? In exploring possible answers to this question, Ray eschews the essentialism of those who imagine an Indian nationalism, a "national spirit" extending in an unbroken line from ancient times to the present day, but is no less skeptical of "the exaggerated stress on the invented, imagined, or constructed element of the nation" that according to Ray is characteristic of the contemporary academic left (Pg. 7). In other words, Ray astutely recognizes that even after one acknowledges the difference that nationalism makes, the novelty that is nationalism, one is nevertheless left with the problem that "Nothing can come of nothing." That is, there need be no necessary tension between the position that nationalism and the formation of nation-states -- the very political horizon we continue to operate under, a horizon bequeathed by colonialism -- is a relatively recent historical development, and the notion that this development must have tapped into notions of community that were far more rooted in order to gain traction:

A nation is born when it perceives itself as such. For all the objective factors that may assist it in this self-perception, this is, in the last resort, a mental process. Its roots are to be found in the history of mentality. Mentality, of course, consists of both ideas and emotions. . . . Nationalism is above all an idea: the modern idea of the sovereign nation-state. However, emotion is equally important. You may try and engineer a nation by propagating an idea. You may "invent" a nation, "construct" an identity, "imagine" a nation, but however much you print or propagate, the "project" will not be successful until you hit upon some real emotional bond.

Furthermore, it may be possible to invent the idea, but it is not as easy to engineer the emotion. You may discover the emotion if it exists, and harness it to your idea. Ideas have been known to be manufactured, but would you also say you can manufacture an emotion? . . . Only if power is built upon an existing passion will there be a tangible achievement, not otherwise. Manipulate the mechanism, and perhaps you may detach the emotion from an older idea and forge it into a newer one. The emotions are the building blocks. One may construct structures of widely divergent shapes with the blocks. One may build a united India, a separate Pakistan, a liberated Bangladesh, an independent Kashmir, a sovereign Khalistan. Much will depend on the specific developments and historical circumstances, on the chain of events. Nonetheless, the general principle is still valid: ideas and emotions are equally important in the political processes of forging a nation. (Preface, ix-x)

One might be skeptical of the bright line Ray draws between "ideas" and "emotions", as if the two could be cleanly demarcated, as if one might ever have a pure idea that somehow is unsullied by emotion, and vice versa. Nevertheless, Ray is onto something here: it is surely uncontroversial to assert that not all ideas are equally plausible, not all equally likely to command the passions of men and women. Particular circumstances and histories will determine what idea is plausible and when (for instance, Tamil separatism was a far more politically viable idea in the India of the late 1950s than it is today, due to various factors, not least of which is the success of the idea of India and the Nehruvian ideological project). And the histories Ray is concerned with here are the Indian histories of a mentality, a mentality that saw the self as part of a group and of multiple groups, a mentality whereby one was part of a group precisely because one felt oneself to be part of the group(s) in question.

Ray's thesis has (self-consciously) contemporary relevance, and the author makes no bones about the fact that he comes down firmly on the side of a "civic nationalism, which ultimately knows no ethnic boundaries" and is "the patriotism of the future," as opposed to the "patriotism of antiquity" which is "the ethnic nationalism of today" (pgs. 36-37). No surprises for guessing which of the two models Ray views the specifically Hindu and Muslim nationalisms of the Indian sub-continent as conforming to, a conviction that leads him to a defiant prophesy that "[t]he circle of reason will expand in the longer run and will incorporate the citizens of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in an extended civil society" even if he has "no hope that [he] will see this in [his] lifetime" (Preface, xii).

Ray offers no reason to believe that his defiance is warranted; in other words, how does Ray's thesis about the history of certain Indian mentalities, mentalities that assumed or were at least somewhat consistent with the notion of a shared and common space for otherwise distinct or even opposed communities, tie into the contemporary sub-continental scenario, where (taking the ideology underlying Pakistan as an example) the entire raison d'etre of a nation-state continues to be the denial of any commonality? It appears to me that the mentalities Ray is speaking of have been superseded here by a mentality of "otherness", and otherness of a sort as to demand political segregation for the two "others". Like Ray, and for a host of reasons, I consider this a bad idea, but at a minimum it would appear to suggest that modern identity politics have overtaken Ray's historical thesis. Pakistan, for instance, is (leaving aside any notion of a political confederation with India) increasingly uncomfortable with its sub-continental skin, and prefers to regard itself as a member of a worldwide constituency of Muslims not tied to notions of commonality with the Indian "other". To flip the point discussed at length below (see (III)), the nature of the Pakistan experiment appears to be precisely the subversion of the sort of mentality that Ray studies, the one that began "ummah-centric" but ended "Hindustan"-bound; the dovetailing of the two-nation theory and the Islamist politics of the last few decades mean that Pakistan increasingly does not see itself as sub-continent bound. In short, even if Ray's historical analysis is spot on, it would thus appear odd to predict a "community of sentiment" on the basis of a history the subversion of which is a deliberate political project.

II

It would be easy to point out that the dichotomy between "civic" and "ethnic" nationalism is hardly a stable one, especially given Ray's own study of the links between pre-modern "patriotism" and its nationalistic heir. If the old patriotism (which maps to modern "ethnic nationalism") is not unconnected to modern nationalism -- indeed this is one of the central theses of The Felt Community -- how can "civic nationalism" be a wholly separate category from its "ethnic" analogue? Ray himself points to the (repressed) "ethnic" prehistory of nationalism when he accuses contemporary academic fashion of ignoring this prehistory in favor of the view that the "nation," along with various other group identities, are "imagined communities," functions of the theory and practice of colonialism as it were. Yet he appears to ignore this lesson when he casts his lot firmly with the "circle of reason" that "civic nationalism" will draw around us; one might say Ray acknowledges the pre-history of modern nationalism, but implicitly dismisses the survival of the "ethnic" within the "civic" whereby, while the latter is not reducible to the former it is never a sphere completely apart either.

The above is a fair charge, but ignores the subtlety, that is to say the sophisticated modesty, of Ray's vision, resting at bottom on an intuitive appreciation of the wisdom that not all ideas are equally problematic, even if all of them are equally contingent:

. . . India strongly resembled Europe: here, too, was a felt community comprising several communities of sentiment, all of which might claim nationhood in course of time, or federate into one composite nation. Several routes of historical development lay open. The generation that belonged to Rammohun Roy's grandsons construed one idea of nationality: a united Indian nation. The idea was propounded by Surendranath Banerjea's Indian National Conference. Behind the fragile construal lay a perpetual community of emotion: the "Hindian." Two generations elapsed before the Muslim League of Muhammad Ali Jinnah came up with yet another theoretical construction: Pakistan. Behind it lay a similarly ancient felt community: the Muslims of Hind. Other construals have followed, based upon various tangled communities of sentiment: the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan have become a nation dubbed Bangladesh; and in India, an effort is on to make yet another nation based on the felt community of the Hindus. The problem with these identifications, with the exception of a confederation based on the Hindian, is that they are all communities of emotion based on the principle of exclusion. Hindiyat, unlike Hindutva, represents the principle of inclusion and not exclusion, and is therefore a less oppressive basis for building a state. . . . (Pg. 38)

In short, Ray does not deny the colonial political construction of both nation and group identities, but his point is that the construction was only plausible to the extent that it could lay claim to and harness an earlier "community of sentiment." The point is not that pluralism, Muslim and/or linguistic and ethnic separatism, or a Hindu supremacist ideology, were inevitable, but that the various histories of India made all of them at least somewhat plausible, as the contemporary sub-continent shows. None is essential, but on Ray's reading none is wholly "imaginary" either. Some of these ideas are better than others, and hence in terms of securing a less oppressive future, the thought our politics must think and the emotion our politics must harness is precisely the most inclusive of all the plausibilities we are heirs to (for an interesting discussion on a related notion, sparked by a recent Mukul Kesavan piece, see here).

In short, one might imagine Ray's critics within the Subaltern Studies school dismissing The Felt Community as bourgeois Indian nationalist historiography dressed up in post-modern garb, but if so, they will have to admit that Ray's book is arguably the most sophisticated and subtle contemporary defense of "Indianness" as a mentality and a sentiment (I suspect Ray would prefer those terms to "idea") that has a history predating colonialism and the birth of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century.

III

At its core, and irrespective of what one makes of Ray's advocacy of a European Union-style confederacy in the sub-continent or how this notion follows from the sub-continent's history, The Felt Community is a history of three major "communities of sentiment," coalescing around the identities "Hindu", "Muslim", and "Indian", the first two inasmuch as they created and conditioned the third prior to modern-era nationalism. The historical portion of the book is divided into three sections, focusing on concepts of "Indianness" from ancient times through the Islamic invasions (and the subsequent development of "Hindu" and "Muslim" group identities as distinct from the earlier use of "Hindu" as an ethnic designation of sorts); the late-Mughal era resistance to the expansion of the East India Company in North India; and the revolt of 1857, specifically with respect to certain rebel claims that they were acting on behalf of "the Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan," a phrase that links all three "communities of sentiment" that are relevant for Ray's purposes.

The Felt Community is formidably learned, but not forbiddingly so, and is written in an engaging style -- it is clear that Ray writes not only for the academic but also for the interested layperson. Ray is a careful historian, anxious not to explain away or hurry past the ambiguity and violence that characterized Islam's encounter with India during much of the first half of the last millennium. This might not seem like much, but is notable given the condescending reticence of most "progressive" Indian historians with respect to this issue, as if study of the depredations of the Delhi Sultanate might cause an anti-Muslim pogrom, or at a minimum amount to complicity with the Hindutva element that seeks to harness a sense of historical grievance to contemporary anti-Muslim politics. This infantile attitude is not only damaging to the intellectual credibility of Indian historiography but also prevents a serious engagement with pre-colonial Indian history, and it is heartening that Ray does not succumb to the temptations of so many of his colleagues in the academy. Ray is proudly pluralist and secular, and respectful enough of his readers that he will not finesse his medieval history for fear of the ugly shrillness of much contemporary Indian politics. Nor is he prone to sweeping generalizations in this area, and makes it a point to cite to evidence suggesting glimpses of multiple realities, multiple worldviews, during the period in question, ranging from violent religious conflict to syncretism and peaceful acculturation. Through it all Ray's point is not that one or other mode of Hindu-Muslim interaction is "essential", but that the fact and nature of the various sorts of interactions made plausible some notion of shared cultural space -- ultimately, of Indianness -- that was not simply reducible to religious or ethnic identity. In time, the shared space of India became the only horizon, even for those who valorized the subordination of kufr to an Islamic imperium. That is, Ray persuasively shows that an Islamic imperium in and of Hindustan became the ideal the Delhi Sultanate and its successors strove towards, as opposed to the notion that the empire in India might just be part of some other, wider, Islamic empire. Other historians have focused on the nature of this arrangement, but The Felt Community is concerned with a different question: why and how did "Hindustan" become the horizon, as opposed to some other community of sentiment?

Ray's account of the experience of Islam in India, that is to say the Indian acculturation of Islam, simultaneously with the impact and influence of Islam on Hindu religious beliefs and practices, provides an answer. The ambiguous encounter, fraught with opposition, necessity, and creative exchange(though not between political equals), led to a mentality that was not simply a "Hindu" or a "Muslim" mentality but something else, a mentality that shared common cultural assumptions. The commonality did not by any stretch of the imagination mean the same thing as "tolerance", "pluralism", or any of our modern concepts: medieval mindsets will not easily be shoehorned into contemporary liberal terminology. But on Ray's account the encounter -- I would say the many encounters -- between Islam and India made plausible the notion of a commonality, a mentality, such that in time the initial categories of "native" and "foreign" came to seem anachronistic; their replacement by "Hindu" and "Muslim" is not a question of a step forward so much as it is a question of recognizing the difference between the two binary oppositions. The former pits invader against native; the latter might be just as oppositional, but assumes nativity on the part of both referents. No coincidence, then, that the early Indian records tend to refer to "Turks", whereas a few centuries later it is a question of "Muslims".

Over the medieval time-span, the horizon shifted, became India-bound as it were, though Ray sometimes appears to verge on the essentialism he critiques elsewhere by occasionally positing a commonality that survives unchanged across different eras. Thus, the popular (and abortive) 1739 resistance in and around Delhi against the rampaging forces of Persia's Nadir Shah, when Hindus and Muslims fought in the name of something other than simply Hinduism and Islam, a something that was nothing less than a besieged common space, the legitimacy of which was incarnated in the figure of the disgraced Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah, is for Ray foreshadowed by the Delhi mob rising up against the forces of Timurlane in 1398. Apart from the fact that both incidents involved Delhi's "low born" population revolting against a victorious invading army (and being massacred as punishment), it is not clear that the two events are linked in any way. That is, Ray's thesis is quite persuasive as applied to 1739, but he himself can hardly cite similarly persuasive evidence where Timur's 1398 sack of Delhi is concerned. In the latter instance, no "Hindustan", embodied in the person of a legitimate ruler, appears to be implicated, and there is little sense that the public, certainly the Hindu public, invested the Delhi Sultanates with any great legitimacy (I would find it odd if it did, given the depredatory and frankly anti-Hindu nature of those polities).

The Felt Community also cites the rebellions and massacres of 1398 and 1739 as evidence of a persistent proto-patriotic sentiment. The chronological gap merely highlights the abiding nature of this sentiment where Ray is concerned. However, one might just as easily counter that "patriotism" is the sort of emotion that needs an "other" in order to exist, and that far from pointing to some common esprit, 1398 and 1739 are simply two dates when invaders posed a common, and arguably an equally grave, threat to Hindus and Muslims (one thinks of World War II, when the USA, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union were on the same side; the first two of these might well be part of a "community of sentiment," but surely China and Russia were not in the same position). Nor should the difference between the mentalities of 1398 and 1739 be surprising: The Felt Community itself argues that after several centuries of Hindu-Muslim interaction (often hostile, often not so, and overarchingly ambiguous) the conditions for a common space were created. It is thus fitting that the contours of this space should be far more visible at a rather late date like 1739 -- after Akbar's transformation of the Mughal Empire into an Indian empire, an Islamic realm for sure in the final analysis but unquestionably "native" as far as its subjects were concerned -- than they were nearly three-and-a-half centuries earlier. This is an instance of Ray reaching for too much, but it makes rather than mars his thesis, which must depend on close attention to facts and local differences. For a "community of sentiment" is not like a monument -- it is a far more ethereal creation, and likely cannot bear the weight of sweeping generalizations.

IV

Ray's survey of medieval and ancient India serves as the backdrop to his more thorough study of the late-Mughal era resistance to the East India Company, leading up to the events of 1857. Ray is quick to note that organized armed resistance to the Company was not typical of the Mughal ruling class, and shrewdly locates at least part of the reason underlying this in the form in which colonialism came to India:

The sense of continuity arose from the colonial hegemony being effected not so much by head on collision as by gradual penetration of the Mughal system. After all, the Company itself was a zamindar and then the holder of Mughal office before it became sovereign. It rose to power from the subordinate layer of Mughal rule assigned to landholders and country powers. By Mughal decree, the Company became zamindar of 24 Parganas in 1757, and diwan of Bengal in 1765; it stood forth as the Diwan in 1772 after seven years of cautious diarchy; having pensioned off the Mughal nazim of Bengal, it also appropriated the Nizamat in 1793 . . . finally, it secured possession of the Red Fort of Delhi in 1803, establishing thereby its paramount position as regent of the Mughal Emperor. The Mughal system was taken over rather than blown apart. (Pgs. 214-215).

Interestingly, although armed Mughal resistance to the Company was far more spasmodic than that offered by the Sikhs, the Marattha confederacy, or Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, it is the Mughals Ray is concerned with. The reason is that in Ray's view the Mughal noblemen who did resist the Company articulated a broader ideological vision of the land, a pan-Indian potentiality, that was beyond the more "local" resistance of the Maratthas, Mysore, or the Sikhs. Ray rues the fact that "[t]he ideology of the Mughal confrontation with the British has not claimed the attention it deserved" (pg. 217), which shouldn't surprise anyone given the sub-continental tendency to exalt personality at the expense of an acknowledgment of political ideology. It follows from such a worldview that the pre-modern ruler is "before" ideology in a sense. He is a type -- a nawab, raja, emperor, etc. -- and his virtues and vices may be personal (Akbar as "tolerant", Aurangzeb as "bigoted" and "narrow-minded", for instance) but not impersonally political. One suspects that colonialism itself is at least partly complicit in such a discourse, insofar as it separates the modern citizen -- the product of colonialism -- from a "despotic" past and a dead end that does not offer the potential for self-actualization that the colonial discourse does. The de-politicization of pre-colonial historical figures, and their replacement by mere personalities, is not only the result of successful Mughal propaganda (it being the proper task of the purely imperial to efface its contingency in the world of the political, and to present itself as irrevocably, cosmically "given"), but also of the colonial incentive to contrast English liberality with native despotic caprice.

