The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

There are many things that keep bringing me back to movies and books on World War II. I find it fascinating how almost every country of note got sucked into the melee. It boggles the mind how fast the conflict escalated and it boggles even more how fast the wounds healed. To me the war is confirmation that this thing we call ‘civilization’ is but a thin veneer.

When I think about World War II the European and the pacific theaters come to mind. Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a reminder of just how far the conflict really spread and how many actors it forced in. Much of the story is set in Siam where the Japanese exploited thousands of Australian POWs to build a railway from Singapore to Burma (Think Bridge on the River Kwai). The protagonist is a surgeon in one such camp who becomes the leader of the POWs and is witness to the atrocities in the camps. Violence, both commissioned by the Japanese and that which is incidental. There’s one scene in which gangrene sets in an already amputated leg of a prisoner, and the doctor has to saw off the leg all the way to the hip in the grimiest of conditions. He struggles hard to suture an artery to stop the bleeding and at the end of a longish struggle finally manages it, only to realise that the patient has already died on the makeshift bamboo bed. I found those parts, where the violence is so banal, the most heartrending.

There’s a love story that runs in the background (or foreground, depends on who you ask) which I didn’t fancy much, but that’s mostly because I’ve lost the enzymes to digest romance in literature. The parts set in the war are truly gripping and soul-crushing. The best war literature gets into what it means to be human both as oppressor and as victim, and I thought this book scores really high there. There’s one passage where the doctor asks one of his compatriots “You still believe in God” and the inmate says “Dunno colonel, It’s human beings I’m starting to wonder about.”

Running in 2014

There's one aspect of 2014 that was very satisfying, and that was my running mileage. I fell short of the 1000km target I had set for myself, but 855 was a still a big improvement over the last couple of years. Credit goes to the following

* Smart phones and exercise tracking apps. For a dataphile like me graphs like the one above are hugely motivating.

* Bangalore weather: In what other city in India can you stick to the same running regimen and routine all through the year?

* Trail races: There are some fantastic trails around Bangalore, or at a short driving distance from here, and some firms that have sprung up and nailed the art of organizing a good foot race. The Kaveri Trail Marathon, Auroville, Bangalore Ultra are all pilgrimages for runners.

Reading in 2014

Books that I strongly recommend

Sense of Style – Steven Pinker

Books on language usage remind me of Heraclitus’s quote “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” How do you make lasting rules on a subject that is as dynamic as language? I think Pinker comes closest to distinguishing good usage from snobbery. My prediction is that Sense of Style will replace Strunk and White as the definitive writing guide for English.

My Struggle – Karl Ove Knausgård

In contrast to my first recommendation, this one eschews style to the point of being boring. Here’s a quote from the book that seems to justify that point of view “…everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books.” I picked this book after a glowing endorsement in Marginal Revolution. Reading the book was a struggle, and at many points I felt like I was wasting my time. After I finished I felt relief and wondered how anybody could read another of those volumes – this is a six-part autobiographical novel, remember. So, why is this in my top recommendations for the year? I don’t think I have figured out a good reason but this passage in the book comes close to a possible answer “And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but in the perception of myself while I was reading.” The descriptions of mundane events in this book are exactly what banalities look like and there’s a certain comfort in accepting them as such. No pursuits of profundity. No unearthing of non-existent layers. Whatever the reason, nothing so boring has been so compelling. Guess what book I’m reading right now? My Struggle – part two!

Honorable mentions

• A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson: Covers everything from the Big Bang to the contintental drift to extinction of the dinosaurs. 
• Waking up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris 
• The Competent Authority by Shovon Chowdhury – Surprisingly funny political satire.
• The Code Book by Simon Singh
• The Sceptical Patriot by Sidin Vadukut: Badly needed reality check in an environment of hyper-patriotism.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Theory of Relativity: Another failed attempt to understand Einstein’s theory.

And finally, these didn’t really make a lasting impression

• Lying by Sam Harris
• Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

How to set up a kitchen garden

If you are a resident of Bangalore here's how you can set up a kitchen garden in your backyard, terrace or balcony.
Step 1. Recycling your wet waste: While you could buy manure from outside, I'd advise setting up your own composting unit. Daily Dump is a good place to start. You can get one of these units to convert your kitchen waste to manure.

Step 2. Set up your garden: Chances are, you don't have a garden area. That shouldn't stop you. You should get yourself one of these beds. If you are from around Koramangala you can pick these up from Agara Lake or near the Shantinagar cemetery. To get started, you may want to buy a bag of red soil and manure as well.

Step 3: Sow the seeds: I buy my seeds from Agro Seeds at Anand Rao Circle but it should be fairly easy to find an outlet near wherever you are. I have experimented with Tomato, Palak, Mint and Brinjal with varying results. If you can find some earthworms drop them into the pots as well.

Step 4: Water the plants regularly: I collect the runoff from my Reverse-Osmosis water purifier so that I can use that water for the kitchen garden.

Step 5: Reap the fruits: Fresh vegetables with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

Vipassana

I had heard about the Vipassana meditation course from various people but all I knew about it was that you have to stay silent for 10 days. Without any other knowledge of the course, the restraint on speech had had me entertain thoughts of giving it a try. Sam Harris’s recent book “Waking up” strongly recommended Vipassana as a good entry into meditation and spirituality for the non-believer. His endorsement finally made me register. For the uninitiated, Vipassana is a 11 day residential meditation course that’s offered free of charge and hopes to introduce you to Dhamma (laws of Nature as taught by the Buddha). You have to agree to live like an ascetic - sleeping on a one-inch mattress laid out on a stone bench, eating only two meals a day, and not speaking - actually not even making eye contact - with the co-meditators for the entire duration of the course. Here I try to chronicle my experience as answers to questions I had before I went there. 

Are the days long?

You wake up at 4 AM, meditate on your haunches for a total of 11 hours in the day. In some of those slots you are challenged to not change your posture for a full hour. The last twenty minutes of such a session feel like eons. So yes, the days are awfully long but you get to experience the paradox of long days - although each waking hour feels incredibly drawn out the 10 days seem to just whizz by. 

How hard is it to not speak for 10 days? Why is this restraint there anyway?

One of the conditions of the course is that you observe Noble Silence or Arya mouna. Not only do you not speak with anybody, you avoid all sorts of communication including hand gestures or eye contact. You have to deposit your mobile phone in a safe locker. You are not allowed to even carry reading or writing material with you. The idea is to not let anything distract your mind in the pursuit of the various stages of revelation in this technique. Surprisingly, though, I found this restraint very comfortable (once and for all answering the question whether I am an introvert or an extrovert).

Why is the course free?

Historically, one of the conditions to learn Vipassana was renunciation. Hence, nobody paid to do this course and the center has tried to keep that tradition. But it serves other purposes, for instance, it suspends the sense of entitlement that comes with paying for something. 

Is it compatible with Atheism?

Buddhism is often described as atheistic because Buddha deemed the belief in god irrelevant to the pursuit of enlightenment. So it wasn’t a surprise that this course was free of all mentions of god or any of the modern day proxies for him, such as, “Energy” or “Life force” or “Something greater than us”. 

Do I have to make some uncomfortable leaps of faith?

The course is surprisingly non-sectarian. There’s not an idol of Buddha to be seen anywhere, nor do they insist on any silly rites or rituals. There’s no hero worship of the founder of the center either. However, there are some cringe-worthy explanations for observations you make during your meditation. For instance, the second phase of the meditation involves a heightened state of alertness that makes it effortless to explore the body and mind. The teacher builds some incredulous bridges of “mind-matter interactions” that would make any rational being squirm. 

What’s the teacher like?

On the first day you are asked to sit in the meditating posture and close your eyes, and then you are greeted by a voice from a speaker singing shlokas in Pali, in a tune that seems to have liberated itself from all shackles of scales and rhythm. You later learn that the voice belongs to Sri. S.N Goenka, the founder of the center that runs these courses, Dhamma paphulla. Most of the course is taught by this gentleman through recorded audio. There are even discourses every evening that are video recordings from a past course. This portly, genial, and rather humorous, gentleman is the real teacher of the course. The teacher who guides you in person sticks to merely telling you when to take your breaks. 

What are the takeaways?

The course promises nothing less than the complete understanding of the law of nature. But my takeaways, much less lofty than pledged, were very satisfying. When you sit through painful stiffness in your limbs and back for hours on end, and train to view them with equanimity (doesn’t happen till the seventh day) the pain miraculously disappears. The mindfulness that you develop before you can reach that stage is exhilarating. Of course, it’s frustrating that you can’t summon that feeling at will, and even when you do, the teacher reminds you not to crave or relish it (equanimity, sigh!). Whether you get the experience of equanimity, or those heightened states of awareness, or those stretches of time when your mind is completely in control, just the 10 days plugged out of civilization is bloody liberating. 

Books that stuck

This was a list-tag thingy going on in facebook. Thought I'll copy that over here too, since this blog has seen a dry spell lately.

Selfish Gene: This belongs to the genre "You can never look at the world the same way again". Many other Dawkins's books left impressions of varying sizes on me, but I should mention "The Blind Watchmaker" and "God Delusion"

1984: Gloomy stories seem to stay longer with you than happy ones. Until it was cheapened to peddle a consumer product, this book was the best ad for democracy.

Old Man and the Sea: The power of good fiction to force empathy out of you. I distinctly remember feeling every bit of Santiago's exhaustion by the time he gets to the shore.

Tropic of Cancer: Whether a book stays with you also depends on at what stage in your life you encounter it. Tropic crossed my path when my own opinions were being formed on a variety of topics- censorship, free will, civilization- and made the kind of mark that none of the author's other books or even a re-reading of this one have made since.

Thinking, Fast and Slow: Had got me hooked on thinking about thinking. Immediately after this one, I binge-read Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" and Pinker's "How your mind works".

Slaughterhouse-Five: It's liable to change in the future, but at this moment, all things considered, Vonnegut is probably my favorite writer of fiction and Slaughterhouse-five is right at the top. Honorable mention: Cat's Cradle.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Like Anantha said, HGG is a genre on its own. What sane mind can come up with ideas like ballpoint planets, SEP fields, and an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "Belgium"?

Asterix series: Incomparable humor. I often wonder how special it must be in its original form in French.

Midnight's Children: I read this book in an 18-hr marathon, sitting in a teahouse in Leh. The setting and the book formed such a strong association that I can't think of one without remembering the other.

The Meadow: Hits home how inextricable the Kashmir situation really is through a masterful reporting of an unsolved kidnapping that happened in the valley years ago. A cloud of gloom hung over me for days after.

Carvalho (Poorna Chandra Tejaswi): The token diversity entry in this list. I'm closet-parochial about the Western Ghats, and no book I've read has quite captured that location with the same level of intimacy. And only my mother tongue seems to do that place justice.