To his credit Ray stresses that his readers "must grasp at the outset . . . that these opponents [the Mughals and the British] spoke a political language" (pg. 218), a language that included space for "Indianness":

The war between Mir Qasim and the Company is the one exception to the pusillanimous surrender of the Mughal ruling class to the British. Culminating as it did in the league of the three Mughal princes, the episode is of particular significance to the course of Indian resistance to colonial domination. . . . The struggle of the Mughal ruling class against the Company, though brief and unsuccessful, was informed by a broader political vision. This because it derived from the explicitly articulated indivisibility of the sovereign Mughal realm of Hindustan. It was a concept that survived a hundred years later to be adopted by the rebel leaders of 1857. (Pg. 217).

Ray's historical survey of the late-Mughal government in Bengal is especially interesting for two reasons. First, for the glimpse it affords into the mind of Mir Qasim (and others), whose letters reveal concerns beyond those of mere statecraft. No matter how cynical one is with respect to the concern for the poor reflected in Mir Qasim's letters, it is hard not to be touched by the Mughal governor's bewilderment at the aggression of the Company, and of the impact on the poor of the Company's policies. Intriguingly enough, the political crisis precipitated by the confrontation between the Mughal state and the Company in Bengal apparently led Mir Qasim to become a free trader avant la lettre, in opposition to the Company's insistence that their relative advantage vis-a-vis other merchants (both native and foreign) be preserved by way of continued duty exemptions for the Company, but not for anyone else (Mir Qasim in 1763 decided to nullify the Company's comparative advantage by exempting all merchants from the relevant excise duties; earlier only the Company had been so exempt). The result was an inversion of the common stereotype contrasting the "feudal" Indian aristocrat with the entrepreneurial English: in this instance the latter were champions of crony mercantilism by virtue of imperial decrees past, and the former (in time, and admittedly under the pressure of a political emergency) of economic activity unfettered by duties and excises.

Second, one cannot help but be struck by the repeated references in Mir Qasim's letters, and those of his subordinates, to "my country" and "my people", in contrast to the alien British. More than the mere preservation of imperial privileges was at stake in the Mughal struggle for supremacy with the Company in eastern India during the late 1750s and 1760s, and Ray vividly demonstrates the popular nature of Indian resistance to the Company in Bihar and the eastern Gangetic valley by 1763. By that date, and leading up to the climactic battle of Buxar (1765) that settled the fate of eastern India in favor of the Company, the Mughal position was, Ray persuasively shows, not only imperial but also popular (the precise extent of its popularity is hard to gauge for obvious reasons), commanding support across multiple social groups, including, on at least one occasion documented by Ray, a marginal social group of itinerant faqirs who enthusiastically attacked a Company factory.

Ray is careful in stressing that we are not seeing nationalism at work, but he is not shy about referring to this as an imperial patriotism in action. The sense of an individual as representative of and subordinate to a national spirit that itself could only be adequately acknowledged via possession of a state, characteristic of nationalism, had not yet arisen. But, Ray shows, more than mere class interest or religious hostility was in evidence during the turbulent 1760s, replete with notions of native and alien, the customary privileges of the Mughal state as opposed to the innovations of the Company's dispensation, and occasional references to an (un-defined) "people" and "country." The nationalism of the future laid claim to these resources of cultural memory, indeed it needed them in order to gain traction, and in the final analysis these cultural resources were not simply products of the colonized imagination. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the pages of the Siyar-ul-Mutakhkhirin (1783), Sayid Ghulam Huasain Khan's history of the post-Aurangzeb Mughals:

The Mughal historian conveys a sense of the nation at large while dwelling on the differences between Hindus and Muslims; and, of course, Hindustanis, Muslims, Hindus, are all equally, as far as he is concerned, qaums. Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan was of the view that the Muslim conquerors, despite their foreign origin, were assimilated among the people of India. They learned the language of the country; and unlike the English, they behaved to the native inhabitants of the land 'as brothers of one mother and one language.' . . . Dissimilarity and alienation gave way to friendship and union, and 'the two nations' coalesced together 'into one whole.'

As soon as the initial state of warfare, slaughter, and confusion came to an end, the Muslim sovereigns of Delhi settled down to living among their subjects 'as kind and condescending parents amongst their children'. Under the Mughal emperors, 'everything in Hindostan was quietness, love and harmony' . . . . It was quite otherwise with the English, who came as strangers and remained so: 'such is the aversion which the English openly show for the company of the natives, and such the disdain they betray for them, that no love, and no coalition . . . can take root between the conquerors and the conquered . . .' .

Ghulam Husain Khan then went on to make certain deductions about the altered equation of identities in the new situation: the people of Hindustan, both Hindus and Muslims, were one qaum, and the English, their conquerors in Bengal, another, with a strange and alien government opposed to the Mughal government of the country. 'In one word, it may be said in general, and indeed in almost every institution and custom, that there is a wide difference betwixt the two nations and Governments; and that it is of such a nature as cannot be remedied at all.' If the Hindus and Muslims at one time were two nations, so were the Indians and English two nations now. (Pgs. 332-333)

The point here is of course not the validity of Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan's history -- it is impossible to accept his idyllic view of pre-British Indian history uncritically -- but the ideological underpinnings of his historiography, of his qaum-centric worldview wherein the qaum was nevertheless a malleable unit, having led in the course of time to a "Hindustani" qaum. It is no surprise that Ray locates the pre-history of Indian nationalism in the essentially conservative impulses of the Mughal aristocracy in decline: in Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan's work, the legitimacy of the Mughal imperium is recast in terms of a popular, qaumi basis that was self-evidently other than a merely "Muslim" basis. Ray's sympathies are with the author of the Siyar-ul-Mutakhkhirin, and even allowing for his enthusiasm one would have to admit that no other contemporary Indian polity allowed for an India-wide view such as that afforded adherents of the Mughal order, by virtue of the fact that, as Governor-General Lord Wellesley recognized, "his Majesty [Shah Alam] is still considered to be the only fountain of . . . honors" and legitimacy. (Pg. 334).

Yet one should be careful not to go too far: where The Felt Community could have done more is by highlighting that moments such as the imperial patriotic upsurge against the Company in the early 1760s stand out in large part because the backdrop might be read to tell quite a different tale, whether before or after Buxar. The question is whether the patriotism that Ray discerns in Mir Qasim's struggles against the Company is representative of a continuous tradition, albeit one among many, and often conflicting, traditions, or is it merely the exception that proves the rule, namely that one cannot speak of any commonality, of a "community of sentiment" other than one based on religious or caste identification, prior to the advent of nationalism in the nineteenth century? Ray's book asserts the former, but at least in his account of late eighteenth century India he does not persuasively account for the evidence cutting the other way. Thus Ray notes the cynicism of those Mughal officers who offered to serve the Company in the wake of Buxar, claiming a kinship of sorts with the British on the grounds that both were "strangers" in the land, but has little else to say about them. Certainly the self-serving statements of a few officers desperately seeking to gain a foothold in the new political dispensation ought to be taken with a pinch of salt; equally, however, it cannot be denied that the notion of these Mughal officers -- proud of their Iranian or Central Asian descent, and contemptuous of the "Hindustani" Muslims -- points to another plausible community of sentiment, and one with a long history among the "ashrafi" or elite Muslims of the Gangetic plain.

Perhaps Ray's rationale in passing over alternative communities of sentiment as The Felt Community moves into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and hence closer to the events of 1857, is that the book is a pre-history of sorts of nationalism. Alternative communities of interest -- Jat or Marattha solidarity, or the self-image of some Mughal officers as "strangers" to Hindustan, for instance -- might not have been less prevalent, but are less significant where the history of nationalism is concerned. To the extent 1857 is seen as a kind of climactic moment for the old Indian order, the upsurge that year reflects the triumph of pre-modern patriotism (a heightened form of the emotion Ray sees operating in the Eastern wars of the 1760s), over contrary tendencies. In other words, if 1857 is the horizon, then Ray's perspective makes sense -- though the modesty of such an approach diminishes its prescriptive power (a normative move that Ray himself has laid before his readers by prefacing his book with a polity-to-come, namely a sub-continent wide confederacy). As the book itself notes at the outset, other mentalities were also tapped by modern nationalism: Muslim "separatism" was one; Hindu "nationalism" was another.

V

The mentality of 1857 brought together all three of the communities of sentiment that The Felt Community begins with -- in the phrase "Hindus and Muslims of Hindostan" -- in a way that was not "nationalism", but was not a mere "restoration" of the pre-colonial categories. The old order's last gasp was something new entirely:

Outwardly, it might indeed appear as if everywhere the ancient supremacies that the British had overthrown were once again coming into their own. . . . [T]he question that arises is how substantive was the 'restoration'? After all, the old supremacies had vanished without a trace in large parts of the Doab, necessitating . . . all sorts of improvisations by the rebel selection of chiefs. Even where the surviving remnants of overthrown supremacies were more clearly marked, as in Awadh, Rohilkhand, and Bundelkhand, there were keen struggles for succession to the departed British magistrates, restoration being by no means automatic. What is more important, the restored chiefships had to come to terms with the sepoy councils that were then the most organized embodiment of the people's power. (Pg. 356)

Ray's imperial patriotism has come full circle by 1857: where nine decades previously Mir Qasim's Mughals spoke in the name of the "people" of Hindustan, in 1857 the "people's power" of the sepoys spoke in the name of the old rulers. It was symbolically fitting that Bahadur Shah Zafar II was intimidated by a mob of sepoys from Meerut into assuming leadership of the revolt in Delhi. Where once Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan had written of a popular justification for Mughal rule, in 1857 the Mughals had no basis other than popular support for any rule.

Significantly, the popular sentiment of 1857 was all too often expressed in terms of "the Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan", a conjunction that itself was hardly traditional. Ray effectively demonstrates the religious nature of the conflict from the Indian point of view: while the British viewed it as a "race war", for both Hindus and Muslims it was a war to safeguard their religion and destroy the "Nazarene sect" root and branch. It is telling that "Christian" was synonymous with British during the conflict, and kafir signified Christians -- and not Hindus -- in the Muslim rhetoric of 1857.

The irreducible otherness of orthodox Muslim and Hindu religiosity to each other is perfectly captured by the phrase "Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan" (certainly "Hindustan" or "Hindustanis" was used alone as well, but Ray cites instance after instance where this term was immediately qualified or explained in terms of Hindus and Muslims), the name of the country serving as the connecting hyphen, a hyphen that did not, pre-nationalism, imply assimilation to any other transcendent ideal such as "the nation":

The Mutiny constitutes the great disjuncture of in the development of the Indian nation: it is not a part of the national movement, nor is it the dying throes of the old order. The best term for it is the one used by the mutineers themselves: the 'war' of 'the Hindoostanis' (or alternately 'the Hindus and Musalmans of Hindustan') to protect their 'dharma' and 'deen' and to 'save the country'. In other words, the patriotic war of a people who expressed their sense of national identity in terms of the attributed brotherhood of the two principal religious communities of a single land. (Pg. 358)

VI

The events of 1857 pointed to the future, as well as to the past. Consider Bahadur Shah Zafar's 1857 proclamation on cow slaughter, reminiscent of nothing so much as the rhetoric of the Khilafat movement:

The slaughter of kine is regarded by the Hindoos as a great insult to their religion. To prevent this, a solemn compact and agreement has been entered into by all the Mahommedan chiefs of Hindoostan, binding themselves, that is the Hindoos will come forward to slay the English, the Mahommedans will, from that very day put a stop to the slaughter of cows, and those of them who will not do so will be considered to have abjured the Kuran, and such of them as will eat beef will be regarded as though they had eaten pork. . . ." (Pg. 388)

Ray astutely picks up on the rhetorical parallel, and intriguingly suggests that the Khilafat movement, far from merely being a marriage of convenience or an attempt by Gandhi to pander to the conservative Muslim ulema, might have been a successor to the spirit of 1857, "articulating a vision of the Indian destiny" not bound to the nation-state as to "one country with two realms, two nationalities within one people" (pg. 376). Ray is in my view simplistic to assign the blame for the extinction of such a possibility to Nehru's rejection of the Cabinet Mission plan, but he is on to something inasmuch as his point is that the language of nationalism and secularism, imported by virtue of colonialism, was not very consistent with India's traditional group identities. Those who saw themselves as upholders of dharma or deen might have been willing to fight together as in 1857, but might well have found the logic of modern nationalism -- requiring sublimation of a "Hindu self" or a "Muslim self" to the impersonal God of nationalism -- profoundly alienating. Faced with such a choice one danger is that one invests the transcendental deity of nationalism with one's own religious exclusivity; the impersonal God of nationalism is asserted to be the same as the "Muslim self" or the "Hindu self", and stands revealed above all else as the enemy of difference. Such a conception is consistent with the rhetoric of separatism or of "majorities" and "minorities", but would have appeared foreign to the rebels of 1857 (and might have seemed unnatural even as late as the Khilafat movement of the 1920s), who seem to have fitfully conceived of a pure (and militant) consociationalism.

Ray does not stop at the Khilafat movement, and extends the parallel to Jinnah and the Muslim League as well:

Thus, two nationalities in one people, one mulk and two qaums, were evident in 1857. Gandhi and Mohamed Ali instinctively followed the logic of the same struggle. They realized how deeply plurality was embedded in India's age-old social structure. When in the 1930s and 1940s the Congress adopted democracy, secularism, and socialism as the basis for an integrated nation-state, a new unitary model began to run counter to this beehive formation.

As Ayesha Jalal has established with a wealth of documentation, the famous Lahore resolution of the Muslim League in 1940 did not envisage Partition, nor indeed even mention Pakistan. Jinnah was willing to accommodate his vision of Pakistan within the confederation proposed by the Cabinet Mission. In a sense, the Muslim League stood for the beehive formation; and in strong contrast the Congress stood for the unitary state and society. It will be recalled how profoundly the unitary model of Islam strained the cellular structure of Indian society at one time; this time there was another, equally powerful unitary model: the secular democratic socialist state of the Congress High Command. Congress radicalism would not brook the conservative plurality of the beehive formation. Because of the mutual suspicions which this stand generated, the confederation proposed by the Cabinet Mission -- the only rational solution to the problems of the subcontinent in the circumstances -- did not materialize. Hence partition, and the continuation of an age-old tension: a perennial civil war between two embattled sovereign national states of the same population. Nonetheless, in the longer logic of history, the proposed confederation was, and is, a viable solution to the contradictions in the subcontinent." (Pg. 553)

To my mind Ray reads far too much of the mentality of 1857 and pre-nationalistic communities of sentiment into the Cabinet Mission plan, and ignores the fact that the plan purported to "solve" the Hindu-Muslim question by means of a geographic grouping of Muslim and Hindu-majority provinces, respectively. While certainly preferable to partition in light of the horrors that followed, one wonders how stable the arrangement would have been: the geographical "groups" seem to me like embryonic nation-states, predicated on a link between religious affiliation and territory, and hence on notions of "majority" and "minority" communities, that seem no less derived from Western liberalism and nationalism than the Nehruvian Congress orthodoxy Ray critiques (the "territorialization" of the Hindu-Muslim question in the plan also represents a rather different political animal from the consociational model of the Punjab Unionist Party and Khizr Tiwana). The Cabinet Mission plan is for Ray a successor to the 1857 mentality reflected in the pre-nationalistic analogue of "we, the people", namely "the Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan", but that is only true at a rather high level of generality. Viewed from up close, the Cabinet Mission plan seems no less foreign to the mentality of 1857 or of Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan than "straight" modern nationalism does. Ray blithely glosses over the fact that Jinnah kept asserting an "opt out" right for the Muslim-majority groupings -- hardly calculated to inspire confidence in the structure -- and asserts the inherent conservatism of Jinnah's vision and its consistency with the mentality of 1857, in contrast to the radical nature of the Congress' conception of India. One can accept the latter without subscribing to the former. As I have argued elsewhere, Jinnah's two-nation theory was the very antithesis of tradition (recognizing that, as Ray reminds us, even the radical taps into some older notion, that even the radical needs to be plausible), and was no less of an innovation than the Congress worldview it stood against.

My fundamental disagreement with Ray on his reading of the ideology of the Muslim League (and his superficial treatment of the Cabinet Mission plan) notwithstanding, The Felt Community is an excellent book, wide-ranging in its scope and passionate in its attempt to uncover an Indian past that is barely accessible to citizens of a post-colonial order. Ray's careful attention to the local, and his ear for the individual voice as revealed in letters, rumors, and testimonies, stands him in good stead given that what he is after is the history of a mentality, one that is almost irrevocably past and the traces of which are buried deep. For that alone, this landmark book deserves to be read.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

2007-03-17T01:07:00.000Z

http://qalandari.blogspot.com/2007/03/book-review-sacred-games-2006.html

What is common between a petty gold smuggler, a Maharashtrian "bhai", the right arm of right-wing Hindu outfit, a "secular Don", a Bollywood film producer, a world famous godman's devotee, a bedder of starlets, and RAW's man off the coast of Thailand? In Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra's recent whale of a novel -- nine hundred pages flat -- they are all the same person, that is to say they have all at one time or another been the man who calls himself Ganesh Gaitonde.