Final thoughts on the election - or my way of dealing with the withdrawal symptoms

Modi's win didn't really surprise anyone. Only the extent of the win was mindblowing. Personally, despite being a long-time detractor I do see positives in the outcome. A near-absolute majority should ease the frustrating policy paralysis that we witnessed in the last few years. Mr. Modi, so far, has been saying all the right things. Something tells me that he is keen to leave a positive legacy and that might be a very good thing for all of us. A single party having the simple majority on its own translates to fewer egos in the coalition that need to be massaged. Lastly for a party accused of being old-fashioned they ran one hell of a 21st century campaign. It makes me believe they are capable of bringing that slickness to the functioning of the government too.

There are things I'm sceptical about, though. The looneys that usually side with the BJP, I believe, were under instructions to stay out of sight at least till the election results are declared. Expect them to slowly start crawling out of the woodwork. I'm hoping Modi's famous autocratic methods will keep the extremists on the margins. There are large sections of people that are under-represented in this Lok Sabha. The muslim representation in this parliament is a pathetic 22 out of 543 seats. In a fair world we should have had at least 4 times that number but that's a vagary of the Westminster system. I do hope that the new government will consider itself accountable to every person in the country, even folks who didn't vote for them. The party has some contentious issues on their manifesto and the people that did vote for them will ask for them to be addressed. I do hope that Modi can bury some of those issues (the temple!) and go after the others (uniform civil code) with finesse and restraint.

Personally for me, as a supporter of AAP, this election has been disappointing. I'm left with a lot of what-ifs. Kejriwal hasn't been an easy leader to cheer. While his unreasonableness got him the early gains, the same trait was a handicap in this election. I believe if Kejriwal had been pragmatic, contested in Delhi, and used his time and energy to help his other colleagues win, we would have seen 10-15 AAP MPs. Someone like Yogendra Yadav would have been a fine man to sit in the opposition. I do hope that they continue to grow in strength because there is a need for a party like AAP that is uncompromising on corruption, does not have a phobia of muslims or sexual minorities, and can actually make politics look like a career option for anyone in the land. But I believe there is an existential threat right now for the party. If elections are held in Delhi this moment, my guess is that BJP will wrest some votes back from AAP. If that happens there is a serious threat of AAP getting relegated to the footnotes of history. That would be a real shame.

Spot booking at Tadoba

It's half hour past midnight in Tadoba National Park, Maharashtra. CM, RN and I are at the Mohurli gate of the Park. RN is sleeping on the granite counter of the forest office's registration window curling up and trying to fit himself on a surface that's barely 3 feet across and 2 feet wide. He has covered himself in a white sheet, “borrowed” from the hotel, to keep off the plus-sized mosquitoes that are buzzing about. CN is taking refuge in the car. When he shuts the windows he fogs up the car and suffocates himself, and when he rolls down the glass he becomes victim to the savagery of the mosquitos. I'm sitting on an uneven bench made of bamboo shoots holding a kindle in one hand and fanning the bugs away with the other. At a distance a temple plays a rendition of a mythological story narrated in sing-song style. Every now and then the narration stops, apparently due to a powercut, and that unique sound characteristic to the night forest - din of the cicadas mixed with an all-enveloping silence- takes over the atmosphere, only to be abruptly chased away again by the cacophonous temple story teller. We are here in this odd setting at this odd hour to ensure that we get hold of one of limited spot-booking slots that the forest office gives away if places set aside for VIPs are not claimed.

At three in the morning we are joined by two other guys from Nagpur, who are rather disappointed not to be at the head of the line. Another stretched-out hour later a family shows up and can’t believe that there is a queue built up in front of the window. The booking counter finally opens at a quarter past five, when a lady clerk tells the crowd that this morning they will have only two spot booking slots, chases the remaining folks, and cuts us a ticket, all with an efficiency that is commendable for such an early hour. We are happy we get the ticket but we are too tired now to go on the safari.

To understand why we had to go through the struggle in the morning you have to be familiar with the barriers that the forest department has put up recently. Firstly, they've closed down 80% of the forests to tourists. They've carved out clear zones in the remaining area and introduced a permit system that limits the activities of the tourists to within the zone for which they obtain the pass. The process to obtain a pass is through an amateurishly designed website that makes IRCTC look like a trendsetter in rich internet experiences. We had done all the hard work getting the passes but had realized the previous evening that our entry gate was nearly 70 kms away from our hotel. The other available option was to do what we did that morning. Even with the "tatkal" permit they've set up barriers to ensure that you don't pay your way into the park by getting guides or locals to stand in the queue as proxies for you. We were temporarily dissuaded by these hurdles and we questioned if all this was worth the hassle, but we had driven 2200 kms for the chance to see some of the best parks in Central India. We had driven all the way from Bangalore, visited Bandhavgarh, Kanha and Pench national parks and had been moderately lucky with the sighting of the big cats. Tadoba was our last stop and the opportunity to see another tiger or two was too hard to resist.

After that episode we didn’t see the tigers on that safari after all, but the forests had so much more to offer. We caught a marsh crocodile basking in the sun, a barking deer scooting across our path, a jackal, with no intent to kill, chasing a herd of chital, several fantastic birds, and so many other sights that we would have hated to miss. CN, RM and I sat through the safari with droopy eyes, but I’m sure we didn’t regret having another story to tell in our long friendship together.

Education and Alienation

MK and I recently had an interesting conversation about education being an alienating factor in India. We were thinking back about our time together in Thanjavur.

Due to the presence of a cluster of social initiatives, Thanjavur attracted a lot of researchers who wanted to be part of the action. There was the post doc from Harvard, the nurse practitioner from Penn state, interns from MIT, researchers from highly rated social work schools. Higher education seemed to have had a liberating effect on all of them. They seemed to be global citizens who would be well adjusted in any part of the world. I remember a New England girl, educated at Harvard, who called Kaushambi her second home (and she wasn’t just trying to be cute while saying this).

I was then wondering why it is almost always the opposite for Indians. There were city educated Indians who came to work in Thanjavur, and with few exceptions, they were maladjusted to living there. The more educated you were the more unsuitable you became to rural India. The more well-traveled I am the bigger a misfit I become in my country.

Now I don’t mean to be judgmental about people who seek brighter pastures and don’t look back at their origins. Every human has a right to the pursuit of happiness. There are also legitimate reasons that make Indians overtly or covertly disown their homeland. Lack of safety (especially for women), ethical compromises forced by a corrupt environment, limits to earning potential imposed by an undeveloped economy are all valid ones, but that can’t be all. I believe there is an alienation forced by education in India. It seems disconnected from real life. To take an illustrative example, there’s no kid from a farmer family who learns to become a kickass farmer, who optimizes his yield with scientific approaches, and uses his academic education to overcome knowledge asymmetries that traditionally work against farmers. Doesn’t happen often enough! You get a degree and you become unfit for your village. If you get a higher degree, chances are you will be a misfit everywhere in your country.

Reading in 2013

I aim to read at the rate of at least one good book per month, and by that measure, 2013 was a satisfactory one.

Top tier recommendations

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined - Steven Pinker: Anthropology, history and ethics all come nicely together in this book, persuading you to accept a reality that seems counter-intuitive, especially when, while I was reading this, the details of the 2012 Delhi rape were just coming out. Eventually, the mass response to that incident did somewhat prove Pinker's hypothesis that we live in the most peaceful time ever.
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel C. Dennett: The chapter on consciousness was such a delight. You realize even when demystified by Dennett's logical deconstruction, "consciousness" inspires awe.
The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod: "Axelrod's tournament" kept getting cited in several books I had read in the recent past, and I had to read this book to satisfy my curiosity. It's intriguing how a vanilla Tit-for-Tat strategy is the most effective one in an iterative prisoner's dilemma game. It's even more fascinating to think that beneath all our complex social behavior our firmware might be as simple as that - tit for tat! (although the author never makes that claim).
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace: A luxury cruise is a good setting for Wallace's dark social commentary. Really funny!
India After Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha: The freedom struggle, the characters in it, and the episodes around (like the Partition, and the Gandhi assassination), by the sheer momentousness probably dwarf all other succeeding events. Somehow, I grew up believing that history ended in the late 40s. Guha chronicles the events after independence. But it's the portraits of the people (Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, JP, Ambedkar etc.) that get the treatment they deserve, restoring them from the distortions dealt by the current popular narratives.
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie: I read this one immediately after India After Gandhi, and it felt like Rushdie borrowed the intricate sets that Guha erected to stage a magical opera of his own. Plus the fact that I read this book by a fire in a kitchen tent in Stok Kangri base camp during the 3 days I spent at 18k ft amsl waiting for the weather to let up made for an other-worldly experience.

Here are other books that I recommend
Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut: My yearly Vonnegut dose.
Satyagraha in South Africa - M.K. Gandhi: A glimpse of how MKG developed his philosophy and political strategies.
Ravan & Eddie - Kiran Nagarkar
D-Day - Anthony Beevor
The Emperor of Lies - Steve Sem-Sandberg
Why Does The World Exist? - Jim Holt: A nice accessible history of ontology and one of the few philosophy books I've read that didn't leave me feeling like an idiot.
Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer: For days after reading this book I was using the memory palace technique to memorize all sorts of stuff.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo
Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese: I probably would have never read this book if my friend hadn't left it back because she didn't want to lug it around for the rest of a backpacking trip she was embarking on. Loved the descriptions of Ethiopia in this one.

Year of the Vader

Each year I try to look back at the highlights and to sum up the more significant milestones. It’s so easy to do that this year because it was all about this little guy. Nothing sums up the experience like that memorable scene in “Lost in translation”

Bob: It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.

Charlotte: It's scary.

Bob: The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.

Charlotte: Nobody ever tells you that.

Bob: Your life, as you know it... is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.

Charlotte: That's nice.

This year has been as much about embracing the new reality as it has about celebrating the joys and frustrations that parenting has brought. Your life, as you know it, is indeed gone. Yet, I can’t help remember how he sat all engaged staring at the wild asses when we took him in an open jeep for a 4 hour safari in the dusty and chilly Rann of Kutch, and realize that he’s still allowed us to not relinquish everything. He’s definitely been more Siddhartha and less Vader.

Rann of Kutch

Lately, Amitabh Bachchan has been popping up everywhere, and in his inimitable voice and diction has been constantly telling us “Kutch nahi dekha to kuch nahi dekha”. He has mostly been eulogizing the white sands of the Greater Rann of Kutch which happen to be a fair distance away from Ahmedabad. Since we were nervous about traveling too far with an infant we decided to check out Mr. Bachchan’s claim at the Little Rann of Kutch instead, which is a more convenient hop away from the state capital.