Yet this book is a lot more than the fictionalized biography of Gaitonde: its ambition is to give us Mumbai itself, and the many worlds and Indias that make the city, ranging from Naxalites on the run from Bihar, Bangladeshi illegal immigrants, Lucknavi girls out to make it big in Bollywood, a Dalit cop with a taste for dance bar girls, a right-wing Hindu politician with an abiding hatred of Muslims, a Muslim "social activist" who isn't above a little dadagiri and corruption of his own, a smalltime TV producer who pimps girls to anyone who'll pay, a transcendent swami in Guruji Shukla, an adulterous flight attendant who has to cope with a dead dog and blackmail, and of course the bhais: Suleiman Isa (clearly modeled on Dawood Ibrahim), Gaitonde himself, and countless others, ranging from Salim Kaka, Chota Badriya, and the oddly named Bunty.

And did I mention Mumbai's only Sikh senior inspector, Sartaj Singh? I should have: along with Gaitonde, Sartaj is the closest Sacred Games comes to a "hero." And this "hero" has to figure out why Ganesh Gaitonde -- one of Mumbai's preeminent bhais, in self-imposed exile in South-East Asia for years -- returned to the city, holed up in an odd-looking cube of a house in Kailashpada; why Sartaj was alerted of his presence, and why Gaitonde killed himself. There's more: for the mystery the reader must solve is: if Gaitonde is dead, who is the "I" speaking of Gaitonde's life as his own, taking us through his life from rags to riches to espionage to terror?

Chandra has a sure hand, and navigates the reader through his vast cast of characters with great authority, without ever seeming to rush, and without ever shaking the reader out of a conviction that everyone and everything is somehow connected, that it all will add up in the end. The artifice, more accurately the seductive power of this artifice, the need to make sense, afflicts many of the book's characters, and it takes an alert reader to avoid falling into the trap. The trap of wholeness, of a reality that makes sense if you simply know enough, such that once you have accounted for all the facts you can see the truth of this reality, feel it like an object as it were. The delusion is perhaps necessary for police work, and (as Gaitonde learns) essential if one is to think of oneself as a self -- but that doesn't make it any less of a trap. For taken to its larger, cosmic conclusion, one might be left with the delusion that if everything is connected into a coherent whole, then there may be a comprehensive, "total" solution for that which ails the whole. And it is here that the horror -- on a scale larger than the "merely" human -- begins (though there's plenty of "merely" human-sized horror in this book too, some of it of the stomach churning kind). That Chandra chooses the relationship between Guruji and Gaitonde to explore this worldview demonstrates -- very subtly -- his firm understanding of classical Hinduism, and -- less subtly -- his political sympathies. The two are not unconnected: Chandra clearly wishes to draw a distinction between a "traditionally" dharmic view, and that offered by those who peddle religion for consumption, who speak of a totalizing consciousness but cannot abide life's messiness, who dream of the peaceful order of the graveyard.

Sacred Games is in a sense the great Bollywood novel I have long been waiting for. Not because this is a novel set in the film industry (it isn't for the most part), but because its overarching structure appears to be borrowed from that of Bollywood's masala genius, Manmohan Desai. But not merely "borrowed"; Chandra is far more suspicious of tying up loose ends than Desai was, and so I should add that the Desaiesque schema is refracted here, giving us a rich and strange terrain that is nothing if not twisted, yet oddly, affectingly, humane at the end of it all. Everything is connected, as in Amar Akbar Anthony, but banish the thought of neat resolution at the end of it all: no-one, no single person can ever know the random ways in which we are thrown against those we have never met, those to whom we are inextricably bound. The novel is also Bollywood to the core in its assimilation of every manner of gangster film (and even -- don't laugh -- Qayamat) into a narrative that is far more through, far more persuasive, and far less glamorous than anything the likes of Ram Gopal Verma have essayed.

And then, finally, there are the songs: snatches of songs and film references punctuate this book, from Gaata Rahe Mera Dil to Gabbar Singh to DDLJ to Dev Anand, Amitabh, Aamir, Shah Rukh, and yes, even Chandrachur and Fardeen Khan, to a host of Rafi and Kishore songs. This book, like the best Bollywood films, has a rollicking soundtrack. And yes, the only Tamil film mentioned is Nayakan.

The plot? Sorry folks, beyond what I've said there really isn't much I can say without giving the book away. The writing is often overwrought and indulgent, one can't really decide if one is reading a masala potboiler or a profound discourse on life and the meaning of it all, and Chandra is sometimes tripped up by political correctness (would have been nice to see some nasty Muslim bigots too in addition to the Hindu ones), but by the end of its nine hundred pages none of that will matter. Its unforgettable: read it.

The kite that didnt fly

2007-03-05T02:02:00.000Z

It came highly recommended. After reading it, I have wondered why?

'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini is average at best. However, the professional critics have thought otherwise. It not only has been on many of the best seller lists but it also was awarded the book of the year by San Francisco Chronicle. However, not surprisingly, most praise has come around from the American press, who have been traditionaly quite easy impress with all things un american.

I was quite expecting to like this book. I have often been impartial to stories of immigrants, their hardships and the wonderful world of clashing cultures. Of course that being said my favourite hardships were the ones that weren’t overly obvious(Hint: Jhumpa Lahiri). Expectedly, this novel has left me completely unsatisfied.

To write great fiction a good dosage of personal experiences is certainly essential. Mr. Hosseini manages to recount a fair bit of Afghanistan to make it interesting. Unfortunately he also manages to completely ruin it by ample amounts of maudlin and melodrama. Not to mention the incessant clichés and the quite Hollywood/Bollywood twists. It is almost as if he wrote this book with a movie in mind. Not surprisingly, there is one coming out next year…

The story revolves around the life of a young well to do afghan pashtun boy and his journey through the troubled Russian invaded times of Afghanistan and his eventual fleeing to America. His story also revolves around his Dad and more importantly his hazara servant/friend. There are other characters in the book and a fair share of ugly secrets but overall his character development skills I thought were quite ordinary.

I think the inherent issue here was the fact that the author was mixing popcorn fiction with realism. Most authors I have read who base a story around a certain political or historical event have often wisely strayed away from diluting it with human drama. If there is drama involved, it is usually subdued. Something that the reader absorbs as he plows through the book! But in this case Khaled Hosseini has used such obvious and tiring human stories that it’s almost leads to torture. I was constantly seeking the parts of the book that dealt with Taliban and Afghanistan; anything that would rescue me from his characters. I couldn’t help but linking his work to that of Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel. At least that book had no pretenses…

His writing skills also fail to impress. Take this for instance. Here, the author is describing a scene where the main character has returned to Afghanistan from America and is having dark tea after being revealed some serious secrets of the past.

“The waiter placed a teacup on the table before me. Where the table’s legs crossed like an X, there was a ring of brass balls, each walnut sized. One of the balls had come unscrewed. I stooped and tightened it. I wished I could fix my own life so easily.”

There are similar instances throughout the book that leave you exasperated. It instantly took me back to my high school essays and that certainly is a good thing.

Perhaps I am being quite unfair and harsh here. There is some good in this book. As I mentioned earlier, I liked reading bits and pieces of pre and post Taliban Afghanistan. Descriptions of kite fighting and transitions into the American life were also quite pleasant. And overall the story is interesting enough to keep one going.

If it weren’t for the hype, I would have been much less harsh on the author. But this book is certainly doesn’t even come close to do what the all the reviews said it would.

The lower-middlebrow reader.

2007-02-28T19:40:00.000Z

Definition: Who /what is this species:

One who technically should not be having any views on Llosa or Woolf because he appreciates Tom Robbins, but one who has sniggering rights at that hot babe who is turning the pages of 'Angels and Demons' at Coffee Day (And why just sniggering rights, who can even walk up to her and suggest her a book. Umm, now let me see, Angela's Ashes? That would be a good one. Did so too, last week. It generally works. Note, DON'T suggest a Murakami or something, she will be scared away. On the other hand, if you, ladies, are suggesting anything to that hot guy with the John Grisham, I'd say DO suggest a Murakami. Nothing is a better stimulant than a really smart woman. And look, he would read that Murakami for sure, and it just might change his life, y'know).

Back to the topic, a lower-middlebrow reader is one who regularly looks into Jai Arjun's book reviews but is too filled with trepidations to comment lest he be swatted away like a lowly maggot, and who can only look at spectacular Kitabkhana with wonderment, and promise to himself that one day, ONE DAY, he will be able to at least attempt to appreciate the exotic writers with even more exotic names mentioned there.

Who could criticize a bit of Tokyo Cancelled, but nobody among the highbrows would care really. On the other hand, who can criticize Transmission, and people will rah-rah that bit. But don't you step out of the line. Don't you dare speak a word about Banville. You can talk about a hundred years of solitude or the unbearable lightness of being or even midnight's children, but only in complimentary terms. Sure, you have read them, everybody has, but are you qualified enough to pan either of them? Even mildly? Hell no you are not.

One who alternates between calling others pseuds and being called a pseud by others.

One whose admiration comes easy. Throw one Calvino or one Cortazar into a conversation and you have got yourself a fan. But of course you need to write like this to get a devotee out of the lower-middlebrow, and if you write like this .... well, in that case you get nothing. Remember, when Infy used to come to your Engineering college and none of the toppers got selected through the puzzle round? The concept's called upper cut-off.

So, that's me. Lower-middlebrow. Hi!

But if nothing, I think I can suggest to you, dear reader of mine, how you can move from lowbrow to lower-middlebrow really quickly.... Here, for your perusal:

The 'taken' road (i.e. the road that is not 'not taken')

So you liked that book which was made into the movie where Audrey Tautou (who I will really marry some day) played Jesus's great-great-granddaughter... so now you should read a Frederick Forsyth
Keep at it for a while.... And then move to Wodehouse.... naah, too easy. It's a crime not to like Wodehouse. I'm sure even the higher-brows like him too.... but read a few Wodehouses, just to get ready for sterner tests up ahead....
OK, now let's get back to thrillers....... Happy with Forsyth? Dogs of War? Odessa File? Day of the Jackal?... Good.... Now the next step, read The spy who came in from the cold.
How was that? Good, na? Next, The little drummer girl and The Honorable Schoolboy.....
Good, you are nearly there now.... Know what, you are lower-lower-middlebrow already. You can discuss (or at least contribute in discussions regarding) the merits and demerits of Le Carre.
Next? .....listen to me carefully now, this is critical .... Tom Robbins. Still life with woodpecker. Not too many have read it. And I'm sure you will love it.
Next? Pause. A few more Robbinses if you please. Or go through the track you went through a few times.
OK, good, a decent few Le Carres, a decent few Robbins. Chip in a Life of Pi and a Curious Incident... Now is the time for the next stage. Portnoy's complaint. Rabbit, Run. The world according to Garp. .... Go through the experience of Catch 22. It was painful for me, it might not be so for you. No please, no Ayn Rand or Catcher in the Rye. Every Teresa, Daniella and Henrietta has read it. You add no value to any discussions on this. And you are looking at saving time, right? Gotcha.
Read some John Irving and John Fowles just to build on the resume of yours. At your present state of the batsman Irfan Pathan-esque literary glory, that should be quite easy.
Next, move to Steinbeck. And you will like Steinbeck. I just know somehow that you will like Steinbeck........ And hey presto, there's a nobel laureate who you like and can atleast pretend to really appreciate.

And there you are, buddy, you are in my team now. You are lower-middlebrow, just like me. I might have gotten there earlier, but you certainly did get there quicker.

The 'bold' road- for the ballsier types only

On the other hand, you could read a Joyce or a Woolf (finish it, please.... I wouldn't know, but it might be worth it, or better still, it might really save face someday) and fake it all thereafter. Don't talk too much, the studied silence is worth more than a thousand words.... Just add once in a while in conversation how Joyce / Woolf changed your life. Memorize a few lines, a paragraph even. Quote them. In moderation. Other lower-middlebrows like me will take you to heart, none of them have moved to beyond 10 pages of any Joyce. I haven't.

Your pick. Oh, and don't ask me how I got to lower-middlebrow-ness (or lower-lower-middlebrowness, but I hope I've graduated). Long story. Some other day, maybe.

(Cross Posted here)

A stroll down MG Rd. one polluted Friday evening

2007-01-05T16:24:00.000Z

Landmark Pune opened recently. I walked in. It was my second time. They were playing Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol. I was surprised. I love that song. Not many guys know about it. Song ends. Voice says that I am listening to Radio Voyager. Ah! I say. I gave them too much credit.

I revisit the first floor, which unfortunately is the only one for books. The rest is crammed with music, toys and suchlike. I go and drool over Frank Miller's Sin City series. I decide I like the Art section simply because the other stores do not have one. However, I remind myself that I need to find a book about the Cricket World Cup. I ask the guy at the comp to search the database. Very nice list comes up, except for the fact that none of them are in. The sports section sucks, and also does the Poetry, one co-browser informs me. A friend reminds me, "They've 4 shelves of fantasy". Great, I think - just what I need!

Just before, I've visited Manney's. Browsing through the slightly bigger sports shelf, I find, "The Story of the Reliance Cup" by NKP Salve. It's old and dusty, it has black-and-white photo centrefolds. It cost just 35 bucks. To me, its priceless. My need for the day is satisfied.

I hope that Manney's survives. At least to record the tales of a few more NKP Salves.

"Eleanor Rigby" by Douglas Coupland

2006-12-07T13:56:00.000Z

Douglas Coupland is probably best known for coining the period-defining moniker "Generation X". It was merely on that basis that I reached out and picked up his 2004 book "Eleanor Rigby" off the library shelf.

"Eleanor Rigby" is narrated by Liz Dunn, someone whose life measures upto the song. Through Liz, the novel provides some of the best insights into the curious mental state that is loneliness, threading through the immense anonymity and sameness that life can cloak itself with. Now, society as a whole thrives on dispelling physical loneliness - dwellings overrun into each other, marriages mean you are a unit of at least two, and technology makes a mockery of Euclidean spaces. But to the loner (who could be that by choice or otherwise), it only provides more evidence of how isolated she is.

But even the loneliest of lives have their share of excitement. Liz Dunn's life is invaded by the Hale-Bopp comet, a long-lost son, an even more lost past, and even a meteorite. This may seem terribly exciting to happen to one person, but unlike other novels where the novelty of the situation forms the raison d'etre of the book, here these events are mulled over and eventually decay to dullness. Liz is comfortable with her loneliness, which doesn't necessary stop her from thinking about it. But some changes are irreversible, and maybe, there's a little companionship in the horizon? Hard to tell.

Now, I'm not saying this is a great novel - far from it. It's a very easy read though. Liz is no fool - she may live outside the orbit of society, but there isn't much she can do about it. This enables her to make some objectively sardonic commentary about the others. The ending, indeed the entire progression may seem flawed and unable to go anywhere. But I didn't mind it not going anywhere. I was just surprised to see someone capture the idea of loneliness so well. Do exciting people lead exciting lives because exciting things happen to them, or because they make things exciting? People in novels are almost always exciting or are having exciting things happen to them (like the kids in Enid Blyton novels). It was a nice change to have Liz Dunn speak about a uni-life.

Elsewhere, a bunch of reviews on the book

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2006-09-16T04:00:00.000Z

He called Pablo Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language". I wonder if that quote will be rephrased someday for Gabriel García Márquez. One shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but what about first lines?

"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Márquez's first novel in 10 years and is also his shortest. In sharp contrast to contemporary writers who seem to write as if they were being paid by weight, Márquez's book about an aging and unamed writer in an unamed South American town is a mere 115 pages. When a writer like Márquez writes such a short book it calls for almost biblical interpretation.

One of my favorite books is Love in the Time of Cholera at whose end the 76-year old Florentino Arriza reunites with the love of his youth - the 72-year old Fermina Daza and they end up cruising up and down the river with the yellow flag of cholera. There a number of superficial similarities but this book is no sequel.

So is this book the 70-year old Márquez's coda to a long and illustrious career then? Unlike our hero Márquez is hardly unsung or unheard, but like Márquez, the unamed writer is a career journalist who loves classical music, is scholar of the ancient Latin writers and a collector of dictionaries. Perhaps this is the life Márquez himself envisaged if hadn't had all that talent. It is part-reminiscence of and part-homage to life itself. There is first the folly of youth, then the frustration of middle-age and the sorrow and regret of old-age. Life is a bitter pill to swallow so what does a man do at the end of it? Márquez suggests that we must celebrate it! But to do that we must do what his hero does,

I confronted my inner-self for the first time in my ninetieth year.