Amitabh hasn’t been kidding; this is a truly magical place. Photos and words will hardly do justice to the endlessness and the flatness of the marshes. Despite the monotony of the landscape the biodiversity is mindboggling. Of course, this region is known for the wild asses - the last breeding population in the wild - but what I hadn’t expected was the richness of the bird populations, both in variety and numbers. The Rann is dotted with little lakes and ponds, all teeming with humongous numbers of avians. Here are a few shots that give you an idea:

This one was a huge flock of Pelicans that seemed like a rain cloud had passed over our head.

Another massive flock, this time of Flamingos

A flock of bar-headed geese

It’s great that Gujarat is promoting this region, but tourism development cuts both ways. It may give the local populations an incentive to preserve what they have here, but increased human activity might take away from the very desolateness that gives this place its character. It will be interesting to see how this one goes.

Female Labor Participation in India

Came across great sets of data maintained by the World Bank, and there are revelations strewn about. Found this one to be interesting:

The Female Labor Participation rate (defined as "the proportion of the population ages 15 and older that is economically active") seems to be dropping for India in the last few years. Look how poorly we do when compared to Bangladesh! This ILO article (ILO happens to be the source of this data) cites increased competition from men, bad monsoons,discrimination, and the global economic crisis as reasons for the drop in India, but doesn't explain why this curve in Pakistan has a healthier trend (despite school girls getting shot in the face!). The article also claims that women in wealthier households tend to have lower participation, which also seems counter-intuitive. Whatever the reason, seems like a serious glitch in the Bharat Nirman narrative.

Ladakh - 2013

Highlights from the Ladakh trip

Stok Kangri: The highlight, of course, was Stok Kangri, which I was hoping to summit. Rains, uncharacteristic for this time of the year, weren't making my plans easy. For three days I stayed at the base camp hoping each day that the rain would let up. It did, but in favor of snow! On the third day it looked hopeless but I didn't want to go back without one attempt at the peak. I tagged along with a group from Kolkata who also had run out of spare days. We started at midnight, walking in the light of our head torches, trusting our guide to know where he's going. By the time we reached an altitude of 5650m the snow was falling hard and covering our tracks in minutes. The slope was increasing too, and our guide reminded more than once that the descent would be much harder. Eventually, at around 4:30 we decided to head back. It was disappointing, but when dawn broke the whole landscape had been transformed by the snow. The view at the advanced base camp (at around 5450m amsl) was worth all the trouble.

Hospitality: One family made this trip special for me. Zia, my guide, who hosted me at his beautiful family house in Choglamsar village, and let me stay in a room with a beautiful view of the Stok Kangri. Later, he put me up at a homestay owned by his cousin. At the end of my stay my host there, the hostess, gave me presents for me and my wife (whom she hasn't met) and profusely apologized for not picking something up for my son.

Independence Day at 5km abmsl: August 15th was a cold and wet day at the base camp, apart from portending the disappearance of any prospects of making it to the summit. The only memorable moment from that day was when a bunch of trekkers put up the Indian flag on a tent pole, convinced all the other Indians in the camp to join them in singing the national anthem, and then crawled back into their sleeping bags to wait out the rest of the day.

The scariest thing about Modi 2014 is not Modi himself

I'm deliberately going to avoid 2002 because that horse has been pulped. If you keep that aside, I believe Modi, on achievements alone, is probably the best option available for May 2014. Let me first clarify that I am convinced that Modi's accomplishments are part fiction but mostly brilliant marketing. Read this post for why Gujarat's report card is underwhelming. 8th on GSDP growth, 15th on literacy rate, 18th in infant mortality, 20th in sex ratio; hardly miracle territory, considering a single party has been in power for nearly 2 decades. Yet, I anticipate that he will affect transparency positively and I think he is genuine in his efforts to curb corruption, and both those issues are important to me. What also makes him the best candidate is less about him and more about the woeful lack of alternatives. The leading contender is an intellectual lightweight with an empty trophy cupboard, and is from a party that gave us the most inert PM in our history. The other thing that might actually make Modi effective is the enormous amount of scrutiny every step of his attracts.

Yet I'm uncomfortable about Modi 2014 and the reason for that is not just 2002. Every party has been guilty of playing its part in riots (btw, Mukul Kesavan has a brilliant piece on why 2002 is not the same as 1984). The lack of a second line leadership under Modi is scary too. Where, for instance, are the Makens, the Rameshs and the Tharoors in the BJP? The environmental damage that the Development brigade will cause is also not the scary bit. The scariest part about Modi is really the Modi supporter. It's like all commenters on Rediff message-boards have an expedited breeding program and have successfully created a cult of supporters where logical fallacies in argument are celebrated and any healthy irreverence is frowned upon. Having a sense of humor is completely forbidden. The reaction of that group when TOI published an account of Modi rescuing 15000 Gujaratis was instructive. Anybody who showed skepticism was branded a congress sycophant. It's a pattern; look in the "comments" section of any article questioning Modi. There's one guy who will bring up 1984, another will talk about the 2G scam, and one more will recommend bangles to the writer for allowing an Italian woman to control us. The remaining ones,who are not frothing at their mouth, will just say "The country need you Modi sir. Jai Hind". Even the more educated folks (think Pritish Nandy) feel they don't need to exercise empirical skepticism about any of the fairy tales if they are made in Gujarat. If Modi wants to be a fascist dictator, he has all the ingredient he needs.

Bangalore 10K - Edition 6

The trend that I noted last year - speed inflation- continues. I finished at 53:16, 2 seconds faster than last year, and yet at 634, I still ended up around 200 ranks down. I have to run a full 78 seconds faster to stay in the top 500. Sigh!

I'll never be a pundit!

I hate to admit it but my political judgment is depressingly flawed. Out of the four times I've voted in the Karnataka assembly elections I've either voted for the losing party but ended up approving the winner or picked the winning party but regretted it sorely. Let me explain. In 1999, I thought it would be a good idea if the center and the state had the same parties in power, and so I picked BJP for the state, but congress won that year. S M Krishna turned out to be, in my opinion, the best chief minister we've had in the recent past. I voted Congress in 2004, fairly confident that Krishna would come back to a second term with a full majority but instead we were stuck with a listless Dharam Singh for the next two years. In 2006, I voted Congress again, but this time Kumaraswamy was elected CM. I was sure things would go awfully wrong, but he turned out to be a surprisingly efficient leader.

In the next election I was wrong on two fronts. Firstly, I was swayed by the popular sympathy-towards-the-victim sentiment that brought BJP so many seats. More embarrassingly, I forecast Yeddyurappa to be the statesman-like leader that we longed for. Over 5 long years he made us all regret our judgment every single day.

This time I voted for Congress again and they won. I'm actually hopeful about Mr. Siddaramaiah. I'm not sure how he'll deal with the mining lobbies, and I'm certain he won't have the leeway to reverse any of the badly thought-out populist policies, but there's one thing I'm hoping he will do. Yeddy had the audacity to allocate tax-payer funds to religious institutions of his choice and he had let right wingnuts feel protected when they went about imposing their warped moral codes. Siddaramaiah, on the other hand, is vocally atheist - the second one we've had in our state. I hope he will bring back some sanity to the religious discourse around here. On every other front, given how wrong I've been in the past, I'm already prepared to be disillusioned.

Coursera

My college housed classes in a dilapidated building, exposed us to practical education in impoverished labs, and inflicted on us teachers who would rather be doing something else. I always knew that my schooling was sub-standard, but having ended my education early, I had no real benchmark to compare it with. Until Coursera came along!

What’s not to like about Coursera. As a phenomenon, I find it uplifting to know that there are scholars willing to expend considerable energy in making courses for no easily quantifiable benefits. There’s a certain kick in doing courses with 60000 other people, a majority of them studying them not because they are investing in themselves, but because they were mildly curious about the topic. You don’t have entrance tests or heartbreaking rejections. There’s no opportunity cost to pay or penalty for deciding you don’t want to continue. Best of all, it has given me a reason not to hate my commute anymore. 

Students in my college, now, must be better off knowing they can use resources other than the ones we relied on, low-cost photocopies of notes from a marginally better-run university in our neighbourhood.

Civilization isn't nigh

The water fountains in our office dispense at a stingy trickle and in the time needed to fill an entire bottle you usually find another person waiting to get a drink; some wait to fill a cup, others to top their bottle up. In my mind the social contract dictates that cups trump bottles so I usually yield access to the tap even if I’m in the middle of filling my bottle. Most often people nod, smile, say thanks, or on the rare occasion insist on waiting. However, many others, in numbers larger than I would have guessed, don’t even acknowledge the gesture and reach for the tap with a sense of entitlement. I had promised myself to wait till I encounter at least 5 people who lack the courtesy to thank before I made this post. I hit my target in the first week.

Denizens of a crowded country are probably habituated to seizing an opportunity and moving on. You see disregard for fellow humans in traffic or at any ticket counter. Maybe I am unfairly wearing the firang goggles that people of my generation pick up on their travels abroad, but I feel disheartened. If you don’t mind being a jerk at office where you’ll meet your colleagues repeatedly, why would you be civil to strangers?

Backyard Bat

I've tried a few tricks to attract birds into the little backyard garden we have at our home. I put up this bird nest on one of the trees but all that managed was just one inspection by an unimpressed squirrel.

I also put up this bird feeder to a neighboring tree but that went unused as well.

My next strategy had long-term focus. I planted a Muntingia tree, commonly called the Singapore Cherry in these parts. Although this is not an endemic species (and makes me feel guilty) it's a favorite of the sunbirds and the flowerpeckers that already visit us. The sapling has taken a liking to its home and is thriving. Yet I haven't been able to coax any of these birds to make this garden a permanent home.

A couple of weeks ago we had a surprise resident; this lone bat that has been regularly roosting on a branch of the gooseberry tree.

I'm not sure what species he is or why he seems to be alone (I always thought bats live only in colonies), but he's been coming back regularly. He had a difficult settling-in period because our gardener believes he will bring us bad luck and was bent on chasing him out. After explaining that the bat might be helping him by eating the bugs here he reluctantly dropped his animosity. Although he wasn't the kind of wings I was hoping to attract this guy has made the garden a little more interesting.

You know you are in Japan...

...when a toilet seat puts a gaming console to shame.

Third evening in Beijing

Nobody told me that Google maps is unreliable in China. On this blustery cold evening in Beijing I decided to ditch the cab and walk back home, guided by Google maps. Three times after the map had insisted that the fountain in front of a mall was my hotel I decided to give up and ask for help. I steeled up for all the translation issues that I was sure would ensue. The very first person I stopped on the street surprised me when he spoke fairly good English. He had no idea where Marriott was, though. This is when he surprised me again. Instead of just walking away he fished out his cellphone from his coat pocket, looked up the number for that hotel and was in conversation with the front desk person, asking for directions. "Come with me, he said" already walking purposefully while still orienting himself to the landmarks that he must have just learned about. While I followed him I apologized if this was taking him away from his destination. He decided that that didn't merit a response and instead asked me where I was from. When I told him he mentioned that there are not too many Indians who come to Beijing during winter. I explained why I was there and he heard me out passively.