He sees his whole unremarkable life in reverse - his parents, his stinginess, the days of reckless debauchery, quarrels with the editor. He finds nothing extraordinary. Nothing that he can remember with special fondness. Then he realizes:

I was transfixed by the idea that life is not something that passes by like Heraclitus' ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years.

This idea literally gives his whole humdrum existence a new lease of life. While the opening lines may suggest otherwise, our hero never manages to consummate his relationship because the girl is always asleep. But this hardly matters as it is still the greatest love that he has ever felt in his life. As if at what appears to be the end of life, our hero gets another chance. While he and his life remain ordinary, its a life worth living. Ultimately, the book is about love - the love for life.

It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love ...

Whenever I read Neruda or Márquez, my greatest regret is to have read them second-hand, as translations (with due respect to Edith Grossman and others). This book gives me hope that someday I will read them in the original Spanish when I start to broil on the other side.

From One Master to Another
J.M.Coetzee's review is almost as long as the book but is the best that is out there. Interesting notes from his reading of the original Spanish and the story behind the intriguing quote from Yasunari Kawabata's House of Sleeping Beauties that appears at the start of the book.

The Discovery of Global Warming

2006-09-15T15:21:00.000Z

The Discovery of Global Warming- Spencer Weart

Any new scientific theory, when born, always comes into the world kicking and fighting back. That's because scientists inherently are skeptical, and in the opinion of one of my colleagues, also inherently mean. Whenever a new revolutionary fact is presented to them, their first reaction is of incredulity because skepticism is a reflex action for them, but also because another reflex action causes them to be galled that they weren't the one coming up with the new idea.
If 'pure' scientific ideas themselves have so much trouble coming up for air, what would the scenario be for a revolutionary new idea that also has a gory heap of political controversy written over it? Messy, to say the least. And so it is for the idea of global warming.

Spencer Weart has penned a lively, informative, and concise history of the discovery of global warming, that precisely demonstrates how difficult it is for such an idea to take root in the public mind and affect public policy. What is more fascinating is how research in climate change was spurred on by unseemly government and military interests, and misunderstood media coverage and inquiry. Weart starts with some old stalwarts from different fields, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how they were intrigued by a fascinating phenomenon- the ice ages, which served as the driving force for suspecting the role of greenhouse gases in changing the temperature of the planet. If there's one singular fact that emerges out of the history of global warming, it is the public's extreme skepticism in underestimating humankind's role in changing the mighty earth's enormous environs, and scientists' reluctance to accept the role of small changes caused by humans and natural forces that could cause violent climate change ('The Day After Tomorrow' notwithstanding).

The discovery of global warming was a painful endeavor, often occupying many scientists' lifetimes. Almost everyone who wondered about it faced opposition in terms of opinion and funding. Almost no one could alone prove global warming without extensive collaboration; not suprising given the interdisciplinary nature of climate. Scientists had to grudgingly forge alliances with other scientists whose fields they would have hardly considered respectable. They had to beseech the government for funding and support. One of the most interesting facts is the government funding of climate studies in the 50s and 60s that was fuelled entirely by military purposes dealing with the Cold War. More than any one else, defense forces were interested in controlling the weather for military purposes, and they couldn't have cared less about global warming. But this was one of those fortuitous times in history, when a misguided venture proved to be beneficial for humanity. Just like building the atomic bomb produced a bonus of insights into the behaviour of matter as a side effect, so did the military's interest in the weather, absurd as it was in many ways, prove to be a godsend for scientists who were hungry for funding and facilities. Weart makes it quite clear how scientists found an unexpected asset in the military's interest in climate. Secretly, they must have laughed in the face of paranoid cold warriors. Publicly, they appeared most grateful, and in fact were, for the funding they got.

If the military unknowingly contributed to our knowledge of climate change by supporting dubious studies in the field, the media contributed to it by miscommunicating the facts on many occasions. During the first few years, the general public wasn't concerned and did not believe in climate change, again, because they could not believe that a puny entity such as mankind could disturb the grand equilibrium of nature. But then, as the general nature of events such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts began to be linked with climate change in the 70s, the media began to pay more attention to scientific studies, and began to exaggerate the connection of man's contribution to the environment and violent weather phenomena. Just like the military's venture, even thought this venture was completely misguided (even today, we cannot pinpoint specific events to global warming), the unexpected effect of the media's spin doctoring was that people began to believe that man could change climate. Of course, the media also was not afraid to point out and again exaggerate when the scientists' predictions and explanations failed, but for the better or worse, people for the first time in history began to take serious notice of global warming and mankind's contribution to it. In the 1960's, Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' provided yet another impetus for the public to consider the general relationship between technology and it's effects on the environment.

And yet, as Weart narrates, the road was tortuous. At every stage, speculative as the scientists' predictions were, they were opposed and overwhelmed by powerful government lobbyists who had influence in congress, and much more money to thwart their opponents' efforts. Whenever a new study linked greenhouse gases with warming, industrial lobbyists would launch massive campaigns to rebut the scientists and reinforce public faith in the propriety of what they were doing. As Joel Bakan says in The Corporation, one of the main methods corporations use in maximizing profits is to 'externalize' costs. Suddenly being responsible for environmental pollution which was previously externalized would put their profit making dreams in jeopardy. Until the 80s, scientists could not do much, as firstly there was not enough evidence for global warming and secondly, computer models were not powerful and reliable enough to help them make their case. Matters were made worse by the Reagan administration which has one of the worst track records in history when it comes to environmental legislation. So unfortunately for scientists, just when their efforts and computer models were gaining credence, they were faced with a looming pall of government and corporate opposition, against which their fight was feeble.

These scientists who researched climate change were and are an exemplary lot. They built computer models, wrote reams of codes, and ran simulations for weeks and months. They went to the coldest parts of Antarctica and the deepest parts of the ocean to gather data and samples, to collect climate 'proxies' such as pollen, ice cores and tree rings, for gathering data in past ages which thermometers had not. They spent lifetimes in their search for the contribution of mankind's action to climate change, even though they knew that their results could disprove their convictions. As far as dedication to science and policy is concerned, you could not wish for a more dedicated lot of investigators.

Slowly, in the face of opposition, predictions began to get more credible, and enough data began to get accumulated to make reasonable analyses and predictions. The discovery of global warming really came in the late 90s, but the culmination of efforts really came in the late 80s. During those few years, droughts and rain deficit around the US again brought media attention to climate change. Computer models became much more reliable. When a powerful volcano exploded in 1991, computer models accurately predicted the drop in temperature (one that was more than compensated by a rise in greenhouse gases) that was caused by the accumulation of sulfate particles in the atmosphere. Scientists began to appear before congress to testify. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created that created authoritative reports on climate change and the 'anthropogenic' contribution to it. The evidence became too widespread to mock or downright reject. Global warming had to be given at least serious consideration. However, because of the uncertainties inherent in predicting something as complex as the climate, government officials always could do cherry picking and convince the public about the speculative nature of the whole framework. Here, they were making a fundamental mistake, of the kind that opponents of evolution make. Just because a theory has uncertainties does not mean it is completely wrong, as these officials would have the public believe. Of course nothing is certain. But in case of global warming, enough data had accumulated by the 90s to make one thing absolutely clear at the minimum; that we were altering the climate of the earth in unpredictable ways. Studies of past climates had also reinforced the conclusion (with some startling impetus from chaos theory) that very small perturbations in the earth's climate and ocean systems can result in huge effects on the climate (the so-called 'butterfly effect'). Man's contributions to the earth's environment are now eminently more than a 'small perturbation'.

However, when it comes to the fickle palette of politics, every colour can be shaded to suit one's interests. There was, and will always be, great hope from the fact that the opposition against CFCs worked and all nations successfully signed the Montreal Treaty. But In 1997, the US Senate rejected the Kyoto Protocol in spite of Clinton and Gore (naturally) ratifying it. After this, it was but a formality for George W. Bush to resurrect this policy by not agreeing to sign Kyoto in 2001, citing that it would bring about grave economic damage.

Today, there is no doubt that global warming is real. It has been endorsed by every major scientific body in the world. Its effects are many and each one of them is devastating. Enough data has now been accumulated to reinforce the relation between greenhouse gases and global warming. Individual details do remain ambiguous in certain respects. But they will soon be quantified. And as I noted in this post, does it matter that we don't know everything with one hundred percent certainty. The repurcussions of global warming are the biggest that mankind will ever face, and even a 30% certainty about them should be enough for us to make serious efforts to stop it. In my opinion, the unfortunate thing about global warming is that it is a relatively slow killer. And because individual events due to it cannot be predicted, people are not going to be flustered by even Hurricane Katrina and think it was caused by global warming. They will just consider it to be an unfortunate incident and move on. If they knew for sure that Katrina was caused by global warming, they would be lined up on the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington. But what they want is certainty. Strange that they don't seem to want it when it comes to terrorist attacks.

Weart's book is not an eloquent appeal to stop global warming. But that's what makes it striking, because the facts, as revealed by the dispassionate hand of science, make the phenomenon clear. However, that's probably the only problem I would find with the book. Weart is a good writer, but not a particularly poetic or eloquent one. I believe he could have made the book much more sobering and dramatic. He essentially weaves a history in the true sense of the word, even if he may fall short of making it read like a novel. The human drama is there, but kept to a minimum. He writes like a true scientist, making the facts matter. The science on global warming is now sound. What is not is human nature.

Note: Weart has an informative site based on his book, which contains many updated essays not in the book. Worth a look.

The stories of Alexander "Chuckle" Smith

2006-08-22T14:01:00.000Z

I first heard of Alexander McCall Smith¹ in a quiz by Sudarshan. The names "Mma. Precious Ramotswe" and "The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency" were so immediately compelling that for some reason I had convinced myself I was going to be a fan of McCall Smith's writing.

Alexander McCall Smith does not write for a living. He is a bit of an expert in medical law, but that does not seem to be the principal reason he famously wrote a set of detective stories set in Africa. His connections to Africa (he was born in Zimbabwe and worked later in Botswana) seem to have left with a deep empathetic love for the simpler life of the land which are as far removed from the sophisticated "civilisation" in his now native Edinburgh. In fact, all of McCall Smith's stories are set in worlds that he has inhabited for a fair while. And what's more, these are worlds that he seems to have been closely observant of as well.

The first McCall Smith book I read was a collection of three small novels (also known as the "Von Igelfeld Trilogy") under the name "The 2 1/2 Pillars of Wisdom" featuring as protagonist, Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld and two of his academic colleagues. Dr. von Igelfeld is a philologist and a leading light of his very very tiny academic circle. McCall Smith is clearly caricaturing some of his own friends and acquaintances from the academic profession, but he does it politely. He gently pokes fun at their self-inflated egos, their tendency to sometimes be out-of-phase with the real world and their occasional moments of objective clarity. The book makes for extremely funny reading in parts, especially von Igelfeld's adventures with sausage dogs and his visit to America. Some extracts became quietly meditative though, which I soon realised was a McCall Smith trademark.

The next book was his No. 1 bestseller i.e. the debut adventures of Mma. Ramotswe. The name conjured up stock images of a woman, broad hipped, in a colourful print dress, and so on, from the lower African continent, and truth be told, Mma. Ramotswe is of typical African stock. Her detective adventures are not filled with urban angst, nor are they highly cerebral puzzles. The founder of the "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" roots her life in the midst of a vague horizon separating the town and the village in Botswana. Consequently, she solves cases related to missing husbands and recalcitrant daughters, while the most dangerous of assignments is to do with the practice of witchcraft. Amidst all this, the divorced detective ponders on life and marriage offers.

"44 Scotland Street" kicks off the Scotland Street series. In contrast to the other two series mentioned above, the characters in this series are much closer home - members, occasionally lonely, of a modern city which is modern in its problems and so more real to most readers. McCall Smith doesn't forsake the light and simple touch here either, so as we accompany Pat, we meet the others at her apartments, her work and sometimes we even meet a living, recognisable Edinburgh celebrity in a bathtbub.The likes of young Bertie with a sax who yearns to be just a boy, the infuriating Bruce, Chris who has his own sinecure are mixed with baby-adventures in Edinburgh pubs and even underground. Before you read the mini-chapters, read Smith's preface telling you that this book originated from a serial offering he ran in a local newspaper, which is why some of the chapters are so tiny.

In all these books, the writing is simple, of the kind that makes you glad and appreciative of his craft. These are quick reads, but thankfully, each series has a few books awaiting their turn. I haven't got yet to the fourth series, that of The Sunday Philosophy Club. The illustrations are a pleasant bonus².

The stories of Alexander McCall Smith, it must be criticised, move slowly. Nothing earth-shattering really happens (unless if you count the travails of the sausage-dog) most of the time. But that's precisely why you like it. The spikes in our mostly ordinary lives are generated by little bits of virtue and vice, by acts of stupidity and wisdom, through obnoxiousness and embarassment, of conceit and benevolence, with vanity and grace. One eventually realises that each of us is living out a story which is in need of just a half-decent raconteur. Through Alexander McCall Smith's words, some parts of us appear in word portraits. And as we shake our heads at these foibles, we chuckle.

1: Random House's page
2: By Iain McIntosh

She was talking to the hand, really!

2006-08-02T15:58:00.000Z

This review is a little late in coming. My excuse is that hold lines at the library are long and hence it has taken a considerable amount of time to get hold of Lynn Truss's latest offering - Talk to the Hand. Her previous book on punctuation - Eats, Shoots and Leaves met with both critical and public acclaim and was a runaway bestseller in the US and Britain. Having tackled rudeness towards apostrophes and commas, the newly-crowned Queen of Zero-Tolerance decided to venture further afield and tackle rudeness proper. She gives Six Good Reasons to Stay at Home and Bolt the Door.
One reviewer Frank McCourt would have nominated her for sainthood only were she Roman Catholic!

Colon Cancer
This controversy is a little old, but I found the whole episode rather amusing. Eats, Shoots and Leaves was quite notably flayed in the New Yorker essay by the Louis Menand who took a rather savage delight in pointing out punctuation errors in the book itself. It is not that surprising that Truss did not to respond to Menand, but it seems a little strange, as she reveals in the latest book, that she has still not read the essay. I must confess that it took me a minute to figure out the mistake in the dedication. I grant the pedantic Menand had a valid point with that and a few others. But, he went a little overboard and some of 'mistakes' he points out - like the missing comma in the title - are more a matter of taste than strict rules. His real agenda seemed to be to somehow prove the 'superiority' of American English (an oxymoron, according to me) over British English. He writes:

An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

(Semicolons should be seen in light of Vonnegut's observation). John Mullan in The Guardian was the gallant knight who rushed to the defence of Lynn Truss and British English in this piece. Truss's publisher called Menand 'a tosser' and remarked wittily that Menand had a 'twisted colon'.

Reader Impoliteness
Coming back to the latest book, I find that it cannot escape 'The Curse of the Sequel' and it was not even a quarter as interesting or entertaining as the first. Why did it not work? With the advent of the Internet and blogs in particular many felt that the English language had descended into the Dark Ages. What if everybody got a driver's license without any tests or training? You would have people driving on both sides of road and not know or follow roadsigns. While the freedom that blogs give was truly a great thing, the total disregard for the language had many bristling with anger. The book tried to bell the cat and was welcomed by grammar traffic cops (Menand excepted) and people (like myself) who could be helped with some driver re-education on the subtleties of punctuation.

With Talk to the Hand, Truss is preaching to the converted. I have yet to meet anyone who is not bothered by cell-phones (not your own, of course!); irked by, "Press 1, now Press 4, enter your 16 digit PIN, etc." or tired of hearing "effing this, effing that". The wit, wordplay and anecdotes that made the first book so accessible - than say, the Chicago Manual of Style - got a bit repetitive and this book has Truss in a rantier mood. After the first few chapters I decided to chuck the book. I am one of those people who once they start reading a book or a movie feel morally obliged to complete it. Ironically, it was this book that forced me to break a personal habit and 'learn to abandon'. The question is - 'Was that that rude?'

A Man Without a Country

2006-07-30T18:00:00.000Z

Cannot but agree with words on the jacket,
Kurt Vonnegut is among the few grandmasters of American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does.

But before being one of the preeminent grandmasters of American letters, Kurt Vonnegut is a humanist, a person who does not believe in heaven and hell. The only way to live on this planet is to behave as decently, fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Everything that he has written in his entire career, spanning more than five decades, has been an expression of that belief in his typical sardonic way. 'Life', he says, 'is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.' Life is hard, shit happens, and there is no getting away from the worst of it. But, always be a human being - do the honorable thing like Ignaz Semmelweis, who despite ridicule persisted in trying to do the right thing and saved thousands of lives. What he found so difficult to do was - convince doctors to wash their hands before they treated patients.

Like all his other books, Vonnegut flits from one topic to another even within paragraphs. Vonnegut talks a lot about American history, politics and foreign policy; so does Chomsky, but darned more entertainingly. He says we are just too cheap and lazy to save the planet. 'Is he serious? Is he joking? Is he is joking, when he swears he is serious? Forget that! Hell, he is funny!' Humour is not a solution, but it is a very human way to deal with problems. With Vonnegut one still feels that there is hope. Not just hope that the planet might be saved, but hope that even if you don't know how to use semicolons you are okay! He writes, First rule: Don't use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites which represent nothing. All they show is that you have been to college.

Why blog? Why spend a Sunday morning writing a post about Kurt Vonnegut?
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to tell them you are gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy one. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Most of us are hopelessly chained to our keyboards and have become slaves to our email inbox. A while ago, I received an email with this quote at the bottom: "Go outside, the graphics are amazing!". Upon reading it, I was compelled to avert my gaze from the computer screen to the scene outside my window. How true it was! I wondered, 'What was I doing here?' Kurt has often been misrepresented as a science-fiction writer, by people who wish to discredit him as a serious novelist (see audio). He writes, 'I think that novels that leave out technology represent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.' While he is no techno-phobe, he writes how important it is to go out and engage in the real world. He describes how he likes to go out, talk to people as he stands in line for an envelope at a newsstand, the experience of going to the post office for stamps. He says, he likes licking the mucilage on the envelope and putting the thin metal diddle into the hole of the manila envelope before he feeds it to the big, blue bullfrog. Yes, he could have still sent an email. While I don't agree with the first two sentences in the next quote, I see his point.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Why has Kurt not made it to Stockholm?
Kurt himself explains why - Thirty-odd years ago, he used to run a Saab dealership in West Barstable, MA. Saab then, as it is now, was a Swedish car. It closed due to his utter failure as a dealer and as he says, 'I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering and I diddled myself out of the prize.' He cites an old Norwegian proverb: 'Swedes have short dicks but long memories.'

Kurt talks about the book in this NPR Interview.

My previous post the Vonnegut classic - Slaughterhouse Five.

Death of a Salesman

2006-07-23T02:23:00.000Z

Having finally got my hands on the much critically acclaimed play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller, I was looking forward to a nice Saturday afternoon read. It is now Saturday evening and I find my self pleasantly saddened by this superb tragedy.

Arthur Miller was born back in 1915 in New York and studied at the University of Michigan (This makes him a fellow Alumni!!) Amongst all his plays, “Death of a Salesman (1949)” stood out in the post war era of America. A time when America was blooming like no other, a time where happiness clouded the newly designed suburbs of a wealthy country, a tragedy was hardly expected. Yet, this tragedy captured the emotions of critics and no doubt many tear eyed watchers. As an author he was at the top of his game, receiving his Pulitzer in 1949.

How does one review a play? Surely, I cannot speak of the quality of language as most of it is conversational English. There is only prose and no poetry. But like all great books of fiction, the character development through the play is simply superb.

Four major characters occupy the stage. Starting with “Willy” the salesman accompanied by his wife “Linda”, his two sons “Biff” and “Happy”.

The father is now 60 years old and his salesman ship has been on the decline. His wife, fiercely loyal and faithful, displays timidity throughout. Biff has fallout with Willy and the other son, ironically called “Happy” is trying to be a good salesman himself.

Willy’s belief in the greatness of his sons and the future is very disheartening. His wife’s undying faith and love for her aging husband is numbing. His sons’ want of moving away from him is very real. But most of all, I found my self choking at the decaying of Willy, the salesman, with age and complete lack of success at work.

The play is inherently simple. Yet, it manages to evoke such strong emotions. Perhaps, I was particularly attracted his work because not only am I away from my parents but off late, for the first time, I thought my parents looked old. Couple that falling finances, undying love of a faithful wife and utter contempt of grown up sons, and what we get is an excellent tragedy…

Wiser critics have drawn much metaphoric interference from this play. They all make for interesting reading, but, I highly recommend reading this play with a clean slate of mind and taking it from there!

The MASONS

2006-06-30T21:55:00.000Z

The JASONS: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite- Ann Finkbeiner

The title of this post is a decoy. If I were asked to name a top secret group of elite government scientific advisors, I would name it The Masons. Except for its ominous overtones, the irrelevant name would be a perfect cover for such a group's identity. But the scientists who advised the US government beginning in the 1950s were even more smart. They came up with an even sillier name- The JASONS, which stands for July-August-September-October-November.

The name is not completely irrelevant, because these were the months during which these scientists came together at some undisclosed location (often the sunny environs of La Jolla, Calif), brainstormed wild and wooly ideas of every ilk related to defense, and actually got paid for that. In this book, Ann Finkbeiner tells us the entertaining story of that group, how it originated, evolved, its utility, and its trials and tribulations.

The JASONS was a secret group of government science advisors drawn from academia, that was formed in 1958 amid fears that after Sputnik, the Soviets would bury the United States under a rain of thermonuclear weapons. In order to predict such advances and to make sure that the US was the one to come up with the more cutting edge ideas in the future, a group of eminent like minded scientists, including Charles Townes (inventor of the laser) and John Wheeler (coiner of the word 'black hole' and Richard Feynman's supervisor) among others, formed JASON. Its members were drawn from the topmost cadre of academic scientists, mostly physicists at that time, and called away from their routine research for a few weeks every year, to think of every possible contraption and defense system that could make due contributions to cold war antagonism. JASON would have many sponsors, most notably and not surprisingly the department of defense, and later DARPA. Also not surprisingly, most of what they did would always remain classified.
There was an inherent advantage in having a group of external scientists as advisors; they would do what they best like to do, namely debate ideas, shoot them down, and most importantly, present objective judgements without any axe to grind. And they mostly did. In addition, JASON provided a family like atmosphere for scientists from round the country to come together. Their wives, who were mostly housewives, could come together and gossip, their kids could play together, and since almost everyone knew everyone else, there would be an unprecedented atmosphere of bon homie between them, which would reinforce interaction.

Finkbeiner relates the idiosyncratic personalities that made up JASON. They were a diverse lot, mostly from ivy league schools, mostly physicists, with some common characteristics. All of them were brilliant, all of them would fearlessly tackle problems in both pure and applied science and stride across diverse fields, and all of them wanted to apply their knowledge to government problems. Many were proteges of the demigods of physics; Oppenheimer, Teller, and Bethe to name a few. The JASONs' erudition was unquestioned; during its fifty year tenure, fourteen JASONs have won Nobel prizes. If you want a group of genius government scientific advisors, you could not get better people than these. Freeman Dyson (with whom I had the honour to correspond) worked with Oppenheimer, Bethe and Feynman, and is one of the foremost scientist-humanists of the twentieth century. Richard Garwin, protege of Enrico Fermi, worked on the hydrogen bomb and was the leading expert on scientific matters related to defense. You really could not ask for a more brilliant and more responsible group of scientists, and the government got what it asked in every way.

Among the projects that JASON ubiquitously worked on were two grand and all pervading cold war problems; missile defense, and nuclear test ban treaties. Many of the JASONS were architects of the Limited Test Ban treaty of 1963. After the cold war, JASONs worked to implement the CTBT. During the Vietnman War, they protested the vast and convoluted bombing campaign based on detached, objective thinking and evidence. Their major contribution was to persuade Robert McNamara to endorse cessation of the bombing, on the grounds that it would only serve to further unify the enemy.

Finkbeiner also relates the problems that are imminent when objective scientific advice clashes with government interests. She talks about situations when JASONs' advice was sidelined or manipulated. But that's the whole point of having such a group; it's the only one which does not have an axe to grind, that won't put political interests above sound advice. Needless to say, such a relationship can often be uncomfortable, especially for the sponsors. In spite of this, JASON's advice was often heeded and carefully considered, if not actually put into practice.

One of the entertaining sections of the book talks about the kind of projects the JASONs worked on. This part is inherently fragmentary, as most of JASON's studies were classified. Missile defense and nuclear test ban treaties were universal projects. Among the more exotic projects was an effort to try to communicate with submarines using radio waves. Since longer wavelength waves are much less attenuated by water, JASON purported to propose an outlandishly big antenna that would generate these waves with humungous wavelengths. The antenna would literally span continents, would be buried in the ground, and for all its grandiose purpose, would be extraordinarily inefficient in getting messages across. But since this was the cold war, and paranoia was the order of the day, nobody was concerned about how outrageous projects could be, as long as they could trump the Soviets. Luckily, the project was scrapped later; apparently, not enough Soviet submarines were now around to warrant such technology.

Probably the most controversial project JASON worked on was the implementation of electronic sensors to sweep and detect activity in the Ho Chi Minh trail, a convoluted series of passages and jungle routes which were the bloodlines of the North Vietnamese. Their system would have sensors and noisemakers, which would relay activity to a receiver, which could in turn pinpoint the location and nature of trespassers. There were many factors such as tresspasser size and nature (what if it was an elephant?) that the system had to take into account. JASON's design was exceedingly successful and even implemented once. But the sheer tenacity of the North Vietnamese meant that no such system could finally thwart them. Nor could any amount of bombing. JASON and McNamara learnt this early on, Johnson and Nixon much later. That was a good instance of the relative ineffectualness of JASON in changing government policy.
Much later and more relevant to current issues, JASON worked on a more prosaic but revealing application of the electronic barrier; to detect movement of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border. As Dyson says, it was astounding to see how many times the sensors beeped. In this case too the sensors finally failed, but as Finkbeiner says tongue in cheek, only because there were just too many immigrants.

Their work during the Vietnman era also cast public aspersions on JASONs. In an atmosphere that had become vehemently anti war and extremely touchy about anyone helping the government to carry on its deeds, JASONs were perceived as the devils of science, who would use their knowledge to bring about the death of millions. Actually that was not the case, and the JASONs had simply tried to give advice which they thought would end the war quickly. But that did not appease the public, and they were relentlessly hounded and maligned. Many JASONs got out of JASON after the war, saying that it was not worth it. Among these was Steven Weinberg, the physicist who won the Nobel prize for his seminal contributions to particle physics.
JASONS also worked on climate studies, and in the early 1970s, came up with models to show that the earth was indeed warming. But due to the lack of experimental data and accuracy of the models, climatologists did not take them too seriously, and it goes without saying that the government did not at all.

One of JASON's projects turned out to be a major contribution to science; adaptive optics, which was a technology for making mirrors adapt their curvature to correct for atmospheric turbulence and diffusive effects. Originally designed for detecting spy satellites and similar objects, adaptive optics was a major breakthrough for astronomers to detect stellar objects.

Finkbeiner talks about many policy issues and shifts in JASON, about who should join (and who should leave), what kind of projects should be worked on, and what kind of advice based on their studies should JASON give the government. She recounts the rifts caused in JASON by many factors. After the 1980s, biology and not physics became the mainstay of research, and so JASON had to acquire new skills and recruit new scientists. Finkbeiner recounts the amusing efforts of old timer physicists trying to adapt themselves to the biologist's messy world.
Moving to a picturesque beach for summer and fall also became difficult, as unlike before, most JASON wives were now working, and it was not possible for them to move with their husbands for such a long time. Tha family like atmosphere in JASON began to crumble. JASONs themselves became relatively alienated from each other because of the diversity of the projects, and because of the different clearances that some but not other JASONS had, which restricted interpersonal discussions. But most JASONs stayed put as the intellectual experiences were always untrammeled and unforgettable, and the interaction was highly stimulating.

The 1990s again saw paradigm shifts in JASON of the kind noted above, as the cold war came to an end. Finkbeiner narrates JASON's admirable efforts to draft reports for the CTBT. As is well known, the US congress did not ratify it even after Clinton's endorsement.

After September 2001, JASON was asked to increasingly move to studies of terrorism and biological warfare. The question is, who was listening to them?
As early as 1970s, JASON had gotten into trouble because of the government's increasingly stuborn attitude to put political interests above sane action. One of the projects that JASON recommended against was building a supersonic plane, which later manifested into Concorde. JASON clearly recommended that the project not be undertaken because of concerns about noise pollution. The administration did not take kindly to this, and accused a senior JASON, Richard Garwin, of leaking JASON's views to congress.

If the relationship between science and government had always been delicate, with the coming of the Bush administration, it downright soured, although JASON still stayed put. In typical bureaucratic fashion, and in an unprecedented act, the government actually recommended three experts to JASON. This was completely against JASON's methodology, as right from the first, it was designed to act as a self-governing body who would recruit its own members. In fact, that was precisely why it would be a free thinking, frank and honest, objective source of advice for the government, without any government constraints. When JASON claimed that the recomendees' credentials were not good enough, DARPA actually withdrew support for JASON and they had to seek it elsewhere. This act clearly marks the trampling of unbiased advice in favour of favouritism.

As the ages have progressed, JASON has had to adapt and change. But it's very nature is too tantalizing for scientists to never want to be part of it. JASON is every scientist's dream; a place where he (or she- very few women were part of JASON, and those who were did admirable work) could absorb new ideas like a sponge, spar ideas with the very best, shoot ideas down, and give advice purely based on objective evidence. There always have been JASONs who were actually members of the president's scientific committee and other government panels, but many others, like the eminent Freeman Dyson, always prefered to be the actual doers and recomenders so that they could stay out and stay unconstrained.

Finkbeiner has written a breezy, conversational, and entertaining book. I got to know about many scientists who were part of JASON, names which I had vaguely heard before in other contexts. She does not much highlight the inherent dilemmas in the whole game of objective scientists working for the government, but the implications are clear. One of the lacunas in the book is that the scientific discussions are terse and sound incomplete. But given the nature of the work that JASON has done, most of their research has been classsified. Many members declined to be interviewed because they did not want to be identified, and did not want to talk about secret work. Some of them agreed to be interviewed only if they could be identified as Prof. X or Prof. Y. Many stopped speaking midway, if they could not recall if what they were going to say was classified or not. Given this incomplete access to information, Finkbeiner does a pretty good job with the science.

What's the future of JASON, or as JASONs themselves asked, 'Whither JASON?'.

I believe that no other time needs JASONS as now, precisely because the current administration is wary and outright antagonistic of any objective advice, scientific or otherwise. Groups like JASON, essential for a good and functioning democracy by way of its honest opinions, are being actively suppressed by the Bush administration. As Chris Mooney more than illustrated in The Republican War on Science for example, not only is this administration neglecting and rejecting sound scientific advice, but it's actually manipulating that advice, and appointing its own spin doctors to present that advice in a politically convenient form to the media and the people. Whether it is climate change or nuclear tests and new weapons, or contraception and food production, the administration has taken a big step back into the past in every instance. Just like it was in the 50s and 60s, it is appointing scientifically ignorant, personal interest lobbyists as intermediaries between science and the people.

Unbiased scientific advice about important problems can be seen as a bedrock of sound democracy, and the Bush administration has blasted holes in this bedrock one after the other. Now is the time when scientists must seek every channel to make their opinion heard, to boldly talk even in the face of persecution. Now is the time when scientists must inform the public as soon as they can, through unofficial channels if necessary. Now is the time when scientists must protest against the administration's active abuse and misuse of science in every social and political avenue. Now is the time when we need not one, but a hundred JASONs.

Prometheus Deciphered?

2006-06-23T01:50:00.000Z

J. Robert Oppenheimer- A Life
By Abraham Pais and Robert P. Crease

(Image from J. Robert Oppenheimer- by Hans Bethe. Copyright: U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

The eternal question first: is there a need for another Oppenheimer biography? So much about him has been written in the primary and secondary sources, especially in the last few years following his one hundredth birth anniversay, that it seems that nothing could be added to this considerable mountain of literature. But this one is different, because it's written by a man who wrote what many consider to be the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. He knew Einstein well. He was a man who was himself a first rate physicist, who knew and worked with the greatest theoretical physicsts of the century- Dirac, Oppenheimer, Bohr and Feynman to name a few. Most importantly, he was Oppenheimer's neighbour and close colleague for more than twenty years in Princeton. If Abraham Pais chooses to write a book on Robert Oppenheimer, it deserves to be given a serious look.

That said, it's clear that this is not a biography of Oppenheimer as such. David Cassidy and Sherwin & Bird have done the job fairly well. But the phrase "fairly well" itself indicates that even they have not managed to construct the perfect evocation of this enigma. Oppenheimer had probably the most complex personality of any scientist of the twentieth century. It is not just his greatness as a scientist and citizen but his ability to project an image larger than life to the audience, and his ability to inject just enough ambiguity in his behaviour and words to keep people mesmerized and guessing, that still makes him a fascinating personality for a biography.