Meanwhile we probably approached the last landmark that he was familiar with so he picked up the phone and was on the call with the hotel personnel again. He again gestured me to follow him and went on his way, seemingly more eager to get there than I was. I trundled along still looking for the best way to express my gratitude. He finally stopped when we spotted the Marriott logo and he nodded as if to say "my job here is done". I told him how much I appreciated his help and then added "Xièxiè". By now, I had said that greeting enough times to know that my pronunciation was horrible. He still didn't break into a smile. He nodded again turned around and left. I said thanks one more time, in English this time to make up for the botched mandarin one but he was busy running away.

There should be a name for this moment during a travel to a new city when, after receiving kindness from a random stranger, you abruptly stop judging said place.

Class Apartheid

If you keep your eyes open you'll see instances of class apartheid in India at every other step. Take my neighbor for example, who never bothered to learn the name of her gardener of 15 yrs because it is so much easier to just call him "Mali". Brochures of real estate companies sell you the dream house where the service lift is so well concealed that the cleaning staff will be virtually invisible. The houses are "3.5 bhk", the half-bedroom referring, of course, to the servant quarters. 

The other day our team drove to a resort called Bluemoon retreat (Sue me guys, I'm about to defame you) just outside Bangalore. After the usual shebang- paintball, cricket, volleyball etc- we settled down for lunch and called our driver, Shiva, to join us. Five minutes later we got a call back from Shiva telling us that he was denied entry into the lunch area. We confronted the manager about this, and he seemed surprised that we were even bringing it up. He even had the Colonel Jessup scowl that said "I don't have the inclination to explain myself to a group that enjoys its manufactured experiences in the sanity that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it". His actual words, though, were, "Drivers are not allowed here, sir. It doesn't look nice".  We eventually sorted it out but not before the conversation had reached newer levels of absurdity. 

If there is a nice thing about class apartheid it is that you can never take your status for granted (except if you are, say, Siddharth Mallya). There's always a level above you and the tables can turn in very little time. 24hrs in my case! The very next day, it was my turn to be denied lunch. I attended a christening at The Bangalore Club dressed in a Kurta and, horror of horrors, sandals. They ignored me initially because they thought I was the cameraman. When they realized I was a guest, they came over to warn me. But when they came close they caught sight of the chappals. That was the deal breaker. In fact, they hate chappals so much there that they won't even deign to say its name, referring to it instead by a euphemism, "open footwear". They promptly threw me out. Luckily there were two other schoolmates of mine that were in similar outfits. We left without protest, and plotted our revenge over fish-curry-rice at Koshy's. Watch this space for an announcement about a club that will have a zero-tolerance approach towards any formal attire

Reading in 2012

Here's my reading list from 2012. While I probably didn't match the volumes of previous years, I feel a greater percentage of the books I read this year made it to my tier recommendations.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman: Do you know those books that affect you in a way that you can never look at the world the same way again? This book was in that category.
• Foundation - Isaac Asimov: Now I know what the fuss about Asimov is all about.
• Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut: I've not had a list in the last three years that didn't feature Vonnegut.
• The Meadow - Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark: I already blogged about this one.
• The Longest Day - Cornelius Ryan: I'm not sure if it's the quality of the work or the momentousness of its subject - Normandy Landings - that elevates this book. We were driving through the Normandy coast visiting the beaches, coincidentally during the anniversary of the landings, while I was reading this book and that probably left a strong impression.
• The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach: I went from being an obsessive sports fan in my teens to one who came to view it as a big waste. This novel about a prodigal baseball player reminded me once again why sports viewing, in its chasing of the fleeting moments of magic and beauty, is so compelling. I almost forgave myself for all the wasted hours in front of the TV.
• Born to Run- Christopher McDougall: This one's a witty read even if you are not addicted to running.    Reading about ultra runners made my pursuits of middle distances and half marathons look trivial. Meanwhile it also articulated why it's ok to surrender to the highs of long distance running. I shaved 4 minutes off my 10km timing just days after finishing the book. 
• The Shining - Stephen King.

The second tier of recommendations

• Nudge - Richard Thaler
• Poor Economics - Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo
• American Pastoral - Philip Roth
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
• Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins
• My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

There was only one book this year that I started but didn't finish: 'Change by Design' by Tim Brown. Another blog post on why I gave up on it.  

The Secularization of Festivals

Back in the day, different festivals meant different things. Sankranti was about sharing the bounties of your harvest. Ugadi was about reminding yourself to have the equanimity to accept both the sweet and bitter of life. Diwali was about driving to Hosur to buy cheap crackers put together by child labourers in Sivakasi so that you could indulge in a large-scale assault on my right to clean air. Ganesha Habba was about introducing toxic lead paints into all our local water bodies.

Now all festivals mean the same thing. "This XXX, head to your nearest mall to buy things you don't really need for a discount that's not really there". Replace XXX with the festival of your choice - Christmas, Diwali, Eid or Navroz- and you know that that announcement works. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, the secularization of our festivals is complete.