That is why the Oppenheimer conundrum never dies. What kind of man was he? What exactly was the 'true' Oppenheimer? Can we ever know him? He remains engrossing because the question "What kind of a man was Robert Oppenheimer" always remains very hard to answer. It remains difficult to pass any final judgement on him, but because of his stature and personality, one cannot stop wondering. That's why books continue to be written about him, in an attempt to remove this doubt from the mind of his admirers as well as his critics. Unfortunately, for all his fame and eminence, the father of the atomic bomb was a surprisingly private person all his life. Even a Pais or a Freeman Dyson would be unable to proceed after an extent to unravel his persona. On the other hand, everyone who knew him had their own unique perception of him, and it's instructive for us to try to gain insight into this unique perception, this time through the eyes of Abraham Pais. The book is also a fitting monument to Pais himself, because he unfortunately died midway through the writing.

In the introduction, Pais gives a very fitting analogy to Oppenheimer- people's perception of New York City. He says that there are people who fall in love with the city without really understanding it, and then there are people who hate it, but they too don't understand it. Common to both people is an extreme perception without real understanding. Their gut instinct is justified to some extent, but the object of their adulation or loathing remains ambiguously understood. Such was Oppenheimer. There was the majority, who were dazzled by his mind and erudition. And then there were those who were put off by what they saw as theatrical exaggeration and high-handedness, and who perceived him as an aloof aesthete.

All through his life, people around him perceived Oppie with such an ambivalence. Most people he interacted with in his life, especially his students, were stricken by his dazzling catholicity, his astoundingly versatile and deep interests, and his stunningly fast mind. His students even emulated him. It was especially this last quality that made him such an extraordinary presence. Whether it was science, poetry, politics, or philosophy, he was widely acknowledged to have the uncanny ability to listen to complex problems from various fields, and then criticise and summarize them in a few minutes better than anyone around him could. This is precisely what made him a great leader of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. I am always fascinated to read descriptions of him by Nobel Laureates, some of the greatest physicists of the century, that coming from less experienced men would have sounded like hero worship. Even the unflapabble Nobelist Hans Bethe who was not given to exaggeration, said that Oppenheimer was "intellectually superior" to everyone around him. The group of men and women that he collected around him at Los Alamos consisted of the premier scientists of the century; including Bethe, Fermi, Bohr, Feynman, Teller, and a dozen other future Nobel Prize winners. Yet, even among this group of the brightest of the bright stars, Oppenheimer was considered a genius and an extraordinary man. Nobody around him could bring such a versatile, quick, and insightful mind to bear on the thorniest of problems.

This quality of jumping to the right conclusion earlier than anyone else also made him a prophet who saw into the future more presciently than all others. At Los Alamos, while everyone was busy building the bomb, it was Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr who first saw how nuclear weapons could make future wars impossible, but who also saw that ignorance of this fact and lack of safeguards of international controls on atomic energy could pave the way toward catastrophe. Today, when we live with so many problems of atomic energy and nuclear terrorism and proliferation, it is remarkable to see how they were predicted by Oppenheimer, and it is heartbreaking to see how we did not resolve them at an early stage when we could have, until it was too late.

However, this very quality of seeing into the future more insightfully than anyone else and suggesting prudent action also made him powerful enemies in the government who put political benefits above everything else, even national interest. They saw in Oppenheimer a velvet tongued icon who had dangerously influential powers of persuasion. They did not like his arrogance, the studied ambiguity of his words which they thought was high-handed, and his drive to bring transparence into matters of national security. With his quickness of mind, Oppenheimer could lose patience with lesser mortals, and then sting them with biting sarcasm or wit. Needless to say, government officials don't take to such an attitude very kindly, especially when it comes from scientists.

Pais says that the problem with Oppenheimer is unique, and does not have to do with his stature as a physicist. He says that it is easy to write biographies of Einstein and Bohr, arguably the two most eminent physicists of the century, because inspite of their qualities, they were at their core, simple and good men who were liked by almost all. One cannot say anything like that about Oppenheimer. He was a man who had outstanding scientific gifts and achieved great things, yet never lived up to the expectations demanded by the magnitude of those gifts. He was a man who played a pivotal role in many key events, yet all his life, he was steeped in self doubt and unhappiness. And of course, he was a man who was both hated and loved, and misunderstood.
When he was a precocious youngster, he said that he wanted to be "a man who was good at many things, and yet saw the world through a tear-stained countenance". As he must have been aware, he more than achieved this goal.

Pais's book then, is not a full length biography of the father of the atomic bomb (and it should not be judged as being one), but his own perception of the man, based primarily on his own experience with him at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where Oppenheimer was director for almost twenty years, but also on anecdotes that common colleagues and friends recounted. The book is also peppered with anecdotes and vignettes of other physicists who Pais knew, many of them famous ones in their own right. This makes the book interesting for any historian of physics.
Pais makes it clear that he never hero worshipped Oppenheimer; rather, he saw him as a flawed great man, a tragic hero. Most of the early chapters of the book are short pieces about Oppenheimer's childhood, his precocity, and his experiences in Europe, where he learnt the revolutionary quantum mechanics from its masters. Pais talks at length about Oppenheimer's role as a teacher and researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, his interests in left wing and liberal politics during depression times, and his personality in those days. As has been frequently recounted by his students, the California days were exceptional experiences for all of them, when their lives were enmeshed with the master's habits and interests, which ranged from French poetry to reading the Gita in the original.

A note about Oppenheimer's research during that period which serves to illustrate his personality: It is widely acknowledged that Oppenheimer was immensely talented and that he did important research. His papers predicting what were later called black holes were considered classics, and some think he would have received a Nobel prize had he lived to see his predictions validated. But many also think that Oppenheimer did not quite live upto the expectation that his gifts demanded, and since then, historians and physicists alike have debated why this was so. Oppenheimer's friend, Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi who knew him better than anyone else, probably provides the best explanation, namely that Oppenheimer was simply interested in too many things to focus on a single topic. More importantly, Rabi thought that although Oppenheimer was exceptionally confident, he still lacked the audacious nerve to consistently explore the unknown to its utmost extent, a common trait in the most famous scientists. Perhaps this was a result of his mystical and philosophical outlook towards life, indeed a quality which irritated some of his colleagues. As Rabi says, he understood the existing body of physics better than probably anyone else, but at the very frontiers, he hesitated to step into new territory. Interestingly, Rabi thinks that Oppenheimer should have consulted the Talmud rather than the Gita, to gain a more practical perspective on life.
This hesitant attitude also could illustrate his life long quality of self-doubt, which kept him from always going boldly forward. For example, he did not consider his work on black holes to be a major contribution at all. All this could again be attributed to his astoundingly quick mind; the problem was that when presented with a problem or situation, Oppenheimer could instantly grasp not just the strong but also the weak points of that problem, and such an ambivalent view could keep him from striding on with complete nonchalance towards the goal. When you are doing research, it is best not to be informed of the drawbacks of your approach or of the field right at the beginning, because then you might lose faith and not give the endeavor your best. Because of his insight, Oppenheimer often understood the drawbacks of a field to his own detriment. His cynicism about quantum electrodynamics is a good example.

In Pais's opinion, Oppenheimer's most important professional contribution was the creation of his school of modern theoretical physics, which was the first and the best such school in the United States. He brought the European style and standards of research to America, and set the standard for many other such schools after his own. Because of his style, interests, and charismatic personality, he influenced many generations of students who carried his style with them to their universities in turn. Almost every top theoretical physicist who was educated in the US in the 1930s either did his PhD. or postdoc with Oppenheimer. Pais thinks highly of Oppenheimer's work during this time.

Pais does not talk much about the most important part of Oppenheimer's life- his time as director of the atomic bomb project. This is understandable; firstly, this story has been told in many places quite eloquently (the all-time top of the list being Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb). Secondly, Pais focuses on his personal interactions with Oppenheimer which might provide insight; he was not in the United States and at Los Alamos during the war, and in fact did not know Oppenheimer then (In fact, he barely escaped going to the Nazi extermination camps- check link).

After the war, Oppenheimer emerged as the top government scientist and advisor in the United States and became a household name, probably the most famous scientist in the world after Einstein. After Nazism, Communism was the next major threat to the US. But Oppenheimer realised that this was not the time to adopt an overly hawkish attitude. The major point was that the US should preserve its monopoly on atomic weapons by insisting on test bans and implementing an international system of control. He tried hard through the Atomic Energy Commission to instill this spirit in the government. Belligerent anti-Soviet army and government officials found such a reconciliatory stance unacceptable. The air force wanted nuclear weapons in its own custody, and was preparing for nuclear war. Paranoia began sweeping the nation, and Senator Joseph McCarthy found this paranoia a fertile atmosphere to engender hatred and deep fear of Americans with Communist leanings. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in August 1949, influential scientists in the government began to push Truman for authorizing a crash program for a hydrogen bomb, even though it was based on an idealistic model. Oppenheimer's committee opposed the program on the basis of technical and moral grounds, but mainly technical ones. At that time, the US had a 200:1 advantage in nuclear weapons. Initiating hyrogen bomb development would only accelerate a dangerous arms race. As Oppenheimer presciently saw, the US could not hope to obtain any advantage after both it and the Soviets had built a certain number of nuclear weapons. As he put it in his typically succint manner, "Our twenty thousandth bomb would not, in any deep strategic sense, offset their two thousandth one". Put even more simply, both twenty thousand as well as two thousand bombs are enough for deterrence as well as destruction, and so the US would not have an advantage at that point. But while the US had two hundred and the Soviets had just one weapon, the US had a distinct advantage which it could retain only if it stopped further weapons development, including the hydrogen bomb and nuclear testing, so that it could force the other side to do the same.

Unfortunately, hawks in the government saw it differently. For them, the only answer to nuclear testing was more nuclear testing, no matter that it did not give your side much benefit at this early stage, while providing handsome returns for the other side. More importantly, these hawks saw Oppenheimer as a dangerous man whose undue influence was endangering national security (quite ironical, considering that it was their fiercely bellicose attitude that was doing this). The new Republican government was also prone to be less tolerant of liberals. The Communist scare provided a very conducive atmosphere to these men, including physicist Edward Teller, to contemplate ousting Oppenheimer from his position of power. Foremost among these was Lewis Strauss, an influential banker and member of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had Eisenhower's ears.

Unfortunately, Oppenheimer's past came to haunt him. In 1943, while he was being questioned for the atomic bomb project, he had equivocated about a friend's Communist associations. The FBI and Strauss pounced upon this information and used it to smear his character, in spite of the fact that the FBI had had this information in its possesion for ten years and still had not thought it to be inflammatory enough for denying the physicist his security clearance. This information, coupled with Oppenheimer's past leftist leanings (although he was never a member of the Communist party himself) gave them an opportunity to declare Oppenheimer a security risk and demand either his resignation, or a trial in which his loyalty would be questioned.

Sadly, Pais passed away before the section covering Oppenheimer's trial, and the rest of the book is written, equally eloquently (more eloquently actually), by Robert Crease, who has penned the excellent The Second Creation.

Oppenheimer's trial is a classic and enduring example of how the government suppreses dissent and freedom of expression under the pretext of protecting national security. In case of Oppenheimer, the trial was pitted against him in almost every aspect. Almost all the proceedings were unfair and biased. Most importantly, information from wiretaps in Oppenheimer's house and phone was available to the prosecution, which he and his attorney never saw before or then. Whenever a delicate matter came up, it was declared to be classified and his attorney was asked to leave the room. In the absence of vital information to which he had no access, the usually eloquent and sharp tongued Oppenheimer became tongue tied and hesitant in the face of relentless cross questioning which repeatedly led him to contradict himself. It is a harrowing reminder of those times that under any other circumstances, such a skewed trial based on information obtained illegally would not have been allowed. In any case, the evil machinations of Strauss and his associates worked; although no information was found that would actually declare Oppenheimer as disloyal, he was branded as a security risk, and his clearance was suspended indefinitely. Strauss also did not want Oppenheimer to become a martyr, and the trial was rigged up to expose him as a flawed and morally inconsistent character. I am quite sure that now, after all the information has been declassified, we view Oppenheimer as being more of a martyr than Lewis Strauss would ever have liked.

The interesting point is that Crease and some other historians (notably Priscilla McMillan) have brought up Oppenheimer's case as an analogy of what is in danger of happening today in the United States. Just like then, freedom is being suppresed in the name of national security and 'patriotism'. This can include almost anything said which does not conform to 'official policy'.
In Oppenheimer's case, his past soul searching and interest in communism was abused and used against him in a pernicious manner. It did not matter that in the 1930s, communism was scarcely viewed as an evil philosophy. The depression at least temporarily had trampled many people's faith in the current system, and many many intellectuals in that period got interested in left wandering and communist philosophy. In spite of this, Oppenheimer was never a card carrying communist, and in fact quickly became disillusioned with communism in the late 30s, when he heard about Stalin's purges and his brutal suppresion of dissent. During the war, he was the director of the government laboratory that produced the weapon that ended the war, and after the war, he was as much against communism as any other patriotic American. The fact that his past associations could be used against him in spite of all these facts illustrates to just what extent the government can create an atmosphere of fear and distrust, and then use it in the most outrageous and justified manner to indict someone of just about any crime.
Just like then, covertly obtained information can be used today to implicate someone and bias his trial. We don't know if and to what extent this is actually happening, but all the elements are there, including the hyped up atmopshere of terrorism, and the Oppenheimer case provides a vivid reminder of what the results can be. I concur. We must always remember what Edmund Murrow quite simply said- "Dissent should not be equated with disloyalty"

Pais has an interesting piece on Oppenheimer's language. Many of his associates have acknowledged that Oppenheimer had the best command over language of anyone they had ever come across. He was a man of many tongues, and had a natural flair for diction and foreign languages. His knowledge about the humanities and arts was astoundingly wide as well as deep, and he could augment his arguments with reference to the great works of poetry, literature, history and philosophy. His speech was flawless and effortless. His students say that he was the only man they had met, who actually spoke in complete sentences. Everyone who heard him was mesmerised by his words.
Yet, Pais says that Oppenheimer's speeches, though eloquent, never made the subject matter completely clear. Many times, this was deliberate, and he would utter one of his Delphic utterances borrowed from some historical or obscure source that would keep the listener guessing. But Pais also thinks that Oppenheimer translated the ambiguity in his thought to the ambiguity in his speech.
I have read Oppenheimer's talks transcribed into books, and I agree with Pais. While the overall experience leaves you quite fascinated, while the sentence constructions are simple and yet unlike anything you have ever seen, in the end, you are not quite satisfied or have not quite understood what he exactly wants to say. However, Pais thinks that this is precisely the reason why Oppenheimer's ambiguity makes his words insightful- because each reader or listener can interpret them the way he wants. On technical matters though, there is no doubt that Oppenheimer would beautifully sum up something in a few words, what others would take a few paragraphs for. The sheer economy and effectiveness of his words is brilliant. He even invented his own phrases- "inspiriting" is an Oppenheimerism that infected Pais in his writing.

After his trial, Oppenheimer retreated to a simpler way of life. Narrations of his tenure as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study are the high points of Pais's book, because Pais got to observe Oppenheimer almost on a daily basis. Pais quite vividly describes Oppenheimer's personality in dealing with the institute. As had always been his nature, he could be unduly considerate and cuttingly indifferent or abrasive in turns. But he always communicated to those around him, an extraordinary sense of the age of science and world affairs that they were living in. At Princeton, he ran an institute that featured the greatest mathematicians and physicists of the century, including John von Neumann, Kurt Godel, Freeman Dyson, Oscar Morgenstern, and Einstein himself. He turned the institute into a mecca of theoretical physics, and instituted fellowships for bright young people from all over the world. He tried to bring natural and social scientists together. He gave discourses on physics, and on the relation of science to society. He was highly revered as the quintessential scientist-citizen and philosopher. To the end of his life, he continued to explore the dilemma of man and the forces which he can harness, and their potential for good and bad.

Pais has written a compassionate book that gives many insights into this complex man's character that have not been revealed in other places. Still, one can never get the wholesome feeling that he has understood Oppenheimer. He was a man who was tormented by his actions, yet orchestrated world shattering events. He was a man on whom ambivalence was writ large: he had great scientific gifts and yet did not fulfil their complete potential (in fact, Pais thinks that this was really his greatest tragedy which he felt deeply), he had high integrity and compassion, yet equivocated about moral decisions, he was exceedingly influential in government circles, yet could not have the shrewd acumen that impresses power brokers (and it was better that he did not in fact have it). He was a man who saw into the future better than anyone else, and predicted the permanent problems that the discovery of atomic energy and its military applications would breed, including many current dilemmas. And he saw the solutions to those problems crumbling before his eyes because of government misunderstandings and interests. Those who knew him, whether they admired him or despised him, all agreed that he was an exceptional man.
That he was one of the most brilliant men of the century is irrefutable, possesing a wide ranging brilliance seldom seen in history. As one of his students best put it, "This man was unbelievable. He always gave you the answer before you had time to formulate the question".
Pais paints a balanced portrait of this complex man who lived in complex times.