Notes (to self, and others) on conservation

Just because you do the following don't mean you are a conservationist
* Watching BBC nature documentaries
* Recycling your waste
* Recognizing and photographing wild birds
* Sporting "Coorg Wildlife Society" bumper stickers (Who is behind that proliferation, anyway!?)
* Going on treks with Bangalore Mountaineering Club

Book Recommendation: The Meadow

One of the joys of reading a work of fiction is when you finish the book, you experience a sensation of leaving a world behind. Especially in the case of a tragedy when you feel attached enough with the imaginary world that you feel a cloud of gloom hanging over your head but detached enough that you feel gratified from experiencing that world and at the same time have no problem getting on with real life. When the work is non-fiction, however, and it concerns a land that you've visited and an incident that you were old enough to remember vividly, the sadness won't be compartmentalized anymore.

The Meadow describes the events around the kidnapping of six foreign tourists from the Kashmir valley in 1995. Too many of us are taught to believe that Kashmir is a simplistic case of a neighbour trying to snatch what is rightfully ours. Somehow the whole place is filled with single dimensional innocent cutouts that are caught in a game played by politicians. And perhaps, the blacks and whites of that portrait just have to be inverted to see Pakistan's version. With its thorough research, this account digs deep into many of the characters, and perhaps, that's why left me feeling defeatist about whether it's possible to extricate ourselves out of the mess. Both the people of the valley and the officials who govern them are victims for the most part, but also can be perpetrators in measures that vary with circumstance. The role of the neighbour does not come as a surprise but what's most disappointing is the duplicity of my own country. Everything seems to be set up, on all sides, to win the tactical day-to-day battles even at the risk of dehumanizing everyone in the process. So forget about the border getting decided amicably any time soon. Forget about not worrying about bombs going off in our parliaments and in our trains. Forget about repatriating people who were chased out of their ancestral homes. This mess is here to stay for a while.

I wanted to also add that you should read the book for its extensive research and its effective prose, but, like I said, stepping back and appreciating the aesthetics of a narrative of something so upsetting is hard to do just yet.

The Caste Trap

I believe that there is such a thing as a poverty trap and that a good portion of the people born in poor families will die poor too. I also believe that any decent civilized state has a responsibility in creating enough opportunities for poor people to escape their predicament. My country's response to that was caste-based reservation (ok! ok! reservation targets other aspects of social justice than poverty alone, but let's keep it simple here). I'm not as singularly oppposed to reservation as most urban educated middle class folks from my generation are but here's my beef with it. It ends up creating a "self-reinforcing mechanism which causes casteism to persist" (and here i'm borrowing from Costas Azariadis and John Stachurski, "Poverty Traps," Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005) as this little table shows. This is from a public school in a remote village in the Pandavapura Taluka of Mysore district. They proudly show off the number of kids from the lower castes who are enrolled in their schools. They probably have targets to meet too. I'm not grudging the kids their rightful place in that school, but I cringed when I saw this kind of reporting in school after school. While attempting to dismantle the poverty trap, I believe we are creating a robust caste trap.

Whale watching at San Juan Islands

I wonder what it would be like to get inside the head of an orca. Maybe I'll find that their undulations at the surface are nothing but a part of their regular breathing. Maybe I'll discover that their enthusiastic jumps and splashy landings are nothing but a mundane response to a mundane stimulus that we don't know about. Maybe they are sticking to their groups just because there is safety in numbers. Maybe it's not really as much fun as it appears to be.

I don't know why they do things they do, but on this bright, clear, un-Seattle-like, warm evening near San Juan Islands, these whales gamboled, splattered and played and infected us with their apparent joy. For two hours they convinced us that we were in paradise too.

Ankegowda's library

Back in high school our curriculum included an essay about a craftsman from rural Karnataka who earned his living carving hand-made combs from wood. The focus of the essay was on how modernization was flooding the market with cheap plastic combs and in the process taking away our protagonist's livelihood.The pathos in the essay was persuasive and we were convinced that the government had to step in and help this artisan. Decades of Nehru-Gandhi had also ensured that we were sold on the idea of a nanny-state. Just to trigger a debate, our teacher, without letting us in on her own beliefs, had asked us to explain why we think the government had a role to play in this. Didn't the craftsman have the responsibility to adapt?

I had been unable to decide back then. I was in a similar dilemma last weekend when, while traveling around Mysore, we stumbled on one Mr.Ankegowda. The protagonist here used to be an employee with the sugar factory in Pandavapura. During his tenure there Mr.Ankegowda dedicated nearly 80% of his salary to buying books and in the course of time built a personal library of nearly 10,000 books. He lost his full time job at the factory and turned to his library as a full time occupation. Mr Khoday, of Old Monk fame, was so impressed with the collection that he had a library built. After moving in to its new home the library grew to its current size, boasting about 30k volumes. It has taken enormous resourcefulness on the part of the collection's owner. Even on the day I was there, Mr. Ankegowda was excited about Mysore university auctioning off some of the books from its library that didn't see too much circulation.

Now the beast is big enough that it can't sustain itself and Mr. Ankegowda has been persuading the government to step in and do its bit. Personally, I'm not convinced if state revenue should be used to sustain one man's obsession, but I must say that the place has enough charm that I'd be disappointed to see it neglected. When you are near Mysore, be sure to visit and spend some time at this place. The library lends itself better to serendipitous discovery rather than planned browsing so hop from one stack to the other. You are likely to get served tea by Mr. Ankegowda's wife and if you are friendly enough you might even get invited for lunch. Meanwhile, get the shy Mr. Ankegowda to warm up to you and let you into his secret cache- coins, first editions of various magazines, rare gazettes. On your way out be sure to drop a little something into a box labelled 'Hundi'. There are some obsessions worth preserving.