I can honestly say that I have read every biography of Oppenheimer published so far, as well as most of the secondary reference material on him. I doubt that any unusually interesting book on him can be published after this, partly because almost all that can be dug up about him has been dug up, and partly because almost all of his associates and students are now dead.

But Robert Oppenheimer will always remain an enigma. I believe that it's because the public (including me) is always fascinated by flawed heroes rather than perfect ones. It's the apparent oxymoron of the phrase that begs explanation and perpetually draws us to such characters. We are always more fascinated by people who climbed the summit of power and toppled from it, either due to their own or others' orchestrations, than people who have stayed at the summit of power. For us, it's always the men who were contradictions, who had opposing qualities, who engaged in complementary actions in their life, who hold sway. In Oppenheimer's case, the legend lives on and the questions endure particularly because he was so brilliant and could have consistently achieved greatness, yet fell short of it in some respects.
Because of the times he lived in, his unique personality and gifts and his actions, he will always stand as being emblematic of the dilemma of the use of science, and indeed of the existence with technology that we share. He was the figurehead of the political and social side of science...and its first casualty. His life illustrates a number of trends, and he was the prime participant in many of them; the development of 'big science' in the United States including the founding of modern theoretical physics, the harnessing of science for human conflict, the role of science in politics and society, the conflict of science and morality, the role of government in scientific matters and vice versa, and the problems created by the application of science to practical affairs. Oppenheimer is really an enigma because he represents all of these issues, and these issues themselves are enigmas, that will remain enigmatic until we continue to think and act in this world. As Pais said, taken together with the times he lived in, J. Robert Oppenheimer was without a doubt one of the most remarkable human beings of the twentieth century, and we are all living in his legacy.

Monologue of A Dog

2006-06-17T23:52:00.000Z

"Prose can hold anything including poetry,
but in poetry there's only room for poetry.

from Stage Fright

Two short poems from Wislawa Szymborska's collection of poems - Monologue of A Dog with an excellent introduction by Billy Collins who writes,
"... in 1996 she unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize in literature at the age of seventy-three. For almost five decades she has been regarded in her native Poland as a prominent and popular poet; yet on the day of the announcement her books were hard to find at that bibliophile extravaganza known as the Frankfurt Book Fair."
"The typical Szymborska poem - if such a thing exists, is free verse meditation crouched in colloquial language. It begins with a stray fact or mundane observation, then ascends to a heightened level of speculation."

Moment

We were chatting
and we suddenly stopped short.
A lovely girl stepped onto the terrace,
so lovely,
too lovely
for us to enjoy our trip.

Basia shot her husband a stricken look.
Krystyna took Zbyszek's hand
reflexively.
I thought: I'll call you,
tell you, don't come just yet,
they're predicting rain for days.

Only Agnieszka, a widow,
met the lovely girl with a smile.

************

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up drenched in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

QUO VADIS, PLUTONIUM?

2006-06-10T14:44:00.000Z

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed
A debate between Kenneth Waltz (left) and Scott Sagan

Sometimes it’s not a question of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, of whether you are an optimist or pessimist. What matters are the consequences of that perception.

Kenneth Waltz (Columbia) and Scott Sagan (Stanford) stand on opposite sides of the fence, perceive the glass differently, and also the consequences of its state of existence. On the subject of nuclear proliferation, they are polarized on opposite sides. Both want the same general consequence, a world in which we don’t have to live in a perpetual state of fear. But both also have distinct and separate visions of the consequences that would arise, if the powers that are and the powers that will be, allow things to continue one way or the other. They have voiced their concerns in other places, in speeches and books and articles, but this book provides a common debate platform for them to discuss our nuclear predicament in a way that is accessible to the layman, and in a form from which the intelligent layman can draw his own conclusions.

Waltz’s outlook is ‘more may be better’. He wants to actually encourage nuclear proliferation, so that states maintain peace by deterrence, an age-old Cold War strategy of course. He thinks that once everyone has these weapons, there will be no imbalance of threat and annihilation. Everyone will have equal opportunity for destruction of their enemy’s nation, and equal fear of retribution. Stalemate or not, this course of events will lead to sustained peace.

Sagan on the other hands appeals to another age-old tendency, that of humans to err repeatedly. He thinks that with the inherent uncertainties and follies of human beings and the complex organizations and governments they run, no country will be safe from accident, error and misunderstanding, and greed, all of which beset sovereignties. Uncertain circumstances will lead to accidents; then, if everyone has nuclear weapons, we will willfully blow ourselves to kingdom come in a frenzied Armageddon. His position is clear. He thinks ‘more may be worse’.

One of the important parts of the book involves the confrontation between India and Pakistan, and the role that nuclear weapons can play in it. This discussion constitutes a major portion of the volume, and in fact one of the main reasons why the book was revised in 2003 was to discuss this state of affairs in the wake of the two nations’ 1998 nuclear tests. Since this discussion is based on the same general points that Scott and Sagan make throughout the book, I will focus on it and summarize it against the backdrop of their basic mindsets. Then, assuming I am an intelligent layman, I will try to say what’s brewing in my own mind.

* Nuclear weapons in South Asia:

* Sagan- ‘More may be worse’:

Sagan is fearful of nuclear confrontation in South Asia. India and Pakistan have always had a tumultuous relationship, leading to the loss of the lives of about 60,000 soldiers in bloody conflicts spawning five decades. In spite of negotiations, a coherent plan for achieving peace still does not seem to be on the horizon. We have fought four wars with our neighbor, including the latest one when both them and us possessed nuclear weapons. Sagan points out that Pakistan has predominantly had a military leadership. Even during the time when civilan leadership did reside in Islamabad, the President has often not been accurately briefed by his generals about their agenda. In the Kargil war itself, Nawaz Sharif was quite unaware of the exact nature of the actions that his troops were taking in the high ranges of the Himalayas. This of course does not exculpate Sharif from having encouraged aggression against India, but it does point to the kinks present in the Pakistani hierarchy. What this translates into in terms of nuclear conflict is that decisions may well not be coordinated between leaders in the Pakistani government and military. Because of this lack of coordination, control inevitably becomes tenuous, insubordination is easier to carry out and harder to detect, and accidents can take place by virtue of miscommunication or deliberate sabotage. Such accidents may give the Pakistani defence forces a manufactured excuse to engage in nuclear aggression against India. The fact that India and Pakistan are neighbours does not help to mitigate tensions. Many Indian and Pakistani missiles currently in the arsenal can easily span the short distance between Delhi and Islamabad.
In case of India, Sagan is a tad more generous. We have enjoyed a very stable democracy, and unlike Pakistan, controls over the manufacture, development, and deployment of nukes in our country are predominantly civilian. Even though, there still has been a divide between military and executive branches in our country, in terms of goals envisaged and decisions taken. To illustrate this, Sagan points to the ‘Brasstacks’ exercise undertaken during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure in the late 1980s. Indian troops engaged in a massive buildup and military exercise near the Pakistani border in Rajasthan. To this day, the exact purpose of that exercise remains shrouded in mystery. However, many from the Indian front ranks, including the then chief of Army staff General Sundarji, have been crystal clear about the purpose; to provoke Pakistan into a similar response, and then possibly use that excuse to engage in military operations against it. One goal in such a conflict would have been to bomb Pakistani nuclear facilities that enriched uranium. Sagan’s message is that even in such a supposedly stable and sensible democracy like India, the reins of power are not always secure, and deliberate or accidental miscommunication can thwart even the most sincere attempts to maintain peace.
According to Sagan’s assessment, nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan have hardly contributed to assured deterrence. The Kargil war is but one case in point. The mini-domino effect is clear; to balance the threat of looming, economically and militarily more powerful India, Pakistan would never back off from its nuclear development. India in turn would always perceive a threat from the proportionally more powerful China, and that would ensure that its breeders and missile cones are up and running. Missile development has always been a constant for our country’s defence establishment. Even when we had missiles that could easily reach major cities in Pakistan, we continued to develop missiles that would extend our military ability to Beijing.

One of the recurring themes in Sagan’s arguments is that of ‘normal accidents’. Any engineer who has designed a complex power plant knows that when it comes to complicated systems, accidents are normal. No matter how tight the control in such organizations, there are some problems which nobody can foresee due to the sheer overbearing complexity of the infrastructure. A defence establishment, with its convoluted hierarchy of generals, civilians, and politicians and with its continuous flexibility in response to international and national affairs, is a fiendishly complex system. Since nobody can prevent accidents from happening in such a system, the only thing can be done is to try to set up the system in such a way that the consequences of that accident will be minimized. In no other arena of policy is this paradigm more important than in nuclear matters. The scenarios are all too familiar; what if Indian intelligence detects activity near a Pakistani nuclear installation that would suggest a nuclear strike on our soil? What if this information was based on assessment of activities that were actually benign? What if the perceived activity had only been an accident? Can we afford to misconstrue something like that? What if we decide to launch a preventive/preemptive strike against Pakistan? What if Pakistan exaggerated the magnitude of our action and responded in kind? Sagan thinks that in order to prevent such an unfortunate conglomeration of events and responses, it’s better not to have nuclear weapons, so that the effect of such a catastrophe can at least be vastly less destructive. Even in India itself, Sagan cites a shocking example of negligence that I was unaware of; in 2001, when the Indian defence minister was inspecting the Milan missile facility in Hyderabad, one missile that was still live accidentally got turned on. Fortunately, it was ‘only’ a 2 km range missile, but it flew off the top of the building, went through the body of a man in the process and killed him, and landed some distance away. Even if this example is impressive, I think that it is a banal example, because such accidents can happen with almost any military equipment that has nothing to do with missiles or nuclear weapons.
One of the problems with both the Indian and Pakistani arsenals, as Sagan points out, is that they lack well-trained personnel as well as Permissive Action Links (PALs), locks which cannot be unlocked without proper authorization.

This brings us to a related issue of great importance- nuclear terrorism. Sagan thinks that shoddy stockpiling of nukes by states makes their theft by terrorists vastly more possible. A case in point is the large number of nukes from the former Soviet Union, many of which are believed to have been ‘cannibalized’ and then sold in the black market. I will have more to say about nuclear terrorism later.

To illustrate all his points, Sagan cites a number of instances during the Cold War, including of course the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US and the Soviet Union came to the brink of war due to sheer misunderstanding. Sagan also warns that in spite of these comparisons, every nuclear nation is unique, and it is precisely because of this uniqueness that India and Pakistan’s nuclear situation is unpredictable, and the knot of nuclear war becomes more probable. New countries can simply not be trusted with nuclear weapons. In a nutshell, they are complex organizations run by complex human beings operating in complex cultural, military, and political environments, and precedent shows that the handling of the nuclear tinderbox cannot be entrusted to such nations.

* Waltz- ‘More may be better’:

Interestingly, Waltz also cites more or less similar historical precedents to draw exactly the opposite conclusions! This is where we begin to see the peculiar nature of history, where one can almost always draw conclusions that are favourable to one’s viewpoint. Sure, there were confrontations between the US and the Soviets when nuclear weapons were going to be deployed. But were they actually deployed?? Sure, nuclear weapons could have been used by India and Pakistan, most notably during Kargil. But were they??
First of all, Waltz says that the development of nuclear weapons by Pakistan was almost inevitable. Once India developed nukes, Pakistan could not cool its heels. Benazir Bhutto made this clear; that given India’s military and economic strength, Pakistan would have developed nuclear weapons anyway even if India had not developed them, simply to correct the imbalance. One can make a similar argument that India developed them because China did…and ad infinitum, until all one can do in my opinion is blame Otto Hahn and Strassman for discovering nuclear fission! So here, Waltz seems to say that irrespective of what either he or Sagan thinks, the development of nuclear arsenals is almost a reflex action, in a world where every country feels naturally threatened by its neighbours.
The main framework that Waltz builds to augment his arguments is that of neorealism. We deal with what happened, not with phantasmagorical war games and theoretic constructs. This is unlike the organizational theory that Sagan brings to bear upon the problem. After all, for all the discussion about uncertainties in complex organizations, the fact that the world has been nuclear war free since World War 2, even though there were several potential vistas for such deployments, is a fact that merits attention. Waltz’s major point is that even though nuclear weapons engender complex environments, by virtue of their ubiquitous destructive power, the decision-making that they force is decidedly simple. The response of states to nuclear acquisition will be predictable and sound. Nobody wants a powerful neighbour who has nukes and who can call the shots. Nobody wants to wage war against a neighbour who has nukes, knowing well that the sword of death lies midway over the necks of both. Deterrence may be an old concept, but it seems to be a concept for all times. Waltz thinks that reactions to nuclear weapons stockpiling, by a nation as well as it’s neighbours, are going to be relatively predictable and standard, not surprisingly reflecting the common goals of survival and development that any sovereignty would aspire to, unless there’s a madman at the helm.
As far as the argument from history is concerned, Waltz points out the several non-nuclear confrontations that have occurred between nations, including the Israel-Palestine conflict and skirmishes between China and Russia during the cold war. Both these are instructive because unlike the Soviet Union and the US, these states did border each other like India and Pakistan and still did not use nuclear weapons against each other, and so one can skirt Sagan’s fears that distance may create unforeseen problems between India and Pakistan, which did not exist between the two traditional cold war adversaries.

About the issue of nuclear terrorism, Waltz points out that many terrorists are not as irrational as we think. They have long-term objectives that they would not always sacrifice for the purpose of causing a big bang. They fear if not their lives, then certainly their organizations and goals, and would refrain from rash actions that would jeopardize their terrorist-military complex.

To sum up, like Sagan, Waltz draws on history, points to the discrepancy between complex nuclear scenarios and simple responses to them, and points to the fact that in spite of the extensive game-theoretic brainstorming carried out in the Rand corporation and the Pentagon, one cannot escape the fact the nuclear states have not fought each other until now with nuclear weapons. Q.E.D.

* Bringing in the verdict:

This is where I swoop in John Casti style, and pen my own opinions about the debate. As is evident, this is a complex debate, and my responses to it will also be fairly complex and distinctly non-partisan. I find myself agreeing with Waltz in some cases, with Sagan in others, with both in yet others, and with none of them in a few aspects.

The problem with history is that it offers a tempting glimpse, but no clear factual reality, of what could have been. This makes it very difficult to judge it as being encouraging or full of despair. For example, consider the simple question; how peaceful has been the world’s history in the latter half of the twentieth century? Well, it depends on how we see it. We can point to the most destructive war in history and say that no war of comparable magnitude has followed in its wake. Or we could point to Kashmir, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and say that we have been no better off than we were at the end of the Great War, when Woodrow Wilson christened it as a ‘war to end all wars’. Which view of history is the ‘correct’ one? The optimistic one or the pessimistic one? It’s hard to say, obviously.

A similar problem exists with an evaluation of nuclear weapons and their role in international geopolitics and relations. The scientists who built nuclear weapons were full of hope about these weapons, thinking that they would make future wars impossible. No doubt that they were pitting their hopes on an early perception of deterrence. In 1946, a remarkable report named the Acheson-Lilienthal report, whose words were largely penned by Robert Oppenheimer, called for international control of atomic energy. The report contained a revolutionary and audacious proposal, that atomic energy should be made equally available to every nation, so that every nation could have it at its disposal. However, nations who wanted to enrich nuclear material or build bombs could do it only at their risk, because of the knowledge that every other nation possessed the same technology and so potentially could retaliate in exactly the same way. Richard Rhodes provides a nice analogy; it was like a gun that had been disassembled and kept on a table within equal reach of everyone else. Anyone who wanted to use the gun on the others could do so only at the risk of his own existence. In its original form, the proposal called for international control. With hindsight, one can say that it espoused what we today call nuclear proliferation, although in a much more promising incarnation. Not surprisingly, it was too radical for the times, and it also was presented in a much more modified and unsparing form to the Russians, who promptly rejected it. But that proposal predated the whole philosophy of deterrence, which its progenitors had hoped would prevent future conflict.

Unfortunately, fear of nuclear retaliation has certainly not prevented future wars; in fact, one can argue that it has infused a sense of aplomb and audacity in antagonist states, because they know that their adversary dare not contemplate nuclear aggression no matter what they do. However, I do agree with Waltz’s assessment that nuclear weapons have made states wary in general and they do have mitigated the scope of the extent to which countries would wage war. Again, history does not tell us what would have happened had the historical tape run again exactly the way it did, except for the presence of nuclear weapons, and so we can only speculate, but we can speculate with some reason. I personally do believe that the brutality of conventional warfare may be limited if the two adversaries possess nuclear weapons.

The fact that nobody has ever used nuclear weapons since World War 2 is unfortunately not a completely reassuring fact. We know this because there is a clear record of more than one case when leaders did come extremely and realistically close to using these weapons. Again, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the archetypal example. A conference in Cuba in the 1990s revealed that the Soviets had an absurd number of nuclear warheads in Cuba- about 200. It should be noted that there are those who think that 200 nukes will be more than sufficient to destroy all the major cities of the US. During the cold war, such a macabre deployment by both sides would in fact have put the US at a disadvantage, because there was a much higher urban population density in the US than the USSR. During the Korean War, the US actually deployed nukes on the Pacific islands, the only time since WW2 it has done such a thing. During the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Israel nukes were purportedly up and ready on warplanes. With such a track record, it is difficult to believe that the world was always in an overwhelmingly comfortable and safe position when it came to using nuclear weapons. Again, one might argue about what actually happened, but one unique quality that distinguishes us after all, is the evaluation of future possibilities based on past possibilities, a quality that has repeatedly helped us to be circumspect and plan for long-term contingencies. I agree with Sagan there, that just because something never has been, there is no guarantee that it will never be. The record is impressive, but as the old adage goes, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip.

However, if I were to think about the limited issue of India and Pakistan, I believe that a nuclear confrontation seems extremely unlikely. Now in this particular case, history does provide some promise I think. Terrorist infiltration notwithstanding, there has been no evidence that Pakistan seriously tried to deploy nuclear weapons against India. This is in spite of the fact that the foundations of governments in Pakistan have been quite shaky. There have been coups, murders, and political instability in general. But no Pakistani general or commander in chief has dared to thrust the depraved possibility of nuclear warfare on his own country. In future conflicts, deterrence could be seen to keep on working. Again, one might argue otherwise, but there would be good reason to believe that even conflicts instigated by Pakistan would be kept in check because of not just Indian nuclear retaliation, but even because of the great power of India’s conventional forces. So in the limited case of India and Pakistan, yes, I do believe that nuclear weapons will help keep the peace.

Coming to the issue of accidents, I do agree with Sagan, that ‘normal accidents’ will always be quite common in complex systems. However, there have been and always will be technical advancements that will prevent such accidents. The simple installation of a hotline between the Kremlin and the White House assured that Khrushchev and Kennedy would keep in touch during vital moments and crises, and could prevent catastrophes arising from misunderstandings and false alarms. Better security, PALs, and well-trained personnel are really simple measures that will go a long away in averting apocalypse. I believe that the US should make a concerted effort in providing these facilities and services to India and Pakistan. For better or for worse, its vast nuclear arsenal produced as its byproducts, sophisticated detection technologies, safeguards, and training protocols, and it’s only fair that the US make these available for the world to use. Accidents always happen and we have lived with them, and they are always preventable. We faced accidents in the past, but learnt to avert them, and even if it won’t be easy, I think we can do the same in the future. That’s a much more general point which I think we can take care of.

I am quite taken by Waltz’s general belief that complex nuclear situations engender simple realities. The old and somewhat discounted framework of behaviorism may help us here. No matter how complicated human beings may be, each one of us responds to incentives and punishment, and each one of us has his weaknesses. I do believe that statesmen in any nation would instinctively try to preserve their objectives and the health of their country, in one way or the other. It does not matter if the nation is totalitarian or democratic. In fact, history has proved that punitive and affirmative incentives have worked even better for dictators than for democratic leaders. I would think that such incentives would be even more important for North Korea and Iran. After all, the leaders of both countries have worked hard to institute their hold on and respect in the population, whether by benevolent or malevolent means. Both leaders want power, have egos, and want to preserve their power, not just for themselves, but also for their future generations. Both leaders want to see an enduring influence of their political philosophies in their nations. Even assuming that they don’t care whether their countries progress or not, they won’t engage in policies that will hamper their own progress. Opening their country to nuclear attack is not one of these policies. Under such circumstances, it would be folly for them to pursue belligerent policies and especially to inflict any kind of nuclear aggression against another nation, especially when the other nation also possesses nukes. Iran may be pursuing nuclear enrichment, but that seems more like a defiant nationalistic policy that is actually whipping up public support and patriotic fervor. Deliberate, armed nuclear aggression is a completely different kettle of fish.

So I agree with Waltz to a large extent about the constancy of human nature. In the end, every leader of every kind is going to think about his survival. That would mean that there would be no ambiguity to the wariness of statesmen in sharing a common heritage of self-preservation and in limiting or eliminating nuclear belligerence.

All this is assuming that human beings are rational…

Which brings me to the question of nuclear terrorism

One of the senior officials who attended the 1990s Cuba conference was Robert McNamara, defense secretary during the missile crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War. Confronting a pugnacious Castro, McNamara learnt that not only did the Soviets have almost two hundred nuclear warheads installed in Cuba, but also that Castro had strongly recommended their use against the US to Khrushchev, well knowing that the result would likely be total annihilation of his country. McNamara was aghast. For all the discussion above about rational leaders wanting to preserve their sovereignties, Castro’s policy turned out to be completely irrational. He did not care whether Cuba was destroyed. He was willing to become a martyr for his grand philosophy and dream, no matter how deluded they would have seemed to an outsider.

This is exactly what Jihadi terrorists are willing to do. The Acheson-Lilienthal report could not have predicted the danger of nuclear terrorism. That is because it did not predict the absolutely absurd number of nuclear weapons that the USSR and US would ultimately stockpile. It also did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fact that this collapse would suddenly make hundreds of ‘loose’ nukes freely available for a short time. Many studies estimate that terrorists could have easily salvaged a hundred or so nukes in the short period of anarchy following the end of the Cold War. Terrorists could easily buy material from these devices and build their own bombs. They could easily build 10-kiloton bombs and smuggle them into the United States. They could even more easily build radioactive dirty bombs. Graham Allison has lucidly discussed the catastrophic pall of nuclear terrorism, and I have already talked at length about this and his book here.

When I first read about the Acheson-Lilienthal report long back as well as about Waltz’s stance more recently, my first question always was, “What about nuclear terrorism?” The problem is clear. Statesmen may have a lot to lose by engaging in nuclear conflict. But what do terrorists who have grand visions of martyrdom and virgin laden heaven have to lose? What do those who believe they are on a holy mission have to lose? For them, such kind of horrendous violence is in fact the perfect way to achieve their glorious goals. They don’t care about political motives, and they don’t care about diplomacy. They may care a little bit if they are state supported terrorists. But what about those who consider themselves messengers of god, unfettered by worldly considerations, politics, personal gains, or the continuation even of a self-centered life? For them, death itself is the ultimate form of life.

Waltz’s argument becomes a little shaky when we consider nuclear terrorism. If acquisition of nuclear weapons were limited to leaders, all the arguments about rational self-preservation would apply. But how will they apply to terrorists who are so deluded that their actions cannot fit into any rational framework? How can the importance of self-preservation apply to those for whom self-destruction is the noblest goal? Sagan is on strong ground when he argues that nuclear proliferation to states makes nuclear terrorism much more possible. Waltz’s arguments about terrorists also being long-term goals oriented and thereby being reluctant to expose themselves to sudden actions and risks may in fact usually be the case. There is reason to believe that even terrorist organizations run like corporate networks, with their own interests in staying alive and fighting. For those with long-term goals, self-preservation may be an important objective, but what about those who set out on holy crusades? All logic is lost upon such mortals, and they won’t stop at anything to inflict maximum damage. For all our purposes, their behaviour is completely irrational. Also, it does not matter that 9/11 type incidents are instigated only rarely. As Allison has noted, one detonation of a 10-kiloton bomb in Manhattan would result in a scenario too horrendous and sickening to imagine. One can only shudder at the thought of terrorists with 200 loose nukes, contemplating Jihads. Ominously, Allison wonders that a terrorist nuclear attack has already not occurred on US soil, at least with a dirty bomb.

In any case, Sagan’s viewpoint is simple; the more the number of nuclear states, the more the outlets for terrorists to acquire nukes. Whatever Waltz and similar minded people say about statesmen, that logic cannot apply to terrorists, because their thinking is bound to be illogical and even more unpredictable. Also, the problem with nuclear weapons is that even a minimalist and rare scenario is quite horrible to imagine, and one would want to prevent it at all costs. This is a complicated matter and it’s hard to see a clear way out of it. Again, heightened security may be the only palliative for now.

Interestingly, there are good grounds for hope even in this scenario, again based on historical evidence. Consider the fact that loose nukes have been available for 25 years now, and yet there has been no nuclear terrorist attack. More hope comes from an assessment of the use of chemical weapons, which are in a class by themselves, since they are much easier to manufacture than either nuclear or biological weapons. Sagan correctly cites the deadly 1995 Tokyo subway attack with Sarin that was orchestrated by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, but that is still one of the exceptional examples. Countries have always possessed cheaply deployable chemical weapons, and yet the instances of large-scale mass attacks on civilian populations have been non-existent, and ‘small-scale’ attacks (like the Tokyo attack and Saddam’s gas attacks on the Kurds) have been rare. I am reading Jonathan Tucker’s comprehensive history of chemical warfare, and find it surprising that in World War 2, even the nonchalant mass-murderer Nazis did not use a single drop of the lethal and horrifying Tabun (similar to Sarin) on the allies, even though they had the distinct advantage of being the only ones to posses the weapons at the time. Historical anecdotes seem to side with Waltz. All these instances indicate that even terrorists using nuclear weapons may not be an obvious and ominous conclusion. In any case, new protocols for security would make the possession, transportation, and use of nukes by rogue terrorists much less likely.

So what do I think about this, finally? Being a pacifist, I would ideally like to see nuclear weapons disappear from the face of the earth. But in that respect, I am a realist like Waltz. I know and believe that we will always have to live with nuclear weapons. It is a product of our Faustian bargain for knowledge that we cannot rid ourselves of. Although it is difficult to pass a final value judgment, I would say that if we could take care of the nuclear terrorism problem, and if we could set good standards of security for loose as well as secure nukes, then Waltz’s stance may be a sober and realistic one. The real long-term problem with that, however, is that deterrence is not really a solution as such; it does not actually solve the problem, but only sweeps it under the rug. Countries that are deterring each other have a tense and uncomfortable relationship, and the peace that exists between them is a rather imposed form of peace. Such nations could find it hard to be true allies. But even if this is the case, if we have to live with nuclear weapons, then we may live this way rather than live in an atmosphere of overt distrust and aggression. I also believe that nuclear neighbours would limit conventional conflict, unless an irrational ‘holy missionary’ happens to be the steward of one of those nations. However, we have already lived with that possibility, and I don’t see how we cannot live with it in the future, no matter that it is an uncomfortable one.

Sagan’s views of nuclear terrorism are better taken, and we will always have to be careful about nuclear weapons getting into their hands. In any case, terrorism has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, but is surely the product of forces beyond those of war, involving politics, poverty, and social upheavals and disturbances. The problem of nuclear terrorism boils down to the problem of terrorism itself, and that problem is one which we will face long after the missile cones have rusted and the fins have become unhinged.

In the end, like it usually is with such matters, what are going to really solve the problem are dialogue, transparency, and constant efforts to achieve the middle ground, no matter how untenable it may look. What we look forward to in this era of nuclear mistrust, is really Niels Bohr’s ‘open world’…

Burmese Days

2006-06-07T02:15:00.000Z

Rather unjustly, a good book gets hidden by its more glamorous and popular siblings. The fame of a select few can completely overshadow all other work by an author. I picked up Burmese Days because it was the only book by George Orwell left on the shelf at the local library and I judged it by its cover. One can always trust Henri-Cartier Bresson to capture the mood and the essence of a place and its people in a single frame. Upon reading the book I realise how appropriate the cover is - the bored look of the waiter and members enjoying their first drink of what appears to be a hot summer evening at their club. Orwell had just returned from India and was only 31 when he wrote Burmese Days, his first full-length novel.

Early in his career, George Orwell was a policeman and served with the Imperial Police in Burma. He did not serve very long, but in those few short years Orwell managed to absorb everything he saw. This book is the product of those years and is Orwell's comment on British India; colonials & natives, their perceptions and prejudices about each other; the British club and its intrigues; the exploitation of the back-country and its people, both by colonials and local politicians. In the middle of all that commentary there is also a Jane Austenesque love story with reality thrown in at the end. Orwell holds nothing back in his critical examination and delineation of his characters. One mark of great fiction is how quickly you can relate to each character within a few paragraphs and how alive they remain in your memory: the conniving 'crocodile' of a Burmese magistrate - U Po Khin; the educated but ultimately servile Indian surgeon - Veeraswami; Ellis - the racist argumentative member of the club; the obnoxious cad - Veerall, who thinks of nothing other than polo and horses; and the hero of the novel - Flory who is forever battling his demons; Ko'Sla his Man Friday. Orwell based his characters and most of the stories in the book on real-life events and did not bother to change names in his first version. Publication was delayed due to fears of libel. Eventually, nothing of that sort happened and the book was quite well-received.

The novel is set in a small back-country station in upper Burma called Kyauktada. The local expat life revolves around the club and club matters such as the inclusion of its first native member. Of course, like in any club, the service is slow and the waiters are more interested in gossip. While the members are willing to admit defeat over the fact that they will never completely control the Burma outside, the club itself is British territory and they will fiercely defend their club, its silly rules and even its servants, if attacked. Even today, long after the British have left, their legacy of the club and its indolent service still persists. In my reading, Orwell's description of the intrigues of camp-life and of the club is surpassed only by Kipling in the Plain Tales from the Hills. Orwell is definitely the literary soothsayer nonpareil and this novel(like his later ones), published in 1931, is remarkably prophetic in its pronouncements. The attack on the club is a portent of the eventual doom of British India while U Po Khin and his like epitomize how the bureaucratic legacy of the British would cripple progress after independance. James Flory, like the Prince of Denmark, is the conscience of the novel and is racked with grave doubts about himself, about the British colonial legacy, whether he 'has gone native' and if he will find 'true love'. The only person who he can talk to freely is the doctor - Veeraswami, who is ironically an unabashed fan of the British Empire and sees the Asiatic as a member of a barbaric race. He will always listen to Flory, his friend, but will never understand him.

This is not Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Burma; it is a comedy, though a dark one. Orwell has a gift for telling a story with much empathy and in the end even the villainous Po Kyin and his dastardly acts seem justified. Orwell metes out a tragically comic punishment to him at end, but not before he creates one of fiction's most unforgettable characters.

Unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, U Po Kyin gazed out
into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help, and yet shapely and even beautiful in his grossness; for the Burmese do not sag and bulge like white men, but grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrinkled, and his eyes were tawny. His feet--squat, high-arched feet with the toes all the same length--were bare, and so was his cropped head, and he wore one of those vivid Arakanese longyis with green and magenta checks which the Burmese wear on informal occasions. He was chewing betel from a lacquered box on the table, and thinking about
his past life.

It had been a brilliantly successful life. U Po Kyin's earliest memory, back in the eighties, was of standing, a naked pot-bellied child, watching the British troops march victorious into Mandalay. He remembered the terror he had felt of those columns of great beef-fed men, red-faced and red-coated; and the long rifles over their shoulders, and the heavy, rhythmic tramp of their boots. He had taken to his heels after watching them for a few minutes. In his childish way he had grasped that his own people were no match for this race of giants. To fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition, even as
a child.

Burmese Days is available as an e-text

The Interpreter of Maladies

2006-05-21T11:12:00.000Z

I have never really found books on the great cross-cultural Indian-American upheaval very good. I think the principal culprit was Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, whose prose seemed unnatural and disconnected from a possible reality, and books like the puerile The Inscrutable Americans didn't help the cause. Therefore, the reasons I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize (for Fiction, in 2000) winning collection of short stories were not the mandatory blurbs or the promise of stories from "Bengal to Boston" as the subtitle promised, but merely that it was a slim volume and I only wanted to experience first-hand her much vaunted writing style.

The book of nine stories turned out to be very impressive. Seldom have I read slice-of-life tales that seem "lived" and crumpled with use. Lahiri suffuses the stories with a rare emphathetic tone, establishing a quiet rhythm. Her choice of sentences are simple without being plain, which is what appealed to me the most. Except for one story set completely in Bengal without any tinge of the Western side, all stories keep up the subtitle's promise of intertwining lives and cultures. Quite as a quilt would when it is being woven - with many ends loose and unsure.

A review of a book like this is best kept brief. So I will, but not before noting that the first few stories from the book had the greatest emotional impact. Perhaps one could attempt reading the stories in reverse order?